“Yes.”
“Are you able to stir the air?”
“Yes.”
“Will you do so? Gently.”
She lifted her arms, as if for an embrace, and the air moved over him like a soft wave of water.
“How does that make you feel?” he asked her.
“I can’t explain. Happy, and afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I want it too much, want too much of it.”
“Close the spell,” he ordered. It wasn’t fair to ask her questions like that, he reminded himself. She hadn’t agreed to it before he’d put her under. “Remember the lights? The baseball lights? Can you bring them back?”
“I’m not supposed to play after bedtime,” she said, and her voice had changed subtly, become younger and full of mischief. “But I do.”
He stared at her rather than the lights she threw toward the ceiling. “Subject has regressed, without direct suggestion. The childhood game appears to have triggered the event.”
The scientist in him wanted to pursue it, but the man couldn’t follow through.
“Ripley, you’re not a little girl. I want you to stay in this time and place.”
“Mia and I had fun. If I didn’t have to grow up, we’d still be friends.” It was said sulkily, her mouth in a pout as she played the lights.
“I need you to stay in this time and this place.”
She let out a long sigh. “Yes, I’m here.”
“Can I touch one of the lights?”
“It won’t hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.” She brought one down until it hovered above his hands.
He could trace it with his finger, a perfect circle. “It’s beautiful. What’s inside you is beautiful.”
“Some is dark.” As she said it, her body arched, and the lights flew around the room like bright stars.
Instinctively Mac ducked. The lights began to whistle shrilly and pulse bloodred.
“Close the spell.”
“Something’s here. It’s come to hunt. To feed.” Her hair began to twist into wild curls. “It’s come back. One times three.”
“Ripley.” Lights flew past his face as he rushed back to her. “Close the spell. I want you to close the spell and come back. I’m going to count back from ten.”
“She needs you to guide the way.”
“I’m bringing her back.” Mac gripped shoulders he knew were no longer Ripley’s. “You have no right to take her.”
“She is mine and I am hers. Show her the way. Show her her way. She must not take mine, or we are lost.”
“Ripley, focus on my voice. On my voice.” It took all his control to keep his voice soothing. Firm but calm. “Come back now. When I reach one, you’ll wake up.”
“He brings death. He craves it.”
“He won’t get it,” Mac snapped. “Ten, nine, eight. You’re waking up slowly. Seven, six. You’re going to feel relaxed, refreshed. Five, four. You’ll remember everything. You’re safe. Come back now. Wake up, Ripley. Three, two, one.”
As he counted down, he saw her come back, not just to the surface of consciousness but physically. As her eyelids fluttered, the lights vanished, and the room was still.
She breathed out, swallowed. “Holy shit,” she managed, then found herself plucked off the bed into his lap and crushed in his arms.
Seventeen
He couldn’t let her go, couldn’t stop blaming himself for taking chances with her. Nothing he’d seen, experienced, theorized, had ever terrified him the way watching Ripley change in front of him had done.
“It’s all right.” She stroked his back, patted it. Then realizing they were both trembling, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held tight. “I’m okay.”
He shook his head, buried his face in her hair. “I should be shot.”
Since gentle soothing wasn’t working, she switched tactics into something more natural to her. “Get a grip, Booke,” she ordered and shoved at him. “No harm, no foul.”
“I took you under, left you open.” He pulled back, and she could see it wasn’t fear on his face but fury. “It hurt you. I could see it. Then you were gone.”
“No, I wasn’t.” His reaction had given her little time for one of her own. Now her stomach quivered. Something had come into her. No, she thought, that wasn’t quite right. Something had come over her.
“I was here,” she said slowly, as she tried to puzzle it out for herself. “It was like being underwater. Not like drowning or sinking, but just . . . floating. It didn’t hurt. More of a quick shock, then the drift.”
Her brows drew together as she thought it through. “Can’t say I cared for it, though. I don’t like the idea of being tucked aside so someone else can have her say.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Fine. Actually, I feel great. Stop taking my pulse, Doc.”
“Let me get these things off you.” But when he started to remove the electrodes, she closed a hand over his wrist.
“Hold on. What did you get out of all that?”
“A reminder.” He bit off the words. “To be more cautious.”
“No, you don’t. Think like a scientist. The way you were when we started this. You’re supposed to be objective, right?”
“Fuck objectivity.”
“Come on, Mac. We can’t just toss the results out the window. Tell me. I’m interested.” When he frowned at her, she sighed. “It’s not just your deal now. I have a pretty personal interest in what went on here.”
She was right. Because she was right, he dug down for calm. “How much do you remember?”
“All of it, I think. For a minute I was eight years old. It was kind of cool.”
“You started to regress, on your own.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. Clear the brain, he ordered himself. Bag the emotion. And give her some answers.
“Maybe the game was the trigger,” he considered. “If you want a quick analysis, I’d say you went back to a time when you weren’t conflicted. Subconsciously you needed to go back to a time when things were simpler and you didn’t question yourself. You used to enjoy your gift.”
“Yeah. And for a while, the Craft—the learning, the refining, I guess you’d say.” Restless now, she moved her shoulders. “And then you get a little older and you start thinking about the weight. The consequences.”
He laid a hand on her cheek. “This, all of this, troubles you.”
“Well, things aren’t simple now, are they? They haven’t been for me for ten years.”
He said nothing, watching her patiently. Words trembled on her tongue, then began to spill out in a flood. “I could see, in dreams, how it might be if I took a step too far. If I didn’t strap it in, wasn’t careful enough. And sometimes, in those dreams, it felt good. Amazingly good to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Screw the rules.”
“But you never did,” he said quietly. “Instead you just stopped it all.”
“When Sam Logan left Mia, she was a wreck. I kept thinking, why the hell doesn’t she do something about it? Make him pay, the son of a bitch. Make him suffer the way she’s suffering. And I thought of what I’d do. What I could do. Nobody would hurt me that way, because if they tried . . .”
She shuddered. “I imagined it, and almost before I realized, a bolt of light shot out of the sky. A black bolt of light, barbed like an arrow. I sank Zack’s boat,” she said with a weak smile. “Nobody was in it, but they could have been. He could have been, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it. No control, just anger.”
He laid a hand on her leg, rubbed. “How old were you?”
“Not quite twenty. But that doesn’t matter,” she said fiercely. “You know that doesn’t matter. ‘And it harm none.’ That’s vital, and I couldn’t be sure I could keep that pledge. God, he’d been in that damn boat not twenty minutes before it happened. I wasn’t thinking of him, wasn’t concerned about him or anyone. I was just mad.”
“So you denied yourself yo
ur gift, and your friend.”
“I had to. There was no one without the other in this. They’re too twined together. She would never have understood or accepted, and damn it, she’d never have stopped nagging at me. Plus, I was pissed at her because . . .”
She knuckled a tear away and said aloud what she’d refused to admit even to herself. “I felt her pain like it was my own, physically felt it. Her grief, her despair. Her desperate love for him. And I couldn’t stand it. We were too close, and I couldn’t breathe.”
“It’s been as hard on you as it has on her. Maybe harder.”
“I guess. I’ve never told anybody any of this. I’d appreciate it if we kept it between us.”
He nodded, and when his lips brushed hers they were warm. “You’ll have to talk to Mia sooner or later.”
“I choose later.” She sniffled again, rubbed her face briskly. “Let’s move on, okay? Or I guess it’s back. You got your readings, you got your tape,” she said, nodding at his equipment. “I didn’t think you’d be able to put me under. I keep underestimating you. It was relaxing, even pleasant.” She pushed back her heavy hair. “And then . . .”
“What then?” he prompted. He didn’t have to check his machines to know her heart rate and respiration were spiking.
“It was like something was trying to get it. Claw its way in. Something crouched and waiting. Boy, that sounds dramatic.” And though she laughed at herself, she drew her knees up protectively. “Not her. It wasn’t her. It was something . . . else.”
“It hurt you.”
“No, but it wanted to. Then I was sliding underwater, and she was the surface. I can’t explain it any other way.”
“That’s good enough.”
“I don’t see what’s good about it. I couldn’t control it. Like I couldn’t control what happened to Zack’s boat. Couldn’t control what I started with the lights tonight. Even though she was inside me, some part of her, it didn’t seem as if she could control it either. Like the power was caught somewhere between. Up for grabs.” She shivered and felt her skin grow icy. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Okay, we’ll stop.” He took her hands, soothed. “I’m going to put everything away.”
Though she nodded, she knew he didn’t understand her. She didn’t want any of it any longer. But she was afraid, deeply afraid, that she wasn’t going to be given the choice.
Something was coming, she thought. For her.
He tucked her in like a baby, and she let him. When he drew her close to comfort her in the dark, she pretended to sleep. He stroked her hair, and she felt the beginning of tears.
If she was normal, if she was ordinary, her life could be like this, she thought bitterly. She could be held close in the dark by the man she loved.
A simple thing. Everything.
If she’d never met him, she’d have been content to go on as she was. Enjoying a man now and then when he caught her fancy and her interest. Whether or not she would have embraced her powers again she couldn’t be sure. But her heart would have remained her own.
Once you gave your heart, you risked more than self. You risked the one who held it.
How could she?
Weary of the worry, she breathed him in, and gave herself to sleep.
The storm was back, cold and bitter. It drove the sea into a frenzy of sound and fury. Lightning blasted over the sky, shattering it like glass.
Black rain gushed from the shards to be hurled like frozen barbs by the wicked wind.
The storm was feral. And she ruled it.
Power fueled her, pumping through muscle and bone with such glorious strength. Here was an energy beyond anything she’d known before, had believed possible.
And with this force at her fingertips, she would have vengeance.
No, no. Justice. It wasn’t vengeance to seek punishment for wrongs. To demand it. To mete it out with a clear mind.
But her mind wasn’t clear. Even in the throes of her hunger, she knew it. And feared it.
She was damning herself.
She looked down at the man who cowered at her feet. What was power if it couldn’t be used to right wrongs, to stop evil, to punish the wicked?
“If you do this, it ends in violence. In hopelessness.”
Her grief-stricken sisters stood in the circle, and she without.
“I have the right!”
“No one does. Do this, and you rip out the heart of the gift. The soul of what you are.”
She was already lost. “I can’t stop it.”
“You can. Only you can. Come, stand with us. It’s he who will destroy you.”
She looked down and saw the face of the man change, features over features that slid from terror, to glee, to plea, to hunger.
“No. He ends here.”
She threw up a hand. Lightning exploded, arrowed down to her fingertips. And became a silver sword. “With what is mine I take your life. To right the wrong and end the strife. For justice I set my fury free, and take the path of destiny. From this place and from this hour. . .” Thrilled, darkly thrilled, she lifted the sword high as he screamed. “I will taste the ripe fruit of power. Blood for blood I now decree. As I will, so mote it be.”
She brought the sword down in one vicious swipe. He smiled as its tip sliced flesh. And he vanished.
The night screamed, the earth trembled. And through the storm, the one she loved came running.
“Stay back!” she shouted. “Stay away!”
But he fought his way through the gale, reaching for her. From the tip of her sword, lightning erupted, and arrowed into his heart.
“Ripley, come on, honey. Wake up now. It’s a bad dream.”
She was sobbing with it, and the wrenching grief in the sound worried him more than the trembling.
“I couldn’t stop it. I killed him. I couldn’t make it stop.”
“It’s over now.” He fumbled for the bedside lamp, but couldn’t find the switch. Instead he simply sat up with her, cuddled her, rocked. “It’s all over now. You’re okay. Wake up.” He kissed her damp cheeks, her forehead.
Her arms banded around him like steel. “Mac.”
“That’s right. I’m here. You had a nightmare. Do you want me to turn on the light, get you some water?”
“No, just . . . no. Hold on to me a minute, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
Not a nightmare, she thought as she let herself cling to him. But a vision, a blend of what had been and what would be. She’d recognized the face—the faces—of the man on the beach. One she had seen in other dreams. He’d died three centuries before. Cursed by the one called Earth.
Another she had first seen in the woods by the yellow cottage. When he’d held a knife to Nell’s throat.
And the third she had seen in the café, reading a newspaper and eating soup.
Three parts of one whole? Three steps in one fate? God! How was she to know?
She had killed them. In the end she’d seen herself standing in the storm, with her sword in her hand. She’d killed because she could, because the need had been so huge.
And the payment horribly dear.
It had been Mac she’d seen running through the storm. Mac who’d been struck down, because she couldn’t control what was inside her.
“I won’t let it happen,” she whispered. “I won’t.”
“Tell me. Tell me about the dream. It’ll help.”
“No. This will.” She lifted her mouth to his, poured herself into the kiss. “Touch me. God. Make love with me. I need to be with you.” Fresh tears spilled as she melted against him. “I need you.”
To comfort, to fill, to want. She would take this, and give it. This last time. All that might have been, all that she had let herself wish, would gather together and stream into this perfect act of love.
She could see him in the dark. Every feature, every line, every plane was etched on mind and heart. How could she have fallen so deeply, so hopelessly in love?
&nbs
p; She’d never believed herself capable of it, never wanted it. Yet here it was, aching inside her. He was the beginning and the end for her, and she had no words to tell him.
He needed none.
He tumbled into her, the yield and demand. There was a tenderness here, a depth to it that neither had explored before. Swamped by it, he murmured her name. He wanted to give her everything. Heart, mind, body. To warm her with his hands and mouth. To hold her safe forever.
She rose to him, drew him down. Met his sigh with her own. Love was like a feast, and each supped slowly.
A gentle caress, a melting of lips. A quiet need that stirred souls.
She opened, and he filled. Warmth enclosed in warmth. They moved together in the seamless dark, beat for sustained beat, while pleasure bloomed and ripened.
His lips brushed at her tears, and the taste of them was lovely. In the dark, his hands found hers, linked.
“You’re all there is.”
She heard him say it, tenderly. And as the wave rose to sweep them both, it was soft as silk.
In the dark, she slept away the rest of the night in his arms. Without dreams.
Morning had to come. She was prepared for it. There were steps to be taken, and she would take them without hesitation and, she promised herself, without regret.
She slipped out of the house early. She took one last glance at Mac, how he looked sleeping peacefully in her bed. For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine what might have been.
Then she closed the door and didn’t look back.
She could hear Nell, already up and singing in the kitchen, and knew her brother would be up and starting the day soon. She needed to get a jump on it.
She left by the front door, heading for the village and the station house at a brisk jog.
The wind and rain had died in the night. Under clear skies, the air had turned bitter again.
She could hear the pounding of the sea. The surf would still be high and wild, and the beach littered with whatever the water had cast out.
But there would be no long, freeing run for her that morning.
The village was as still as a painting, captured under a crystalline coating of ice. She imagined it waking, yawning, stretching, and cracking that thin sheath like an eggshell.
Books by Nora Roberts Page 196
