desk seemed used to making exceptions for family members heading up to the cancer ward. He waved Dylan and Rio through, and they took the elevator up to the tenth floor.
Rio waited outside the room as Dylan put her gloves on and opened the door. Her mother was asleep, so Dylan took a seat in the chair beside the bed and just sat there quietly watching her breathe.
There was so much she wanted to tell her - not the least of which being the fact that she had met an extraordinary man. She wanted to tell her mother that she was falling in love. That she was excited and scared and filled with a desperate kind of hope for all that might await in her future with the man standing right outside the hospital room.
She wanted her mom to know that she was falling head over heels in love with Eleuterio de la Noche Atanacio...a man like no other she'd ever known before.
But Dylan couldn't say any of those things. They were secrets she had to keep, for now, certainly. Maybe forever.
She reached out and stroked her mom's hair, carefully pulled the thin blanket up under her delicate chin. How she wished her mother could have known one true, profound love in her lifetime. It seemed so unfair that she'd made so many bad choices, loved too many bad men, when she deserved someone decent and kind.
"Oh, Mommy," Dylan whispered quietly. "This is so damn unfair."
Tears welled up and flooded over. Maybe she'd saved a lifetime of crying in preparation of this moment, but there was no stopping them now. Dylan wiped at her tears but they kept coming, too many for her to sweep away with her latex-covered hands. She got up and went around to grab a tissue from the box on her mother's wheeled bed tray. As she dabbed at her eyes, she noticed a ribboned package sitting on a table at the other side of the small room. She walked over and saw that it was chocolates. The box was unopened, and from the look of it, expensive. Curious, Dylan picked up the tiny white card tucked under the silk grosgrain bow.
It read: To Sharon. Come back to me soon. Yours, G. F.
Dylan mulled over the initials and realized it had to be the runaway shelter's owner, Mr. Fasso. Gordon, her mother had called him. He must have come to visit her sometime after Dylan had left. And the message on the card sounded a bit more intimate than your basic boss-to-employee, get-well sentiment...
Good Lord, could this actually be something more than one of her mom's many disastrous infatuations?
Dylan didn't know whether to laugh or cry even harder at the idea that her mother might have found someone decent. Granted, she didn't know Gordon Fasso outside his general reputation as a wealthy, charitable, somewhat eccentric, businessman. But as far as her mother's taste in men ran, Dylan figured she could - and had - done a lot worse.
She can't hear me.
Dylan froze at the sudden sound of a female voice in the room.
It wasn't her mother's.
It wasn't an earthly voice at all, she realized in the split second before she processed the static-filled whisper and then turned around to face the spirit of a young woman.
I tried to tell her, but she can't hear me...can you...hear me?
The ghost's lips didn't move, but Dylan heard her speak as clearly as any other specter her Breedmate gift had allowed her to see. She held the sorrowful gaze of a dead girl who looked to be less than twenty years old.
A distant familiarity sparked as Dylan took in the goth clothing and the pair of black braids that hung over the girl's shoulders. She'd seen her before at the shelter. The girl had been one of her mother's favorites - Toni. The runaway who'd no-showed at the job Dylan's mom had gotten for her. Sharon had been so disappointed when she told Dylan about losing Toni to the streets. Now, here that poor lost child was, reaching out at last, but from the grave and truly too far gone for anyone to help her.
So, why was she trying to communicate with Dylan?
In the past, she might have tried to ignore the apparition, or deny her ability to see it, but not now. Dylan nodded when the ghost asked again if she was being heard.
Too late for me, said the unmoving lips. But not for them. They need you.