Chain of Souls (Salem VI)

by Heath, Jack

  "No," Amy said, her voice strengthening slightly. Her eyes locked with his for a second and then her gaze drifted away over his shoulder. She finally brought her eyes back to his. "Love you," she said.

  John nodded, his eyes blurring with tears.

  Amy mumbled something else he could barely understand, and then her head dropped on her chest. John reached a hand out to touch her neck, desperate to find a pulse. There was nothing. He started to crumple, but felt Sarah's arms come around his chest, holding him up.

  The next minutes and hours were a blur as they stumbled up the stairs to the first floor, finding the large house now strangely empty of the servants that had always seemed to bustle around in the background. John reacted like a man too numb to think or act as Sarah took him out into the driveway and pushed him in to the passenger seat of a Bent-ley that still had the keys in the ignition.

  She told him to stay there and went back into the house, returning a few minutes later with her passport and wallet. He looked at her blankly then shook his head, trying to form coherent thoughts. "The passport? How did they get it? How did you know?" he asked.

  Sarah started the car and looked in the rearview mirror as she backed up and maneuvered away from the other cars. She shook her head. "I don't know. I just knew it was there."

  John moved a numb hand down to his own trouser pocket, and he patted his leg and felt his own passport where he always kept it. They could go home, he thought. But home to what?

  John watched the countryside go past in a blur as they drove out the gates of Jessica Lodge's estate and turned left, away from Lands' End and toward the rest of Great Britain. They came to a roundabout and Sarah headed north and east and kept in that general direction and after a time they saw signs for London and then signs for Heathrow.

  Sarah parked the car in long-term parking, helped John out, and then went back and like a career criminal she wiped the wheel and all the surfaces to erase any fingerprints they might have left. She led her father to the bus and from there to the terminal where they bought two tickets on a flight to Boston.

  John followed her through security and sat beside her in the waiting area, feeling like a terribly old man, a man who had been utterly used up by some terribly violent and intense experience. His mind was blank, too stunned and exhausted for rational thought, but underneath the empty white noise of random thoughts he felt an unspeakable pain welling up like a knife in his heart. Amy, he thought, she had kept things from him but only because she was trying to save him. Why couldn't he have understood and accepted that and at least let their last few days and hours together be something he could look back on with anything but bitter regret?

  He turned his head because he felt Sarah's gaze.

  "Are you okay?" she asked.

  "I don't know," he told her.

  "I'm so sorry about Amy."

  He nodded. "Thank you."

  "What was it she said to you at the very end?"

  He closed his eyes and tried to recall those last words she had spoken, words so soft he had hardly been able to make them out. Words that even now left him wondering if he had heard correctly. Amy had looked past him, toward Sarah just before she said it.

  "I think she said, 'I'm sorry because I was too late.'"

  "I wonder what she meant by that?"

  He looked at her, his daughter, the one surviving person in his life after the Coven had murdered both of the other women he had loved, and he tried to shove down the fear that nibbled at the corners of his exhausted mind. Things would get better, he told himself. Things would definitely get better because they had to, didn't they?

  "I don't know what she meant, not exactly," he told Sarah. And he hoped it was true.