Cauchemar by Alexandra Grigorescu Page A

let out a cry, suddenly panicked.
    In that moment, she heard every nook and cranny of her windpipe. She thought again of feathers tangling in her trachea, and shadows began to stir at the edges of her sight, crowding in. Something flashed in the mirror, milk-white even in the room’s red glow.
    She tried to sit up, just as the creature disappeared behind the couch. “Callum,” she breathed, and thought she saw a chalky claw stretch toward Callum’s foot. How had it found her?
    â€œSomething’s wrong,” she tried to say as his fingers mapped the long cords of her neck, but a low vibrato started in her pelvis. He shoveled deeper, a steady spade. And then it happened. He struck ore, and they both wailed. An interminable note that made up for her many years of silence.
    He stayed there, his arms trembling, gazing down into her eyes. With a tender smile, he licked her lips as she wheezed herself back to earth. Then he toppled to his side and nuzzled into her breasts, wrapping himself around her body. Beyond him, the room was empty.
    â€œI’m going to hurt tomorrow,” she said.
    His wide eyes turned to her, sheepish. With hair matted in scrolls to his forehead, he looked impossibly young. He looked wholly himself. “I don’t know what came over me. I got swept up in the moment, I guess.”
    She laughed, and pressed him against her shoulder. “Baby,” she murmured. The dizziness had left her, but already she knew she would never again be painless.

CHAPTER
    THREE
    When she returned to her house several days later, she found a letter from a New Orleans estate lawyer who claimed to have been hired by Mae. He said there was a will.
    Callum bundled her into his boat, her body sluggish with anti-nausea medication to weather the rocky trip, and by the time they arrived on the outskirts of New Orleans, Hannah’s eyes were at half-mast.
    They rented a car and Callum drove them down the highway into the city proper. Hannah noticed the blurry landscape in flashes: squat palm trees in the shade of construction cranes were overtaken by streetlights crowned in iron fleur-de-lis. White wooden crosses lined the road, fenced in by miniature American flags.
    New windows sat inside weathered brick, and Hannah craned her neck to peer inside homes as they drove past. She saw courtyards filled with lush plants, slow-moving streetcars, and above it all office towers glinting against the clouds. Hannah watched the parade of high-heeled women in fitted blazers heading home from work and caught a glimpse of a very different life.
    The lawyer’s office was down an alleyway near Frenchmen Street. Callum paused in front of the door as the energetic beat of a big band tune drifted down the street. “That’s a beautiful sound,” he said, smiling. “Joyful music on a Tuesday afternoon.”
    Hannah tugged the short hairs of his beard. “Let’s go have a listen. The lawyer said his whole afternoon was open.”
    A dog barked from a balcony above them and was quieted in French.
    â€œI tried it here, before. I tried hard and it didn’t work, so why torture myself with it,” Callum said. A measure of regret hung in his voice, and Hannah realized she wasn’t yet privy to its cause. “You’re just avoiding this. Go on. I’ll wait out here,” Callum said, and knocked on the thick wooden door. “Good luck, sweets.”
    The lawyer was a short man in a seersucker suit and white socks, his graying hair combed over an obvious bald spot. He explained the inheritance that run-in-the-stockings Mae had left for her.
    â€œThe contents of her bank accounts will pass to you. The house, she says, is not hers to give, but she is certain that its owner would grant it to you. She did make one note,” he frowned as he rifled through the file. “Well, in any case, it was a short note. She urged you to sell the house and purchase elsewhere. Somewhere out