Free Shadowbound by Dianne Sylvan Page B

provocatively; she was just standing there, one arm resting on the side of the black acoustic guitar that hung around her shoulder. And right there between and above said breasts was that weird necklace she never seemed to take off, the huge ruby on a heavy antique silver setting.
    She was smiling with a hint of mischief and a lot of humor. Mari didn’t remember her smiling at all when they were young.
    The headline beside her read: Miranda Grey Bares Her Teeth: The Rolling Stone Interview.
    She couldn’t take it anymore. She lurched up out of her chair, nearly knocking over her laptop, and seized the package and vial, dropping back down into the chair with the items clutched to her chest.
    It wasn’t any different from vaccinating a toddler. She tried to think of it that way. She was giving that imaginary little girl in her head a vaccine against reality.
    The ritual was calming: roll up her sleeve, run her fingers over the skin to find just the right spot. Her veins were in abominable shape after six months of this, but at least there was no one around to notice, and when she left the house she wore long sleeves even in the Texas heat.
    Open up the syringe packet. Watch the clear liquid fill the syringe, then flick the air bubbles out. It was the same kind of magic that warded off chicken pox and polio.
    The old man was on about twenty different drugs, a great many intravenous, and given his condition there was no reason for the hospital to bat an eye at a little extra morphine here and there. At this point if he wanted to spend his remaining days in an opiate coma, who were they to say no?
    Nobody was watching anyway. This was Rio Verde—the people here had known her since she was born. They whispered about her mother, but they knew Mari and her father were normal people, stable people. They were a family of doctors and lawyers.
    And Miranda.
    Mari hadn’t spent enough time in town since arriving here to really get a sense of how people felt about their local-girl-done-good. The local teenagers were probably fans, wearing holes in her CDs and dreaming of a day when they, too, could get the hell out of this town and make something of themselves.
    Miranda looked too much like Marilyn for people’s comfort. She always had. In the brief period between Marilyn being dragged off to Austin to the hospital she would later die in and their father moving them all up to Dallas for a fresh start, people had seemed wary of Miranda, reluctant to look her in the eye. There had been no love lost between Miranda and Rio Verde.
    Or Miranda and Marianne.
    The plunger shot home, and within seconds her racing thoughts began to slow down. It felt as if someone had cracked an egg on her head and a sweet burning trickled down over her body, sending her fear back under its rock and her shame a mile away.
    She was glad she’d finished writing the e-mail already. Typing right now would be hilarious.
    Would it work? Would curiosity, if nothing else, draw the prodigal daughter back to this dismal hole in the world? Did Miranda have anything to say to her dying father, or anything to say to her sister, who might as well already be dead?
    Mari found herself hoping Miranda wouldn’t reply. She nearly deleted the draft altogether. She could tell him she’d sent it. She could keep putting him off until it no longer mattered. He was barely lucid for five minutes at a time, and she had always been a skilled liar.
    The doorbell rang; UPS was due to bring another shipment from either the mail-order pharmacy or the medical supply company. Marianne stood, her hand still on the keyboard, tempted . . . so tempted . . . to hit delete.
    But seeing the vial next to the ripped-open package and used needle brought a touch of the shame back, and with a heavy sigh, she hit send.
    She couldn’t deny a last request . . . although whose it was, she wasn’t sure.
     • • • 
    The tarot cards were pissing Stella off.
    She sat cross-legged in front of