Gathering Dark by Fox Candice

Author:Fox, Candice
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781473563667
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

BLAIR

I hadn’t dreamed of the murder in many years. The dreams had always come unexpectedly, surprise attacks that arrived in the middle of a good week, when my mind was furthest from the night filled with blue lights and red blood. Sometimes I was pregnant, the way I actually had been when I killed Adrian Orlov, and sometimes Jamie was a small child tucked into a crib in the beautiful nursery I’d made for him. I was standing at the kitchen window of my house, watching gold explosions dazzle on the horizon towards the coast, young revellers getting rid of their after-midnight fireworks. Dark landscape burning. I’d never been an enthusiastic New Year’s reveller, and, being unable to drink, I’d decided to spend the evening by myself watching Sex and the City reruns in my cotton pyjamas instead.

It was on one of my frequent night-time trips to the toilet that I’d stopped in the kitchen for a glass of milk. Almost as though its inhabitants could feel my exhausted presence, music started up at the Orlov house. I sighed, leaned and looked at the house next door. Gold light in a tiled room. Kristi Zea storming in, thrusting open a cupboard that was immediately slammed shut by her boyfriend’s hand. His wide, boxy fist pulling back as if he’d drawn a bow, snapping forwards, smacking into her temple with a noise I figured I could hear from where I was standing.

My mouth fell open. Next came the moment that changed everything. Not so much a decision, but an instinct to turn towards the stairs and run down them rather than heading back to my bedroom to grab my phone and call 9-1-1.

Stupid. Arrogant.

Later I knew what it was: sheer, ridiculous bravado. I was wild with instant adrenaline, with the belief that I was untouchable. That because I could somehow manage to create a thriving human life inside my body from nothing at all, that I was clearly some kind of god. I was a doctor. I created life. Sometimes I brought life back to the dead. Miracles. The week before the killing, I’d performed surgery on a five-year-old girl who had been paralysed in a horrific pile-up on the I-10. Her nerve endings had been as fine as hair. I’d saved her from a lifetime of paralysis. Intervening in a fight between a man and a woman at the house next door seemed like child’s play. I’d march in and know exactly what to do, just like I did in the operating theatre. I was heading down the driveway towards the Orlov house, shattering my own life one self-righteous step after the other.

Then a hand was on my mouth.

Weight on my back.

I was suddenly not in my old driveway in Brentwood eleven years ago but here, now, in my bedroom in my apartment in Crenshaw. The dream fell away like a dropped curtain and I felt stubble against my cheek, my ear. He didn’t say anything. In the nightmares shown on true crime television, they always say something.

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