The song. The song about meeting in the graveyard.
“Oh, crap,” she whispered. The song was a message—a message meant for her.
There was no way she was going to meet a stranger in a graveyard, she told herself sternly, but she was already flinging the bedclothes back and pulling on a pair of jeans. It is wrong, it is stupid, it is dangerous, and it is unfair to William, she thought, even as she put on sweater and shoes and dug in her dresser drawer for a flashlight.
This is the dumbest thing I have ever done, she thought, as she opened her bedroom door and crept down the hall toward the back door. He could be a homicidal maniac. Or some poser jerk who likes to seduce girls with the whole woe-is-me routine. But she didn’t really believe it.
In the kitchen, ready to unlock the back door and make her escape, she hesitated, remembering her mother’s advice. After a brief tussle with her conscience she crossed the room to open the basement door and descend the steps.
William was deep asleep on the futon, cocooned in a quilt; her guilt level spiked at the thought of waking him on top of everything else. She could leave a note—no. She needed to do this right. She switched on the bedside lamp and said his name until he stirred and blinked.
“What’s going on?” he asked through a yawn.
“I’m really sorry, William,” she said, handing him his glasses so that he could see her properly. She sat down on the edge of the mattress, her stomach hollowed out by what she had to say. The words came out in a rush. “I’m going to meet Tanner Lindsey. I hate to do this to you, but I really feel a connection with him, and I need to see if I can find out what it is.”
He blinked and nodded. She wasn’t sure if he was awake enough to understand her.
“If you want to break up, I’ll understand,” she said.
“Over a conversation? Jeez, you talk as if I make you wear a burka.” He struggled to a sitting position, still yawning. The faded Spider-Man t-shirt he wore as a pajama top was twisted around, and automatically she reached out to tug it straight. “Or are you planning something more than conversation?”
“I’m not planning anything! It’s not like I’m taking a booty call.”
“But you think you might should be with him instead of me.” He said it without a trace of resentment, and she was so touched that it was hard for her to speak for a minute.
“That’s what I need to find out.”
He took a deep breath and let it out. “Then good luck,” he said. “Let me know what the verdict is.”
“Good grief, William, of course I’ll let you know! I’m not going to just drop you out of my life—you’re a part of this just as much as I am. I—”
“Shh, you’ll wake up your parents. You don’t have to get defensive. You’re just doing what you have to do.”
Guilt and gratitude made her eyes well up. How could she think of leaving a guy this great? She sniffled. “I shouldn’t go.”
“You have to,” he said simply. “There’s something between you two, and you won’t be happy with me or anyone until you’ve figured it out.”
Even for William, such understanding was hard to believe. She ventured, “Have you been having second thoughts about us?”
He took off his glasses and wiped the hem of his t-shirt across the lenses, and she knew at once she was right. “Maddie?” she guessed.
He grimaced without meeting her eyes. “Maddie.”
That gave her a little pang. But she had a better understanding now of how someone could take hold of your heart and not be shaken. “When school starts back,” she said, feeling magnanimous, “maybe you should talk to her about it.”
After a second’s silence, he nodded. “Maybe so.”
For a moment she felt forlorn. They might never be this close again, and the thought was painful. Then he smiled at her, and she knew they’d be okay. Even if they weren’t a couple, they’d be okay. “You’d better go,” he said. “Tristan’s probably waiting for his Isolde.”
She pulled him into a hug and squeezed him tight for a moment. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she was darting lightly up the basement steps toward the back door and the cold winter night.
There was a light in the old cemetery that wasn’t the light of the moon or stars. Tanner really had come to meet her. A camping lantern rested on a fallen headstone, and he sat beside it, head buried in his long, slender hands, only to start up at her approach with a look like the dawning of the sun.
It made her steps falter. This was for her. But why?
“You came,” he said. “I hoped you would.” He was gazing at her with his whole heart in his eyes, and she felt a sweet painful tightness in her chest; why should his happiness mean so much to her?
She took a deep breath to steady her galloping heart. She needed to set ground rules, because she knew suddenly that things could get out of her control very easily. Being so close to him was undoing all of her pure intentions. “Coming here doesn’t mean I’m committing to anything,” she said warningly.
That didn’t seem to dismay him. “What does it mean?”
“I had to find out why I feel this connection to you. Why we have this amazing chemistry.”
“Chemistry,” he repeated. “Is that all you think it is?”
She moistened her dry lips. “That’s what I came here to find out.”
He took a step closer but made no move to touch her. She sensed that he was holding himself back so he wouldn’t frighten her away. “Maybe I’m your destiny,”’ he said softly.
She wished she knew him well enough to tell whether that was a line. “I don’t believe in destiny,” she said recklessly, not even knowing if it was true. “I don’t accept that my life has already been decided for me. I get to choose what I do and who I’m with.”
“So maybe what you feel for me is so powerful because I’m the right choice,” he said, moving slowly closer. “Not destiny, maybe, just the best decision you can make—for both of us. The choice that will make both our lives whole.” When she didn’t answer, he said quickly, “I know you must think I’m insane. If you can just trust me, just believe in me—”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” she admitted. “When you touched me, I felt—” Her voice was unsteady, and she stopped for a second to get control of it. “I felt like I was remembering, but something that never happened.”
“It did happen,” he said, confidently now. “It should have happened. Did you recognize the song?”
“Should I have?”
Some of the hope in his face dimmed. “It was you who wrote the lyrics,” he said. “To send a message to me.”
Startled, she searched her mind for memories of that, and found nothing. What else was she missing? “Tell me what I can’t remember. I want to know.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that will work. And it could be dangerous for you that way.”
“Dangerous? How?”
“There’s a chance that if I try to force the memories on you, your mind will resist them. I think the memories have to come from you.” He was so close now that he could speak in a whisper. “I need you to remember, Joy.”
She knew what that meant, and wasn’t sure she was brave enough to try it. Touching him before had unleashed such an overwhelming force, and talking was all she had planned for. But she knew that if she didn’t at least try to get the answers she’d come for, she’d never be able to stop wondering.
“I guess I’d better kiss you,” she said, and the delight that lit up his eyes at those words made her put up her hand to stop him even as he moved to put his arms around her. “Please let me do this my way, though.”
“Any way you want,” he said eagerly. Too eagerly.
“I’ll need you to put your hands behind your back,” she said firmly. “Otherwise I might—”
A smile touched his beautiful mouth. “Might what?”
“I don’t know what I might do. That’s the problem.”
“You’re wonderful,”
he said quietly.
She gave a self-conscious laugh. “I’m a mess.”
“You’re taking such a risk for me. It’s beautiful.”
His voice was warm with admiration and—love? She was getting more flustered by the moment, exactly what she didn’t need. “Stop talking now,” she ordered, and before she could change her mind she stretched up and touched her lips to his.
Images and sensations slammed through her with the force of an electric shock. Tanner advancing on her with bitter anger in this very graveyard. His hand touching her face where tears had fallen. Her arms tight around his waist as they sped over blacktop on his motorcycle; his arms around her as they swayed to a slow song on the dance floor. His whisper stirring her hair as they lay together in the arbor the night they became lovers.
She gasped against his lips and clung to him as the only solid thing in the storm of memories that buffeted her.
His hand on her pregnant belly, touching where their baby’s foot pressed against her skin. His eyes luminous with love as he knelt on one knee and proposed to her.
His heartbeat against hers. His ring on her finger. His name on her lips.
“Tan,” she whispered, and opened her eyes. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and she didn’t know if they were his or hers. It didn’t matter. “Tan. What happened to us?”
He put his arms around her and held her as tightly as if he was afraid she’d slip away from him. And maybe that was exactly what had happened. “Magic,” he said. “Our lives have been rewritten. And we’ve got to put them back the way they’re supposed to be.”
She rested her head against his chest and felt the sweet familiarity of this embrace, the rightness of the way his body felt against hers, and it was like coming home when she hadn’t even known she was lost. This was where she was supposed to be. If it wasn’t destiny, it was something just as certain. “How do we put things right?”
His wry chuckle was a rumble against her ear. “We’re still working on that.”
Her mind was still catching up with her heart, making sense of the torrent of experiences, and she gasped as more memories slotted into place. The clinic outside Atlanta. Going into labor. “Rose,” she cried, as a new loss awoke in her, and squeezed her eyes shut as if it would block out the pain. It was too much to bear; something was going to tear apart in her.
“I know, babe. I know.” She could hear the grief in his voice, and realized that this wasn’t a fresh loss for him. He rested his head against hers and stroked her back. “We’ll find her.”
“But how?” she asked again, drawing back so that she could look into his face. His dear, familiar, absurdly handsome face, with a bittersweet pleasure warming his eyes now as he gazed at her. “How did this even happen?”
“It’s a long story, and I don’t know how much time we have.”
“And why didn’t I remember you? You remembered. Both times, you remembered.” It horrified her to think how thoroughly she’d forgotten him. The anguish she’d caused him.
“Your dad thinks it’s because of the succubus’s power that I can remember. But I don’t think I could ever forget you. You’re too much a part of my life—part of me. It’s like you’re woven into my DNA now.”
She reached up to touch his face. “I feel the same way about you.”
A faint sad smile flickered briefly over his face. “You’d survive without me,” he said gently. “And that’s a good thing, because depending on what happens… well, it makes me feel better to know your life won’t be ruined. You can still be happy.”
Somehow his calmness made these cryptic hints even more frightening. “Tan, please tell me what you’re getting at. Why would I be without you?”
“The problem is, our past is still rewriting itself. And unless we can find some way to stop it, I—well, I’m probably going to get written out.”
“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Was I not there on Samhain to save you from her?”
“That’s one possibility.”
“You mean there are others?”
“There’s something I never told you about the night we met.” He seemed to struggle for words, and she forced herself to wait silently until he found them. His face was strained in the lantern light. “I didn’t come here just to have a tantrum,” he said finally. “I had a gun stashed here.”
Her breath stopped. “Tanner, no.” But his eyes told her it was true.
“I was too ashamed to tell you later,” he said, his voice rough. “But if you hadn’t come that night—if Sheila hadn’t dared you, and if you hadn’t been in the right mood to take the dare—”
“Don’t even think it.” She tightened her arms around him again, straining him close as if sheer physical effort could keep him with her. “How can I hold you here?”
“Your dad’s working on it. And if he doesn’t find the answer, the council may know of some magic we can use.”
But that didn’t bring her the hope she was looking for. The council was slow, stodgy, committee-minded; what she and Tan needed was something human and personal. Some magic that was theirs.
“The rose garden,” she exclaimed. On Beltane night it had felt like their sanctuary from the real world. Perhaps it really could be—and could buy them enough time to come up with a solution. “Time stopped there for us once. Maybe it will again.” She pulled out of his arms and caught at his hand. “Hurry, Tan. If we can find it—”
“—then we may have a chance.” His grin was radiant. “I love having a brilliant wife.”
Wife. A thrill of pleasure and awe rushed through her. Every memory was like living things over again, and it froze her momentarily in place as she marveled at the knowledge that they were married.
Tan’s urgent tug at her hand brought her back to the present. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“Mom’s car. You?”
“The Ninja.”
“Seriously? You have it back?”
“For the moment,” he said grimly, and cold clutched at her heart as she remembered that this, too, was just a vestige of the past that had been overwritten. Then they were running for the car.
The wooded ridge at the back of campus looked threadbare with so many leaves fallen. Joy’s flashlight and Tan’s lantern cast their glow on monotonous ranks of skeletal trees, and Joy realized how easily they could become lost here, with only the slope of the ground to tell them which way they had come from. It was a bleak scene, and the bend and sway of the trees in the wind looked more suited to Halloween than New Year’s.
Dry leaves crackled under their feet as they hurried hand in hand up the ridge, steadying each other as the leaves slid underfoot, trying to retrace their steps from Beltane night.
“I think it was this way,” Joy said breathlessly, pointing with her flashlight. So far there was no sign of the rose garden: no fragrance, no glimpse of hedges or blooms between the dry dead-looking trees. “I only saw it those two times, though.”
“Me too.” There was silence except for the crunching of their progress and a rising wind that summoned a hushing sound among the trees. “And I don’t even remember how we got in on the night of the ritual.”
“How did you and I get there the first time?” she wondered aloud. “We were talking about the night we met…”
Tan stopped abruptly. “I made a wish,” he said in triumph. “I wished I didn’t have to go back to Melisande.” Their eyes locked, and Joy knew that the dawning excitement and hope in his face must be mirrored by her own.
“Wish now,” she breathed. It had to be worth a try.
When Tan spoke next, it was loudly and deliberately, as if to capture the attention of whatever magic might be hovering nearby. Or to be heard over the wind that was waking dry chattering in the drifts of dead leaves. “I wish…” he began, and whatever he said after that was drowned out in a great shrilling gust of wind that flung Joy’s hair in her eyes and swayed her almost off her feet, so that she threw her arms out for support. One han
d met the roughness of tree bark, and she braced herself against the trunk until the wind died down enough for her to scrape the hair out of her eyes and look around again.
She was alone.
Chapter 14
And I awoke, and found me here, on the cold hill’s side. She blinked as she looked around. The night was still and silent. There was nothing to be seen except trees and a carpet of dry brown pine needles and leaves at her feet. A flashlight dangled from one hand.
The ridge behind Ash Grove? How had she gotten here?
The bigger question: why?
She found her way down the hillside to campus, clutching at tree trunks as the leaves slithered out from underfoot and threatened to make her fall. Her mother’s car was in the lot, both doors standing open, keys still in the ignition. The hood was warm when she laid her palm against it.
Why both doors?
Sitting in the driver’s seat, she pulled the doors shut and started the engine but sat there unmoving, thinking. There was a confused impression in her mind of urgency, of hope and fear mixed together. Maybe she’d been dreaming. Was it possible to not only sleepwalk but sleepdrive? The idea sent a shiver up the back of her neck. She could have killed herself, or someone else.
And I awoke, and found me here… The lines from Keats were stuck in her head. In the poem, the knight had awakened to loneliness and desolation, abandoned by the beautiful lady without mercy. The painting in the school library showed the knight in happier times, his handsome face alight as he gazed at the fairy damsel he loved. Why did the thought of it make her feel like crying?
Weirdness. She shook her head hard to slough off the confusion. Then she buckled her seatbelt, took off the parking brake, and set out for home, hoping the answers to all her whys would be waiting for her there.
* * *
“I’m going to break up your engagement,” said Maddie.
Staring at her, William just managed not to let his jaw drop. “You’re… what?”
“Breaking you and Joy up,” said Maddie serenely. She had taken the seat across the table from him in the coffee bar one mid-morning break. “You two aren’t right together, and I want you for myself. Clear?”
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 16
