Free Shadowbound by Dianne Sylvan Page A

against her Prime and let the rhythmic motion of the car lull her into the first peaceful sleep she’d had in days.
     • • • 
    PLEASE COME. HE’S ASKING FOR YOU.
    The words on the screen wavered in front of her eyes. The longer she stared at them, the less sense they made. English seemed to have a short life cycle in print—after a few minutes the words broke apart in the mind until they were unrecognizable and lost all meaning. If she stared at a word too long, she started doubting the spelling. “Please” . . . what did that even mean?
    Her hands were shaking on the keys. She couldn’t keep her fingers there any longer.
    Her eyes fell on the sterile package on the other end of the table and the vial of clear liquid sitting beside it, unassuming, innocuous. From this distance it could have been anything. Whatever was in the vial could be something as harmless as vitamin B12, or it could be the difference between life and death for its recipient.
    In her case that was only metaphorically true.
    As always, the shame crawled its way up her spine and clamped its jaws around her throat. The litany began: How could you? How could you? He’s an old man. An old dying man. How could you?
    He doesn’t know the difference, her other internal voice, the one she imagined as a petulant child in a dirty pinafore, wailed. I need it and he doesn’t! There’s no way anyone could find out. What difference does it make?
    You’ll lose your license.
    Oh, who the fuck cares?
    She had to smile at that. The little girl in her mind loved to curse. She’d started cursing, in fact, after George told her about his secretary—such a cliché. He moved out, and the little imaginary girl stamped her foot and threw things.
    Six months later, alone in the house she’d grown up in with an old man she barely recognized as her father drooling and raving in a hospital bed in the room that had once been her mother’s art studio, Mari knew something had to give.
    It wouldn’t be long—a month, at most—before the old man shuffled off his goddamn mortal coil and finally got out of her life. She couldn’t hide here much longer. There would be estate sales, paperwork . . . what she really wanted was to take a gas can to the property and burn it down with his corpse inside. No fuss, no muss. A modern Viking funeral. It should be so simple. As it was, the indignity of death wasn’t enough for Americans—no, after you died all the possessions you had worked your whole life to collect were sold off, stored, dumped in the trash, anything to get them out of the way of the living who would move into your house and erase your existence.
    One of these days she would die, too, and Jenny would be forced to observe the ritual of sorting, culling, trashing. Mari had left the seven-year-old with George for a couple of weeks, since she was out of school and Mari didn’t want to force her to deal with a mean old man who pissed himself and looked like a haunted-house ghoul. Jenny sounded happy on the phone—absentee father figure guilt equaled lavish attention and a lot of fun trips. That was fine, for now. Mari hated a lot of things about George but knew he’d take good care of their daughter.
    She realized she had been staring at the vial for several minutes and wrenched her eyes away, but they landed somewhere else she didn’t want them to: the copy of Rolling Stone that had been lying there since she had returned to Rio Verde to pose as a one-woman hospice crew. She had most of the magazine’s glossy insides memorized, but nothing so well as the cover.
    A woman with ridiculously gorgeous red curly hair falling all around her shoulders stared with intense leaf-green eyes at the camera like some modern-day Medusa daring people to meet her gaze. She wore black, tight leather that showed off the milk-and-honey of her complexion, including thigh-high boots and a corset top providing a perfect laced-up frame for her breasts. She wasn’t posing