Shimmer: A Novel by John Passarella Page B

the others—
“Is she violent?”
—but was afraid the question would provoke the woman.
    Liana must have realized Fallon was on the verge of panic. She held up her hand and quietly said, “It’s okay.”
    Thalia raised her own hand—the hand that had been holding the paintbrush a moment ago—and reached toward Fallon’s face, but paused, inches away, her fingers trembling.
    “What—what do you mean?”
Was I in a dream of hers?
“Saw me how?”
    “Shine,” Thalia said with a look of awe on her pale face. “You… are. You shine. The light in the dark…. Beacon in the dark.” She smiled, but her lips quivered with the fragility of her comfort.
    On impulse—a fleeting, subconscious moment of trusting some unknown instinct deep inside—Fallon pressed Thalia’s trembling hand against her cheek. A rush of emotions flooded through Fallon’s mind, ricocheting around her consciousness with tiny jolts of elation and pain, triumph and failure, love and loss, comfort and fear, joy and anger, compassion and revulsion, confusion and emptiness and loneliness…
    Thalia’s hand had become cold as ice.
    Fallon shuddered but held on, hoping for… something—
    —until Thalia snatched her hand away!
    “Dark—dark—dark!” Thalia whispered rapidly. “All the dark, so dark. So dark, and it screams, you know. It screams because it’s angry.
And it listens!”
She swung her arm in a circle to encompass them all, fixing her wide-eyed gaze on each of them in turn.
“Don’t—don’t ever let it hear you!
That’s how it gets inside.” She wiggled her fingers beside her ears. “Rips you apart from inside.”
    Thalia shook her head as if to disassociate herself from her warnings. She looked back at Fallon again. “You’re different. Like that, like the light, but not like that. I don’t know why. You won’t hurt me, will you? Not like the light. It’s warm—” she shook her head “—but it blinds! It
hurts!
” Thalia had begun to sob softly. “Don’t hurt me, Fallon.
Promise!
”
    Again, Liana rushed to her sister’s side to comfort her.
    “Warm, warm, like the light,” Thalia said, still staring at Fallon. “Make her promise. Please, Liana, make her promise.”
    “You’re safe, Thalia,” Liana assured her. “Nobody will hurt you.”
    Thalia pointed an accusatory finger at Fallon. “You say it!”
    “I won’t hurt you,” Fallon said. “Promise.”
    Thalia giggled and the tension seemed to drain out of her in that moment. “I was right about you, I was. Right about Fallon. You’re different.” She let Liana lead her from the office, but her voice carried back to them with a haunting, sing-song clarity. “I saw her. I saw Fallon. Right there, like before, but different. It’s always dark, so dark, but I could see her, up there… I could. She shines, doesn’t she?”
    Fallon heaved an audible sigh, releasing some of her own incredible tension. Her neck and shoulders ached again, while her legs trembled like those of a newborn foal. She held up her hands and saw they were shaking as well.
    Ambrose reached for her hand, perhaps to lead her to an armchair, but she jumped back with an almost self-preservation instinct. “No more touching!”
    Nodding, Ambrose said, “Please, sit, Miss Maguire. You look terribly pale.”
    Logan shadowed her to the chair, but respected her wish not to be touched. Maybe he thought she would stumble and fall. At the moment, she wouldn’t argue against the possibility. But she found her way to the nearest chair and lowered herself into it, following the effort with another sigh.
    Logan leaned close and whispered, “Should have warned you about Thalia. Never thought she’d come down from her attic studio.”
    “May I fetch you a beverage, Miss Maguire?”
    “Water would be great,” Fallon said. Then, as an afterthought. “And it’s still Fallon.”
    “Of course,” Ambrose said. “Back in a moment.” Then he left the two of them alone in his