Dark Heart by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin Page B

parked at the greasy spoon across from her building. She could see flames and smoke billowing from inside the diner. Three firemen with axes were chopping a hole in the roof of the restaurant. More firefighters were on ladders, spraying the roof with water, while others worked on the ground to keep the hoses straight.
    She ran her hands through her hair, massaging her scalp. No relief from the headache caused by too little sleep and too much tension. She wondered why so many fires seemed to start at night. Maybe they were just more obvious in the dark…
    She let the curtains fall closed, wandered back across the floor, and collapsed limply onto her bed. Between working late, the murder, and her nightmares, she knew she’d never get back to sleep. Maybe that was a good thing. She was afraid the nightmares would return.
    They’d been the same for the last several days. Something was chasing her, hunting her. Closing in, even though she was running hard, faster than she’d ever run before. Just as it caught up with her, when she could feel its breath on her back, its sharp teeth on her neck, its claws brushing her skin, she’d wake up, heart hammering like a steam engine.
    She shook her head, exasperated. I don’t jump at shadows. Not anymore .
    Not since she’d left her ex-husband. She’d left that waking, walking nightmare far behind. Chuck was out of her life. Permanently. And that was fine.
    Anyway, the dreams she used to have about him were nothing like this. In those dreams, he would hold her underwater until she drowned. She could never break his grip, no matter how hard she struggled, and the more she screamed, the more water filled her lungs.
    The highlight of tonight’s nightmare had been that disturbing beast, sharp-toothed and armed with claws. When she woke up it slithered into the shadows of her mind, its precise shape forgotten. But though she couldn’t remember a single clear detail, the dream still left a lingering chill in the air, a darkness around her heart.
    Blinking her eyes, she crawled out of bed, opened her door, and, yawning, walked down the hall. There was a light on in the kitchen. Benny was up. The smell of brewing coffee filled the air. He swiveled his wheelchair around as she came into the room and raised one quizzical eyebrow.
    “You’re up early,” he said.
    Sandra focused her attention on his eyes, not on the scars where half his nose was scraped away. She knew the skin there wasn’t wet, but it always looked that way, slick and shiny, so smooth it glistened in the light.
    She forced her gaze to remain steady on his. She knew he hated it when people stared at his disfigurement. He’d been a cute kid before the accident, the sort of gawky, computer geek kind of cute that was all the more endearing because he never seemed to know he was cute.
    The other scars on his face wouldn’t be so noticeable, if not for his nose. The surgeons had told them they could do more restorative work, but Benny had refused. He insisted he’d already spent as much time under the knife as he planned to in his life.
    And maybe he had a point. Who was she to judge? She wished she didn’t think about it so much. She could only imagine how much he must think about it.
    “ I’m up early? What about you? Unless, of course, you haven’t gone to bed yet.” It wasn’t unusual to find Benny still tapping on his computer in the shank of the night, but she had never found him in the kitchen, making coffee at five A . M .
    “Couldn’t sleep,” he said. The coffee machine bubbled and gasped into silence. He swiveled back to it. “Want a cup?”
    “Yeah. Please.”
    He filled two mugs and put them on the kitchen table. She opened a cupboard, looking for the box of artificial creamer. After years of greasy spoon coffee, she liked the fake stuff better than real cream. Her spoon made small metallic chimes hitting the side of her cup as she stirred.
    “Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked finally.
    Benny