Broken Moon by Laken Cane

Chapter Twenty

Someone was screaming, but I thought I was having a nightmare until Ash jumped on my stomach and barked in my face. He jumped off the bed when I shot up, then ran to the doorway and into the hall, then back into the room, telling me to hurry.

“Lucille,” I yelled, my voice croaky and dry, then barreled from my room and into hers. I hit the light switch and then, for a second, I froze.

She sat straight up in her bed, her eyes open but only the whites visible. She didn’t take a breath, and her voice didn’t waver. She screamed.

“Fuck,” I yelled, then leaped at her. Between her screams and Ash’s frantic barks, I thought I might lose my mind. I grabbed her shoulders and shook her. “Lucille! Wake up!”

She did, abruptly. “Oh my,” she said, completely normal. “I had a dream.”

“No shit,” I said. “You scared me half to death.” Ash had climbed up and was attempting to lick some color back into her face, and she hugged him, all smiles. It was beyond freaky. “You were screaming,” I told her. “Loudly.”

She waved a hand. “I should have warned you about that before I moved in. Sometimes what I see—well, I don’t see it really, I am it—makes me…” She shuddered, then forced her smile back. “Makes me scream.”

“What was your dream? What did you see?”

“I normally push the dreams from my mind,” she said, kissing Ash’s head. “Unless they won’t leave me alone or aren’t quite so frightening, like with you.”

“Lucy. What did you see?”

She frowned. “I just explained to you that I ignore them, Kait. They’re too hard on me. I developed a pretty good system where when I wake up, I lock them away and don’t think of them again.”

“That’s impossible,” I said flatly. “They’ll explode out of that box someday and kill you. Besides, what you have is a gift. Don’t you want to help the people reaching out to you?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. I can’t help anyone. I can only see them suffering. Gift?” For a second she was not the sweet, lighthearted Lucy I knew. Something ancient and dark peered through her eyes. “What I have is not a gift. It’s a punishment.”

“Honey,” I said, leaning over to give her a hug. “What happened to you?”

She said nothing, but I could see her need to talk, to vent, to have someone as weird as she was listen to her agony. I could relate. “Come on,” I said, when she remained silently thoughtful. “I’ll make us some coffee and we’ll talk about it.”

She climbed from the bed and I couldn’t help but snort at her nightclothes. She wore a frilly white gown decorated with huge butterflies. Their gossamer wings, made from some sort of netting and lace, had been sewn on. It was definitely hideous, and definitely Lucy.

“There’s a cake on the countertop,” she said. “I brought it home from the bakery. We’ll have cake and coffee.” She stopped in the doorway. “There’s a girl, Kait. Someone has her in a box, and she’s screaming, because he comes in and…” She swallowed convulsively. “I don’t know where she is. Why do I have these fucking dreams when they don’t tell me how to save them? I can’t save them.” She whispered that last bit, then shoved her knuckles against her lips until I was afraid she would hurt herself. “I can’t save anyone.”

I pulled her hand gently from her face and kept it securely in my grip until we reached the kitchen. By then, she was back to her bubbly self. I could see her shoving away the bad stuff. Forcing it into the box and locking it up—much like the girl in her dream.

Poor kid.

Neither of us spoke again until we were sitting at the table with cake and hot coffee—black for her, lots of cream and sugar for me—and through the little window above the sink, I could see dawn sneaking in.

“What happened to you?” she asked me, perhaps needing me to start with my own traumas before she revealed hers. “I mean, I saw some things, but they made no sense to me. I saw you in the wilds, running, and a pack of wolves were chasing you. You were screaming inside. And don’t you know, I never did get those screams out of my head. Every time I’m near you, if I am still and silent, I can hear your pain.”

I was amazed by her. Amazed and a little disturbed. I shivered, then took a quick gulp of too hot coffee. She needed me to tell her something. “When I was fourteen years old,” I said finally, “I saw my father die. There were a lot of angry, raging…people after him, and he was killed in front of my mother and me.”

Her eyes were wide. “Why, Kait? Why did they kill him?”

“Because he’d been secretly turning people against our…leader. He was marked as a traitor and killed.” My voice was emotionless, almost cold.

She shuddered. “I’m so sorry, Kaitlyn.” Then she nodded, stared into her coffee cup, and told me about her past. “Something traumatic happened to me when I was fourteen, as well.” She threw me a quick smile. “Another thing we have in common.”

I reached across the little table and took her cold hand. “It’s okay, Lucy. You can trust me.”

“I know. I know that without a doubt. I saw that inside you, as well. You’re a good person. A good damn person.”

I squeezed her hand and waited.

“My father died as well,” she started. “He was my mother’s entire world. She was pregnant when he died—nothing sinister, he was simply in a car accident and was pronounced dead before they reached the hospital. My mother went into labor the same night he was killed. The shock, I suppose. The huge emotional trauma. It nearly killed her. She wanted to die, but she had me at home—I was seven—and this new baby being born on the same night my father died.”

She took a drink of her coffee and a bite of her cake, but I could tell she didn’t really taste either. “The baby was what kept her alive, though, and do you know why?”

“Because she thought your father’s spirit went into the child when he was born.”

She stared at me, surprised. “Yes. Yes, that’s right. She never saw Elliot as…as Elliot. But my God, Kait, he was her life. He was her everything.”

And I could see the little girl she’d been. Neglected by a mother overwhelmed with sadness, grieving for her father, confused, and then a new baby who her mom thought was her dead husband…

“Good God, Luce. I’m sorry.”

But she wasn’t finished. “So when I’d just turned fourteen and my little brother was seven, I had a couple of friends over. Friends I wanted to impress, of course. My mother had to go to work—some sort of emergency. She was a surgical tech, and she was on call. She normally had my grandmother come sit with us when she had to go to work, but I was fourteen, and she told me she trusted me to take care of Elliot.”

She stopped for a minute and stared blankly into space, and quite suddenly, I absolutely did not want to hear the rest of her sad story. Did not. But I drank my coffee and I listened, because Lucy needed to talk.

“So my little brother kept coming into my bedroom and doing stupid stuff, you know how boys are. He was embarrassing me in front of my friends, and I was afraid they’d leave.” Her smile was bitter, now. “I yelled at him, told him to go to his room and play and leave us alone. He went.”

She was crying now, licking the tears off her lips and smiling this horrible smile that was not really a smile at all, and I knew that every second of every day she was filled with this awfulness that had lived inside her since she was fourteen years old.

“I’ll just hurry to the end,” she said finally. “The end for my brother. He found my father’s gun. He shot himself. He died on the old carpet of my mother’s bedroom floor, and she never forgave me. I never forgave myself.”

She took a drink of coffee. “Eight years ago,” she whispered. “And it seems like yesterday.”

“Luce,” I said. “That wasn’t on you, honey. Your mother left a loaded gun where a child could get to it. That wasn’t your fault.” But I knew my words would matter not at all. It was okay. I was there, I was her friend, and I was never going to judge her.

And I knew something else.

Lucy needed me just as much as I needed her.