Darkness Becomes Her Read Free

minute details tonight.”
    “Did she bat her eyes at you, tell you how much work there was to do, so little time to finish it?”
    Magnus narrowed his eyes. “I offered all on my own, no eye-batting necessary.”
    “What do you know about her?”
    “She just moved here, got a job at the music shop where I bought my kit. She won’t let me pay for her coffee or lunch, yet I know she’s tight on money because she wanted a large latte but settled for the small. She’s volunteering her time at this carnival because someone in her life had muscular dystrophy. You can tell it means something to her when she talks about it. She’s warm and playful with the kids who take classes. And you forget, if she had any murderous thoughts, I’d probably pick up on them.”
    Magnus could read thoughts, or at least pick up words here or there. He hadn’t lost his abilities when he’d taken the antidote. Lachlan had been bitter about that, but he’d come to realize he didn’t deserve abilities, not when he’d killed someone by using them. Now, though, something had come back. Something different than what he’d had.
    “I’ll go back earlier and see what happened.” He had always been able to project at will, but nothing happened.
    “So it’s not back, then,” Magnus said a minute later. “You haven’t gone all tense and twitchy.”
    Lachlan’s eyes snapped open. “Humor me and stay away from the carnival.”
    “How did she kill me in this supposed vision? Knife in the parlor? Candlestick in the drawing room.”
    “Sure, joke around when I’m telling you your life is in danger. I couldn’t tell how you’d died, only that you were dead. Everything around you was a blur, but I didn’t see anyone else.”
    “Give me more, Locky.”
    Frustration swamped him. “I don’t have any more.”
    Magnus got up and walked to the foyer.
    Lachlan followed. “I never hallucinated. That wasn’t what happened with mum.”
    “You saw something that wasn’t there. By definition, that’s a hallucination.” He pushed open the door and turned back. “Last time you thought you had everything under control, and then you lost it. Don’t do anything crazy.”
    Magnus left, and Lachlan stalked back to the table, staring at the picture of the girl. He had to find out more about her. He’d lost both his mother and father in the last eleven months. He wasn’t about to lose his brother, not when he could prevent it. He could never live with himself if he didn’t do something. Hopefully, Magnus wasn’t in danger. But that meant his own sanity was.
    Lachlan grabbed up the newspaper and walked to his room. The house was a square, like a fort, wrapped around a courtyard flourishing with flora, fauna, and fungus, his father’s fascinations. The trek from one place in the house to another gave Lachlan too much time to think. He sat at the computer, booted it up, and waited through the process.
    He’d been cut off from the world for so long, exposed to television more than to actual people. For the first half of his life his father had rented isolated homes. During the last half, they’d lived here in a house they owned, built in the middle of a large tract of land. Their social interactions consisted of brief forays into town.
    Magnus made friends easily. He longed for the world, for contact. Lachlan had inherited the lack of need for others from his father. Dad could spend all day in his lab or out with the fungus. Lachlan did that with the old truck now, immersing himself in the process of restoring it. He’d done it several times before, resurrecting something old, rusty, and broken into something whole.
    Something he could never do with himself.
    He launched into a search for Jessie Bellandre, finding several mentions. One was a blog entry dated two years earlier in which her name appeared. The blogger was a sixteen-year-old with muscular dystrophy, talking about her experience at an MDA summer camp. Her counselor was Jessie, and the