He couldn’t remember, yet he had to remember. For Willie’s sake. God, let me remember, Johnny prayed, closing his eyes and focusing on the flames leaping in his memory.
He saw rocks ringing the fire, a brown hand grab and swing a flaming brand. He heard horses scream and mules bray, saw them tethered close by—a black Arab mare, a sorrel gelding and two dusty brown mules, their eyes white and rolling with terror.
He heard the bark of the jackals, the snap of their jaws, the groan of wood cracking under stress. He looked for the source and found it, a long, narrow box protruding from the back of a high, two-wheeled cart resting on its braces in deep, firelit shadow beneath a palm tree.
The cart was shuddering and rocking. Three men, two of them small and brown and wearing bright robes, the third the man with the carbine and muttonchops, were shouting and backing toward the fire. The jackals were closing in, their eyes glowing red in the half dark, their fangs gleaming.
The barrel of the carbine flashed; the crack of its discharge rang on the still desert night. A jackal fell, yelping, but its fellows leapt over it, intent on the men—until the cart turned over on one wheel and the box tumbled out with a thump. It was a coffin. The jackals wheeled toward it, whining and scraping their bellies in the sand.
The lid flew off and the sides splintered. The natives fell on their knees, praying, and the man with the carbine stared openmouthed with horror at the figure inside wrestling to be free of its shroud. Canvas ripped, a pale human hand emerged and dosed on the shattered side of the coffin.
In the lick of the flames Johnny saw a hook-shaped scar on the index finger and wanted to scream. He wanted to shut the memory off and run from it, but forced himself to look, for Willie’s sake, until Raven shrugged free of the shroud and sat up inside the splintered coffin. His face was gaunt and colorless, his eyes as red as those of the jackals as he turned his head, saw the men and smiled.
The lynx screamed. Johnny started and opened his eyes. They were blurred with tears. He dragged a sleeve across his face and saw the lynx shake itself, leap into the air and whirl around biting at its bobbed tail. A glittering finger of mist swirled up from the spot where the cat had been, melted into the fog and disappeared. The lynx snarled and bounded away into the darkness.
Johnny unlocked the French doors, took a tentative step outside and a deep breath. The stench was gone, and with it the creature that had Enthralled the lynx. There was only the smell of wet sand and dank earth in his nostrils. He picked up the sodden mail and the compact Willie had thrown, went back inside, locked the doors and, leaning a fist and his forehead against them, cursed himself.
He should have left Stonebridge and drawn Raven away while he’d had the chance, but he’d been selfish and craven. Now a monster far worse than Raven had come, searching for him and the ring he wore. Johnny knew that much, but he didn’t know how. Nor did he know who or what the creature was and why it wanted the stone.
He felt a tug at his senses and glanced up at the half-moon gliding behind a skiff of ragged, racing clouds. Two small stars winked nearby, like the dear stones flanking the jewel in Raven’s ring. Already his time here was shortening. He knew by Luna’s phase, felt in every atom of his being the first icy fingers of cold, black nothingness reaching out to drag him back. It terrified him more than Raven did, even more than remembering his grandfather’s funeral.
He’d been no more than seven or eight, his brother, Samuel, a plump, lace-skirted toddler sleeping and blowing milk bubbles on his mother’s black bombazine lap. He remembered playing with the ends of her heavy veil while he’d sat on the hard, unyielding pew in the Stonebridge Congregational Church listening to the drone of the minister’s nasal voice.
He remembered walking behind her, behind the plain wooden casket borne by his father and his father’s five brothers into the graveyard next to the church. It was winter; he couldn’t recall the month, and cold enough to make Samuel cry.
He’d clung to his mother’s skirts as she’d shushed Samuel and the coffin was lowered on creaking ropes. The edge of the grave was ragged and soft, from the work of the grave-digger’s pickax and the thaw freshening the wind. He’d felt the ground crumble beneath his feet and tried to scramble away, but his mother clamped a hand on his shoulder and held him fast at her side.
He couldn’t tell her that he was falling; his, throat was clenched shut with terror. He’d watched his father fling a spadeful of dirt on his grandfather’s coffin, heard it rain like pebbles on the wood, and the minister’s somber voice intone, “We commend into your keeping, O Lord, the soul of Jonathan William Edward Raven,” just as the ground gave way beneath him and he’d tumbled headlong into the grave.
He remembered his mother’s scream, but nothing else except ripping his right index finger open on a coffin nail. He looked at his hands, felt pain flash in his memory, saw blood well and drip on his grandfather’s coffin from the hook-shaped scar.
The same scar Raven bore. He knew now that he and Raven had once been one, but something had happened. Some abominable, horrible thing too terrible to remember had separated them and made Raven a vampire, a monster outside the laws of God and man.
He didn’t know what the thing was, and wasn’t sure it mattered now — or if it ever had. He was tired of hiding and being afraid. It was best to bare his throat to Raven and end it. Best for both of them. Best for Willie.
He waited by the doors a while longer, made sure the lynx and the thing that had sent it were gone, then threw the mail and the compact in the trash can in the pantry and went upstairs. Willie was asleep, huddled on her side beneath the double-wedding-ring quilt with a pillow over her head. The cat was curled in the small of her back.
She’d left a lamp burning on the table between the bed and the half-open window, beside the brass wall mirror she’d angled to match the dresser mirror. The curtain fluttered in a damp breath of wind and overturned a small amber plastic vial on the table. Johnny picked it up and read the label. Tranquillizers. He didn’t blame her.
He turned off the lamp and watched moonglow backlit by lightning spill through the window and the uncurtained doors leading onto the widow’s walk. Thunder rumbled faintly; the trees outside the window rustled and bumped against the roof.
The cat raised its head, laid back its ears and growled. Willie rolled out from under the pillow onto her back and made a fretful noise in her throat. The cat hissed and shot off the bed, its tail bristling, and disappeared.
Johnny mouthed the words, “Good night, Willie,” and raised his left hand to the mirror. He intended merely to touch her reflection, as she’d touched his in the seashell mirror. Instead, he saw his hand reach through the glass, and jerked his arm back, stunned.
Was this an illusion, some trick of his deprived senses, or could he really touch her? Johnny raised his hand again and inched his index finger toward the mirror. He saw it slice through the glass and immediately felt the tingle of contact with the fine, soft hair on Willie’s right forearm and a dizzying whirl of sensation.
Oh, God. He could feel the satin smoothness of her skin, the pebbled rise of gooseflesh tracking the graze of his fingertip down her forearm. His senses soared and filled with wonder.
Willie murmured and rolled away from him, away from the mirror. Johnny closed his hand around her wrist in the glass and held her, felt the flex of her muscles, the bone in her wrist, the slow throb of her pulse. At last, oh God, at last, flesh warmed by a beating heart.
He tried to touch her outside the mirror, but his fingers passed through her as they had twice before. He could see and feel her wrist clasped loosely in his left hand, so long as he watched in the mirror. If he looked directly at Willie his head spun and the room with it.
He didn’t try again. He had no idea how this was possible, how silvered glass could bridge the chasm of time and space between them, nor did he care. It was enough to sit beside her on the bed, stroke the oh-so-soft skin of her inner wrist and feel alive.
Until she murmured something he couldn’t hear and rolled toward him so that her left knee, bent beneath the covers, touched his right leg. In the mirror he watched her straighten and felt her leg slide against his—felt it in every atom of his being. He felt the friction of the quilt against the taut cotton of his breeches, felt every stitch in every seam.
Willie flung the quilt back and sighed. He felt the soft waft of her breath on his right hand braced between them, a shiver of awareness and sudden, unexpected arousal. How it was possible without the body Raven had taken from him, he didn’t know, but it was as real as Willie’s wrist circled in his fingers in the mirror, as lush and wondrous as the shadow of her breast through the blue cotton top of her pajamas.
Heaven and hell, only real in the mirror. But sweet, oh, so sweet! The ache made his senses throb, made him shift on the bed and lift his hand from her wrist to her breast. He closed his eyes and savored the soft, full swell of her, stroked his thumb across her nipple and felt it peak. She murmured and sighed.
Johnny raised his hand from the mattress, cupped her hip tightly against his, caressed her breast and rolled her against him in slow, sinuous circles in the mirror, reveling in the curves and hollows of her body.
She made a soft, purring noise in her throat and flung her left arm over her head. Johnny glanced in the mirror, saw that she was still asleep, saw the gaped front of her pajama top. He slid his lingers past the top button, felt the heat of her skin, the rough pebble of her nipple like sandpaper on his senses, raking sweet, raw shivers through him.
Willie moaned and curled herself around him. He opened his lingers to take more of her, felt the button pop and free his hand, filling it with the full weight of her breast.
It was glorious. Not only to feel again, but to know he could make Willie feel, too. He kneaded her breast tenderly, brushed her nipple and ached to suck it deep into his mouth. She shivered and murmured restlessly.
He slid his hand inside her pajama bottoms, cupped her and rocked her against him, felt her quiver and writhe against him. When she stiffened and her breath caught, he rolled her away from him, went up on his right knee and made sure he could still see her in the mirror. Then he raked her pajamas out of his way and caressed her, molding her against the palm of his hand.
“Ohh, Raven,” she murmured in her sleep. “Ohh, Johnny.”
She arched against him, whimpered and relaxed, her fluttering eyelashes spiking shadows across her cheeks. Johnny tugged and tucked her back into her pajamas as best he could, raised his hand and breathed deeply. He felt his nostrils flare as the scent of her filled his senses. Then he spread his arms on either side of her and saw her smile, a sliver of moonlight glimmering on the curve of her nose.
He wanted to kiss her, but wasn’t so eager to go with Raven that he’d risk sticking his head through a mirror. It was enough that he’d given her pleasure, that he’d been allowed to love Willie. His own sweet little Willow.
Oh, how he loved her. He always had. When she was a child he’d loved her frizzy braids and freckled nose, her imagination and sense of wonder at the world and everything in it.
That love had blossomed little by little, summer by summer, as he’d watched her grow from a girl to a woman. He remembered her first bikini, the fit Betsy had thrown when she’d worn it, and the thrill that had shot through him watching her shimmy into it.
He remembered the Christmas he’d been here and she’d come with her parents, remembered listening to her talk on the phone to her boyfriend from college and shaking with jealous, impotent rage.
Oh, God. Why had he touched her, made love to her? He couldn’t leave her, not now, not again. But he would, he always did. He knew that, remembered the cold and the terror and the wrenching agony of leaving Willie and forgetting her, of remembering her again and how much he loved her, just in time to leave her again and forget her, and then remember her and how much he loved her.
Again and again and again….
Chapter 13
It was either the best dream or the worst nightmare of her life. Willie didn’t know which, nor did she know how she’d slept through it or how she’d lost a button on her pajamas.
She sat on the flank of a dune overlooking the beach, arms looped around her legs, chin on the knees of her blue jeans, the button between her fingers. She didn’t remember it being loose, but maybe she just hadn’t noticed. Or maybe she’d slept on her stomach and broken the threads.
But she didn’t think so. She was pretty sure Raven had been in her bedroom last night. She couldn’t think about him making love to her. Not and stay sane. She couldn’t imagine why he’d want to, either, even though he’d kissed her.
Maybe that was why she hadn’t wakened. Maybe he’d done some hoodoo vampire thing to her mind, or she’d been too scared to wake up. Or maybe too drugged. Maybe that was why she’d dreamed about the starfish again.
She’d taken enough psychology courses in college to know the human mind never forgets anything. Every experience, every incident of your life is stored someplace in your brain.
Still, she couldn’t figure out the significance of the dream, why her subconscious had led her twice in as many nights back to that morning on the beach when she’d been nine years old and she’d been stung by the starfish. What was she supposed to see that she couldn’t remember when she was awake?
Willie hadn’t a due. She rubbed her nose as she had in the dream and wondered how Raven had gotten into the house. Johnny couldn’t pass through walls, but maybe Raven could. Which didn’t bear thinking about. Not before breakfast.
The morning tide had long come and gone, reclaiming most of the debris the storm had blown ashore. Willie had cleaned up some of it before she’d sat down to puzzle over the missing button and the starfish dream, and watch the sun burn through the fog bank on the horizon.
That was a good long while ago, yet the clouds still hung low and gray, spitting a chilly wind in her face that frizzed her hair and made her shiver. She wasn’t cold, but her jeans were wet. She got to her feet, shoved the button into her pocket and picked up the red plastic bucket and shovel left over from her childhood.
She always brought them with her after a storm to rescue starfish. She’d saved half a dozen this morning and felt good about that, but she didn’t feel good about returning to Beaches. Her body had been violated, and so had her sanctuary. If she wasn’t safe at Beaches, she wasn’t safe anywhere, and that really pissed her off.
A good-size breaker crashed up the beach, drawing her attention from her white canvas espadrilles, which she was shaking sand out of, to the rolling green sea, still disquieted by the storm. Willie loved coming to the beach after a big storm, seeing how the wind and surf had reshaped the dunes. It was a lesson in humility, a reminder that there were forces in the universe beyond even her father’s control. Like vampires.
She reached inside the navy sweatshirt she’d pulled over a white turtleneck and closed her fingers around the little gold cross she’d dug out of her jewelry box. About five seconds after she’d wakened and realized what had happened wasn’t a dream; she’d raced to the mirror looking for punctures. She hadn’t found any and had almost fainted with relief.
She’d been trying since to build a case for Raven not being a vampire. But what she had so far wasn’t much more than pure and simple this-can’t-be-happening disbelief.
She’d considered the psychological disorder she’d read about that made people think they were vampires, and the blood disease that imitated the symptoms and gave its victims a strong aversion to sunlight, but every theory she came up with fell apart when she came to Raven putting the mirror in her hand.
If he wasn’t a vampire, if he hadn’t known what she’d see when she looked in it, why had he given it to her? Why did he want her to know he was a vampire? Was it a warning, as she’d first thought, or something else?
Willie had too many questions and not enough evidence. She needed answers and she needed proof. Not to mention the guts to
go after them. She’d put on the cross because it made her feel safe, and had come to the beach to hatch a plan and give herself a pep talk. Well, she’d hatched a plan. It was time to go eat something and set it in motion. She put on her shoes, picked up her bucket and headed for home.
Johnny stood watching her on the crest of the dune, bare feet spread and arms folded, the sleeves of his shirt snapping in the brisk, onshore wind. Willie didn’t hear it, just slogged past within three feet of him, through wet sand and soggy beach grass, a frown wrinkling her brow, her cheeks reddened by the chill.
He wanted to tell her it was him, not Raven, who’d been in her bed last night. He’d been in her room when she’d wakened, had seen the horrified look on her face as she’d rushed to the mirror. He ached to tell her and to touch her again, to prove it to her, but he couldn’t.
He could only watch her walk past and just miss stepping on his boots. If she’d been closer, would she have tripped over them? He wished he had a voice, wished he could shout at her to look at him, that he was real, that he loved her, but he couldn’t. He could only pick up his boots and follow her.
As he was every Sunday morning in the summer, Frank was on the terrace—in jeans and a windbreaker, the Boston Globe in his lap and his ankles crossed on the table. He put the paper and his coffee cup down beside the watering can and the pot of geraniums she’d left there last night.
“Ahoy. It’s the shore patrol. Your comics are untouched, Commodore, just the way you like ‘em.”
“Did you drink all the coffee?” Willie put her bucket in the storage bin and saw the trowel she’d left beside it.
“Yeah, but I made fresh. What’s for brunch?”
“Sea rations,” she said, dropping the trowel into the bin.
“Ho, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.”
“Oatmeal and toast.”
“I was hoping for eggs Benedict.”
“Then hope your way to Denny’s.”
Willie had forgotten about the mirrors until she stepped into the house ahead of Frank. She held her breath waiting for him to ask, but he didn’t, just followed her into the kitchen and said, “Wild night, huh?”
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