Lily: Nightmareland Volume Six (Nightmareland Chronicles Book 6) by Barnett Daniel

Author:Barnett, Daniel [Barnett, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The wind, the wind, the wind.

Mariah felt it all the way back to the house. It followed them down from the bluff and along the creek to Lonsum Drive, teasing through the woods with the furtiveness of a stalking wolf. She listened to the branches come slowly alive around her, and she pictured the big, sighing darkness beyond the range, and she was calm. Marshall’s letter lay folded across her breast, and she was calm. She didn’t know why that was so, but it was: she glided over the road like a sailboat with the sun on its prow. When they reached the driveway, she asked, “What will you do?”

“I’m going to shut my eyes awhile,” Marshall said through a rising white veil of breath. It couldn’t have been more than twenty degrees out, and with the breeze beginning to cut its teeth on the mountains, conditions would only get worse . . . and that was before factoring in the heavy white cargo waiting to shake itself loose from the clouds lowering overhead. “I don’t expect much rest to come but with a little luck, I might be able to track down Isaac and convince him to lend the bed some of his body heat. Neither of us have slept particularly well lately, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So it goes,” Marshall said, and Mariah flashed suddenly and painfully to Lydia Washington, who had once lectured her about Clive Barker and Kurt Vonnegut atop a trailer’s gently bouncing rooftop. Marshall would have liked Lydia had they ever met. They would have been two book worms in a teacher’s apple, or wherever it was that book worms felt most secure.

They arrived at the front door. Marshall didn’t ask what Mariah intended to do once they went inside; they both knew the answer already. She was going to read.

“Thank you,” she said before realizing she meant to speak.

“For what?”

“For taking us in.”

“We’re glad you’re here.” Marshall’s mild gray eyes held her gaze. “And that’s not going to change, no matter what the night brings. You and your boy will always be welcome in our home.”

Mariah almost confessed about the baby right then, but something—some newfound sense of assurance—held her tongue. There would be time later. They would have all the time in the world. “Marshall?”

“Yes?”

“Would it be terribly improper of me to kiss you on the cheek?”

“My cheek would be terribly offended if you didn’t.”

So Mariah did, and she let the kiss linger for a moment, until Marshall’s lightly stubbled skin thawed from the warmth. What was it about the Hawthorne brothers? How did they carry such cold inside them, and why did their respective chills taste so different on her lips? Simple, said a voice in her head. One feels all of it while the other feels none of it at all. She wondered which was the greater burden. Both options seemed equally awful to her. “There you go,” she told him as she set back down on her heels.

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