Dreams for the Dead Read Online Free

forehead between them. The curls of her hair created a barrier between her and the rest of the world.
    Most of the time her shifts at work seemed to last forever. Beyond the dark window, the night was suspended in the surreal amber haze of streetlights that put her on the edge of time. When she looked at the glass, all she could see was a dim reflection of the store. And herself, but she usually avoided her own eyes. She never noticed anything weird in her own bathroom mirror, but in the store, where the light was different, the window showed her eyes as hollow shadows. Their dismal reflection made her feel like the living dead. If she stared closely into her pupils, she could discover the most frightening version of herself.
    Her job was mostly dull, but the dullness suited her. The dullness was her. She worked among stiff pages beneath the hum of the air conditioning. Her feet creaked the floor beneath the thin carpet. Day after day of fuzzy sunlight slanting across her knuckles. Night after long September night, each one cooler than the last.
    Sometimes the wind outside was fierce, buffeting the window and jangling the bell above the door. Those windy nights she felt jumpy and savagely wistful, and she waited and wished for som ething to happen that never, ever did.
    Until now.
    Dawn got up from the footstool and went to sit behind the register instead. With a sigh, she poked her sunburned shoulders. The tip of her nose had reddened too.
    Uncoiling the strips of neg atives from the film canister, she held them up to the light. Leila probably would have yelled at her for getting fingerprints on them.
    The negatives showed nothing important. They were just tiny shots of Leila’s carefully co mposed, half-blurred vision. There were a few of Dawn. She wondered how Leila chose which ones to develop. Most of them were too abstracted to make sense to her.
    She rolled them back into the canister and glanced at the clock. Almost ten. Time to start coun ting the drawer.
    It was a quick task, and she walked the drawer back to Roy with three minutes to spare before closing. “I’m going home,” she said.
    He opened the safe and stuck the drawer inside. “Thanks.” Then he pretended he’d been going over the store’s accounts all along, instead of watching The Crow , which was paused on his laptop.
    “See you tomorrow.”
    Though the bookstore was close enough to the apartment for Dawn to walk to and from work, which she had often done when the weather was nice, she hadn’t felt safe doing it tonight. She drove home, still wondering why she didn’t just call the police. It had been twenty-four hours now, or close to it. And Leila wasn’t home. The apartment was dark.
    “All right,” she grumbled as she parked her car and got out. “I’m doing it.” She dialed 911 while walking to the door and was about to hit send.
    Someone stepped in front of her and she looked up, expecting a neighbor. But she’d never seen the man before. It could have been a neighbor, since she didn’t know them that well, and people were always moving in and out. He was tall, with shoulder-length black hair and swarthy features. He was kind of handsome, but she didn’t really have time to think about that. He wore a plain white shirt and holey jeans.
    “Excuse me,” she said, and started to move around him.
    “You’re going to make trouble for us, aren’t you?”
    She stopped again. “What?”
    “I can’t let you make that call.”
    His hand flashed out and he snatched the phone from her. Dawn gaped in astonishment as he crushed it in his fist. Who even did that? For a second she forgot to be afraid, because she was so a ngry she’d lost two phones in twenty-four hours. No, not lost. Some random assholes had destroyed them.
    And suddenly the fear returned. This wasn’t some weird joke or a coincidence. Something bad had happened to Leila, and now the bad guys had come for her to tie up loose ends. The man’s bottomless dark eyes