Fade To Midnight Read Online Free PDF Page B

street, trying to get the taste of the man’s guilt and sour self-loathing out of her mind.
    When she went into that place in her mind, she started picking up stuff from the airwaves. Whatever people were projecting. And there was no shutting it out. Not if she tried.
    She looked around, for someone else to tune in to. Someone more upbeat, more hopeful. Like that cute couple across the aisle from her.
    Yes, they looked promising. He was handsome, in a stiff, prosperous looking way. She looked sweet. Edie sketched her, smearing ink with her finger, trying to catch that glow, the shadows and curves, that unfocused, blurred look of shifting possibilities…oh, God.
    Pregnant. That girl was pregnant. Just a few weeks along. It was still secret. Her dinner partner didn’t know. She was planning on telling him. Tonight. Nervous about it. Smiling until her mouth ached from it, but her guy was not responding to her smile. He looked preoccupied.
    Edie drew the stern line of his Roman nose, his sealed, thin-lipped mouth. His eyes, deep-set, sharp, pinched looking. Energy was gathering inside him. A storm brewing. He intended to hold forth, say his piece, present some watertight argument. He would bolster himself with arrogance, condescension. He thought only of himself; his freedom, his future, his own best interests. They filled his mind so completely, he didn’t even really see the girl. How beautiful she was. How hopeful. The cliff she was poised upon. He was bored by her puppyish clinging. He felt suffocated. He was wondering if he could do better. Snag someone sexier, more interesting, more educated. Smarter. Richer.
    He was about to to tell his girlfriend that he thought they should be seeing other people. Edie’s pen faltered, digging a hole in the paper.
    Maybe she was projecting. Casting this guy as another Eric. An ex who had worn a similar hateful look on his face when he’d dropped that same bombshell on her. But probably not. She was never wrong in these things. Not even when she desperately wished that she were.
    Ouch. She capped her pen, laid down the sketchbook. Threaded ink-stained fingers together. Studied her wineglass. She should stick to horse skulls, stuffed birds. Drawing real people was too dangerous.
    So she defaulted to the next best thing. Fictional characters. She could draw them, have intense insights into their heads, and call it creativity, rather than delusional craziness. Or obscene invasion of personal privacy, depending on your mood.
    She didn’t mean to do this, to anyone. She didn’t want to. It was just something that happened to her, since she was fourteen. Since the Haven, and Dr. Osterman’s cognitive enhancement techniques.
    She’d been enhanced, all right. Practically into the mental ward.
    But dwelling on that was not useful. She did some quick sketches of Fade Shadowseeker, the main character of her graphic novel, trying to catch the right pose for the part where Fade was holding the knife to the throat of the sex-trafficker villain of the fifth Fade Shadowseeker book. Demanding to know where the girls were, because his lover Mahlia was being held among them. His face was a taut mask of fear.
    Drawing Fade made her think of the argument she’d had with Jamal that afternoon, while the kid was systematically inhaling everything in her fridge. Jamal was her eight-year-old upstairs neighbor and her very good buddy. He came down and slept on Edie’s couch when his mother was entertaining her clients in their two room-apartment, on the floor above Edie’s. Which was quite often.
    The argument had come about because Jamal had been having problems separating fantasy and reality. Jamal was insisting that Fade Shadowseeker was real, and walking the streets of their neighborhood. Jamal claimed to know people who had seen Fade with their own eyes, people who’d been saved by him. Jamal knew of places to which Fade had given big wads of money that