In the Dark of Dreams: A Dirk & Steele Novel by Marjorie M. Liu

Author:Marjorie M. Liu [Liu, Marjorie M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, General
ISBN: 9780062078490
Google: dhr32lY_rt4C
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2010-11-30T00:31:36+00:00

Chapter Eleven

I cannot fix on the hour, Jenny recited silently, clinging to lines from Pride and Prejudice, which steadied her, brought her down into the world in ways that the rocks beneath her did not.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago.

Too long ago, when she had laid the foundation of what was happening now. And yet she could fix on the hour. She could fix on the look.

Twelve years old. A morning on a beach.

Jenny lay curled on her side, in leaves and dirt, her knees drawn up to her chest. She wanted to sleep, but was afraid to. Not that she was going to have much choice soon. Everything hurt, and her eyelids were heavy.

“How is your fever?” Perrin asked. His voice was low, rough enough to be unfriendly, even menacing. Jenny wasn’t intimidated. Nor was she bothered by the bruises on her arms. Not anymore.

“Fine,” she replied, which was a lie. She was not fine. She was exhausted, heartsick—and there was a parasite attached to the base of her skull, drinking her blood, burying itself to the bone.

Kra’a, she named it. The very thing Perrin was searching for. She was absolutely certain of that.

And every time she tried to tell him, some mysterious compulsion kept her mouth shut tight. The impulse frightened her more than the parasite. It made her angry, too.

Be angry. Anger is good, whispered a dry, almost masculine, voice inside her mind.

Jenny shivered with fear. Shut up, I don’t want you. You’re not real. I’m losing my mind.

You are losing nothing.

Jenny shut her eyes, trying to block out that voice. She had heard it for the first time right before the earthquake. No words. Just an incomprehensible murmur. Not part of her. Something else, a presence inside her head.

That sea witch, crone, shape-shifter—whatever she was—had a terrible sense of humor. What would it have taken for her to point one claw at Jenny’s head, and say, “Look there?”

That would be too easy. Think of Grandma and Grandpa.

Always showing, never telling. A lesson given, they liked to say, was never learned.

A philosophy they had stuck to every time something new and strange needed to be introduced into Jenny’s life. She’d learned about shape-shifters that way. Eight years old, at the circus. Her grandparents had taken her to see a special performance—a small, elite troupe of actors and performers, who had danced and sung, and done magic that seemed like real magic, and cast illusions so fantastical, so rich and bleeding with life, that Jenny had found her imagination—and heart—bursting with the strength of possibilities.

Not all the performers, of course, had been human.

Jenny hadn’t known that, at the time. Her grandparents had planned her introduction to that side of their lives so carefully—arranging the performance as a way to open her eyes. Not with fear. But with love.

Even so, one performer had stood out above all the others. Serena McGillis. A tall, lithe,

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