A Deafening Silence In Heaven - Thomas E. Sniegoski Page 0,43
beside him. “We just have to be prepared.”
“Can we do anything?” Steven asked.
Linda barely knew this cop, but she could tell he was a good man, and he certainly cared for Remy. She hoped that when—if—this all resolved, no matter how it turned out, they’d have the opportunity to get to know each other better.
“No, no,” she said, suddenly realizing she was incredibly thirsty. She went to the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of water, and nearly drained it one long gulp. She turned and leaned against the counter. An uncomfortable silence filled the room.
“People should probably know,” Linda finally blurted out.
Steven looked at her, confusion on his face.
“Remy’s friends: They should know what’s happened and that things might not turn out so good.” The words were painful to utter, and she felt her eyes grow hot with the potential for tears again. “Sorry,” she said, wiping at her eyes.
“It’s all right.” Steven looked at Squire, who was testing the sharpness of a ten-inch blade by shaving patches of thick hair from his arm.
The room grew silent again and Linda took another swig from her bottle of water before asking the inevitable question, “Is there anybody I should call?”
Steven seemed to give it some thought for a few moments. “He really doesn’t have that many friends. He knows a lot of people, but”—he paused again—“I don’t think he made many friends because of who and what he is.”
“Does he have any . . . angel friends?”
“He doesn’t seem to get along all that well with his own kind.”
“Ashley,” Squire suddenly blurted out.
Both Linda and Steven looked at him.
Squire set the blade he was still playing with down on the table. “If you’re going to get in touch with anybody, it should be Ashley.”
“He’s right,” Linda said.
“Yeah,” Steven agreed. “They are pretty tight.”
“Does she know what Remy is?”
“Yeah, she knows,” Squire said. The goblin pushed back his chair and stood. “She should see him, just in case.”
The weight of the goblin’s words was crushing.
“Does anybody know how we can get in touch with her?” Linda asked.
“I know where she is,” Squire said, walking toward a growing patch of shadow by the kitchen window. “We—Remy, Ash, and me—were all involved with this thing once,” he said. “We’ve stayed in touch since.”
Squire turned and ducked into the shadow as if it were a thing of substance, like pulling back a curtain and disappearing behind it.
“I’ll see if I can bring her back.”
Linda and Steven heard the words echo hollowly from somewhere beyond the shadow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ashley was supposed to have been up at six for an eight-o’clock Early Childhood Development class, but she hadn’t been able to find the energy to get it done.
Instead, she’d lain in bed, listening to the Top 40 DJs and their inane banter, and music that she couldn’t stand interspersed with news, weather, and traffic. It should have been more than enough to drive her from bed, but it hadn’t.
She’d thought she might be getting sick—a cold maybe, or even the flu, but physically she felt fine. There had just been something wrong about the morning, and it had lasted well into her day.
Ashley had asked her roommate if she felt it, too, but she’d just laughed and said Ashley was probably getting her period.
But that wasn’t it; that wasn’t it at all.
The day felt wrong.
She sat in a lawn chair in the backyard and played with her phone. There were no messages from anyone, and nothing she could find on the Internet that would give her such an intense sense of unease.
Just crazy, I guess, she thought. She figured a shower might help and was about to rouse herself from the chair when she heard her roommate call her name.
“Yeah?” Ashley responded, her skin suddenly prickling and her heart beginning to race.
“Can you come in here?”
She bolted from the chair, up the back steps, through the mudroom, and into the kitchen, where she found Melissa looking pale and more than a little befuddled.
“What is it?”
“Your friend is here,” Melissa said.
“My friend? What friend?”
“The creepy one. He’s in the dining room, eating cereal.”
“The creepy one,” Ashley repeated, already on the move into the small dining room.
Squire sat at the table, just about to shovel another spoonful of Lucky Charms into his mouth, as she burst in.
“Squire,” she said. “What . . .”
The goblin wiped his milk-stained mouth with his sleeve and stood.