Another wave hit the boat. Liz revved up the engine, but overestimated the tide's strength. The boat jumped ashore, and she had to grab the side to keep from flying over the stern. When she righted herself, she saw that the twister completely blocked the moon, hiding everything outside the path of the floodlight.
Then a shadow fell, splitting the beam in two, defying natural law. A head, huge, dark. Two large, powerful arms. Long legs that ate up the light as the form swirled toward her. A pair of red eyes blazed down at her as though she were a small insect, and a menacing drone accompanied its movements.
Liz closed her eyes, squeaks of terror hiccuping from her throat, but when she opened them, the figure was still there.
Turn back, Guardian.
She screamed, the sound merging with an abrupt clap of thunder. Lightning streaked across the sky, allowing her to see her father running toward the boat.
"Izzy." She strained to hear him above the drone. "Leave. Leave now. You cannot win when you got no opal!"
The creature's noises rose to a high-pitched whine. It spun, directing red eyes toward shore. Leave us, puny defender.
But her father continued running, waving his hands, shouting, and the whine rose to a shriek. The creature abandoned its human form, spinning with dizzying speed directly toward her father.
Helpless little sounds spilled repeatedly from Liz's lips, her eardrums recoiled from the punishing noise, her eyes took in her father's moving mouth, saw his feet pounding the gray sand. Then the monster burst into hundreds of dancing flames, cooling the warm night with a blast of frigid air, and she saw it swallow her father's racing body, saw him fly into the air.
The last things she heard were scraps of words. "Power above . . . divine ... I . . . to thee . . ." Then nothing. The sky was vacant save for the sickly moon. No sound, not even the splash of the once-turbulent water.
Liz opened her mouth and let out a scream so shrill it nearly ripped her throat apart.
* * *
Zach's feet barely touched the ground. His speed was much greater now that he wasn't trying to block out the earsplitting whine with his hands, but its sudden cessation alarmed him. When he heard Liz scream, his alarm exploded into full-scale panic and he pushed the last ounce of energy from his whirling legs.
Fat drops of rain splattered the dry earth, and thunder still rumbled far away, and through it shone a floodlight. The intensity blinded him for a moment, and when he recovered, he saw Liz climbing from the boat. She uttered pathetic mews and held herself so tightly he didn't know how her blood could flow.
"Liz!"
She jumped like a frightened mouse, then turned her wide, blank eyes on him. "My fath . . . Papa . . ."
Shock. He'd seen it before as a cop after reaching a scene of terrible violence. Terror and grief combining until the victim was little more than a shivering zombie.
He arrived at her side just as her legs gave out, and caught her easily while she sank, trembling, to the sand. His eyes automatically scoped out the barren land, the empty boat, as he crouched beside her.
"Where is he?" Zach wasn't certain Liz would even understand his question.
"T-The tornado . . . Ankouer—" She shook her head violently. "No, no, not Ank— The tornado picked him . . . picked him off the ground . . . li-like a s-stick."
She curled her arms around his forearm, clutching so hard her fingers bit his flesh, and her wide, tearless eyes stared as vacantly as they had in the dream he'd just awakened from. He could only guess what she'd seen. Her father caught in the storm, the twister spiraling down to pick him up, then lifting off to carry him away. Horrifying. Horrifying. No wonder she could barely speak.
"It's okay, Liz," he gently told her. "You don't have to talk about it."
"It b-b-burst into f-flames, Zach, ice-c-cold f-flames!"
Her description sent his mind traveling back in time, but he quickly slammed that door. "It was a tornado, Liz," he barked. "You're in shock, imagining things."
Zach's harsh words sliced through Liz's paralysis, and she looked up at him, her vision coming into focus. Rain was falling on them both, streaking down his worried face, and the floodlight showed stress lines between his brows and around the hard line of his mouth. A muscle twitched in his jaw and his blue eyes looked at her sternly, as if daring her to talk of these things again. She sensed a hard wall around him now, that despite her fog she knew hadn't been there a moment earlier.
She couldn't blame him.
The world she'd created for herself in Chicago excluded everything that she'd been taught during her first fifteen years of life—phantoms and ghosts, even God and higher powers— had just shattered. As she met Zach's warning gaze, she felt her hold on sanity grow tenuous and slippery. She didn't know where Zach had gone or how he'd managed to erect his mental barrier, but she wanted to join him there.
Another explosion of lightning and thunder shook the sandy beach, and she gazed directly ahead to the spot where her father had vanished, and told herself if she had any hope for survival, she'd better find the same protective place that Zach had entered. Madness would be so easy, too easy, and it was an indulgence she couldn't afford.
"We have to hunt for him." She tried to rise to her feet, but terror had cooked her legs to mush.
Zach leaned forward and slid his hands under her arms and lifted her. She quivered from head to toe, and he had to support her so she wouldn't fall again. Her breathing still came in tatters, interrupted now and then by the same small mews she'd been uttering when he'd found her. Raindrops trickled down her face. He gently brushed them away, but she hardly noticed.
Finally, her trembling subsided to infrequent shivers. "Did you hear me, Zach?" she asked. "We have to hunt for Papa."
"It's nearly pitch-black out here, Liz, and we're in danger from the lightning. We need to find shelter." He stepped away just slightly, testing the steadiness of her legs.
"Maybe the twister put him down somewhere."
"But we don't know where."
"I read about a cow once that was dropped gently on . . ." Her trailing voice hinted that she saw the futility of her suggestion.
"Yeah." If living things survived tornadoes often, newspapers wouldn't report them. But Liz had borne enough pain. He didn't have to agree with her that Frank had probably fallen with spine-fracturing force.
"In the morning. We'll search in the morning. When the storm's over and we have light. Okay?"
Her head bobbed up and down, and when he pulled her into his arm, bearing a great deal of her weight as they walked to camp, she said not another word.
Once in the alcove, Zach wrapped her in a blanket, then covered it with a tarp to protect her from the rain. She rocked back and forth under that unsubstantial shelter, mewing again.
Using stones to secure the edges, he erected a flimsy lean-to against the rock wall, then dragged a sleeping bag beneath it. When he finished, he went to help Liz to her feet. Shock had stolen her strength again, and she could barely stand, so he carried her to the shelter, then stripped off her shoes and rewrapped her in the blanket. Then he returned to the shore to secure the boat. If it was lost, they'd both be doomed.
Afterward, he climbed under the lean-to. Liz was still awake, lying on her back, stiff and wide-eyed. He took her in his arms. "Sleep, cher," he whispered. "Tomorrow we'll search for your pa."
Her chin bumped his chest as she bobbed her head again, and a few minutes later he felt her relax. She still hadn't cried, he noticed. Raindrops on her cheeks, but not a tear, and he wondered if she ever did, and also wondered about the cost of holding back a lifetime of sorrow. Soon even that thought was forgotten. His own body relaxed as well, and he drifted asleep to the lullaby of his childhood sweetheart's breath.
Chapter Twenty
Liz pressed against the warmth. of Zach's body. Rain drizzled on the roof of the lean-to. An occasional clap of thunder sounded overhead. The frequent lightning flashes turned everything as bright as day, and with each sw
ath of light, snippets of her past played across the liver-toned canvas above. Mama singing her a lullaby in French. Papa hanging the truck tire to the giant cypress tree. Zach laughing as he put a worm on her fishing hook.
Then darker memories. Grandmere chanting over the body of a dying man. Mrs. Cormier looking left and right as she sneaked up the porch steps to get a potion to keep her man from cheating. And she knew with increasing dread that each recollected nugget was leading her to a night she'd wiped from her mind twenty years before. Already the pieces were coming. Heat lightning flashing through the sky. The air thick and sticky and hard to breathe. Liz rolled on her side, pushing away the images, pleading for sleep to take her back into its arms. Instead the images got crisper, more vivid, sweeping her irresistibly into the past . . . to the night she'd jerked from her sleep and shot upright in her narrow bed, calling her grandmother.
Lightning had swept like the path of a torch across the room Izzy shared with her grandmother, and her sweat-damp nightgown clung to her body. Though the shutters were open, no night breeze stirred the stuffy air inside the screened-in second floor, and she found it hard to breathe.
She saw Grandmere sitting on her bed, clutching a blanket to her chest, and wondered how she stood having it touch her skin on so hot a night.
"Grandmere," she whispered. "Grandmere."
The older woman didn't turn. Instead, she stared at an empty space, saying with uncharacteristic venom, "You cannot take the opal, no. I will die before you have it."
Then die you will, old one. The stone shall be mine.
The words in Izzy's mind sounded so like the warning she'd gotten the day she'd hidden from the storm with Zach and Jed that she trembled.
"Grandmere," she called again in a shaky voice. "Wake up. You're dreaming bad."
It was as though she hadn't spoken, wasn't there. Her grandmother's eyes remained transfixed on the vacant spot. Fear, thick and sticky as the hot air she breathed, permeated the room.
"Never! Never! Not if you summon demons from hell."
What could Grandmere be staring at, talking to, that unleashed such terror and caused such harsh words to come from her mouth? Again the voice sounded in Izzy's head.
I am hell. I am the unformed, the ravenous one that cannot be denied. I am hungry, old one. Give me the opal!
"Never! Again I speak never!" Her grandmother scrambled to her feet and stood on the bed, crying, "Power above, power divine, I call to thee in my hour of need!" Swaying on the sagging bedsprings, she lifted something above her head. Colors—gold and orange, blue and red and green—swirled through the room, bringing it alive with brilliant hues. The opal! Izzy realized. Why was it here in their bedroom instead of locked up in the sideboard downstairs?
A hiss sprang up, not of the mind, but real. Very real. Too real. Izzy shivered violently and grabbed for the muslin sheet at the foot of the bed, pulling it tight, frightened into paralysis.
Still not knowing what her grandmother battled, Izzy held her in a frozen stare. Her long, dark, gray-streaked hair fluttered behind her head as if stirred by wind, and her eyes looked toward heaven as she recited the prayer Izzy had heard so often she knew it by heart herself. With each word, the hissing got louder, longer, more frequent.
"Glow, glow bright opal, free your fire," Grandmere chanted.
*You cannot win, ancient guardian. You have no defender. You're old and tired and weak. Release the stone. It is mine.*
Grandmere trembled so badly the opal quivered in her hands and she stumbled over her words. "Cleanse . . . cleanse my . . . heart . . . of fear."
The sparkling globe in her hand flickered and dimmed with each stuttered syllable, with each quake of her body. Izzy couldn't stand it anymore. She adored Grandmere, had adored her all her life. She forced another call past her numb vocal chords. "Grandmere!"
"Izzy!" With eyes that were black dots of terror, Grandmere turned her head.
Ah, the seedling guardian. Come. Join the old one.
Her grandmother's expression abruptly changed to defiance. "Never, Ankouer! The child will defeat you in the end!"
Do not speak such drivel, foolish one.
Even in her terror, Izzy recognized that the mental voice contained an uncertainty that hadn't been there before, that somehow she could help. What she needed to do came to her in jerky, random thoughts. The prayer! She could help Grandmere say the prayer.
Still hugging the sheet tightly to her body, she began reciting in her high, sweet, young woman's voice. As her voice grew stronger, her grandmother's grew weaker.
"Izzy!" she called thinly.
And then the opal was hurling through the air. An irregular ball the size of her fist, weighing no more than ounces, but the light inside it sparkled like fragments of a fireworks show.
A silent scream rose from the unseen force, splitting her eardrums, making her hands want to fly up to cover them. But the stone was sailing toward her. She had to catch it, had to, had to. So fragile it was, and it would turn to powder if it struck the wooden floor.
And then the nothingness, the speaker in the mind, the hisser, the thing that terrified her Grandmere so bad, burst into flames. Izzy steeled herself against the heat. Instead, she felt the nip of cold. Creeping, seeping, biting at her sweat-damp skin, at her toes and fingers.
Her hands felt clumsy now as she cupped them to catch the opal. But she continued chanting the prayer— "Power above, power divine" —while waiting, waiting, waiting for the precious object to fall into a downward arc.
She heard Grandmere, knew she was speaking to her, but she couldn't look, couldn't, couldn't. If she did the stone would—
"Take care, you . . . for the fire stone."
Flames now engulfed the room with a fire that froze. They licked at her legs, her body, her small, child-woman's breasts, at the hands that waited for the soaring opal, making her movements jerky and hard to control. The fire stone. She must catch it before—
"You are . . . the last . . . the last guardian It is up . . . up to you to defeat Ankouer."
*I take the old one, came a voice from deep inside her mind. For now. But you and I will meet again, seedling. I swear it.
"Power above, power divine," Izzy whispered.
The stone landed in her hands, soft and hard at the same time, and she closed her fingers around the glittering object and clutched it close.
With one last blinding flare, the flames vanished, allowing summer's heat to return to the room. She swooned, she must have swooned, because the next thing she knew morning had come. Her father sat beside her on the bed, uncurled the fingers she'd wrapped so tightly around the precious stone, and sadly told her that Grandmere had died in her sleep.
Even Mrs. Tricou's skillfully applied makeup couldn't hide the blue stain on her grandmother's lips as she lay against the soft white satin. And after they placed the coffin reverently in the vault, Izzy returned home, packed a few belongings in a paper bag, and went in search of Zach. But he scoffed at her fears and tried to talk her out of leaving. So, alone and scared and not yet sixteen, she paddled her pirogue out of Port Chatre, leaving the fire stone in her mother's care and doing her best to wipe out the memory of that terrifying night.
Abruptly, the canvas shelter above her came into sharp focus. The rain had stopped. The sun was rising. Liz idly stared at the fibers that bound the canvas together and finally saw the patchwork quilt of her entire life. The crazy events fell into place. The warnings in her mother's journal, her father's insane quest, even Maddie's curt chastisements. The obstacles Ankouer had placed in her and Zach's path.
And Harris. Suddenly she remembered everything he'd told her that night in his bar. She had run from duty, had fled the certain knowledge that Izzy held in her heart. Because of it, her mother had died as surely as if Liz had actually slaughtered her. With that crushing realization, she instantly knew where she'd find her father. Bolting to a sitting position, she leaned over.
"Zach," she said urgently, shaking
him awake. "Zach."
His eyes fluttered open.
"I know why we're on Quadray Island," she told him. "We're here to destroy Ankouer."
Still half-asleep, Zach brought Liz's hands to his lips and stared into her ever-changing, amber eyes, trying to take in what she'd just said. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, he delayed his answer. She held his gaze and waited patiently.
"Liz," he said, breaking the silence. "You, well, you've lived through a terrible event. I can see why . . ."
She didn't argue and this uncharacteristic behavior troubled him more than her startling statement.
"I'll go hunt for your father's body," he said wearily. "Go back to sleep until I return."
"He's not dead, Zach. Ankouer took him. Don't you see? Le fantome noir is luring me to his cavern by taking him there."
"In your own words, Liz, Ankouer doesn't exist."
"I was wrong. He does." She covered the hand that held hers and brought it to her breasts. He felt a quickened heartbeat that belied her outer calm. "I remember, Zach. I remember why I left Port Chatre."
As she began her story, he found himself wanting to reach for the flask. Instead he pulled out a cigarette and listened to her tale with an increasingly sinking sensation in his stomach. The events she described stirred a memory.
He turned away from it. Yes, he believed the island was evil. He felt the very presence of that indefinable quality in the air he breathed. But to swallow the legend of le fantome noir? In his philosophy, evil was a force, but it came from the dark impulses that resided in each man and woman's heart, not from some single supernatural entity one warred against like a marauding despot.
Sure, he found himself occasionally crossing himself, and once or twice he'd been tempted to throw salt over his shoulder. At times . . . at times the memory of his ill-fated journey for the orchid came flooding back. And the occurrences of this trip went well beyond rational explanation. But Liz was talking of fantastic things that science had long ago proven didn't exist.
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