Dreams of Shreds and Tatters

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Authors: Amanda Downum
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Young Adult
that someone was watching him. A black-coated figure had moved in the corner of his eye one too many times, never mind that half the people he’d seen in Vancouver fit that description.
    The darkening sky and lingering ache in his chest made the decision for him. After a detour at a liquor store, he made it back to the hotel with a bank of clouds spitting sleet at his heels. He couldn’t feel his hands or feet, but a glass of Chartreuse remedied that. The green fire also chased away the headache that had followed him since yesterday. He nursed a second glass while he waited for Liz, the muted television casting flickering shadows against the walls.
    Something was bothering him besides contagious paranoia, but he couldn’t decide what it was. No, he decided, he did know: he didn’t trust Morgenstern. The man’s charisma might work on Liz and hospital staff—and maybe on Blake, to judge from the sketches— but Rainer reminded him of people he’d known years ago, who he’d left behind and tried hard to forget. The magnetism, the attraction that even Alex couldn’t dismiss, though it raised his hackles.
    Rainer reminded him of Samantha.
    His hand closed on the cool plastic of his inhaler. His chest had ached since they’d visited Blake’s apartment—the pain reminded him of Samantha, too. Every attack, every albuterol hit, every round of pneumonia. The weakness in his lungs was congenital, but ever since that disastrous night in Boston seven years ago, it had been close to crippling. Or would be, if he let it.
    He let go of the inhaler and fished a two dollar coin out of his pocket. It winked in the lamplight as he walked it across his knuckles.
    He tried not to think about Samantha, normally, or to think of her only in the simplest terms. Sometimes that worked. He’d been young and stupid, reckless, gotten involved in a relationship that only a seventeen-year-old could have fallen for and ended up hurt. These things happened.
    But the other things, the things he remembered in scattered flashes—the chalk circle on the hardwood floor; Samantha’s voice rising in an incantation; the writhing, luminous shape that answered... Those things didn’t happen. She’d told him they hadn’t, after all, when she finally visited him in the hospital. Embarrassed, not meeting his eyes as she invented a story about a gas leak, about mold in the walls. And even then, knowing she was lying, knowing that she’d used him and something had gone wrong, though the details of why and how were lost to him—even then he had wanted to believe her.
    He’d been stupid and gotten hurt. So had Blake. Maybe for the same reasons. Alex could sympathize, but that wasn’t enough reason to get involved.
    But maybe Liz was. And—though he could never admit it to her—the mystery piqued his interest. What the hell had Blake gotten himself mixed up in?
    Ice rattled against the windows by the time Liz returned, damp and flushed and weighed down with shopping bags. His second glass was nearly gone.
    “I was starting to wonder what happened to you.” The bi-metallic coin flashed between his fingers.
    “I ran into Antja at the hospital.”
    “And you had to perform some sort of ritual shopping exercise?”
    Liz wrinkled her nose at him as she carried the bags to the bedroom. She returned coatless and barefoot; the dark blue carpet swallowed her footsteps. “Ritual shopping exercises are a good way to learn about someone.” She nudged his legs out of the way and sat down on the couch, tucking her feet beneath her. Second-hand chill soaked into him. Her eyes were brighter than they’d been this morning. Maybe it was only the cold putting color in her cheeks, but he felt a futile jealous pang that someone else had managed to cheer her up.
    “And?” he asked, pulling himself upright. He flipped the coin one last time and caught it before reaching for his glass.
    “I’m not sure,” she admitted with a shrug. “She was close to Alain, and I

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