Body and Soul

by Susan Krinard

  Gary dragged his free hand across his face. Beside them the flames spread, catching the roof of the cabin and threatening the overhanging branches of the nearest pine. Gary’s eyes twitched to the blaze and back to David. “They were dreams,” he croaked. “Not … real …”

  It wasn’t working. David could see the strength of Gary’s resistance, the madness that made that strength possible. A shock was necessary, one that would smash every barrier between them.

  Abruptly he struck out, catching Gary’s upper arm in a painful grip. “I can’t let you hurt her, Avery,” he said. “It was always me you wanted to kill.”

  Gary’s reaction was immediate. The gun went off with a shattering roar.

  Somewhere a woman screamed.

  Gary heard the sound above the echo of the gun’s report, staring at the man who should have been falling with a bloody hole in his chest.

  The man, the ghost out of nowhere, the demon from hell hadn’t fallen. He hadn’t even flinched.

  This was the presence Gary had sensed in the motel the last time he’d been here, the figure that rose again and again from the darkest corner of his brain.

  Gary’s nerveless fingers lost their hold on the gun, and it slid from his hand. His head was full of buzzing, white noise that blotted out every coherent thought. He could barely feel the man’s grip on his arms, but he knew it was unbreakable. Not even death could make his tormentor go away.

  The buzzing grew to a shriek that pierced his remaining defenses and whistled through his skull as if it were a barren cage of bone. He looked beyond the man’s merciless face to the woman who stumbled to a halt behind him.

  He knew her. She should be dead. Her accusing gaze locked on him as in the nightmare, damning him utterly.

  He closed his eyes. The man said something, spoke the name again. The name he recognized inside the howling bedlam of his mind.

  Avery.

  The storm swept him up, ripped at his body, tore him apart with giant’s hands and crushed the pieces. His soul was left naked and mewling in the center, the eye of the storm where there was no past or present.

  And he remembered.

  The silence was profound. Within its sheltering arms he gathered up the fragments of himself and put them back together. He opened his eyes and met David’s stare.

  David, who knew what he had done. Who had found him at last.

  Around them lay the blackened ruins of Parkmere Hall, still tainted with the miasma of fiery destruction. Even the tall and ancient ash trees had been scorched, stretching skeletal fingers toward the sky. There were no servants to pick among the stones and crumbled beams, no birds singing in the park. Only the eerie quiet.

  Avery hadn’t meant to return. He’d fled after the fire, snatching up whatever came to hand in his terror. He’d drunk himself into oblivion and kept on running.

  But he was here, and David had found him. And for once in his life David saw him, looked at him as if he existed. As if he mattered.

  Because now he had David’s attention. He’d taken something from the brother who had everything. David would hate him, but hatred was better than indifference. Avery braced himself for the rage that would strike him down, ready to exchange hate for hate.

  But David wasn’t doing what he should have done. He wasn’t raging or swearing vengeance. His eyes held an unfathomable depth of sadness.

  And of pity.

  “You despised me, Avery,” he said. “And I couldn’t see. Perhaps I didn’t want to.”

  Avery blinked. His heart plunged into his belly, quivering with impossible emotions. He had feared this discovery, but now that it had come it was … wrong. There should have been a battle between life and death. Avery would have laughed, taunted David with those years of hidden contempt for his elder brother. No matter what David did to him, this time Avery would have been the master, and the pain in David’s eyes would have been the sweetest victory.

  David had stolen his thunder, disarmed him with a simple acknowledgment that robbed Avery of the scathing revelation he’d anticipated for so many years. He was reduced to a little boy again, empty and alone.

  He hated it.

  He balled his fists. “Yes,” he said. “I despised you. I despised the mockery you made of our family name. The way you gambled and whored and caroused your way across the countryside, leaving all the work to me. The way you broke Mother’s heart, killing her with your neglect of duty and by marrying that lowborn slut. You deserved nothing, and you were given everything—” He broke off, feeling himself lose control. He swept his arm to the side, taking in the burned ruins. “What have you now, elder brother?”

  David should have broken then, lashed out at the only man who’d ever dared to tell him the truth. But David didn’t so much as glance away.

  “All you say of me is true,” he said. “I gave you the burden of my title, and none of the glory. But those were excuses for your hatred, Avery. Like the excuses I made for myself, so that I wouldn’t have to feel.” His handsome face closed up, as if he were feeling far too much. “I failed you. When we were boys. When I abandoned you for my own pleasures, and never looked back.”

  Avery froze. The devastated landscape shifted around them, was reborn to a green and sun-golden lushness that could come only of an idealized past. The Hall stood larger than it could ever have been, like some mythic castle. Arthur’s Camelot.

  In the space of moments Avery felt himself live through entire years—summers of play with wooden swords and imaginary chargers, winters telling tales by the fire. Admiration and worship for a brother who was everything he longed to be. His one true friend, bestower of a rough and careless affection, who kept the ice from closing around his heart.

  Until the day David was no longer a boy, and Avery ceased to exist in his brother’s eyes. The betrayal was casual, without malice, and left Avery with nothing.

  “You were my knight,” Avery said, his voice that of the child he’d been, cracking and undisciplined. “You swore to defend the castle. You were supposed to be loyal.”

  David flinched. The green and golden Hall burst into flame, and the child in Avery burned with it, unmourned.

  “If I’d stayed—if I’d been a true brother to you, it could have been different,” David said hoarsely. “You wouldn’t have—”

  “I’d never let you take the Hall from me,” Avery snarled. He wrenched his arm from David’s hold. “I wouldn’t have any brat of yours inherit what I made, what I held with my own hands. Never.”

  David’s face finally hardened, his eyes chips of blue ice. “So you killed Sophie,” he said. “You punished her for my misdeeds. Did it give you pleasure to hear her screams as she died?”

  Why Avery faltered then he didn’t know. He had thought himself beyond the guilt that had tortured him in the beginning, numbed by time and the fugitive’s life he’d led since the burning of the Hall.

  But the guilt wasn’t dead. One sentence from David and it all came flooding back, a sick taste of bile on his tongue.

  Sophie, screaming. He hadn’t been too drunk to call the servants, move Sophie from her room. He’d known what he let happen when he overturned the candle in the hallway and did nothing to stop the inevitable consequences.

  Screaming. Begging. Dying …

  It was an accident, the coward in him cried. “You weren’t here to save her,” he spat. “Fine soldier, protecting the nation while your wife died alone.”

  “Yes,” David said. “I failed her. I was as guilty as you—”

  “No.”

  The voice was soft and feminine, but there was an edge of steel behind it. Sophie moved up beside David, resting her hand on his arm. She was dressed, not in one of the expensive gowns she’d insisted on wearing even when she spent most of each day in her bed, but in a simple white garment without ornamentation. She was beautiful.

  Sophie, who was dead. Sophie, whose eyes held Avery’s with a steadiness he’d never seen.

  “You’ve more t
han paid for anything you’ve done, David,” she said, and her gaze went to his face. Lovingly, with forgiveness, with a serenity alien to Sophie’s temperament. “All the guilt in the world doesn’t rest on your shoulders.”

  David looked at her, saying nothing. He didn’t need to. His expression spoke for him. Tenderness, sadness, awe—love. Love that David Ventris was incapable of feeling.

  But did.

  Avery squeezed his eyes shut. A pressure was building within him, a terrible knowledge that left him nowhere to hide.

  David had changed. Sophie was alive. They confronted him, glowing with an internal light that beat at him in waves of searing incandescence.

  “It has to stop,” David said, as if a silent conversation had concluded just out of Avery’s hearing. “You’re sick, Avery. You haven’t escaped what happened to you, to Sophie, to all of us.” He reached out again, snatched Avery’s unresisting hand. “You can’t bear to face her, so you keep trying to destroy her. Destroy your own guilt. But you can only end it by recognizing it. By owning up to what you’ve done—”

  Avery moaned. “No. She—you deserved it—”

  “You made your own trap.” David’s voice took on a sudden urgency. “You can set yourself free. Set Sophie free. Look into your heart—”

  “The fire,” Sophie said. “David—”

  A blast of furnace heat pressed down on them like God’s judgment. Avery opened his eyes.

  A lick of flame caressed the hem of Sophie’s white gown. It sent lecherous ringers groping upward with appalling speed.

  She wasn’t screaming. She continued to gaze at Avery as if the fire could not hurt her.

  Because she was dead. She had been sent to haunt him forever.

  Avery tried to back away. He staggered, nearly fell in his panic; hands grabbed at him, held, imprisoned.

  David’s hands. And Sophie’s. By now the fire was wreathing Sophie’s neck, and still she kept looking at him, her eyes shifting color from brown to hazel, her face melting and re-forming into contours both alien and familiar.

  His throat locked on a scream. Through Sophie’s touch he was carried back to the hallway, to the moment when he had decided to let her die.

  Vengeance. Make David hurt. Make him know what it is to be utterly alone.…

  And then he was in Sophie’s room, lying in her bed, the flames racing among the bedclothes and curtains, too weak to fight.

  He was Sophie. He felt the new life in his belly, dying before it had a chance to live. He felt the hatred, the terror, the despair.

  Crying. Screaming. Suffering. Dying.

  “It has to end,” David’s voice said. “Only you can stop it—”

  In the very core of the inferno, Avery found a single spark of pure, cool radiance. He reached for it, clung to it, absorbed it like fresh, healing air.

  And the knowledge burst open inside him, no dreadful explosion but a desired release. Two halves of him came together, each aware of the other. Each in perfect agreement. Each unafraid.

  He looked away from Sophie, from David, toward the blazing building that was beginning to collapse in on itself. The flames had spread to the nearest cabin. He could reach the heart of the fire in seconds.

  He hurled himself to one side, breaking loose from the hands that held him, and sprinted toward the open maw of the collapsing cabin.

  The fire accepted him into its loving embrace.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jesse didn’t stop to think. There was no time to explain to David, even if she’d been able to find the words.

  She sucked in a deep breath of air and dashed toward the open door of the burning cabin. Gary had vanished inside, as if a flaming mouth had swallowed him whole.

  “Jesse!” She heard David come after her as she dodged through the blackening door frame, and then all she could hear was the spit and hiss and roar of the firestorm.

  She should have been paralyzed with terror. Sophie should have been a wailing and mindless presence within her, reliving her own death.

  But a strange peace had settled in around Jesse’s heart, and it felt as though the flames couldn’t touch her. They had no power to hurt or destroy. Even as the heat singed the hair on her arms and flames barred her passage, she didn’t question why she was here.

  She covered her mouth with her hands and searched through the smothering billows of smoke. She found Gary crouched at the center of the blaze, protected by some fluke of architecture or air flow from the worst of the fire. It was only a matter of seconds before he lost that fragile reprieve. In the roiling light she could barely make out his face, but what she saw of it held that same unfamiliar peace.

  He had known what he was doing. He wasn’t insane.

  “Gary!” she shouted, and held out her hand. “Let me help you!”

  He saw her clearly. She knew that he heard. But he shrank back, shaking his head as the flames finally reached him.

  Jesse coughed and began to fight her way forward. Something grabbed her from behind, pulled her back just as a blazing beam crashed down from the ceiling where she’d stood. The roof collapsed with a shriek and groan, sealing Gary into his self-made tomb.

  Jesse didn’t struggle as David carried her out of harm’s way once again. She gasped in lungfuls of air and clung to him until he set her down a safe distance from the fire. Then she closed her eyes and let the tears come.

  “David,” she whispered. “Why—”

  “Jesse!”

  The warmth of David’s body deserted her. She opened her eyes. He was gone, and the voice she heard was someone else’s. The voice of a very dear friend.

  “My God, Jesse,” Al said, breathless as he dropped to his knees beside her. His forehead was beaded with sweat, and his eyes widened as they swept the fire and returned to her face. “Are you all right?”

  She worked her way to her knees and managed a nod. Her mind was numb with shock and loss, but she’d had too much experience in crisis situations to lose her ability to think. “How did you find me?”

  “Wayne Albright called me, said that Gary was back in town and was talking crazy about you. Making threats that Wayne thought were real. Gary said he was coming here. I came to look for him, to make him—” He caught his breath and gave a sharp shake of his head. “I saw Gary run into the fire. Saw you go after him. And—”

  She balanced herself and grasped his hand. “He’s dead. The cabin—” She didn’t need to complete the sentence. The cabin was little more than a skeleton now, and the fire had moved on to fresh prey. It had spread to the second cabin, and only the clearing and the windless day had confined it to the buildings and the nearest trees.

  No one in the mountains underestimated the danger of a fire in summer. “We’ve got to get help, Al. Can you go back to town and send the alert?”

  “I could see the smoke as soon as I reached the road,” he said. “Everyone in town will know by now—”

  “Go back and make sure, Al. I’ll be okay.”

  “I won’t leave you alone here.” He made a move to help her to her feet. “Come on. I’ll get you to a doctor—”

  “I can’t. Not yet.” She gripped his hand tightly. “I can take care of myself. Go.”

  He wet his lips. “Jesse—the other man who was with you, the one who brought you out—” He broke off, flushed under his dark beard.

  He meant David. He’d seen David, just as Gary had seen him. But Al and David had no previous relationship that might have made it possible.

  Jesse hadn’t the will to summon up a single logical excuse. “Explanations later, Al.” She held onto his hand as if the pressure alone could convince him of her sincerity. “I will be all right, but I have to stay.”

  “At least come outside the fence.”

  She nodded, and he helped her through the open gate and out onto the lane. She knelt on the pavement and gestured him away. “Go.”

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said. “Don’t—” He met her gaze and scrambled
to his feet. “Be careful, Jesse.”

  And then he was running toward his car. Jesse watched him until he’d pulled out of sight, and then she retreated within herself and called to David with everything she was worth.

  He reappeared as suddenly as he’d gone, his expression carved in lines of grief and unutterable weariness. His eyes when he looked at her were filled with relief and pride and love.

  Love.

  But he waited, searched her face for permission to approach, as if he doubted his welcome.

  She didn’t wait for him to discover the truth. She took five shaky steps and wrapped her arms around him.

  His return embrace nearly lifted her from her feet. He buried his face in the hollow of her neck, breathing her in as if the taint of smoke that clung to her hair and clothing were the finest perfume. His heart pounded under his jacket, and his hands worked ceaselessly over her back, intent on assuring himself that she was whole.

  “David,” she murmured into the solid strength of his shoulder. “You came back.”

  He held her close a moment longer and then pushed her away gently. His eyes were very bright as he caught her face between his hands. “I couldn’t leave you to Gary—to Avery. I knew what he was.”

  “Even though I told you to go?”

  “You set me free. After all I revealed, you still forgave me, even if you could no longer—” He stopped. “I wanted no part of salvation without … knowing you’d be safe.”

  “You saved me.” She turned his hand and kissed his rough palm. “In more ways than you’ll ever know.”

  He went very still. “I intended to kill him when I came back. I thought that was the only way to protect you. I thought I could hate him enough. But I couldn’t do it.”

  She leaned her forehead against his chest. “I wouldn’t have wanted that, David. Not ever. He was your brother.”

  “He was your murderer. And the man who drove your mother to her death. Did he—did Gary ever admit what he’d done?”

  “No.”

  “Yet you forgave him. Forgave them both.”

  She wondered how he recognized it before she did, how he felt the source of that peace within herself. She wondered when it had happened, when old hurts and old anger surrendered to something even more powerful.