Page 44 of Rune’s Solace

Her shoulders came up.

“Radiator might not’ve been an accident. Then there was that garage, and whatever Amy saw down that row put her on the floor. Now we know there’s a man following her who’s been careful enough to stay out of my sight while he does it.”

Brenda finally turned. I hated what I saw in her face. Not surprise. Fear.

“Devil’s got Mystic digging into her history now,” I said. “But he’s starting with a name. That’s about all we’ve got, and Dawson’s not exactly rare.”

“I promised her.” Barely above a whisper now. “Lord, Rune, I promised that baby. That first night, when she finally told me enough to let me help her, I looked her right in the face and told her she would never have to tell it again. Not Devil. Not the club. Not anybody she didn’t choose herself.” She pressed a hand to her mouth, got herself back together, then dropped it. “I have kept that promise against every man in this clubhouse for a year. Devil included.”

“I know.”

“It’s the one thing she asked of me.” Her voice broke again. “One thing, Rune.”

Brenda stared at me for a long time, before putting both hands over her face. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she whispered.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

BY THE SIXTH night I’d quit calling it trying to sleep. Trying meant there was still some chance of it happening. Mostly I just lay there in the dark now, holding still and waiting for something my body had apparently forgotten how to do.

People say tired like tired is the problem. You look tired. You should take a nap. Go to bed early tonight. Thank you, incredibly helpful, hadn’t thought of sleeping. Tired I could handle. Tired is a Coke, an afternoon nap and maybe being kind of bitchy until dinner. This was different. This was reaching for a pen and watching my hand shake. Standing under the shower, coming back to myself with the water cold and having no idea how long I’d been in there. Crying at a dog food commercial because the old dog got adopted, then crying harder because I was crying at a dog food commercial, which felt like a pretty solid sign that things were going great. Every sound was too loud. Somebody dropped something in the hallway at school and I nearly came out of my skin before I could tell myself it was a water bottle and not a door opening somewhere it shouldn’t.

I got two hours Monday. Maybe ninety minutes Tuesday, chopped into useless little pieces. Wednesday I’m generously calling four, except I’m pretty sure at least half of that was just me being unconscious while my brain ran the nightmare anyway, and I came out of it at early in the morning with my jaw clenched so hard it hurt to eat breakfast.

Thursday I got nothing.

Not one minute.

I watched the window turn that ugly almost-morning blue, and sometime around five a mockingbird started losing its mind outside. I hated that bird. Deeply. Personally. By five-thirty we had a problem with each other.

Friday was when I started screwing things up.

Nothing big. Nothing anybody could point at and say, Amy is losing it. I left my keys hanging in the door. Called Josie Sawyer and laughed hard enough about it that he gave me a look. Put my coffee in the cabinet and didn’t notice until I went looking for it twenty minutes later. Then I sat down in a lecture I’d been waiting a month for, opened my notebook, wrote the date at the top like a person who had her shit together, and couldn’t follow a single damn thing the professor said.

I tried.

God, I tried.

I’d catch the beginning of a sentence and hold onto it as hard as I could, but by the time he got to the end, the beginning was gone. I’d look down to write something and forget what I was writing halfway through the first word. Everybody around me kept taking notes, pages turning, pens moving, and mine just sat there with the date at the top and half a sentence underneath it.

That scared me more than I wanted it to.

Because school was mine.

Not Brenda’s. Not the club’s. Not something somebody rescued me into or gave me because they felt sorry for me. I got myself across that bridge every morning. I sat in those classrooms. I knew the answers. I’d built this one thing all by myself, and sitting there staring at a page I couldn’t fill, I had this horrible feeling that whatever was happening to me at night had finally figured out how to follow me into the daytime and start taking that too.

So Friday I locked myself in a bathroom stall and cried over a biology lecture.

Eleven minutes. I know because I timed it, which is either impressive or deeply pathetic. Jury’s still out.

Then I blew my nose, fixed the black under my eyes, went to my next class, and answered when somebody talked to me like there was nothing wrong.

Nobody knew.

Six days without real sleep, nightmares every time I managed it, my brain starting to come apart in the middle of class, and nobody knew.

Which is a terrible thing to be proud of.

I was proud of it anyway.