His angel. The force of those eyes, the shock of seeing her there, it hit him in the stomach like a bull’s head, knocking out all his air.
His lungs were sending him signals of distress. He reminded himself to breathe, got oxygen. He lurched forward. Read the name.
MEET THE AUTHOR. EDIE PARRISH. 2:30 PM.
The table was heaped with graphic novels. He locked his knees, tried to stop the drunken swaying. Another black and white headshot, but in this one, her hair was flung back and she wore no glasses. She gazed straight at him. The look in her eyes was a quiet, level challenge.
He had no idea how long he stood in the aisle. If his mouth hung open. People jostled by, inconvenienced by his large body blocking the aisle. He registered their annoyance but he was unable to move.
Edie Parrish was his white-clad angel. No wonder she’d been so small. She’d just been a child, eighteen years ago. Eleven years old.
A beautiful child. Grown up into a beautiful woman.
He stared into those eyes, his brain revving into a strange, altered state. Fear, laced with a strange, unbelieving joy. Dread, too. He would no longer have his magical talisman, so crucial for negotiating the maze of his jerry-rigged mind. If his angel was a flesh and blood person, he could not expect protection from the powers of darkness from her. He couldn’t use her like a magic penny if she was a real, live woman, with her own problems, her own bullshit and baggage.
A woman. So fucking beautiful. His hands shook. He was taking this too seriously. He could see that, feel it. But he could not stop it.
How could he have met her? Where? How had he known her? Would she recognize him? Could she know something about him?
No, dumbass. Don’t go there. Don’t hope that. She couldn’t. She was just a child. She was tiny. She could have no clue. None.
A muffled cough caught his attention, and he caught the nervous, gaze of one of the bookstore personnel. Fake normal, butthead. He moved closer to the table, picked up a book. He glanced at the cover, felt the delayed jolt to his system. That was a drawing of…himself.
Wait. What in the flying fuck? Kev rubbed his eyes and lifted the lenses of his sunglasses to peer at the drawing, his body thrumming.
Fade Shadowseeker, Book IV, Midnight’s Curse.
Midnight’s Curse. The name reverberated inside him like a gong. Whorls of spiky dirt-blond hair, pale green eyes, thin face, flat mouth. His face was scarred, on the right side. No. Not possible. Get a grip.
Hallucinations? Was he messed up enough to justify even this? Maybe he should get stronger meds. Dope his out-of-control imagination into submission. Or get checked out for schizophrenia. Only crazy people thought everything in the world referred to them. Only crazy people heard personal messages in popular songs, TV shows. Or found portraits of themselves on bestselling graphic novels.
But something in him rejected the idea, with visceral horror. He’d admit to being brain damaged, but not crazy. He’d rather be dead. He wouldn’t be squeamish. He’d just quietly put himself out of his misery. Insanity was one level of hell he would not stoically endure.
But he wasn’t crazy. Stressed out, yes. Sleep deprived, knocked on the head. Of course he thought it was all about him, him, him. Never mind war, famine, and plague. Forget indifference and brutality and climate change and innocent babies dying by the sword. Oh no. His own weird, twisted problems were still the center of the fucking universe.
It was just a sketch. Bold and stylized. A chance resemblance, and Edie Parrish’s solemn angel eyes had rattled him. Made it too personal. He just had to get over himself. Take a breath. Lighten up.
He grabbed another book at random. Fade Shadowseeker, Book I, Midnight’s Secret. The man on the cover had long hair, like his own had been before the waterfall. Green eyes. The right side of his face was puckered with scars, down to his jaw. He could see it more clearly in the close-up. The book shook in Kev’s hands. He flipped it open, leafed through quickly, and then more quickly, so that he wouldn’t have time to fixate on anything and go into a full-out panic attack.
Every few pages there was a full-page color sketch, between the black and white strips. There was Fade pushing a broom in a desolate industrial warehouse. Fade, seated on a wretched cot in a squalid room, shoulders slumped in despair. Fade, shoehorning himself into a windowless bathroom the size of an upright coffin to wash himself. Leaning over a sink the size of a loaf of bread to splash his scarred face. Staring into a cracked mirror, into eyes bloodshot with trapped despair.
Locked in his own mind, read the thought bubble over his head.
That sink, that cot, that mirror, that bathroom. He knew them like his own hands. That was the room behind Tony’s diner.
How had she seen that wretched place? How could she have known? Even Bruno had never gone back there. That stifling room had been his own lonely, private hell. The knot in his belly grew tighter.
The meet-the-author event would begin in about an hour. He looked down at the table, rummaging with a clammy hand until he found Volumes II and III. Midnight’s Scion and Midnight’s Oracle.
He found a secluded corner, a rubberized footstool for reaching top shelves. He planted his ass on it, and contemplated his gelatinous thigh muscles while he gathered the courage to open the books.
There’s one thing I don’t believe in. Coincidences. The words he’d said to Bruno echoed in his head. Problem was, he didn’t believe in their opposite, either. Which left him nowhere. Trapped in limbo, suspended in midair. No clue where to stand, what to feel. What he could believe in.
So what else was new.
Midnight’s Oracle, Book III, was on top. He cracked it open, near the beginning, to one of the dynamic full-page color drawings. It depicted Fade clinging to a rock in whitewater rapids. He clutched a girl under his arm. The girl struggled, screaming. On the next page, the girl had been saved, but Fade was heading over the waterfall, cartwheeling.
This time, the weirdness rattled him less. Those shock-and-awe hormones could only squirt out full bore a few times, and then the reservoir ran dry, thank God. He picked out Book I, braced for the flock of birds that was going to take flight from the pit of his stomach any minute now. He opened up the book, and began to read.
“Any more questions?” Edie looked around the crowded room. Today’s was a talkative, enthusiastic bunch. The ego strokes were nice, but it took energy to be smiling and chatty with a bunch of strangers.
She pointed to a tall girl with dyed black hair and black lipstick.
“Where’d you get the idea for Fade?” the girl asked eagerly. “He’s so real! And so intense. Is he based on anybody you know?”
Edie felt her smile falter. “Not exactly,” she lied. “He came to me in a dream once, and I never forgot him.”
That, at least, was the truth. Fade Shadowseeker had visited her dreams ever since she’d started drawing him, when she was eighteen. It hadn’t taken long for those dreams to turn scorchingly erotic.
A redheaded girl jumped up without waiting to be chosen. “Fade is so sexy. I love it that he and Mahlia finally get it on, in Midnight’s Curse, but then the bad guys abduct her and everybody gets distracted. Are they ever going to, um, you know? Get together? Like, a couple?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I find out that kind of thing as I go.”
The redheaded girl looked disappointed. “But can’t you just, like, make them do it?” she said sharply. “I mean, you’re the boss, right?”
“Wrong. I’m not the boss at all if the story is working. It’s a paradox. But I really hope that Fade and Mahlia get together, too.”
“Are you Mahlia?” the redheaded girl demanded. “She looks kind of like you. Is Fade, like, your own fantasy?”
The