Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

He focused instead on her - shallow breaths, careful silence...a heaviness within her that had nothing to do with the myriad mistakes that had transpired between them.

She was mourning privately.

"How bad off is she...your mother?"

Dylan swallowed, her hair sifting over his chest as she gave a vague shake of her head. "It's not good. She keeps getting weaker." Dylan's voice trailed off. "I don't know how much longer she can fight it. To tell you the truth, I don't know how much longer she will try."

"I'm sorry," Rio said, caressing her back and knowing that he could only offer feeble words.

He didn't want Dylan to hurt, and he knew that she was weathering a deep pain. It didn't take a blood bond to tell him that. And he was ten kinds of bastard for doing what he did with her here tonight.

"We can't stay here," he said, not meaning it to come out like a snarl. "We need to get moving."

He shifted beneath her uncomfortably, groaning when he only succeeded in making their position even more awkward. He muttered a curse in Spanish.

"Are you okay?" Dylan asked. She lifted her head and looked up at him, frowning with concern. "Is the pain coming back now? How do you feel?"

Frustration rose up in his throat on a scoff, but he bit it back. Instead reached out to stroke her cheek. "Have you always tried to take care of everyone around you before yourself?"

Her frown deepened. "I don't need taking care of. I haven't needed that in a very long time."

"How long, Dylan?"

"Ever."

As she said it, her chin went up a bit, and Rio found it easy to picture Dylan as a freckle-faced little girl stubbornly refusing any and all help, regardless of how badly she might need it. As a woman, she was much the same. Defiant, proud. So afraid to be hurt.

He knew that kind of fear personally as well. He'd walked a similar path from the time he was a child. It was a lonely one; he'd almost not survived it himself. But Dylan was stronger than him in so many ways. He was only now coming to realize just how strong she really was.

And how alone as well.

He recalled that she had passingly mentioned having brothers - a pair of them, both named for rock stars - but he'd never heard her speak of her father. In fact, the only family she seemed to have in her life at all was the woman currently residing in the cancer wing of the hospital down the street. The family she was likely going to lose before long.

"Has it been just the two of you for a while now?" he asked.

She nodded. "My dad left when I was twelve - abandoned us, actually. They porced soon afterward, and Mom never remarried. Not for lack of interest." Dylan laughed, but it was a sad kind of humor. "My mom has always been a bit of a free spirit, always falling in love with a new man and swearing to me that she's finally found The One. I think she's in love with the state of being in love. Right now, she's crushing on the man who owns the runaway center where she works. God, for her to have so much love left to give even when the cancer is taking so much away from her..."

Rio smoothed his fingers down Dylan's arm as she fought the sudden hitch in her voice. "What about your father? Have you been in touch with him about what's going on?"

She scoffed sharply. "He wouldn't care, even if I knew where he was and he was sober enough to listen to me. His family was only of value to him when we were bailing him out of trouble or helping him score more booze and drugs."

"Sounds like a real bastard," Rio said, anger for Dylan's hurt spiking in his belly. "Too bad he's gone. I wish I could meet the son of a bitch."

"You want to hear why he left?"

He petted her hair, watching the candlelight play over the burnished waves. "Only if you want to tell me."

"It was my 'gift' as you called it. My weird ability to see the dead." Dylan idly traced one of his glyphs as she spoke, remembering what had to be unpleasant times. "When I was little, elementary school age and before, my parents never paid much attention to the fact that I occasionally would talk to invisible people. It's not that unusual for kids to have imaginary friends, so I guess they ignored it. Plus, with all the arguing and problems in our house, it wasn't like they heard a lot of what I was saying anyway. Well, not until a few years later, that is. In one of his rare sober moments, my father ran across my diary. I'd been writing about seeing these dead women from time to time, and hearing them speak to me. I was trying to understand why it was happening to me - what it meant, you know? - but he saw it as an opportunity to cash in on me."

"Jesus." Rio was despising the man more and more.

"Cash in on you how?"

"He could never hold a job for long, and he was always looking for ways to make a fast buck. He thought if he charged people to come and speak with me - people who'd lost loved ones and were hoping to connect with them somehow - he could just sit back and count the cash as it poured in." She shook her head slowly. "I tried to tell him that's not how my visions worked. I couldn't bring them up on command. I never knew when I'd see them, and even when they appeared, it wasn't like I could carry on a conversation with them. The dead women I see speak to me, tell me things they want me to hear, or want me to act on, but that's it. There's no chatting about who's hanging out with them on the Other Side, or any of the other parlor game type of stuff you see on TV. But my father wouldn't listen. He demanded I figure out how to use my skill...and so, for a while, I tried to fake it. It didn't last long. One of the families he tried to swindle pressed charges, and my father split. That was the last we ever saw or heard from him."

Good riddance, Rio thought savagely, but he could understand how that kind of abandonment must have hurt the child Dylan was.

"What about your brothers?" he asked. "Weren't they old enough to step in and do something about your father?"