The Missing

know what I’m making. I can tell by the drool all over your chin.”

    “I’m not drooling.” Yet. Her belly rumbled demandingly, and she dug a bowl out of the industrial dishwasher. Rose laughed and ladled out a heaping serving for Taige.

    The first taste, spicy and savory, exploded on her tongue, and she didn’t bother waiting for the food to cool as she quickly devoured half of it.

    “You didn’t sleep last night.”

    Rose’s voice was quiet and devoid of emotion, but nonetheless, Taige heard the worry in it. She shrugged. “I slept a little.”

    “A little—how little? What did you get, maybe two hours?”

    “Probably,” Taige muttered. She shoveled another spoonful of food into her mouth, but she knew better than to think Rose would let it go at that.

    “Those dreams again?”

    Taige nodded haltingly.

    “Was he there?”

    He being her uncle. Leon Carson had been sleeping in his bed when Taige finally fell asleep, but when she woke up from the dream, he had been standing over her bed. “You had another one of those devil dreams,” he’d said, shaking his head in that sad, mournful way of his, like she’d done something to let him down.

    He always seemed to know when one of the dreams came. The dreams were just as hard to control as the visions that came to her during the day. Vision, prophecy, it didn’t matter what she called them. They happened, and they had for as long as she could remember. Taige had been eight years old when she had the dream where her parents died—and they’d died that very night.

    “Yeah. He was there.”

    “Did he . . . ?” Rose glanced around, knowing how much Taige hated anybody to know what her uncle did.

    Taige shook her head. Nobody was standing close enough to hear. “No, Rose. He didn’t do anything. He won’t, either.”

    Rose shook her head. She had a scarf wrapped around her head, completely covering the wealth of dark hair. The scarf was white, and Taige knew that somehow, when Rose left, it would be as white then as it was now. Taige couldn’t work in the kitchen without covering herself with stains. She didn’t know how Rose managed it.

    “You can’t know that, girl. He done it before. He gets mad enough, he’ll do it again.”

    “No. He won’t.” Because Taige knew he had believed her when she told him she’d kill him if he ever touched her. Leon was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid. Self-preservation was high on his list of priorities. He couldn’t do his preaching on Sunday, telling the damned that they must repent if they didn’t want to burn in the lake of eternal fire, not if he was dead.

    Taige looked down at her bowl, still half full. The food she had eaten weighed in her belly like lead, and she blew out a breath. She turned to dump the jambalaya and caught Rose looking at her with mournful eyes. “I’m sorry, girl,” Rose murmured. “Come on, we don’t need to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

    Guilt churned in Taige’s stomach as she looked into Rose’s dark eyes. She hated making Rose feel bad, inadvertent as it was. “I know you worry. And I know it’s because you love me.”

    Rose smiled and pressed her hand against Taige’s cheek. “You look so much like your mama. You’ve got so much of her inside of you. Not just your gift, either.” Her voice dropped. “It is a gift, Taige. You’re going to do great things with your life. Just like your mama did. But you got your daddy’s strength. You’ve had to, to live the life you have. Lord, but I wish he had some family left around here that you could have gone to. You would have been so much happier if you had family instead of that crazy uncle.”

    Taige covered Rose’s hand with hers and smiled. “I got a family, Rose. I got you.” It was nothing more than the truth. Taige had lost her parents, and the crazed bastard they put her with would have liked nothing more than to beat the “evil” out of her, but Taige hadn’t been alone because of Rose and because of her son. Rose and Dante were the family that Taige hadn’t thought she would have.

    Rose had been there when Taige got her period. Rose had been there when Taige came face-to-face with bigots, and Rose had been there as the years passed and Taige’s weird gift became stronger and stronger. It’s a hard road you’ve got to walk, Taige, half-white, half-black, and different from just about everybody else. You’re different in ways most people couldn’t