The Missing

to eat.

    You work yourself too hard. Why are you doing this?

    Rose had been dead for three years now, a victim of Katrina. She’d gone to New Orleans to visit a friend who had just lost her mother, one of those friends who hadn’t tried to leave until it was too late, and by the time it was clear they needed to leave, they couldn’t. Rose had stayed by her side. They had both drowned when the water got too high.

    Another one of Taige’s failures.

    You can’t help everybody, baby girl. Come on now, put the wine down and go get something to eat. Take a bath . . . go for a swim . . . you got to do something besides sit inside and brood.

    Taige lifted her wineglass in a salute. “If it’s all the same to you, Rose, I’m just going to sit inside and brood.” She drained the glass and filled it a third time. She hoped by the time she had emptied a fourth, her brain would be getting fuzzy. Otherwise, she was going to have to drink that nasty merlot Dante had brought over when he came down at Christmas last year.

    You didn’t fail me, Taige.

    She closed her eyes and wished she could block out those annoying little whispers. Sometimes, it seemed like Rose had settled inside of Taige’s soul, instead of going on to be with the husband she’d lost when Dante was only two. But it wasn’t really Rose, just memories of her, just Taige missing her.

    But the real bitch was that Taige would have preferred a real ghost and all the nagging and mothering in the world over what happened if she managed to fall asleep before she was so tired she ached with it. When she was that tired, bone tired, she could fall fast and hard into a sleep to rival that of the dead. Dark, dreamless sleep.

    Over the years, training and regular use had given her a greater control over her skills, and as her control increased, those abilities had evolved so that she rarely needed to sleep for the visions to come. They came easier now, and she could recall them in fine, vivid detail. Now that she actively sought them, instead of waiting for them to find her, she had more control over them, and they rarely plagued her when she slept.

    Unfortunately, though, that left room for something that much more disturbing. The only thing that kept those dreams at bay was sheer exhaustion—or lots of liquor. She didn’t have the stomach for whiskey, hated the taste of it, and the smell of beer was enough to nauseate her. So that left wine and cocktails. Cocktails usually required a little more work than Taige liked, unless it was something simple like rum and Coke. It all added up to her drinking a hell of a lot more than she should.

    The rhythmic ebb and flow of the waves was having a hypnotic effect on her. She could feel her eyelids dragging down while her body sank into that heavy, drowsy state that came right before sleep. Tired . . .

    Her lids drooped low once more, and then she tensed, her body going ramrod straight in the chair. “Damn it,” she muttered. She set the wineglass down and scrubbed her hands over her face. Didn’t do too much to help. The fog of sleep was already clouding her brain, and nothing short of a caffeine injection or a cold shower was going to do the trick.

    Caffeine required too much work. Shoving her tense body out of the chair, she stumbled into the bathroom, stripping off her clothes and dropping them behind her as she went. She left the clothes wherever they fell, shirt, bra, boots, socks, and jeans forming a haphazard trail. Wearing just a pair of plain cotton panties, she flipped on the light in the bathroom and opened the door to the shower stall. She turned the water on full, not bothering to adjust it to a warmer temperature. After stripping off her panties, she climbed inside and let the cool water rain down on her.

    It soaked her hair, and Taige realized she’d forgotten to undo the thick braid. Too tired to care, she left it alone. She’d deal with it later. Even with the cool water spraying down on her, she felt like she was in some sort of fog. She gritted her teeth and adjusted the spray, letting the water go from cool to icy. Then she grabbed the mesh sponge from the hook on the wall and soaped it up. The familiar scent of the Molton Brown bath gel filled her senses. She breathed it in as she scrubbed the sponge over her body, hoping she could force herself into wakefulness for a while longer.

    By the time Taige finally turned off the water, her teeth were chattering. She decided that maybe