Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,39

to work on a history term paper that was due on Monday. Mostly, I just stared at the screen of my laptop and zoned out, but other times I managed a sentence or two that I invariably deleted five minutes later. Bob was stretched out beside me on the couch, his head against my hip, but he’d long ago fallen asleep and wasn’t much company. I was pretty tired myself, but not overly eager to face whatever dreams my mind planned to throw at me tonight.

Bob woke up the second he heard the key in the lock, and he was off the couch and doing a welcome home dance before the door even began to open. I quickly brushed the dog hair off the middle seat and fluffed up the cushions. The leather might still hold a hint of eau de chien, but based on the look on my dad’s face, a dog on a forbidden couch was the least of his worries.

I swear he was looking older every day. The bags under his eyes were growing more pronounced and darker, and the brackets around his mouth had gone from shallow trenches to veritable canyons.

“What are you doing still up?” he asked, rubbing at his eyes and stifling a yawn.

Maybe now isn’t the best time for this conversation, I thought to myself. It didn’t look to me like Dad needed one more thing on his plate right now, so maybe I should just leave it until morning.

The problem was, if things stayed true to form, he wasn’t going to look much perkier in the morning—he might even look worse, if the phone ended up ringing at some unholy hour—so there was no point in putting it off.

“I need to talk to you about something,” I said, and though he tried to hide it, I could see the hint of worry that sparked in his eyes.

“Any chance it can wait until morning?” he asked. “I’m dead tired.”

I was tempted to take the out he’d just given me, to spend a few more hours trying to pretend that everything in my world was normal. But denial no longer seemed like such a hot idea, and I wanted to know how much of what I’d seen might be real. After all, just because the fleur-de-lis had turned into a phallic symbol didn’t mean I’d really been chased by a trash monster or that I’d really seen a baby turn into a pile of dust and blow away.

“No, I don’t think it can,” I said, searching his eyes to see his reaction. He’s usually pretty good at hiding what he’s thinking—one of the many “flaws” my mom harped on during their epic fights as the marriage ended—but he didn’t do such a great job this time.

I’d suspected from the moment Luke and I had talked about it that some of the weird things that were happening in the city and keeping my dad at work so much were the same brand of weird I’d been experiencing, and the look in my dad’s eyes was all the confirmation I needed.

Walking gingerly, as if his bones were aching, he made his way to his favorite chair and dropped down into it with a groan. “What have you seen?” he asked.

At least he wasn’t bothering with a useless denial. “Enough to make The Twilight Zone seem like a documentary.”

He winced and rubbed his eyes again.

“What’s going on, Dad?”

He shook his head and sighed. “I wish I knew, Becks. I wish I knew.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees. “What really happened on the night you called nine-one-one?”

I was surprised to find I was still harboring a fair amount of anger about that night. My response made it out of my mouth before I had a chance to think better of it. “You already made it clear that you know the One True Answer to that question, and nothing I have to say about it is worth listening to.”

“I made a mistake,” he admitted. “But it’s not like you were telling me the truth, so don’t mount your high horse just yet.” The words came out mildly reproachful rather than angry, and that helped defuse my own fit of pique.

“If you didn’t believe the plausible explanation, then you would never in a million years have believed the real one,” I said, with no heat.

“Maybe not then,” he agreed with a nod. “But I’m listening now. I doubt it’s any