She pushed him hard. He landed on his back on the bed.
He began to fumble with his shirt, trying to get it off.
“No, I’ll do that,” Diana said. “I’ll do everything.”
Pete
SOMETHING WAS NOT right. He could no longer balance atop the sheet of glass. He had fallen. He was falling still.
There was a ringing in his ears. A fire burned inside his body and that body was almost all he saw now. The sister was a faint echo. The Darkness was far away. He was inside himself, burning, twisting, and falling forever and forever.
He tried to make his mother appear, but she wavered and slipped away.
The cool breeze could not reach inside him, it sliced his skin but did not put out the fire.
He felt his body empty out. Wrong. Wrong even to see himself, wrong to have his body be so big a part of his mind, pushing everything else aside.
Pain. An explosion, one of many, erupted from him and shot white-hot spears into him again and again.
His sister was upset, her distraught, too-bright, too-blue eyes swam around like fish in an aquarium.
The pale tentacle reached, quested, but could not find him because he was no longer high atop it all, perched and balanced, he was falling, spinning downward into thirst and burning and pain.
He had to make it stop.
But how?
Chapter Twenty-One
24 HOURS, 10 MINUTES
LITTLE PETE LICKED his lips. They were dry and cracked.
Astrid was thirsty, too. She’d gone out a couple of times, defying the quarantine, to look for water.
Her plan now was to wait for dawn when the dew would settle on the leaves of the trees, on the siding of the house.
She had a squeegee and a bucket and some fairly clean rags. She had to get water. She had to get Pete something to drink.
No one to call on for help. Sam was gone. She had looked for Edilio but not found him. Who could get her anything? Who could help her?
Little Pete coughed hoarsely and licked his lips as he hung in midair, twisting slowly, like a chicken on a rotisserie, hovering in the breeze that blew strong through the window.
Afterward Diana lay alone in her bed. She’d kicked Caine out and Caine was relieved to go.
Diana would not have minded him staying. But she sensed he needed to go off and think, wonder what he’d gotten himself into, and regret any implication that he had cleaned up his act and accepted her terms.
It was all a fantasy, of course, the idea that he would change. Maybe someday. Maybe when he was older. Maybe when he got a career and a house and a wife and all the other things that cause wild boys to turn into men.
Not that men were always better behaved than boys.
Diana stayed on her side of the bed, just as if Caine was still there. That had become his side of the bed. It belonged to him.
Of course if that was true she was going to have to find some condoms. From just the two times the risk of pregnancy wasn’t great, especially given the fact that her body was half wrecked. But still. The last thing anyone wanted was a baby.
What chance would any kid have with Caine as father and Diana as mother? Diana laughed softly. And could not later recall the exact moment or the exact reason that her laughter turned into bitter tears.
Edilio stood completely still in the hallway outside of Roscoe’s room.