Awaken the Devil

by A. J. Chase

  Four or five weeks? She had probably gotten pregnant the first time they were together. But how was that possible? "I didn't think it was something that could happen. I had a vasectomy twenty years ago," Chandler heard himself saying, though it was no one's business but his own. And apparently, Fielding's.

  The doctor raised one eyebrow. He was probably thinking that the baby wasn't his, but Chandler knew better. With Helena, he really had doubted until Anne had come along looking just like a squalling, gnomish version of him. Fielding, whatever she had done to him, was not the kind to whore around like Helena.

  The doctor seemed to recover himself. "Sometimes the vas will spontaneously rejoin. It also sometimes happens that the procedure was not done correctly or that a third vas exists. Failure is unusual but not unheard of. Maybe one in every five hundred to a thousand operations. I would see your doctor and have that looked at. You may have to have the procedure repeated if you really want to remain, or technically become, infertile."

  "I…" Chandler shook his head to try and clear it. "I don't know."

  The doctor looked at his clipboard. "Well, you certainly don't have to make a decision now; the extent of your wife's injuries is not conducive to another try within the next few months. You can see her in about fifteen minutes."

  Fifteen minutes would feel like forever. But, he was going to sit right here until he was allowed to see Fielding.

  She had been pregnant with his baby. Unlike with Helena, he was touched by the idea. It gave him a strange, dazed sensation that he was not that old after all. That his life could start all over again. Even at this point.

  Then he was disgusted with himself. Fielding had used him. She had said that she loved him, and that was the most brutal lie of all. And the sickest thing of all of it was that he still loved her anyway. Despite all the pride and arrogance he had been raised to wield as weapons, he didn't even have enough strength to walk away from a woman who didn't really love him. After all, pride and arrogance weren't the same thing as confidence. Not the same at all.

  He let the nurse who came to the waiting room lead him to her bedside. She looked small and fragile, and the image flashing behind his eyes of her crumpled on the floor with the hilt of that knife protruding from her stomach made him dizzy. He sat beside her bed for almost an hour just watching her breathe, a miracle all on its own, and thinking.

  She had wanted him in her life so that she could appease her uncle, not because she was so attracted to him. He should have known it from the start. It was the way this wicked world had always worked, and always would, until the last man was gone. She would no doubt be less than happy to discover him here if she were to wake. She didn't truly want him, and if he had any sense, he wouldn't want her either.

  She was okay. The doctor said she would be fine.

  If she was anything like the other women he knew, she would not be that upset to lose a baby she wasn't even trying to have. Staying here would not make it more or less true that she would be fine, and Sara attacking her wouldn't make her perfidy any more or less horrifying. Nor would her injury and recovery make him any more or less weak for forgiving her, when she wouldn't even care.

  Not that it mattered because he didn't forgive her. How could he ever? She had done what he thought was impossible. She had proven that he had a heart after all. And then she had broken it.

  Abruptly he found that missing strength, stood before he changed his mind, and, his back ramrod straight, walked out of the hospital and away from Fielding French forever.

  When she woke up, Fielding jerked in horror and pulled at the ropes around her, trying to get up off the floor. Except they weren't ropes, and the floor felt like a firm but comfortable bed.

  "Hey, calm down, Fielding. Everything's okay."

  A machine to her right started screeching, but she still relaxed back in her bed when she heard Josh's voice. It was over. It had to be. Josh was here, and she was in the hospital. A nurse came in, and Fielding pulled herself back to reality enough to realize that she had pulled an IV tube out of her arm with her desperate thrashing. The nurse tsked, turned off the machine,.

  "Good morning, Miss French. I see you're with us again. I'll have Dr. Miller come in here and chat with you for a minute."

  Fielding used her other hand to rub her eyes. They felt gritty and swollen. She touched her tender abdomen. "Sara Flynn stabbed me."

  She couldn't believe it, even when she said it out loud.

  Josh's eyes softened. "I know."

  "But, I liked her." She knew it was a stupid thing to say, but it was true. She had respected and admired Sara for so many years and the woman, the gigantic Broadway star, had tried to kill her.

  "It wasn't personal honey. She was crazy."

  "She's Annabelle Aylesworth's sister."

  Josh nodded. "I finally got it all figured out. Sara was a daughter born to the absent mother when Annabelle was about six. I guess that madness ran in her family. The mother eventually killed herself, about ten years ago, so she fell pretty much right between her two daughters' suicides."

  Fielding stared at Josh. "Sara killed herself?" She was horrified.

  "With the gun that was still in the detective's hand. He's pretty upset."

  Poor Wallace.

  "I was furious at myself for not seeing the relationship before you got hurt. I wanted to kill myself when Bentley called me and said you were in the hospital," Josh finished.

  "He called you?" The pain in her chest was almost as bad as her stomach when she remembered the look on his face when he'd implied he hated her.

  "On his way to the airport. He said he didn't want you to wake up alone." He was sheepish. "I'm sorry. I misjudged him, and it wasn't fair." He cleared his throat. "I have to tell you something. Last night—"

  The door opened again, and a tall, blonde woman strode into the room. "Well, Miss French. Nice of you to join us. You gave us quite a scare." She pulled Fielding's chart off the front of the bed and looked at it. "I'm Dr. Miller, and I'll be helping you out a little this morning."

  Fielding looked at Josh who was looking at the floor then back at the doctor. "Will I be okay?"

  The doctor tapped Fielding's chart with a pen. "For someone who got stabbed yesterday, you're doing remarkably well. Fast response time was in your favor." She moved in closer to the bed and patted Fielding's hand. "I'd like to give you better news about the baby, but I'm so sorry to say that there was nothing we could do."

  Both she and Josh stared at the doctor. "Baby?" She was barely able to form the word. Oh, God. This was like some kind of nightmare. Please tell me that I wasn't pregnant. That Sara didn't kill my baby. She squeezed her eyes shut against the crippling pain of the idea.

  "I'm so sorry. We thought you must have known. We automatically run those kinds of tests whenever a woman comes into the hospital, and we don't know much about them, especially when it's a young woman like you." She gave Fielding's hand another pat, but Fielding snatched it away. Slowly, the doctor added, "You were only between four and five weeks. I would wait between three and five months before you try again, but I don't see any reason why you can't have a family very soon."

  The final words were said in a conciliatory, quiet way, as though they would somehow make up for the reality of what she was saying. Fielding couldn't force her eyes open. She curled away from the doctor and then cried out in pain as her stomach objected sharply.

  How could this happen? How could fate be so cruel as to take the only man she had ever loved, and then take the baby that she could have had? She knew that she would never see Chandler again, but she could have held his baby in her arms. She could have had something born of the love that she felt for him growing in her stomach. Instead Sara had killed that dream. She had killed their baby.

  The doctor sighed. "I think maybe I should come back in a few minutes."

  Fielding felt Josh's hand on her arm even though he was behind her. "I'm so sorry, Fee," he whispered. He hadn't called her that nam
e since childhood. Pain made her feel hollow and achy. She wanted to go back to sleep and pretend like all of this had never happened.

  "I'm going to send up a counselor from our emotional rehabilitation department," Dr. Miller proclaimed on her way out the door.

  She heard Josh's small voice as if from inside a tunnel. "Maybe you should," he told the doctor. "She had a death in the family last night as well."

  Oh, no. No. Mac was dead. Her baby was dead. Chandler was gone. She curled even tighter perversely getting some satisfaction from the pain it caused her. Everything was gone. She felt her shoulders convulse with her bitter tears, but no sound came out of her at all.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The biggest shock in the aftermath of Sara's behavior was Leslie's sudden propulsion to fame. But perhaps that was only the biggest shock to Fielding since she had experienced Sara's insanity first hand.

  Sara had spent a large part of her young life trying to reconnect with her lost half-sister. After she had, Annabelle Aylesworth had become her life. She had idolized her sister and had been devastated by her suicide. Sara had spent almost a year in an institution starting the day that she had identified Annabelle's shattered body at the morgue.

  In her long and rambling suicide note, Annabelle had blamed Chandler, the man she knew as Everett, so Sara had blamed him, too. In her twisted mind, Chandler had not gone to prison for his terrible crime, so she would have to devote her life to insuring that he went to prison for some terrible crime, even if he had not been the one to commit it.

  Her phenomenal fame in the theater world had apparently only been an accidental by-product of her real goal in life, making sure that Chandler's life was the kind of hell that she was sure he had caused her sister's to be. She had grown increasingly more insane and increasingly less cautious as the years went by. In the scattered journals found in her New York apartment, which had been plastered with creepy pictures of Annabelle, Chandler, and her own victims, she expressed that she had been forced to hide the bodies of two of the women she killed after not being careful enough to not implicate herself.

  The oddest and possibly saddest thing of all was that Chandler didn't even know who Annabelle Aylesworth was, and the police had been able to prove that he had never even met her. But she had seen him in the theater, and that appeared to be enough.

  Zave Wallace had suspected from the first moment of seeing Charlotte's wounds that the person who had killed her had been shorter than her, rather than taller. Charlotte was tall, so that hadn't eliminated many men, but to him, it had eliminated Chandler, who was over six feet. Even bent at the knees, he was still too tall.

  It wasn't until it was already too late that the autopsy report had come back and told him just how much shorter the attacker had been. With Bentley's strict insistence on tall dancers, there were only two people in the entire theater who were small enough to fit the bill. Fielding and Sara.

  Wallace was being hailed as a hero, and Fielding was being hailed as some sort of intrepid investigator with almost supernatural powers. In reality, it was Josh who had done most of the work, but it was she who received fifteen job offers in a week from papers around the nation, three while she was still in the hospital.

  It was beyond ironic considering that she had never penned a single word in the course of her whole investigation and had no intention of doing so. Plenty of other papers had something to say about Chandler, though. He had become an overnight enigmatic heartthrob who still refused to be interviewed.

  When Chandler had retreated back to his ancestral estate, ostensibly to avoid the reporters that were now hot for his blood in a whole different way, he had left Liz in charge of Pirates. It was the day before opening night, and Liz had made the sudden, and wise from a marketing standpoint, decision to promote Leslie to the lead role that Sara's death had left empty. The understudy was pretty much furious, but Liz made her decisions based on business, and her decision was made—a decision that would have been fine had anyone known where Leslie was. But then as it happened someone had.

  Zave Wallace had indeed been telling Fielding the truth. Leslie was fine, and she had been safe. He had kept her in his apartment while simply thumbing his nose at the legions of cops, PIs, and FBI agents that her parents had produced. At first Fielding had been furious to learn she had been forced through the emotional turmoil of Leslie's "kidnapping" for no particular reason.

  Then Leslie had explained that after she had found the knife she had given it to the police and very soon after had found a note scribbled in red lipstick on the mirror inside her own home saying that she shouldn't have touched the knife, and now she would be next. That had been enough to make her nervous, but the knife stabbed into a stray dog and then into her bag was enough to make Zave react. He grabbed her, the dog, and the bag, and dragged them all out of the theater himself, something that had surprised her into screaming when she hadn't known who was behind her. The blood on the floor had belonged to the poor dead dog and not Leslie at all.

  As near as the police could figure, Sara had left the knife for Chandler to find. She had known him well enough after twenty some odd years to know that even though his fingerprints would then be on it, he would still give the knife to the police. However, no one knew for sure why Sara had been so furious about Leslie's accidental discovery. Probably because it had ruined another one of her plans.

  The papers and the TV, both, were wild about the story, which had everything they liked to see in a real image maker—insanity, wealth, famous people, gorgeous men and beautiful women, murder and sex. It was everywhere.

  Pirates probably would have been a success one way or the other, but the press catapulted it into astronomical fame. If Chandler hadn't already been a millionaire and a theater God, he would have been after Pirates hit the stage. But he didn't seem to be enjoying the fruits of his labor, or his newfound innocence in the court of public opinion. He never left his estate, as far as anyone had seen.

  Fielding ended up being in the hospital for nearly three weeks. Her frequent emotional breakdowns didn't help her progress, but as soon as all the human growth hormones were finally out of her body, she was able to bounce back like a normal human being instead of the weepy, hysterical one that pregnancy had made her.

  She was still very upset that she had lost her baby and Mac in the same day, but she was making it through. She had gone from missing Chandler desperately to coming very close to hating him for his abandonment when she could have used his presence so frantically. The void he left was filled, as well as possible, by Josh and Janine, who were worth their weight in gold in the cheering-up department.

  Three weeks after the play opened, she had gone to see it. It was so impossible to get into, that she'd had to resort to asking Armand to get her tickets. She had been shocked and delighted to see how well Leslie stepped into the role of Yvonna. There was none of her shy demeanor or pastel prettiness in the sultry whorehouse owner that Leslie became on the stage. Fielding was thrilled. Leslie's career could do nothing but skyrocket from this point on. And Profundo was beautiful, just as Armand had always dreamed.

  During the curtain call, Leslie stopped and pointed to Fielding. "Earlier tonight, our choreographer, Armand Mancier, pointed out to me that we have a very special guest with us tonight. We loved her here at Pirates, and we were very sorry that she ended up having to leave us, and even more sorry that it was in an ambulance. But now she's out of the hospital."

  Leslie's bottom lip trembled slightly. "If not for a truly tragic mishap, she would have been another star up here with us tonight, so I'm going to need her to come up here. Come up here, please," she added, looking right at Fielding and beckoning to her. Bob and Kyle leapt off the stage and helped her up. "Here she is, ladies and gentleman, a great dancer and a better human being. Fielding French."

  This pronouncement was greeted with thunderous applause. Everyone knew Fielding's name from the paper by now. She was a kind of celebrity. Something she had accomplishe
d by way of allowing herself to get stabbed. Some career.

  She stayed with them during the curtain call, but refused their later request that she rejoin the cast. There was no way she was going back to a musical that would forever remind her of Chandler. Of how much she had loved him and what a fool she'd been.

  In fact, at that moment, she wasn't sure how long it would be before she would feel like she could dance again. She had no intention of staying at the paper either. Even though it now belonged to her she had no interest in it. She left Dale in charge even though he was a prick. But he was also the best manager Mac's paper had ever seen, and she still felt she owed Mac that much.

  Mac's funeral, of a necessity, had occurred while she was still in the hospital. She had watched it all on her TV screen at the hospital via live video feed. Mac's hundreds of friends and colleagues came to offer their last respects, but there was not a single family member there. She was the only one. Because of that she couldn't completely begrudge him the desire to have her make his restitutions with Chandler.

  Mac's best friend of thirty-seven years, Harry Milton, had come by the hospital after the funeral to pay his respects to the girl that Mac had considered a daughter. He had filled in the last piece of Mac's mystery request. Mac had had a small list of things that bothered him, choices he had made over the course of his life that he regretted. He had been able to make up for all of them except for the debt he owed to Chandler Bentley and his daughter. Over the years, research had shown him enough to believe that Chandler was innocent after all.

  In retrospect, Mac knew he was guilty of a cruel lack of journalistic integrity in regards to the Bentleys and a cruel manipulation in regards to baby Anne, who haunted him as a memory that could be easily superimposed with his memories of his niece at the same age. In the end, he had been too sick, and Bentley had been too angry, for him to address this one last issue. He had tried at several points over the years, but Bentley had remained unmoved.