Comes the Dark

by Celia Ashley

  “Good.”

  The waitress brought his water, and he indicated with a raised finger that she should wait while he gulped it down, then he asked for another. “I’ll take my time with this one,” he promised with a smile. A rather charming smile reserved for every woman from the quick ease of it. He hadn’t smiled at her. Not once.

  The waitress tapped the table in front of Maris’s hand. “I’ll bring out both dinners together. I didn’t realize you were waiting on company.”

  “I wasn’t. But I have company now. Thanks.” Maris delayed until the server had departed before swinging around in her chair to face Dan. “I was hungry. I don’t normally hang around in bars.”

  “I’m not questioning your judgment. You can pick anywhere you want to eat. And the food is good here, so…”

  Maris returned her attention to the table, picking at what appeared to be an old-fashioned Kilroy. She hadn’t seen one of those since she was a kid and found the character drawn in the back of her mother’s old school book in the attic. Kilroy was here. Evidently it meant something back then. What it meant now was that these tables hadn’t been replaced in forty years.

  “Why would someone want to kill your aunt, Maris?”

  With a frown, Maris lifted her head. “Couldn’t this wait until we’re done eating?”

  “I figured the topic would be uppermost in your mind.”

  “I…it is. Of course, it is.” It hadn’t been, not until he’d spoken, but the mystery of her great-aunt’s demise took a momentary backseat to the flare of shadow licking suddenly around Dan like dark flame. Maris’s heart contracted in her chest. Please, please, no.

  “Are you not feeling well?” she asked, trying to sound casual but knowing she hadn’t succeeded.

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t even go there.”

  “I…You just look tired, that’s all.”

  His eyes went to mere slits and then opened, almost as if he were trying to disprove her point as he stretched them wide. “I ought to be tired, but I’m not. It has been a long day, though.”

  Maris nodded, taking a swig of beer. She lowered the glass slowly, licking a drop off the side of her lip. Dan observed the latter action with a pained expression. Damn it, she wasn’t doing it deliberately to entice him.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to come in tomorrow,” he said, “for elimination prints.”

  Maris agreed too fast. She should have acted confused or indignant or something other than guilty.

  “And to ask you some questions about your whereabouts,” he added.

  Maris rubbed her eyelids. “Did you follow me here? Why are you bringing this up now? Shouldn’t you have just waited until you were ready to haul me down to the station?”

  Shifting in his seat, Dan reached to take the second glass of water from the blond server. He swallowed a mouthful before setting the glass down. “Maris, it’s routine. And I’m done poking at you. Let’s eat and chat about other things.”

  Like what? The fact that death surrounds you, clinging like a second skin?

  Tears pricked at her lids, shocking her. She turned away, pretending rapt interest in the descending plate of steaming food. Her stomach growled. She slapped her hand to her abdomen.

  Beside her, Dan chuckled. “You kill me.”

  Don’t. Don’t use words like that. Don’t pretend they don’t matter. Not with me. Not with someone who sees your doom as clearly as you see that fork in your hand.

  “Maris, you okay?”

  “Yes.” She shoved a forkful of mashed potato into her mouth, and her next words slid around it. “Hungry, like I said.”

  “I think I’m getting that. And I’m not even psychic.”

  She shot him a look from beneath lowered lids, glad to see the aura of shadow had retreated to the thinnest outline, as if it were an illustration in a coloring book and filled in with life. She studied him, storing the images of his sandy hair and his thick, brown lashes, watched the way he cut his food, spreading pieces across his plate and then eating them one by one, because one day what she remembered of him would matter.

  “You’re staring at me, Maris Granger. What on earth are you looking for?”

  “I’m not looking for anything.” She speared a piece of meatloaf and popped it into her mouth.

  “What is it you see, then? You talk about seeing things. What are you seeing when you look at me? I realize I just told you not to go there when you asked me how I was feeling, but now I want to know.”

  She swallowed. “Nothing.”

  “At all?”

  “I see you.” She placed another mouthful of meat on her tongue.

  He laid his knife and fork on the edge of his plate. She lifted her gaze to his face.

  “You’re not exactly lying, Maris, but you speak in half-truths, don’t you? Is that all part of the presentation? The fortune-teller performance?”

  The little bit of food she’d eaten turned in her stomach. His words were designed to ridicule, perhaps even to hurt, but he spoke them softly, gently, as if trying to provoke candor rather than anger. Maris sighed, lowering her utensils as well. “It’s not a performance. This isn’t a sideshow act.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “Life. My life. My reality. It’s not a show, not a trick. It’s both gift and curse, and I’ve tried for years to disown it, but it won’t let me. I was born with a cowl over my face. Right there in the ocean tide. Do you know what that means?”

  He shook his head, his inner energy stilled and listening.

  “I can see things, as you said. I have the Sight. And that ability has shaped me. It’s who I am. What I am.”

  Dan shoved his plate aside, signaling to the waitress with his other hand. “May I have the check, please? And box the food to go. We’ll be back for it.”

  Maris looked from her meal to Dan. “Back for it?”

  “You and I are taking a walk.”

  Chapter 8

  Maris walked with her hands shoved into the pockets of her wooly sweater, the hood pulled up over her head. The weight pressed her dark bangs against her forehead. She kept blinking to chase the hair out of her lashes.

  Dan had never known a woman like Maris, and he’d been acquainted with many. Enamored of a few, sure, and in love once. With the exception of his former wife, he’d never felt as connected as he did right now to Maris. And without exception, he’d never felt the nearness of a woman fire his blood the way Maris did. Yeah, she was hot, but it was something else, too. Stupid, foolish nonsense, all of it, but even nonsense had its place in a person’s life.

  “I don’t even know you.”

  She glanced aside at him through fine, black strands. “What?”

  “Sorry. Thinking out loud.”

  She went back to looking ahead along the road. He slowed his pace in order to watch her stride, the sensual tendency of her movements. She didn’t walk with the conscious aggression of a model’s runway saunter, but with the pacing of a feral cat. After a moment she looked back over her shoulder, her smoke-gray eyes dark in the growing gloom. “Am I walking too fast for you?”

  “Of course not.” He hastened his step, falling in beside her again.

  “So, Dan, why exactly are we taking this stroll?”

  “I needed to clear my head”—which was becoming more befuddled by the minute—“and I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  “About?”

  “About what you said back there.”

  “Oh.” Her breath plumed in the air. The temperature had dropped since he’d gone into the bar for dinner. Perhaps a walk outside hadn’t been the best choice since neither of them wore a coat. But he had no desire to turn around and go back. The sensation of being locked inside a bubble with her, separate from the world, was strong, and he didn’t want to give that up just yet.

  “Not about your aunt and not about…” About the fact he should be considering her a suspect. He couldn’t say th
at. Not right now. “I want to talk about this thing you call ‘the sight.’ You really believe it.”

  “I believe it because it’s true.”

  With no sidewalks on the outskirts of town, they had been walking along the shoulder of the roadway. Through the trees, he saw the gleam of headlights approaching the curve and took Maris’s arm, tugging her into the grass. She stood next to him, her shoulder against his bicep. The car sped past, tires growling on the blacktop.

  “How you do you know it’s true? What definitive proof do you have?”

  She stared across the street at the burgundy sign marking the entrance to Alcina Cove’s nature preserve. “A lifetime’s worth. Can we go in there? It’s not dark yet. Don’t those types of places close at sundown?”

  Amused by her abrupt and somewhat childlike distraction, he took her hand and pulled her across the road to the lane leading into the preserve. Once on the gravel, he released her. Their footsteps crunched on stone.

  “Give me some examples,” he said.

  “I knew my aunt was gone.”

  Ah, yes, but there could be other reasons for that knowledge. He didn’t want to think about that, though. “Something else.”

  Maris bowed her head, looking at the ground in front of her feet as she moved along. “Sometimes they’re little things, relatively unimportant things. Like I’ll wake up with a newspaper headline in my head, and when I retrieve the paper from the front steps, it’s there.”

  “But couldn’t that be some trick your mind plays on you? Where you think you thought of it before, but you really hadn’t?”

  Her lips compressed. She shook her head.

  “I want to believe you, Maris. I really think I do want to.”

  “You didn’t before. What’s changed?”

  He released a breath through his nostrils. “I don’t know.”

  Maris lifted her head and looked across the long parking lot they’d reached. “I had a breast cancer scare a few years back. I hadn’t even gone to my yearly appointment yet, didn’t know the doctor would send me for an ultrasound because she felt something in her exam. I had a vision of the entire visit as I was waking up, though. I knew the doctor’s exact words. I told my mother about it in advance, and she came with me to the appointment, stood by as the doctor told me her concerns. My mother knows what I can do, and she doesn’t like it. She asked me to never tell her anything like that again.”

  The catch in Maris’s voice, the evident pain, twisted Dan’s guts into a knot. But it could all be an act. It could. “Everything turned out all right?”

  “Oh yeah, I was fine.” She smiled, the turn of her lips visible through her blowing hair, the white feather in her right ear entwined in the black strands.

  He reached out and stroked the tiny plume, pulling the hair away. “Peace, Maris.”

  Her hand shot up and grasped the feather between thumb and forefinger, pushing his hand away in the process.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t apologize. You didn’t do anything wrong. I was surprised, that’s all.”

  She picked up her pace, scurrying toward the sign of the park’s layout several dozen feet away. Dan joined her a moment later, observing her finger pressed to a point on the map.

  “I didn’t think I remembered this place. According to that over there”—she nodded at the park’s history charted out on the sign—“this park was created a while after I left with my family. I want to go see this.”

  Dan leaned forward for a better look. He hadn’t needed to. Of course Maris would gravitate toward that particular landmark. He straightened. “The sun’s nearly down. I don’t think we should be hiking in the dark.”

  “Why? You think somebody’s going to arrest us? You’re a cop. You should have some leverage.”

  “No, it’s the dark that worries me. The terrain isn’t all that level.” And he had no desire to test the validity of the tales that had been circulating for years regarding the stone circle—the Circle of Alcina, from which the town had gotten its name. Buried for a century or more beneath the encroaching forest, some of the stones tumbled flat long ago, the whole monument had been unearthed and resurrected as a project of some professor who had finally located it after years of searching. The preserve was created around the circle with the monolithic stones as the focal point.

  Maris fumbled through her purse and pulled out a flashlight a few seconds later. She flicked it on. “Not dark. We’re good.”

  “Great.”

  “I’ll lead the way. It says the path is marked.”

  “Even better.”

  Dan followed close behind, looking from side to side beyond the light’s beam into the deep shadows beneath the trees. The park was a perfect place for an attack, if someone was so inclined. Dark, secluded, and a good five hundred feet away was the nearest neighbor liable to hear a cry for help . The naturalist, Felicia Woodward, lived in that house all by herself. She never gave an impression she had any fear of this place. She was a lot like Maris in her beliefs and her attitude. Maybe he should introduce the two of them. Maybe Maris wouldn’t feel so alone.

  As that final sentiment circled through his brain, he had a strong urge to take the woman marching in front of him into his arms. That would be a mistake, one he couldn’t come back from.

  Maris stopped abruptly and spun to face him.

  “Shit,” he said. “Are you going to tell me you know what I’m thinking?”

  She cocked her head to the side, flipping the flashlight up to his face and back down toward the ground again. “Why? Is it bad? I was just going to say we’re here.” Turning around, she raised the beam. Twenty feet away the stones rose out of the earth like the silvered bones of giants. A chill danced down his spine. He’d been here once or twice in recent years to roust out unruly teenagers drinking inside the circle. In the atmosphere of a silent night without commotion, he could understand why people made up stories about the stones.

  “Come on, Detective. I’ll race you.”

  “I’m not—” But she was gone, and the light with her.

  * * * *

  Maris stood in the center of the circle with the dark flashlight held against her thigh. Enough ambient light existed from above for Dan to pick his way in after her. She’d sensed his hesitation when she insisted they come to the stones and had wondered why he faltered. She had no regrets. It was amazing and beautiful. Tonight, she would describe this in her diary. She’d been writing down her thoughts since she was a teenager, most of them intimate and not the type of thing she’d share. But the act of writing helped her to cope. Her therapist had suggested the exercise to help with healing, but she had chosen to keep it going.

  Raising her arms toward the sky, head tipped back, she turned in a slow circle. Energy reflected off the stones’ surfaces like radiant heat on a sunny day. Even through her sweater, the hairs on her arms lifted with the fizzing of power. She felt welcomed here, as if encircled by old friends. She understood the force encased in a configuration of stones such as this, had learned of it in her lessons with Aunt Alva long ago. A strength existed within the circles, often called upon by many to enhance their gifts.

  Maris stopped turning, lowering her arms to her sides. She’d been told her family had lived for generations in this area, nearly four hundred years of connection. Had the females of her bloodline met here, communing beneath the stars, before the stones had fallen?

  And I am the last.

  A sound welled up in her throat like a howl. She clamped her teeth together to keep the noise contained, refusing to let it loose into the night. All around her whispers began to flutter like leaves in the wind. Or was it the wind? Confused and unsteady, she began to turn again, arms outstretched for balance.

  “Maris!”

  “Dan, I’m he—” Holy Mother of God, what the hell was that?

  Tall and thin and nearly in the shape of a man, a shadow flitted
from stone to stone with no source of illumination strong enough to create it. Maris sucked in a breath, lifting the flashlight, thumb fumbling for the switch.

  “Who are you?” she hissed through her teeth.

  You know who I am.

  “No. I don’t.” Maris depressed the round button on the flashlight’s plastic casing. The bulb remained dark.

  Yes. You do.

  “Maris!”

  “I don’t. I swear I don’t.”

  Think. Think hard…

  “Maris!” Dan burst between the stones into the circle. The flashlight in Maris’s fist flared into life. Dan hurried to her side and grabbed her arm. “Who were you talking to?”

  Maris swung the light around to illuminate the stones one by one. “Nobody. There…there was no one here.”

  Dan pulled her close. She let him, turning her head against his sweatshirt, the scent of rank fear rising from both of them mildly offensive as well as reassuring. Even if Dan didn’t understand what had just happened, hadn’t been close enough to witness it, at least he’d felt it. Maris burrowed her face against his chest.

  “I think we’ll come back another day,” she said. “A sunny mid-afternoon.”

  A sound rumbled through him, a kind of laughing growl. Not because he thought what she’d said was funny, but in defiance—a deliberate insolence to counter the unease. With his fingers tight on her upper arm, he led the way out of the stone circle and back across the parking lot to the main road. By the time they reached it, Maris was breathless from trotting alongside him.

  “I didn’t see your car when I came into the bar. Are you staying at the Hideaway?”

  She nodded.

  “Let’s collect our food, and I’ll walk you back, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Maris kept an eye on him as they made their way to the bar, marking his mood in the lines of his profile. By the time they reached the parking lot, he’d calmed down considerably. Once they’d claimed their boxes of leftovers, they continued on to the quaint motel, walking with enough distance between them they could have driven a small vehicle through. It had to be that way.