Ghosts of Christmas Past Read Free

creator. Lucy wasn’t sure what the thing was yet. She didn’t think Cassandra knew either. The sculptress tended to work from the gut, only she used hippie words like “feeling the aura of the metal”.
    The rest of the artists were either occupied in their spaces, some behind cubicle partitions, others simply isolated by headphones as they worked. She noticed many of the cubicles were decorated with garland or icicles. There must have been a holiday party last night. That explained why most of the artists were asleep. For a good chunk of them, this was home.
    The landlords who’d repurposed this space in an attempt to prevent it from becoming derelict didn’t care as long as things were well kept, though living here was probably breaking some zoning laws.
    Like anyone cared about that in the Double C. Besides, people living here prevented break-ins. She knew that several residents had expensive audio and visual equipment. Where they’d gotten it, she didn’t ask.
    She walked past the high windows darkened with the storm’s gloom and reached her own corner. She looked over at Graham’s workspace. The remains of a book, pages and spine separated, sat on his workbench, which was basically plywood over two sawhorses. In a few days, that book would be transformed into something three-dimensional representing the story inside. The project must be holiday related—red and green paint sat next to the pages.
    For now, it just looked like a mess. So was Graham, slumbering under a throw rug on his old couch.
    Lucy sat at her stool and ran her hands over the tilted workbench. Her own easel and artist’s table, and her own supply of pencils and brushes and crayons and papers.
    Her parents had bought most of her supplies, eager to make up for lost time, especially since it’d been an argument about her need to be an artist that had first led her to run away at seventeen. They’d offered to build her a whole studio in their home on the last visit. She had said she’d think about it, but it seemed like a step backward, not forward. She was a full adult now, not an angry teen.
    Her mother had nearly cried at her answer. Her parents didn’t understand why she stayed in the Double C instead of moving back home. They offered her the studio, the fancy college, anything, really to get her to come back and live closer to them. And she put them off, without being able to explain why. She was caught between here and what they wanted.
    This whole mess is my fault.
    No, Beth Nakamora had told her to stop with the negative thinking. Yes, she’d run away at seventeen, but she’d been ready to go back home and deal with her parents when she’d been nabbed off the street and made into a lab specimen for six years. Blame her captors for that.
    Al would definitely agree on blaming the killers. His broken arm, suffered while fighting her former captors, still ached, especially when the weather was bad. Good thing he wasn’t an artist, he’d joked, because some days he couldn’t hold a pencil. Never once had he even hinted his injuries were her fault. She suspected that thought had never occurred to him.
    Lucy picked up her drawing pencil and flipped open her sketch pad. She’d told him to put the book away because she didn’t want to show him the subject of her drawings.
    Him.
    She liked these last two sketches the best. The first was Al, standing at the entrance to a bank that had been the scene of a horrific crime. His hands were tucked into his pockets and his gun butt peeked out at his waist from the open overcoat. His tie was askew.
    His eyes stared at an area marked Crime Scene , missing nothing. He stood as she’d first seen him, the first person she’d thought could actually be competent enough and would care enough to give a damn about helping her.
    The overcoat, though unbuttoned, concealed much of what he really was. Oh, the broad shoulders were