I pulled myself away from Storm but he held on, refusing to let me go. Several moments later I tried again, and this time his arms dropped to his sides. I turned round to take a good long look at the body that had been Steffane Ronin. I saw what I had failed to see earlier. Gasping, I strode over to the bed and reached for it.
Sitting on the coverlet right in front of Ronin’s body was a single long stemmed black rose. The instant my fingers touched it it disintegrated into ash. “No!” I cried out in rage. My fingers clenched, closing over nothing. I was holding nothing in my fist, just as Devil Claw had intended.
Chapter 33
DIANA
Storm sent me home to rest. He wasn’t mad at me, and after all why would he be? He had no idea what I had planned. He just thought that I had raced to this house to try and save Steffane Ronin. I had let him believe that. How could I admit to him what I had really planned to do?
When I woke up the next morning I felt no better. I had dreamed of the black rose laughing at me. The Devil Claw Killer had left it for me. How could he have known that I had dreamed of a black rose? Had he seen into my dreams? Was he like me? Could he see and know things that he wasn’t supposed to know?
It felt horrifying to not know. I had wanted to torture him before killing him to find out what he really knew about to me, and now I was scared that he knew more than I had ever thought. Scared that he could reach into my mind and pluck out a dream.
I spent that weekend working at Grimshaw’s magic shop, trying to achieve some sort of normality. But I felt odd. I felt like my psychic radar was a giant drum that had taken a bashing. I felt like I was resonating with the furious emotional aftermath of what had taken place. I couldn’t control it. It would have to stop on its own. And worse, now that the buoyant feeling inside me had gone, I had no idea how I really felt.
The one thing that kept me going that weekend was the memory of Storm hugging me. Of holding me tight and refusing to let me go. That wasn’t just what a boss did, right? That meant that he felt something. It meant that he cared. Maybe it meant that he had been horrified by what he had seen in there when he had followed me into the house, and that he had been scared that I might have been hurt. I was speculating, but that’s what I did when it came to Storm. My mind went into overdrive.
And I wanted to talk to him on Monday. I should have realized why he had been behaving so warily around me. Storm had problems and family secrets of his own. And I was a psychic. Obviously he didn’t know me yet, and he didn’t know how I would deal with any of his secrets. He didn’t want me in his private business. Storm felt vulnerable around me. That was why he had kept a distance, especially after I had pried into his private life that day he had ended up in my bed thoroughly drunk. That had to be it. And I was going to tell him that I would never betray him. Not when it came to that. I would never tell anybody any of his secrets. That he was safe with me.
Secretly I supposed I wanted him to hug me again. And tell me that we were both going to be all right.
This was the thought I woke up with on Monday morning when it was time to go into Agency Headquarters for work again. I woke up earlier than usual, determined for once to arrive at the office on time. I got dressed and didn’t bother to eat breakfast. That would only slow me down. I scooped up AngelBeastie, ready to let her out on the street outside my building, and opened the door of my apartment and promptly stumbled over Finch Greyiron.
He had been sitting cross-legged on the floor, his back leaning against my door. I had to grab onto his shoulders to keep myself upright.
“Finch!” I cried. “What are you doing here?”
Immediately I felt horribly guilty. It had been a week since I had spoken to Finch. I had completely forgotten about him and Zezi. I had promised him that I would help to find her and I had not bothered to call him back, and now the poor guy had been forced to to come looking for me.
That he had found out where I lived was a fact that I wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
I find myself scowling at him accusingly.
Finch looked at me with those bright intense hazel eyes of his that I’d never bothered to pay much attention to before. There was a hint of green in them that reminded me of a vast and magical forest. And there was grief in them to. Finch was not smiling. He was pale anyway, but now he looked downright ashen.
“She’s dead,” he said in a dull voice. “We went looking for her, and now they’ve killed her.” His voice shook on the last part.
I stared at him in disbelief. “What?” I said.
“She’s dead!” he yelled. “And it’s our fault. We are the reason why she is dead!”
And so instead of going into the office that morning I went with Finch to the coroner’s building where we found Zezi’s mother identifying Zezi body, which was laid out on a steel gurney covered with a white sheet. Only Zezi’s face was visible. Her mother was bent over Zezi, her forehead pressed against Zezi’s forehead.
Zezi looked just like she had in her pictures. Except now her eyes were closed and she was no longer smiling. She really was dead. She hadn’t died years ago. She had died just yesterday.
Mrs Shahidi turned and saw me and Finch standing in the doorway. She screamed and she ran towards him and started beating him with her fists. “You did this!” she screamed. “You did this! You killed my Zezi.”
Finch didn’t lift a single finger to defend himself. He let her beat him as if he deserved it. He was shaking. Tears were pouring down his cheeks. He flinched at every blow that landed on his face. He let her hit him until she was exhausted and sank to her knees.
I sank to my knees too and hugged her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry I didn’t find her.”
She was sobbing in a gasping convulsing way that seemed like she would never stop. I didn’t notice the young girl sitting on the bench outside the mortuary until the girl came over to us and put her arm around her mother. “Mama, don’t cry,” she said in a small voice. She looked lost, like she didn’t know what to do.
Mrs Shahidi shoved me away. She put her hands over her face so that her daughter would not see her tears. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she said to me. “You don’t care. You didn’t find her. She was alive. All these years she was alive.”
She struggled to her feet and walked away from us, taking her little daughter with her. The girl looked over her shoulder at me, taking one long lingering look at me, the girl who had promised to find her sister and not kept that promise. She had big glowing eyes, just like Zezi’s.
I found Finch staring down at Zezi, but when I tried to make him go home he refused to leave her. So I stayed with him for a while, while he just stared at her helplessly. I knew that he didn’t want to go because this is was the last time he would ever see her. Zezi was really gone, and he was spending these moments trying to get to used to it. To know that he would never get to tell her that he loved her. He would never hear her say those words to him either.