by Lara Parker
And still the beast came after them, its breathing hoarse and its growls echoing as it thrust itself forward, stopping at times as if it, too, were confused by the darkness. Jackie felt her teeth clench and enormous dread clamped her chest like a vise. They were going to die an agonizing death, and there was nothing they could do. Her heart breaking, she would hear David’s final shrieks of pain, then Carolyn’s, and finally her own. The werewolf was an unfeeling brute without understanding, with no control over its murderous nature, and she was not powerful enough to stop it.
Jackie could feel her pulse in her ears, and she strained her eyes to make out another turn, but the shadowy air folded in on itself and her hands plunged deeper into the darkness.
All at once the walls widened and, from the echoing of their footsteps, she could sense they had entered a small open space of some kind. They came together, holding one another, and listened. Behind them in the corridor the beast’s breathing was a rasping wheeze, like a rusty hinge. She could smell its stagnant breath and the odor of fresh excrement.
“Where are we?” Carolyn whimpered. “What shall we do? David? We can’t see anything!”
David was close to Jackie now, his arm around her shoulder and his mouth beside her ear. Oddly, for the first time, she felt the scratch of his new beard, and a wave of tenderness left her weak.
“Jackie,” he breathed. “We need light. Can you give us light?”
She trembled and shook her head, “How?”
He pressed his lips closer to her ear and his breath warmed her. “Think of what you can do,” he whispered. “You are a witch.”
She shook her head. “No. No more.”
“What do you mean?” he whispered. “Help us.”
“I— I can’t…” Like the pages of a book come unbound, the moments of her life flew apart and were scattered in the wind of her mind. She struggled to grasp where she was, what was expected of her, what she needed to do to remain sane. But she was drowning in the whirlpool of her past lives.
“But, Jackie, you are magical. Don’t you remember how we flew?”
She thought of that night when they escaped the Klan. How had she done that? And she had restored the painting, even though it had been only for a moment. Angelique had not helped her. No, she had done that! It had been Angelique who had stood in her way, making her ill, making her fearful. But Angelique was gone and she was alone.
Her heart fluttered in her breast. She moved farther into the room, her hands stretched out in front of her, and she searched within the darkness of her own mind for her magic. Was it still there? Something about the earth, the stones, the sea that lay beneath the cliffs, the rush of the tide beneath Widow’s Hill, roused a memory of what she had been before. She shivered and looked down. Fire glowed in the tips of her fingers.
She heard David say again, “Jackie, you are the only one who can save us. Don’t you know what you are?”
Hot tears sprang to her eyes. Her breath came in bursts. Her arms and then her hands grew numb and began to vibrate. She pulled away from David and began to circle slowly and to rise in the darkness. Her ears were buzzing and her hair twisted on her scalp when she lifted. A bolt of electricity flared through her, hissed out of her bones like children’s sparklers, and pierced the darkness.
A dozen candles atop an iron candelabra burst into flame.
“Yes!” David wrapped his arms around her.
They were in a small room with rounded stone walls, and there, leaning against the wall, was the painting. Glimmering under its dust was Quentin’s likeness, hollow-eyed but intact, the thick sideburns, the cleft chin, the magnificent eyebrows, and the swatch of lustrous black hair.
The three stood dumbfounded, staring, and David leaned over and brushed the dust away. Jackie, still trembling, whispered, “What do you think? Will it work?”
At that moment the beast’s growl reverberated through the walls and Jackie could see the red eyes shining in the dark corridor like pinpoints of fire. Enraged by the constricted tunnel, it struggled, pawing at the air.
“David!”
David grabbed the painting and lifted it, but the werewolf only writhed and wrenched itself farther out into the room. The portrait did not seem to lessen its rage.
“Jackie.” David whispered. “The painting isn’t working.” He looked to her in desperation. “It’s because it isn’t signed. The painter told me … do you think you … do you think you can paint his name there?”
She shook her head. How?
“Try.”
She leaned in and took a breath. Her mind was clear and a silver stream of confidence flowed into her body. A shiver of sparks traveled through the bones of her fingers as she spun a beam of light, and she scrawled—as if she were holding a paintbrush—CHARLES DELAWARE TATE in the air. She watched in awe as the signature magically appeared at the corner of the canvas.
The painting was vibrating in David’s hands. Jackie could feel Carolyn behind her, clinging to her shoulders, as they both froze and waited for the portrait to come to life. There was a long moment while she stood shaking, listening to the beast pant. Then the werewolf’s breaths grew shallower, and the growls diminished; there was a long rasping groan, and an incredulous sigh—the sigh of a man reprieved from the scaffold, or pulled nearly drowned from the sea—as Quentin staggered into the room.
The painting shuddered and the werewolf convulsed. A dark substance, flesh but also smoke, was sucked into the canvas with a rush of fur and shadow. And the grisly visage of the wolf man radiated on the surface, then sank into the paint. Flashing and darkening, Quentin fell forward and collapsed—human once again.
Carolyn lifted up a groggy head and said, “Is it gone?”
“Yes,” Jackie said in a soft voice. “I think it’s gone.”
Warily, David crept over to Quentin, whose head lay on his arm. Inching closer, David propped the painting against the wall beside the reclining man and leaned down.
“It worked,” said David softly. “Quentin? The painting broke the spell.”
“It stole the curse,” Jackie whispered. “You’re free.”
But Quentin still did not speak and only lay moaning, his face hidden. Then Jackie looked at the canvas and frowned. “It’s not like the other one,” she said in a soft voice, and David remembered what the painter had told him. He slipped an arm around her, and pulled her back.
“Yes,” he said. “This painting is different. The eyes are closed.”
Quentin sat up on the floor uttering long watery sighs, his hands over his face. The painting beside him glowed, and Jackie could see the eyes were painted shut as if the man in the painting was sleeping, a vague smile playing upon his lips.
She moved forward to take his hand. “Quentin?”
Something was wrong. Quentin did not stand but crawled across the floor with his head lowered as though he were searching for a dropped coin. Jackie reached down to help him, but Quentin’s fingers groped at the darkness.
“My eyes,” he whispered. “I can’t see!” He was turning his head this way and that and staring feebly up at the candles flickering in the gloom as if to draw light from those magical flames.
Grinding his fists into his sockets, Quentin swayed, and then pulled his hands away, opening his fingers. They glistened with red. Jackie gasped, “No … oh, no.”
Quentin turned to her. Crimson irises shone within his youthful features. Slowly, painfully, he turned his face toward David and said, “I am saved. I am saved from the curse, but it does me no good.” He reached up and touched his cheek. “Is this my face? The face I shall never see? Will I ever see anything in this world again that is not stained with blood?”
David walked over and said kindly, “Quentin. You don’t know—it may take a moment—” But Jackie reached for his arm and pulled him back.
“Look, David,” she whispered. “Look at the portrait. It’s coming to life.”
They both stared at the painting in amazement. The closed
eyelashes were fluttering, and they lifted slowly, almost imperceptibly.
And then the eyes opened.
And stared out with all the malevolence of the beast. They were a venomous crimson, but there was something else: the pupils were thickly clouded with scarlet. Captured on the canvas was Quentin’s handsome face in all its vibrant perfection, but the eyes were the bloodred eyes of the wolf.
It was the painter’s final gift.
Twenty-seven
“But how can we let a young girl stay all alone in the Old House,” Elizabeth was saying, her voice tinged with sadness. As she looked back from the drawing room window, the colored light from the stained glass played across her lovely features and caught fire in her emerald earrings. “I’m sure her mother will return soon, and then she can go back home.”
David looked around at the damage. There was shattered glass on the floor, and the crimson velvet of the sofa was slashed, exposing the batting. Roger paced in front of the fireplace, elegant as usual in a dark suit and brocade waistcoat, his hands clamped behind his back and his head bent forward. The world outside the window was still blanketed in white, but the flickering sunlight inside the room seemed to predict, even in February, an early spring.
“Elizabeth, your misguided compassion will only inspire more difficulties,” he said with his usual impatience, then glanced toward the closed doors and lowered his voice. “I insist that we discuss this another time when Jacqueline is not waiting in the foyer within earshot.”
Lingering outside the drawing room, Barnabas stood in the shadows near the settee beneath the stair. Jackie was perched there, still wearing her bedraggled coat and her torn jeans, and she turned her pale eyes up to him as the conversation drifted out through the wooden doors.
“Roger, why must you always be so obstinate?” said Elizabeth. “I’m simply saying I think we should let her move in here for the time being, where she will be safe.”
“After what has happened? Just look at this room! Surely you will allow things to settle down first.”
“Settle down? What do you mean?”
Roger’s ire was developing. “Listen to me, Elizabeth. You were the one who gave Dr. Blair permission to set up a laboratory in Rose Cottage, and now the poor man has committed suicide on our property. Slicing his own throat with one of his surgical instruments. It’s positively horrendous.”
David spoke up. “I told you Dr. Blair was a total maniac. But you wouldn’t listen. That’s because your solution to any problem, Father, is to ignore it.”
Jackie rose to her feet in the foyer and without looking back crossed to the door and reached for the handle.
“Where are you going?” Barnabas whispered.
“He doesn’t want me here,” she said softly.
“As you wish. But you need not be afraid. You who have faced the gallows without flinching.” He observed her more critically and saw that she was unkempt, her hair in knots and her fingernails grimy, even though her pale eyes glowed like pieces of the moon. He hesitated, and then gestured to the stair. “Why don’t you go up to one of bathrooms and make yourself presentable?”
She looked at him quizzically.
“The Collins family dotes on appearances.”
Jackie climbed the treads slowly and stopped on the landing. Shining though the massive window of stained glass were miasmas of colored rays, and she caught her breath, afraid to draw in the poisonous mist that pervaded Collinwood. Collinwood! The very name made her ache with longing. Her chest tightened and she thought she might faint. She turned to look back at Barnabas still standing in the shadows, and he gave her an encouraging nod. Her gaze fell upon the Oriental carpet covering the stair, the bronze statue of the wild horse on the sideboard, and the portrait of Barnabas that hung beside the entrance. Behind her the vibrant colors of the stained glass poured onto the parquet flooring of the vestibule, dancing sun motes that flashed in rainbow prisms.
The long hallway led her to a room she knew well. It had been Josette’s room where she had burned with jealousy as she waited on her mistress and longed to become Barnabas’s true bride. Her jaw tightened as she struggled to stop tears from flowing, but the lump in her throat make her neck ache. Now the room belonged to Elizabeth, and only a few days ago she had stood at this very spot and been pampered and clothed in silk and lace by three laughing girls. Walking past the four-poster with its crocheted canopy, she entered the bathroom, steeled herself, and raised her eyes to the mirror, afraid of what she would see. But Angelique was not there, only Jackie’s own reflection, pallid and frail. She turned on the tap, waited until it grew hot, then dipped her hands before splashing her face. Mist clouded the glass.
Her attention was caught by a group of photographs on the wall beside the mirror, all of Elizabeth in her many film and theater roles. Radiant smiles and sultry gazes captured her varied moods, but one small photo seemed especially poignant. It was of Liz in her flapper days, wearing a dress of silver fringe, her cheek up against that of another breathtaking girl child in a shimmering shift. Leaning in to look closer, Jackie gasped and chills crept up her back. It was a picture of her—transformed into a beauty—after Liz had made her over into the “cat’s meow.”
* * *
Barnabas entered the drawing room, imperious in his black cloak and grasping his silver-headed cane. “What happened in here?” he asked, looking around in surprise.
Quentin spoke dryly. “There is a wolf in the vicinity and it appears that it broke in and wreaked havoc.”
David turned from where he was standing beside the secretary. To Barnabas, he seemed older than his sixteen years. “Father,” he said, “at least let me tell you how I feel.”
“No, you may not. You have thoughtlessly created another embarrassing situation, and you should be sensitive enough to understand the difficulty. We can’t have a young girl your age living in the same house.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” chimed in Quentin from the corner of the room. “Nothing must besmirch the holy sanctified Collins name!” David smiled and looked to the door.
“Well, it’s not as though there was no room,” offered Carolyn, who was in her usual seat on the fireplace rail. She wore a beige cashmere sweater and there was a blue ribbon in her long golden hair. “We could open up one of the many wings.” She made a dismissive gesture with her hand, rose, and walked toward the hallway, then turned. “If you’re so worried about propriety, Jackie can sleep in my room, and I’ll be her chaperone. That way no one in the village will talk.” She giggled and glanced back over her shoulder to where she thought Jackie was waiting.
“Carolyn, go to your room. This is not your affair.”
“Whoa … pretty harsh there, Uncle Dear. This is about me, too, and it would be lovely to have a real friend. It’s always been so lonely here.”
Roger ignored her. “I’m referring to your coming exams, David,” he insisted. “You have already missed weeks of study. And your education is more important than running a boarding-house.”
“She can’t stay in the Old House alone,” said David. “She’s too vulnerable. There are strange things going on, as you well know, something is out there—”
“Not our responsibility.”
David remained calm. “You’re saying you wouldn’t feel responsible if something happened to her and you could have protected her?”
Roger harrumphed. “My dear boy, please be reasonable. We have enough to worry about here at home. We cannot take in strays.”
“Strays! This is a human being, not a dog. This is,” and he paused, “someone I love.”
Roger drew in his chin. “David, don’t be difficult. You’re much too young to know what love is.”
David’s cheeks reddened. “And do you know what it is, Father? Does anyone in this family know what love is? Because I have never seen it in this house.” He was digging the fingernails of one hand into the palm of the other.
But Roger muttered, “That’s not fair—I may not be overly
affectionate, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want the best for you—”
“Did you love my mother?” David’s voice was harsh. “Did you protect her? Where is she now, thanks to your indifference?”
Barnabas had never seen David be intentionally cruel. He hoped it wasn’t the strain of cruelty that ran in the Collins family.
Roger was stunned. He glared at David, but his lips trembled. “Be careful before you say things you will regret.”
“What I was about to say,” David continued, “was that if she cannot stay here until we hear from her mother, then I will move out and live at the Old House, where I can keep her safe—”
“David, you are my son and I am telling you it would not be respectable—”
“Respectability be damned! Yes, I am your son, but I can’t live in your shadow forever. When I am master here, we won’t have all this secrecy.”
Roger’s face blanched with annoyance.
“When you speak of secrecy, you don’t know what you are saying. There are things you don’t understand. You don’t know the family history. You’ve been sheltered, protected—”
“You mean that we were bootleggers during Prohibition?”
Roger’s eyes lifted under his brows, showing white beneath the irises. He set his jaw. “Where did you hear that?”
“I know more than you think, Father. I know that innocent people died to keep the family business afloat. And before that, we traded in slaves.”
Roger was visibly disturbed. “Wherever did you get such ridiculous ideas?”
“I also know there is a curse.”
“A curse?” Roger placed a shaking hand on the mantel.
“And if it is ever to be lifted, it must be exposed.”
“Intercourse with the outside world has always led to disaster,” Roger said in a wavering tone.
“I aim to change all that.”
Barnabas could sense an almost imperceptible squaring of David’s shoulders. Listening to the discussion, he was aware of that shift when a child moves into a new phase of early adulthood. At some point the child becomes the father of the man. David had already marched into the foyer. A moment later he returned with Jackie, her hand in his.
