There was a grain of truth in what her mother was saying. Many times Lauren had lain awake at night and thought of just such things happening. She had cried herself to sleep wanting that highwayman to swoop down on her coach and carry her away with him to his keep where he was lord and master.
She had imagined the lusty pirate who would board her ship, lift her high in his powerful arms, claiming her before his band of ruthless cutthroats as his own before sailing away with her to some tropical shore.
She had longed for the brawny, sun-darkened arms of the Cheyenne warrior to snatch her up on his horse and ride away, escaping the cavalry’s noose to hide her in his encampment deep in the Texas hills.
She had dreamt of the highland rebel who had defied king and country to win her hand, who fought with flashing blade and bare knuckles to keep her forever at his side.
She had created the star traveler whose fast-as-the-speed-of-light war cruiser could whisk her away to his home in the heavens where he would make her his queen and his mate.
And she had put herself in every romance novel she had ever read and every romantic movie she had ever seen. She had pictured herself in the arms of movie stars and rock stars and every handsome man she saw. She had pretended love songs were written just for her ears and that those mysterious dedications on the pages of her favorite novels had been penned for her.
Yes, she thought with guilt, she had fashioned a world for herself where she was the center of attention.
“He heard you, Lauren,” Maxine whispered. “He heard you calling and he came for you. Just as he came when I called him.”
“I don’t...I can’t...” Lauren slammed the book shut and buried her face in her hands. “Nothing makes any sense!” She pushed the book away. “Nothing at all!”
“Doesn’t it?” her mother asked kindly. “You needed him and he came.” She stroked Lauren’s shoulder. “I doubt even he knew how much you would come to mean to him.”
“Then why did he leave?” Lauren sobbed. She looked through the obstruction of her fingers. “To answer some other woman’s cry for help?”
Maxine shook her head. “No. As sure as I am sitting here, he did not want to leave you, Lauren.” She glanced down at the mound of her daughter’s belly. “Especially after he impregnated you.”
Lauren winced at the crude way her mother put it, but then a thought, jarring and horrible, flitted through her mind; a gist of a long ago conversation coming back to taunt her. She gaped at her mother, her face going as chalky as death. “Oh, God!” she croaked. “Please tell me it is possible for him to produce children.”
Maxine looked away.
“Mama?” Lauren’s voice was like a child’s asking for comfort.
Her mother’s shoulders sagged. “If you cut him, he will bleed, although that blood is as black as his sinful heart. If you feed him what he has to have to stay powerful, he will piss and shit like any normal man, but...” she looked back at her daughter. “Those are the only bodily fluids that are normal within him, Lauren. He cannot father children on his own.”
A tiny whimper came from deep within Lauren’s chest. “Then whose child is it?” She shivered, suddenly more afraid than she could ever remember being.
“Someone he would have approved of,” Maxine was quick to say. “A healthy, vital male whose offspring Syntian would not have minded raising as his own. Someone who would have had to have had the same coloring, the same build.” At Lauren’s harsh intake of breath, she nodded. “My guess would be Ben Hurlbert.”
“No!” Lauren shouted, flinging herself out of the chair and against the wall. “It can’t be! I won’t let it be!”
“If you read through the history in the book, you’ll see that he has only done this once before. In Ireland, back in the 1600s. Bridget Mulroney, the woman who asked it of him, made a note on the reverse side of the pact that he had been furious with her for having to lower himself to gather the seed to impregnate her and she advised no one else try it for she feared his wrath.” Her eyes softened. “For him to have willingly done this for you, shows how much he loves you, Lauren.”
“Love?” Lauren shouted, nearly mad with the thought of carrying an unknown man’s child in her body. Even given the fact that it might be Benny’s, the mere notion of it was akin to the vilest kind of defilement.
“Can you imagine how degraded he must have felt to be handled by another male? The shame he must have endured just to provide you with what you wanted?” She studied her daughter’s face carefully. “And it was you that wanted the child, not him, wasn’t it?”
“Why are you defending him?”
“Syntian was my lover,” her mother answered, feeling as much as seeing the flinch that shook her daughter. A perverse imp inside her made her reckless. “Even after he met you, one final time, he came to my bed, Lauren.” At Lauren’s look of shock, she shrugged. “Why do you think I left Milton? I had to get away from him before it happened again. I have no protection from that man’s lust any more than you do.”
Lauren glared at her mother. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
“I won’t deny it,” Maxine defended. “I will always love him, just as I suspect you will always love him.” She lifted her chin. “Just as Angeline Hellstrom loves him, else she would not be holding him against his will and away from you!”
“What are you talking about?” Lauren yelled. She was on the verge of losing her sanity and her mother was back to vilifying Angeline.
“For pity’s sake, girl, think! Somewhere along the line he had to have told you he was bound to her. I know Syntian. He would have tried to break the vow he made between her and him and she might even have allowed him to put aside a portion of it in exchange for the sexual favors he was never all that willing to give any of us! If she realized how much he wanted you, she’d have given him enough rope to hang himself then reeled him in when she thought he had gone too far. Willingly getting you with child would have been way over the limit with her. Don’t you see that?”
What her mother said made sense even though the whole thing was beyond the surreal and had ventured into the realm of the improbable. Such a fantasy as her mother was spinning was hard to believe and yet the proof was there before her: in the so-called pacts made with the Demon NightWind; in the drawings that were aged too well to be anything but genuine; in the photographs which appeared just as authentic; in the signatures on the last few documents that could be none other’s than Syntian’s handwriting.
“Do you realize how ludicrous this sounds, Mama?” Lauren asked. “How bizarre?”
Maxine nodded. “To anyone else, yes, it would. But you’re not just anyone else, are you, Lauren?” She leaned forward. “Haven’t you felt the Calling? The pull that tells you you aren’t like everyone else?” At her daughter’s perplexed look, Maxine jabbed her finger onto the tabletop to make her point.
“Haven’t there been times when you knew, you knew something was going to happen before it did? Or a moment when you knew that if you but tried, you could change what was going to be? You may not have acted upon that knowledge, but nevertheless you felt you could have done something if you’d just had the courage to try. And haven’t there been times when you’ve looked at a person and known beyond a shadow of a doubt that that person was evil or that he or she could do things no one else could? Have you ever tried to deflect that evil or stop those people from doing something by just thinking of doing it?”
“Everyone has intuition, Mama,” Lauren explained away the feelings she had had since she could remember.
“It goes deeper than intuition, Lauren. These are things granted to the women of our family by our connection to Syntian. He gave us these abilities.’’
Lauren looked down at the table. “Even if everything you say is true,” she looked up and fused her gaze with her mother’s, “even if Syntian is...is...” She couldn’t say it.
“Not of this world?” her mother finished for her.
The y
ounger woman’s forehead crinkled with befuddlement. “How can he not be?” She shook her head in negation of the possibility of such a thing.
“None of this is important,” Maxine stated. “Whether he is human or not is of no matter. The question is: Do you want him back or will you allow Angeline Hellstrom to win?”
Lauren opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She lowered her head into her hands and started to cry, heart-rending sobs which shook her entire body.
For once in her life, Maxine Fowler took pity on a fellow human being and got up from the table and went to take her daughter in her arms. She laid her head on Lauren’s and rocked the girl, shushing her wracking sobs with soft words of encouragement.
“We can get him back for you, Lauren,” Maxine assured her. “Everything we need to do is written down in the book.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “I can gather what we need and we can perform the ceremony right here in this house.” She lifted her head and gazed about her. “There is no better place than where Syntian, himself, has dwelled.”
Maxine knew there had to have been a room where he had performed magic of his own before Lauren had come to live with him. She was almost positive it no longer existed for he would not have wanted his wife to know what he was until he could no longer hide it from her.
“If he’s with her,” Lauren sobbed, craning her head back so she could look up at her mother, “why hasn’t he tried to let me know he’s all right?”
Maxine’s face hardened. “She would have seen to that, Lauren. If I know her, and believe me I do, she would have had a place already prepared before she summoned him the last time, a place from which he couldn’t escape. She would have taken all the correct precautions to keep him from being able to leave once he was within.”
A hitching breath shook Lauren before she could speak. “What kind of place?”
“A holding place, a cell,” Maxine answered. “A cage made of iron that has been strengthened with incantations to keep him in. That would be the only kind of internment that would make it impossible for him to get to her, too.”
Lauren’s face showed her confusion.
“Who do you think raped Inez and Karla, Anna Lauren?” her mother asked with characteristic sarcasm. “Or frightened Louvenia Yelverton so badly she had to be committed to an insane asylum? Those women tormented you, didn’t they? They caused you hurt and embarrassment and he would have gone after them to punish them, to keep them from doing it again.”
Fear and shock flooded through Lauren. “No,” she denied. “He wouldn’t have done that. He couldn’t have!”
“Oh, yes, he could,” Maxine told her. “You just think about it a minute and I’ll lay you odds you can come up with other people who’ve been hurt or who’ve had sudden changes of heart since Syntian has come into your life.”
Beth Janacek’s face flashed across Lauren’s mind, as did the face of the teenage girl who had almost ran her down on the street. Agnes and Anna Black. Thad and Nina Atherton. Henrietta Malone.
Maxine saw the wheels of realization turning in her daughter’s mind. “He’s been protecting you, Lauren. That’s all. Given his nature, those who hurt you the most were simply eliminated. Those he could control, he just planted a seed in their minds and let it grow. Suddenly, everything is right in your world.”
“Beth,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. “He killed Beth.” The face of the teenager slipped like sewage across Lauren’s mind. “And that young girl.” Her hand came up to her mouth as though she could silence the thoughts inside her tormented being.
“And he would tear Angeline Hellstrom apart if he could get to her, I can tell you that,” her mother vowed. “She’s keeping him from you and by now, I would imagine he’s beyond feeling any kind of human restraint and has reverted to the beast he was before our first ancestor called him from the Pit. Angeline knows if she should slip up and he should ever get free, there would be nothing left of her but pulpy ooze.” Her lips tightened. “And it couldn’t happen to a nicer person!”
There had been too much, Lauren thought, too much information being fed to her. The circuits of her mind were beginning to shut down. She felt the overload coming, the glitch in the system that would make that system crash. Already she could feel the program that was her consciousness starting to spool. Flashes of faces, facts, voices were tumbling past her mind’s eye in a blur. Soon the screen would go blank and there would be no way to ever store data again.
“Lauren?”
She pulled out of her mother’s arms and got out of her chair on the opposite side, away from the hand her mother had reached out to soothe her.
“Honey, everything’s going to be all right. We can get him back for you. I will not let Angeline win again!”
Lauren stared out the bay window, her gaze sweeping over the lush gardens that had seemed to spring up almost overnight after he had brought her to this house. She took in the fishpond, the gazebo, the brick patio she had always envisioned having. Her eyes moved past the exact Adirondack outdoor furniture she had dreamed of owning. Her inner gaze saw the furniture, the linens, the curtains, the dishware, the appliances, the color of the carpeting throughout the house: All of it just what she had wanted and had been shocked to find upon entering the house for the first time.
“He knew just what would please me,” she mumbled as she put a trembling hand on the bay window that had been in her notebook of dreams, as had the white tile table at which she had been sitting. She smiled at the birdhouses along the back perimeter of the yard. “Down to the very shade of gray I wanted.”
“What?” Maxine asked, pushing her daughter’s bow-back chair under the table. “What did you say?”
“It was all here,” Lauren said softly. “The pattern of china, the stemware, the pots and pans, the silverware.” She slowly shook her head in amazement “And I never questioned it.” Her voice was incredulous. “Not once. I just accepted it.” Her gaze fell on the wicker porch swing in the gazebo. She remembered long evenings of sitting there, not once bothered by the pesky mosquitoes that were a way of life in the South. “Everything was perfect. Everything. Down to the most minute detail.” She shook her head. “Not even a pigmy rattler in the pine straw.”
Maxine exhaled a long sigh. “He only wanted to please you.”
“He did,” Lauren said with wonder. “I thought him the most wonderful man in the world. The perfect husband. The kindest friend. The most gentle lover.” She leaned her head against the coolness of a windowpane. “And all of it was a lie.”
“Not all of it,” Maxine told her.
Lauren’s head jerked around and she glared at her mother. “What wasn’t?” She flung her hand at the immaculate kitchen, a kitchen she had dreamt of having. “Everything in this house is a lie!”
“He loves you. That isn’t a lie.”
Her daughter’s face turned severe. “And I loved him. What does that say of me?”
Maxine reached out and took Lauren’s shoulder in a hard grip. “Do you want him back?” When the younger woman didn’t answer, she shook her. “Answer me, Lauren. Do you want Syntian returned to you?”
For one brief, rebellious moment, Lauren almost said no. Hurt and anger and what she thought of as the infinite betrayal had turned her tender heart rock-solid in her chest. Spite entered her gleaming eyes and her mouth turned bitter with regret and revenge. She pulled away from her mother’s touch and glared at the woman.
“Yes, I want him returned, if for no other reason than to send him back to the hell from which he sprang!” she hissed. This time she was the one to reach out and grip her mother’s shoulder in a painful clutch. “Is that possible? Can we do that? Can we send him back?”
Vindictiveness shot over the older woman’s lined face and a pitiless smile began to stretch the contours of her wrinkled lips.
“Oh, yes,” Maxine said in a low, throaty voice. “We can do that. We can send him back, never to return if that is what you want.”
> Lauren’s head came up and she squared her shoulders. Her gaze was fierce, implacable. “What do we need to do?”
Chapter Twenty-One
The plate of food slid across the floor toward him with a tinny grating sound that set his teeth on edge. He glared at the new bondservant Angeline had conjured. This one was cautious, considering what had happened to Delbert, and would come no closer to the cage than he had to. He pushed the plates of food and bowls of water only as far as Syntian could stretch out his hand to take. He didn’t make the mistake of pushing them to the very bars of the cell.
“Throw me the water bowl,” the man grumbled, leaning on the broom handle.
“Get it yourself,” Syntian snarled. He was sitting at the back of the cell, well away from the man. As quick as this one was, he could move out of Syntian’s reach even if he came right up to the bars and Syntian took the chance of lunging at him as he had done once before when Angeline had relented and removed his shackles.
The man’s slit of a mouth stretched into a thin, humorous line. “You can do without for all I care, NightWind.” He turned and leaned the broom handle against the basement wall, then started to climb the stairs.
“Wait!” Syntian called out. His thirst far outweighed his need to be contrary. He scooped up the plastic water bowl and got to his feet, carried it over to the bars and flung it toward the man.
Angeline’s new servant stared down at the bowl for a moment then craned his head around to look at Syntian. “You wanna play games? You can do without until I come back this evening,” he chuckled. “Maybe by then you’ll have remembered who is the prisoner and who is the warden!”
Fury shook Syntian and he gripped the bars, pulling on them as he had done nearly every day for the last four months he had been held captive. “You son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled as the light to the upstairs world closed off once more and he was pitched back into the darkness. “You pond scum!” He heard an amused guffaw come from above stairs and he slammed his fists against the bars then spun around to glare into the interior of the cage.
NightWind 1st Book: HellWind Trilogy Page 28