On his right hand a thick gold ring glinted dully, and she found that reassuring. It was an heirloom piece, with a rampant gryphon stamped into the bezel. He’d always said that he wore it for that reason, but she knew that he was vain of his hands and wore the ring to draw attention to them. She’d loved that little vanity in him.
She imagined the grip of his warm hand on hers, and the uncomfortable bite of the ring’s inner curve into her own fingers. The memory was far more painful now than the pressure of the ring had ever been.
She shouldn’t have come; that was obvious.
Jess was used to being around attractive men—theatrical men. Nick had been refreshingly lacking in that instinctive, manipulative charm that most actors developed. She had always felt that she was seeing the man himself, candidly offered for her inspection without deception or embellishment.
Now he seemed so guarded, like a man assessing a threat.
“How about a glass of wine?” he said abruptly, and she became uncomfortably aware of the long silence that had built between them. “I was about to go down and get something to open for later.”
She jumped up from the couch, relieved to have something to do. “Tell me what to bring, I’ll get it. I do know my way around down there, Nick. Still.”
He suggested a California cabernet, and opened the cellar door for her. She ran down the stairs and paused at the bottom to inhale the familiar scents of earth and stone. The bare light bulbs down here illuminated no changes. One weekend, while turning the bottles stored in the rows of cobwebby bins, he’d shown her the secret safe in the wall and joked about “the family jewels.”
She couldn’t remember now exactly where it had been located—maybe some of the wine racks had been moved after all, to conceal it.
“A piratical pack, my ancestors,” he’d said cheerfully. “A chunk of their ill-gotten gains is stashed away down here. They never let anything valuable out of their grabby paws, but they’re all dead, there’s just me left and I’m much nicer than that, thank god!”
These days he must have trouble negotiating the cellar stairs. Maybe a glass of wine was a rare treat now anyway. People with unreliable legs can’t afford to get tipsy.
How the hell did he live out here, all by himself? She waited, scrubbing dust from the chosen bottle with the tail of her shirt, until she got control her frustration.
If only he’d invited me to come and stay, I could have helped; we’d be more comfortable together, we could be happy in spite of everything!
Back in the living room, he wielded the corkscrew efficiently and set the open bottle on the heavy antique sideboard to breathe.
“I’ve got to take the dogs walking soon,” he said. “They need the exercise. I do too, doctors’ orders. What did you want to talk to me about?”
“The play, of course,” she retorted. Enough, for God’s sake! What did she want with this painfully eclipsed sun of a man, who clearly wanted nothing to do with her? It hurt her to look at him.
“I hear,” he said, “that you’ve impressed Walter with your reading for Eva.”
He sat, carefully, across from her again. So she wasn’t to be thrown out for mentioning the play, then; not yet.
“I’m ready to impress you too,” she said. “I’ve got my whole first scene down. I can do an audition for you right here, without the script.”
“No,” he said. He frowned at her. “I told Walter and I’m telling you—I don’t want you in the part. I don’t want you in the play. I don’t want you in the theatre—not while ‘The Jewel’ is playing there.”
It was like being sucker-punched. She struggled to frame a coherent response.
Wearily he added, “There’s no point arguing, Jess. I’ve made up my mind. So have a glass of wine—and then go home. A better play will come along. You look wonderful; I’m sure everyone says that, and it’s true. You’ll do fine; just not in my play.”
“Just tell me why!” she demanded.
Nick sighed and sat heavily forward, wrapping both hands over the head of his cane like an invalid. Jess forced herself not to look away. “There’s nothing I can tell you that would make any sense to you.”
“Try me, damn it! Nick, please.”
He looked down at the marquetry design on the coffee table between them. “Remember what I said after the accident, about the woman on the horse, the person that I saw but you didn’t? My explanation would be like that. You don’t want to hear it. You’ll think I’m crazy, and frankly I’m just not up to fighting with you.”
“I won’t fight, I promise,” she said. “Just tell me.”
He hesitated a long moment. She held her breath, willing him to take the plunge.
Instead he struggled to his feet with a grunt, limped back to the sideboard, and poured two glasses of rich red wine. “I’m sorry you’ve had this long trip for nothing. Better go call that cab back. I don’t drive these days, and town is too far to walk.”
Stalking
Ivo liked trains. The flying vistas outside the windows soothed him. He was reminded of all the decades that had flown by since he had begun his mission. It was as if those years still existed somewhere, the way these towns and stations and patches of riverside scenery would still exist when the train was gone.
His approach should have been different, of course: a charge on a strong horse, a battle cry, and a ringing stroke to cleave the enemy into bleeding, dying meat before him
Ah, the old days. He smiled.
In these times, the horse was iron, trundling along its shining rails at a speed no flesh and blood creature could have matched. He sat at a window with a newspaper, picked up from a seat across the aisle, open in front of him.
He thought of himself as circling the prey, a wide circle right now, but destined to narrow until the coils closed tight. The signal had been given, the war-horn sounded, and now it all lay in his hands to accomplish. His plan must be sound. The original raging lust for revenge had long since settled to a cooler resolve.
So for today he was merely a specialty dealer come to check the local antique shops for possibly undervalued treasures in the wealthy town of Rhinebeck.
He might buy; he might sell.
He would definitely reconnoiter. The lie of the land was a vital factor in war.
A Man at Bay
Nick walked his dogs along the back wall of the long garden behind his house for the second time that day. He’d been unbearably restless for two days since Jessamyn’s visit. Only getting outside, out of the house, seemed to help.
Although the trees that lined the stone boundary fence were leafless, their branches at least partially shielded him from the view of anyone who might be snooping around in the woods beyond. Anyone: the enemy, faceless and nameless and unimaginable in ways that he could never have explained to anyone, not even Jessamyn.
He’d had rivals before, angry men opposing him over some issue or some prize. But this was someone moved to destroy him because of who he was, and who his father had been, and his grandfather and on back, he couldn’t tell how long. This was something far beyond mere social or professional friction, the bristling of hackles, a flurry of challenges, insults, even punches.
Among other things, this was more invigorating. Nick walked without his cane, not easily and not fast, but with determination. Today he would do the whole fence line with hardly a trace of the limp he had exaggerated for Jess, running on self-discipline fueled by adrenaline. Tomorrow maybe he’d do it without limping at all.
Small, hot needles of pain darted through the muscles above his knee with each step. He accepted the pain as penance for deliberately stonewalling Jess, hurting her, and now driving her away. He was disgusted with himself for having been able to do it. But hardness was his reality now. She deserved to be spared further contact with it.
The dogs paced beside him, alert but quiet, heads high. He’d named them “Mac” and “Beth” in defiance of the old theatrical superstition that “the Scottish play” carrie
d bad luck. The gesture, originally spit in the eye of Fate, seemed puerile to him now.
Never mind; they knew their names, answered to them with alacrity, and showed none of the viciousness of their shared namesake. They were beautiful and affectionate, but he was careful not to spoil them.
He’d had dogs as pets, of course, for their energetic cheerfulness and their love. Those days were gone. He had these dogs because he needed them.
He walked, his gloved hands swinging at his sides for better balance and momentum and to break his fall, if he did fall. The lame leg sometimes slackened when he was tired. His foot sometimes dragged, catching on a root or a rock.
The sun wallowed in cloud-wrack low behind the trees. He shrugged his duffle-coat higher around his ears, his breath misting the air in front of him. Early or late, cold or warm, he walked every day, in the privacy of his own grounds and without his cane.
He didn’t want to have to count on the dogs. He needed to be able to trust his own strength, to be able to run, to pivot, to plant his feet firmly so he could back a punch or a kick with his weight.
His enemy was close. The play would bring him closer. That was its purpose.
This was the enemy Nick had never believed in. Uncle Rob had talked about him just that one time, after the funeral of Nick’s father. Pressed for details, Uncle Rob had retreated into iron silence.
The story was ridiculous. Nick had tried to mock Rob into retracting it. There had always been a bit of a rivalry between Rob, the artistic one, and Nick’s tycoon father. Nick hadn’t been willing to let his uncle rattle him.
And yet: the family history proved that many male heads of the family had died young and violently, a few even by their own hands. But that must have more to do with their reckless pursuit of wealth than with some crazed, supernatural enemy stalking them down the centuries!
If you were going to seek your fortune shipping slaves from Africa, you might expect someday to be killed in a revolt on board. A man who went West burning with gold fever might be killed over a rich claim. And one who ran down rumors of a lost emerald mine in South America could run into gangsters down there and not be seen again, which was what was thought to have happened to Nick’s father.
At first Nick had ignored the package in the safe, which Uncle Rob swore held convincing evidence. Nick let it sit there and fester, whatever it was. Let it rot in the dark, deprived of the nourishing fears of the latest head of the Griffin family. Nick wasn’t going to play into the hands of any so-called “curse.”
He’d been away traveling so much since, he’d all but forgotten the thing existed. Nobody used the clunky old safe anymore.
But then he’d wandered into the battlefields of central Europe, and the dark history of that bleak but beautiful part of the world had stirred his creativity, and out of that came “Blood Kin.” When it was accepted in Chicago for their spring festival, he’d gone out to celebrate with the woman he loved, and driven them both straight into the impossible.
No one believed him. Why in hell would they?
But he knew what he’d seen that day: a woman in dark, floating garments sitting bareback on a massive milk white horse built like a medieval war mount. Horse and rider had simply appeared in the middle of the junction with the paved road, halted there, waiting, dead ahead. The woman’s head had turned, as if with mild curiosity, toward the onrushing car.
“First the Woman on the White Horse comes,” Uncle Rob had whispered, “and shows herself to the victim. A little while later, in some terrible, violent way, he dies.”
Nick had almost died right there at the junction, first from a surge of fear so huge it had felt like the bursting of his heart, and then from the impact of the crash.
He hated to think that in his arrogance, his foolishness, his partisan distrust of Uncle Rob, he had nearly gotten Jess killed. He’d loved that woman, from the moment she came staggering, swearing and laughing, onto the stage that day in summer years before (having tripped becomingly over a lighting cable). And he’d come close to destroying her.
In the hospital he’d dragged himself from his room to hers, watching over her in a relentless turmoil of pain, fear, and remorse. She’d just lain in drugged sleep, her head and hands swathed in bandages and her broken arm covered in a cast from shoulder to wrist. He sat there for hours on end, beyond tears, deprived by the bandages of even a decent look at her. That hurt, because he knew by then that this would be the last intimate time he would spend with Jess Croft.
His dreams were haunted by the vision of her crushed eye socket, which had hit the corner post of the windshield, before the doctors reconstructed it. He remembered watching, feeling sick, as a nurse unwrapped the raw mangle that had been Jess’s left hand. He’d fled the room that day, hobbling down the hall as fast as he could despite the agony of his leg.
It had been a mercy (and an unbearable deprivation) to finally be allowed to go home, away from her. And it had been absolutely necessary.
First came the lady on the white horse, and then came—what, exactly? What was he to expect, and what could he do about it?
The first thing he’d done on returning home was to make his painful way down into the cellar and open the wall safe. He found a document in spidery writing on parchment, so old that it was surely a museum piece, and the typed, modern version that his grandfather had provided. Behind these was another bundle of papers, bound in a black silk ribbon, pertaining to the incredible situation the letter described.
And there was the ruby, in a cardboard box.
It was a dusky, blood-red stone the size of a small bird’s-egg, simply set and hung like a medallion on a chain of thick gold links. No maker’s mark or karat stamp showed on the gold. This thing had a crude, brooding beauty completely different from modern gems, which were cut and polished to sparkle and shine.
The documents recounted how, because of this rather ugly jewel, his forebears had died cruel, early deaths, pursued by an implacable enemy who claimed ownership of the ruby.
And now, according to the story, it was Nick’s turn. The Lady had come for him.
He believed it, because he had seen her and almost died for it.
It took him a long time to work his way to the determination that he wouldn’t allow himself to just wait for the devil to come get him. Instead he’d made a plan and set it in motion. He’d turned to his one real talent, and had begun revising the play into the lure that he needed.
And he’d made damned sure that Jess wasn’t going to be involved in any way; he’d done enough damage there already.
Still, hidden away while he worked on the play, he’d phoned Jess’ physical therapist every week for secret and highly illegal reports on her progress. Later on, he’d learned of the onset of her paralyzing attacks of stage fright. The problem had struck, embarrassingly, when she was called on to deliver lines in Ernie Wilkes’s class for professional actors—just saying lines in a class!
Ah, poor Jess.
Actors went to school all their lives to keep their skills sharp, but Jess had been turned into a beginner again; worse than a beginner, because she was older than most others in the class, and less sure of herself. She must be terrified that her looks—not a matter of vanity but the foundation of every actor’s toolkit—had been spoiled by the accident.
By him.
He rewrote the play to be a signal flag, high and red and waving, a crudely coded message to lure this crazy enemy out of hiding and bring him within reach: Here I am, I know about you, come and face me.
Jess must not be anywhere near when the answer came, just in case.
He’d simply never imagined that she would try out for the part of Eva, not after his cold disconnection of his life from hers. He was still furious with himself for not foreseeing her starting her stage comeback so soon, and trying to do it in his play. He should have been able to divert her somehow, before things got to this point.
She wasn’t going to quit, that was clear.
Wh
at the hell was he going to do?
Her visit had hurt him, badly. She looked different, she carried herself differently, her eyes were shadowed with anxiety. He had longed to comfort, explain, draw her close.
But how could he? He was an unarmed man with wolves on his trail.
He should have refused to see her. Letting her into the house and spending even that brief time with her had been a mistake. He’d denied himself even a handshake, a touch on the shoulder, because one touch, the ghost of a touch, would have leached all his resolve out of him.
He felt the weight of that damned red gem like a boulder on his heart.
His breath showed pale in the chill air. The dogs paced at his side. He swiped moisture from his eyes with the cuff of his coat and limped the last twenty feet of the stone fence back to the house, his left leg beginning to drag.
Blood Angel
Ivo, back from his day in the country, was restless. So that was his quarry at last, a tall man attended by two fine dogs, walking his boundaries like a lord patrolling his castle’s defenses. Just a glimpse of him through the trees had been exhilarating, and exhilaration had burned up a lot of energy.
Lying back now on his bed in his clothes, Ivo slept away the bright afternoon, dreaming the only dream he had dreamed for centuries.
In the dream, he saw the castle walls reddened by flames. Firelight glinted on the armor of figures fallen around him. Someone groaned nearby. He turned his head to see, and pain lanced from his shoulder down into his chest. It took the breath he needed to scream with, and his sight went dark.
He woke to the sound of a horse nickering in the night, but no accompanying human voices. This would be no helpful ally searching for survivors, for the sound was moving away as the animal wandered among the bodies.
The moon was high. Its light silvered the curved surface of a breastplate on a still form a yard from his right hand. He knew the design engraved on that armor as well as he knew the crest on his own shield, but the name of that friend and comrade, survivor of a hundred skirmishes and pursuits, eluded him.
The Ruby Tear Page 3
