Key West by Stella Cameron

they’d said when they thought she still couldn’t hear.
    The scream bubbled up. She opened her mouth and filled it with sheet, forced it inside until she gagged and rolled to let her head hang over the side of the bed.
    “Sonnie. Cara mia? Look at me.”
    Please, nο. “Go away!”
    “Do as I tell you. Look at me. You will do as I tell you. You will not do anything unless I tell you that you may. Do you understand? I will never let you go. Not alive. The only way you’ll be, free of me is in death.”
    “Don’t hit me. Oh, don’t hit me.” All the air left her space and only heat and pulsing remained.
    Α crack smacked her head back against the pillows. She started to pull herself up. A blow to the back of her head threw her forward, and she drew up her knees to meet her face and muffle the next scream.
    “Look at me.”
    She opened her eyes and stared. The window wall was a sheet of flame. She would die here.
    “That’s right.”
    Sonnie slid from the bed to the floor and curled up as small as she could. Frank’s face. Trembling, too weak to hold her head up, she raised her eyes once more and, through the flames, she saw a face. Frank. His lips drawn back from his teeth, his eyes glowing sockets.
    She closed her eyes and waited, and the heat lost its intensity. Her body, bathed with sweat, turned cold. Her teeth chattered. When she opened her eyes, there was no flame, no leering face, no host of stabbing fingers.
    But they had been there, hadn’t they?
    They could come back.
    Whatever she did, she must stay awake. She must never close her eyes and try to sleep again. She needed help or she would die here, alone, with only demon hallucinations to greet her.
    Scooting on her bottom, she backed up until she sat against the bedside table. She kept her eyes on the window and managed to grapple the phone down into her lap. Romano would come at once. She should have listened to him when he warned her she was in trouble and needed help.
    After several attempts, she managed to punch in numbers. What numbers? She usually forgot them. Did she know the number of the country club? She’d never liked the place. It had been for Frank, and for Romano when he was in Key West.
    “Yeah?”
    A cry worked from her lips and it took both of her hands to hold the receiver.
    “Who is this?” The voice on the other end of the line sharpened. “Answer me. Who is this?”
    “S-sorry,” she said. “Wrong n-number.” Chris had made her repeat his number before he’d left that afternoon, only minutes after Romano. She’d written the figures on a board by the kitchen phone, then put them in the little book beside her bed. But she’d dialed it automatically.
    “Sonnie? It is you, isn’t it?”
    Romano hadn’t wanted to leave her with him, but she’d insisted, and finally her brother-in-law had gone, but not before she saw how badly she’d hurt him. Chris had seemed anxious to leave soon after. He’d done his duty to Roy and checked on her, nothing more.
    She hung up the phone. Her breathing was easier, but her head ached. What was the matter with her? She’d had another nightmare—one of many—nothing more. Just because her nightmares were so real, she’d managed to persuade herself there was something she had to find out, that they brought messages intended to send her on a mission for the truth.
    Always in those desperate moments when the flames came, and the face, or sometimes faces, she expected tο die, then wanted to die.
    There was no fire.
    There were no faces.
    Heaving, she hauled herself onto the bed and lay facedown, praying for coolness, for peace, for dreamless sleep.
    “Hush little baby, don’t you cry.”
    She covered her ears. She would talk to Romano in the morning, apologize to him, tell him what she feared, and ask him to help her. He would do that.
    Time stretched while she lay there in her damp pajamas, among damp sheets. As one area grew warm, she moved to another, then another. She needed to