Black Fall (The Black Year Series Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  EPILOGUE

  FAQ

  Credits, disclaimer, and copyright

  WHITE WINTER

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my patient, earnest, talented, and occasionally blunt muse of a wife,

  Who told me what she really thought of my characters and made me write a better book.

  PROLOGUE

  Jonas stood stiffly by his mother’s side at the end of the aisle, resisting the urge to tug on his collar or shuffle his feet. Tatters of muted conversation floated up from the crowd.

  “—do you think she’ll do now? Go back to work?”

  “She still has the boy to think of. Besides, I heard her condition—”

  The black leather shoes were new and uncomfortable, and his collar itched after the big guy who picked him up from school knotted his tie too tightly. He was wearing cufflinks for the first time and didn’t like the way they made the cuffs hang loose over his wrists.

  “—looks like his father. It’s unnatural, considering—”

  His father was dead. Jonas had been rushed to a store on Park Avenue, measured, then taken to an old-fashioned barbershop where a hunched Italian man who’d earned his barber’s license in 1967 shaved him and cut his hair. Then back to the clothing store where, face still warm and damp, he’d been fitted for the suit, tried on the shoes, and left wearing them.

  It was a bright, chilly night. The full moon was hidden by clouds, but it was never really night in New York. A light breeze drifted through the open double doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Nice night for a funeral, Jonas thought, as he stared up at the vaulted ceilings, and immediately felt a twinge of guilt. His dad hadn’t been big on sarcasm. The design was beautiful though, ribs crisscrossing in the shape of eight-pointed stars above the aisle, arching so high that it made him feel dizzy.

  Two hundred people sat in the pews. They stared at him, his mother, the five-foot-tall picture of his father, and the urn set on a small wooden table beside them. The pressure of their stares was suffocating. He fought the urge to rip off the stupid jacket and shoes and go grieve his father alone.

  The mourners, most of whom he’d never met, began to come up one by one or as families.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Black.”

  “My condolences, Mrs. Black.”

  No one looked at Jonas or called his mother, Alice, by her first name. It was as if they were all scared of her. She’d always seemed delicate around his father, and sometimes sad when Victor Black was away. Now she looked cold and intimidating. He’d never seen her like this.

  “Mrs. Black, my… family would like to assure you we had nothing to do with—”

  Alice cut the man off. “Not now, Vincent.”

  Vincent was tall and pale, with limp, yellow hair plastered to his skull. He looked ancient, and his grey eyes seemed to look through Jonas and his mother, focused on something else. “Of course, Mrs. Black. My apologies.”

  Jonas’ eye was caught by a glint of moonlight that slipped past the cloud cover and through one of the stained glass windows. There was a sudden commotion in the pews — a young man having some kind of seizure. The boy’s older brother, a large man who looked to be his twenties, grabbed the kid by the upper arm and walked him outside, almost dragging him. A similarly large woman from the same group — not fat, more like a pro wrestler in formal clothes — walked quickly up to Jonas’ mother and said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Black. He’s young, and Phillip isn’t here…”

  “It’s alright, Leticia. I was touched your family came on such short notice. Why don’t you take the others home? There’s no ill will between our families.”

  Leticia, who must have been the boy’s mother, bobbed her head. “Of course there isn’t. Thank you, Mrs. Black.” Jonas thought he saw a glint of yellow in the woman’s eyes, but before it could register she walked back to her group; they all stood — at least two dozen of them — and filed out of the Cathedral.

  “Your father was an important man, Jonas,” his mother said.

  My father was a salesman, Jonas thought. I’m not even sure what he sold. He swallowed and blinked back tears. No, he thought, shaking his head slightly, that’s not fair. His father had been exceptional in many ways. He never got angry, never raised his voice, and always had time for Jonas or Jonas’ mother when he was home. It was almost as if he didn’t have needs of his own, and he’d filled his life with quietly supporting everyone around him.

  Still, Jonas couldn’t fathom why they were being treated like royalty. He went to a public school, wore regular clothes any day but today, and had a normal girlfriend who’d liked him enough to stick around for the past year. He was supposed to be bored, not get his life trashed.

  He glanced at his mother sideways, taking in her rigid posture, her blank, polite expression, so different from the smiling, insightful woman she’d been on his father’s arm. She looked lifeless. I can’t make this worse for her, he thought.

  Jonas stopped fidgeting, stood up a little straighter, and tried to look politely neutral in the face of calamity.

  More people started to trickle out, pausing to talk in little clumps as they made their way to the door. Finally, it was just Jonas, his mother, and Marcus Fangston, a longtime family friend.

  Marcus put his hand on Alice’s elbow and said, “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

  “I will, Marcus. Thank you.”

  “Goodbye, Jonas. Come see me sometime.”

  Jonas nodded numbly. His feet were sore, his legs stiff, and a scream was frozen in his throat, but he kept it from showing. As Marcus walked toward the exit, Jonas’ mother reached to retrieve the urn. She started walking toward the doors, then stopped. Jonas heard the sound of porcelain on porcelain as she removed the lid and sniffed.

  “Mom, what are you—”

  “Marcus!” she snapped.

  He stopped and turned, eyebrows raised in surprise. Then, with a sigh, he walked back to where she was standing. “Alice, it’s been a long day—”

  “This isn’t him,” she said sharply, hefting the urn.

  His shoulders dropped, and he looked at her pityingly. “Alice, we’re all devastated by Victor’s death, but this isn’t the time to—”

  “You listen to me, Marcus,” she said, in a tight, clipped voice. “I am not some mewling housewife to be appeased, drugged, and sent to therapy. Did you think I wouldn’t know? That I don’t remember what human ash smells like?” Her voice rose to a shriek, loud enough to echo off the Cathedral walls. “This is not my husband!”

  Fangston gaped and Jonas watched in horror as she slammed the urn to the ground, scattering shards of porcelain and white ash across the floor.

  That was when Jonas found out what human ash smelled like: incense, charcoal, and chalk dust. It slipped through his fingers like white sand and crushed seashells. It got into h
is mouth, nostrils, and eyes. It colored his hair and mingled with his tears… but no matter how frantically he tried to gather the pieces back together, his father was never coming home.

  CHAPTER 1

  Jonas looked over his father’s shoulder as Victor took a crowbar to one of the wooden crates. It was full of equipment – military gear, like something out of a war movie. His dad rifled through boxes of walkie-talkies and bulletproof vests, looking for something. Then, as his dad reached to lift something out, there was a loud ding – the sound of an elevator door opening. Victor dropped whatever was in his hand and spun around, fear clearly written on his face.

  That’s when Jonas realized he was dreaming. He knew his dad wouldn’t be scared. Neither was Jonas.

  “I’m not afraid,” he told himself. “No one is stronger than me in my dreams.” It was something his dad had taught him as a kid.

  The first time he’d had a nightmare, when he was four years old, he’d woken to find his dad standing at his bedside.

  “Go back,” his father had said, stroking Jonas’ forehead. “Go back and hunt the thing that scares you.”

  He remembered the weight of his dad’s hand on his forehead, and a feeling of calm. He couldn’t remember what he’d been afraid of, but afterward, he never had trouble sleeping again.

  His view blurred, and suddenly his dad reappeared on the other side of the room, partially hidden in shadow. Then he blurred again, and disappeared from view. Jonas willed the dream after him.

  As he floated along, bodiless, he tried to make sense of what he was seeing and feeling. The air around him felt cool and damp, as though they were in a cave, but the walls were brick. The place definitely felt old, yet the pallets, crates, and cardboard boxes were new, laid out in neat rows, like a warehouse, with just enough room to pass between them.

  The next room was occupied by… things. Monstrous shapes with glowing eyes lurked in every corner, and each room his father blurred into, seemed to have more. Jonas noticed his dad looking increasingly scared now, almost a caricature, glancing over his shoulder like a pulp-horror heroine at something just out of sight.

  The dream moved faster, crossing entire rooms in a blink, Victor taking stairs upward whenever he could. Jonas followed easily, floating behind him. Soon, however, it became clear that his father wasn’t afraid of the shapes in the dark. The creatures barked, hissed, and screeched, but his dad ignored them. No, it had to be something else, some unknown presence just out of sight.

  Several floors above where the dream started, Victor ran out of options. They stood in a large, square room with brick walls, and a high ceiling striped with metal rafters. There was a single door opposite the stairs, with sunlight seeping under it.

  “Dad! Not that way!” Jonas shouted, momentarily forgetting it was a dream. Both his father and mother had a condition — a severe reaction to sunlight. It gave them rashes and blisters, and could send them into shock. That’s why they only went out at night, and every window in their apartment was covered with heavy black curtains. All except the one in his room. Somehow, he’d lucked out in the genetic lottery. To him, sunlight was just warm.

  Jonas watched his dad standing there, frozen, afraid to go back and unable to go forward. Then, suddenly, the door swung open, revealing a man’s shape silhouetted in the afternoon sun.

  The figure spoke a single word. “Victor!”

  Victor fell back in terror, as a single ray of sunlight struck his leg. Jonas felt a sharp pain in his shin, and yelped.

  ♚

  “Jonas, wake up!” Amelia hissed. She kicked him again and his eyes popped open.

  “What happened?” he said, feeling several sets of eyes turn to look at him.

  “What happened?” Amelia whispered. “We’re supposed to be studying French, and you fell asleep. That’s what happened.”

  They were in the public library, a few streets and avenues over from the block they both lived on. He’d awakened loudly, so he mouthed an apology to the people he’d disturbed before letting his eyes swing back to his girlfriend.

  She was a petite brunette, with serious, hazel eyes and a cute line of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her lips were squashed together in a thin line. She wasn’t pleased.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Je suis désolé,” she corrected, narrowing her eyes. “And sorry isn’t going to take your tests for you. What were you thinking?”

  “I was dreaming about my dad,” he answered, feeling a trace of hurt creep into his voice.

  Amelia sighed, and the lines on her face relaxed. She slid her hand across the table, placed it over his, and squeezed. Then she frowned and pulled it back.

  “It’s been a year, Jonas. The teachers aren’t going to let you get away with this forever.”

  “They aren’t—” He noticed his voice start to rise, as did several other people, and cringed. “I’m passing all my classes,” he whispered.

  “B’s and C’s won’t get you into a good college,” Amelia said, crossing her arms.

  Jonas sat back. She’d been doing that a lot more lately: talking about his future… their future. “You’re worried I won’t be able to get into the same college as you, aren’t you? That’s kind of creepy, you know, we’re only—”

  “I didn’t—” she said, blushing.

  Jonas’ eyes widened as the image of a tall, balding man who had Amelia’s nose, and never seemed happy to see him, popped into his head. “Your dad,” Jonas said, smacking his palm to his forehead and letting it slide down to cover his mouth.

  Amelia nodded and looked down at her hands.

  We’re only sixteen, Jonas thought. College was two years away… a lifetime. “What’s his problem with me, anyway?”

  Amelia started to say, “He just—”

  “It’s okay,” Jonas interrupted. “I know. Let’s just get out of here.” He gathered up his books.

  “Okay,” she said, not meeting his eyes.

  They walked home in silence. It was early November, and the leaves were changing. Jonas had always seen fall as a time of preparation: animals overeating for hibernation, students cramming for midterms, and trees shedding their leaves to survive until spring. Now, ever since the funeral, all he noticed were black skies, dead leaves on the ground, and the bite of an early winter.

  About halfway to her apartment, Jonas reached out and took Amelia’s hand. He’d tried talking to her about his dreams before, but she didn’t understand. How could she? Vivid dreams were one thing, but some of his felt real. And lately, they all did. He’d read about déjà vu online, how it was little short circuits in the brain, but his dreams weren’t tiny sparks, they were more like electrical storms. Sometimes, it was almost like he caught a flash of what people were thinking.

  Amelia was right about one thing, though. Dreams wouldn’t put his life back on track. It had gotten derailed, causing him to lose the warm certainty he’d had as a child. Up until the funeral, he’d thought life was a series of predictable, generally benign, events that led to adulthood – with goals, a good job, and a family. As it turned out, they’d all been walking tightropes with blindfolds and no safety nets. His father had fallen off, and his mother…

  “I’m worried about my mom. She’s been spending a lot more time in her room lately. Ever since…”

  Amelia’s hand tensed. “Doesn’t she have…?”

  “Porphyria cutanea tarda,” Jonas said, automatically. He was used to having to explain it.

  “Right… can’t be out during the day… gets sunburns, blisters, and—”

  Jonas shook his head. “I’m not talking about that. We have heavy curtains on all the windows, and she still goes to work at night. It’s just that, well, she used to come out and visit in the afternoons, when Dad was still… alive. Now, she stays in her room until it’s time to leave, and when she sees me, it’s like she’s surprised I’m there.”

  “She’s grieving, Jonas,” Amelia said, squeezing his hand.

/>   Jonas stopped. “Really? It’s been over a year since she threw his ashes all over the church floor, and she still doesn’t believe he’s dead. That’s not normal!”

  Amelia winced.

  “Sorry, didn’t mean to raise my voice. I’m just worried. I need to talk to her… tonight.”

  Amelia looked at him skeptically. They started walking again but didn’t talk for the rest of the trip. He could have told her about the dream, but that kind of stuff just made her uncomfortable. All of her energy was focused on the real world — school, parents, and plans for the future.

  Jonas thought back over the previous year. At least money hadn’t become an issue for him and his mom. They’d stayed in their expensive apartment, and she hadn’t given him the, “We need to make different choices now that your dad’s gone,” speech. But Jonas knew she couldn’t be making that much working as an administrator for a tiny clinic. So, unless she’d inherited a trust fund, his father must’ve made arrangements.

  On the off chance she just wasn’t paying attention, he’d decided to save some of his allowance. He felt a little sick every time he used his debit card. In a lot of ways, Amelia was braver than he was. Real life could be a lot more frightening than dreams.

  As they approached the front entrance to Amelia’s apartment building, she turned and said, “Thanks for walking me.”

  Jonas leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Sure, I’ll see you tomorrow, okay babe?”

  Lately, he’d started experimenting with terms of endearment. It felt awkward. “Honey” was too many syllables to blurt out, “hun” was too southern, and he didn’t think “love” was honest. He liked her, and they spent a lot of time together, but he didn’t look at her like his mom looked — had looked — at his dad. So he used “babe,” even though it made him feel like a jock.

  She rewarded him with a smile, and he felt its warmth on his face, like the sun on a cold day. I did something right today, he thought, returning her smile.

  “You’ll call me if you need to, right?” she said.

  “I will.”

  He watched her walk up the steps to her door. She turned before closing it and blew him a kiss.