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?"
"By that time, both of them were gone." Dylan's voice sounded very quiet, more pained than at any time when she'd been reliving her father's betrayal. "I was only seven when Morrison died in a car accident. He'd just gotten his license that week, just turned sixteen. My father took him out to celebrate. He got Morrie drunk, and evidently my father was in even worse shape, so he gave the keys to Morrie to drive them home. He missed a turn and ran the car into a telephone pole. My father walked away with a concussion and a broken collarbone, but Morrie...he never came out of his coma. He died three days later."
Rio couldn't contain the growl that boiled up from his throat. The urge to kill, to avenge and protect this woman in his arms was savage, a seething fire in his veins. "I really need to find this so-called man and give him a taste of true pain," he muttered. "Tell me your other brother beat your father to within an inch of his useless life."
"No," Dylan said. "Lennon was older than Morrie by a year and a half, but where Morrie was loud and outgoing, Len was quiet and reserved. I remember the look on his face when Mom came home and told us Morrie had died and our father would be spending a couple days in jail once he got out of the hospital. Len just...dissolved. I saw something in him die that day too. He walked out of the house and straight into a military recruiter's office. He couldn't wait to get away...from us, from all of it. He never looked back. Some friends of his said he'd been shipped out to Beirut, but I don't know for sure. He never wrote or called. He just...disappeared. I just hope he's happy, wherever his life took him. He deserves that."
"You deserve it too, Dylan. Jesus, you and your mother both deserve more than what life has given you so far."
She lifted her head and pivoted to face him, her eyes glistening and moist. Rio cupped her beautiful face and brought her to him, kissing her with only the lightest brush of his lips across hers. She wrapped her arms around him, and as he held her there, he wondered if maybe there was a way that he could give Dylan some hope...some piece of happiness for her and the mother she loved so dearly.
He thought of Tess - Dante's Breedmate - and the incredible skill she had to heal with her touch. Tess had helped Rio mend from some of his injuries, and more than once he'd witnessed firsthand how she could take away battle wounds and knit broken bones back together again.
She'd said the ability had diminished now that she was pregnant, but what if there was a chance...even a slim one?
As his mind started chugging away on the possibilities, his cell phone went off. He grabbed it from out of the pocket of his discarded jacket and flipped it open.
"Shit. It's Niko." He hit the talk button. "Yeah."
"Where the fuck are you, man?"
He glanced at Dylan, looking so delectably naked in the soft glow of the candles. "I'm in the city - Midtown. I'm with Dylan."
"Midtown with Dylan," Niko repeated, a sardonic edge to his voice. "I guess that explains why the Rover's sitting at the curb and there's no one here at her place. You two decide to take in a show or something? What the hell's going on with you and that female, amigo?"
Rio didn't feel like explaining at the moment. "Everything's cool here. Did you and Kade run into any problems?"
"Nope. Located all four inpiduals and did a gentle little soft-shoe on their memories from the cave." He chuckled. "Okay, maybe we weren't so gentle on that asshole she works for at the paper. Guy was a first-class dick. The only one left to do is the female's mother. Tried her home address and the shelter where she works, but no luck either place. You got any idea where she is?"
"Ah...yeah," Rio said. "Don't worry about it, though. It's under control. I'm going to handle that situation myself."
There was a beat of silence on the other end. "Okay. While you're, ah, handling the situation, you want Kade and I to run the Rover out and pick you up? Time's gonna be getting tight soon if we want to make it back to Boston before the sun comes up."
"Yeah, I need pickup," Rio said. He rattled off the cross-streets of the hospital complex. "See you in twenty."
"Hey, amigo?"
"Yeah?"
"Are we picking you up solo, or should we expect company for the ride back?"