Free Last Snow by Eric Van Lustbader Page A

Annika’s bosses have turned their backs on her. They may even send people after her.”
    “To bring her back?”
    “To kill her.”
    “You’re kidding, right? Tell me this is a joke—I don’t care how sick it is, maybe I deserve it, but just tell me—”
    “It’s no joke, Alli.” He sighed heavily. “Now you know why I didn’t want you coming with me.”
    She was silent for some time. The plane hit an air pocket and dipped unexpectedly, obliging them to hold on for a moment. Jack reached for one of the overhead bins, Alli grabbed on to him, pressing closer.
    She bit her lip. “The only reason I fought to come on this boring trip was so I could be near you.”
    “Alli—”
    “Listen to me. I feel safe only when I’m with you. It doesn’t matter where you go, Jack. I can’t be on my own now—I can’t be with my parents or their handlers or the doctors. When I am, I’m filled with a nameless dread, or maybe it isn’t so nameless, right? We know him—you and me and Emma.”
    “Morgan Herr is dead, Alli. You know that.”
    “And yet I
feel
him close to me, breathing against my neck, whispering horrible things in my ear.”
    Jack put his arms around her. “What kind of things?”
    “Things from my past—people and places, things that only Emma and I knew, and sometimes not even Emma; things I’m deeply ashamed of, things I’d rather not remember, but he won’t let me forget. It’s like he crawled inside my head and somehow, I don’t know how, he’s still there, living and breathing, whispering to me, whispering . . .”
    Her last words dissolved into racking sobs. She pushed her face into his chest and he rubbed her neck in order to soothe her and, in another sense, soothe himself because he felt her pain almost as if it was his own, a twin, two melancholy trains running along the same track, which led to Emma, perhaps only a memory of her, perhaps not; best friend to one, daughter to the other. But part of him wasn’t sympathetic at all. He sensed that a good deal of her persistent anxiety stemmed from pushing down those very incidents in her past, because the more she turned away from them the more they tore at her, exacerbating her anxiety, stoking her fear. For the moment, at least, it was easier for her to believe that Morgan Herr was instigating those thoughts, rather than admit to herself that it was her own mind struggling to work through the most emotionally devastating days and nights of her past.
    “I wish Emma were here,” she said in her soft little girl’s voice.
    Jack stroked her hair absently. “Me, too.”
    “Sometimes I can’t believe how much I miss her.”
    Alli said it, but it might just as well have been Jack. “She’s in our memory, Alli, which is what makes memory so precious.” He detached himself from her so that he could look her in the eye, to confirm to her, if she didn’t already know, that they were traveling along the same track. “It’s this same memory that holds your dark days—Emma’s, too, for that matter, as well as mine—and I think you can figure out for yourself that it’s all one, the dark days and the bright, shining ones. Of course we both want to remember Emma, and wedo, but for you the cost of holding your dark days at bay has become too great. If you push them away then you risk losing Emma as well.”
    “It can’t work that way—”
    “But it does, Alli. Whatever’s happened to you is a part of you; you can wish it hadn’t happened, but you can’t deny that it did.”
    “But every time I think about the dark days I break out into a cold sweat, I start to shake, and I hear a screaming inside myself I can’t silence, and then I’m sure I’m losing my mind, and the fear starts to build until I can’t stand it anymore, and I think . . .”
    True to her word, she had started shaking, tiny beads of sweat appearing at her hairline. Jack held her close again. “I know what you think, honey, but you’re never going to act