by Celia Jerome
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
Teaser chapter
YOU KNOW HOW SOMETIMES YOU DREAM ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE,
but you know it’s really you? Like you see a girl going into the wrong door and you shout at her, “No, there are monsters there!” But she doesn’t listen, and you are the one who gets eaten by the monsters. In your dreams, of course. Or else you dream about yourself, but it’s really someone else?
Just so, I dreamed I couldn’t move my legs. I started to panic, but I told my sleeping self that I was simply re-visualizing the paralyzed heroine of my current work in progress, the young girl in a wheelchair, Hetty. She was desperate to get out of whatever room she was in. Even knowing that she was a figment of my imagination, that I’d written her into that small, cold room, I felt trapped. Doubly trapped, because I couldn’t get out of the dream, either. I started to panic.
No, stay calm, I told myself mid-dream. Look around. Find the door.
There was no door. No windows, either, just rough wood plank walls with a bare lightbulb shining overhead. Where the hell was my wheelchair? I pulled myself over to the wall so I could lean against it, panting with the effort. I could feel my sides heaving, dampness on my skin. Why couldn’t I get out?
A noise. The monster was coming!
Wake up, Hetty, I tried to scream. As if I could warn my sleeping self or my character or my alter ego. There are no monsters!
Oh, yes, there are, she/I shrieked back.
“Readers will love the first Willow Tate book, Willow is funny, brave and open to possibilities most people would not have even considered.”
—RT Book Reviews
DAW Books Presents Celia Jerome’s
Willow Tate Novels:
TROLLS IN THE HAMPTONS
NIGHT MARES IN THE HAMPTONS
FIRE WORKS IN THE HAMPTONS
(Available November 2011)
Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Metzger.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1547.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-51454-2
First Printing, May 2011
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA
HECHO EN U.S.A.
S.A.
http://us.penguingroup.com
To Sheila Gilbert, for taking a chance
PROLOGUE
THE GATES BETWEEN THE WORLDS WERE closed forever. Except for the time a desperate troll broke the rules, and when a megalomaniac tried to conquer both universes, and when a half-breed boy was returned to his rightful place.
Who knew what else crossed the lines while the barriers were down. . . .
CHAPTER 1
A WAITER ON HIS WAY HOME FROM WORK flipped his Nissan on Montauk Highway to avoid a deer. Only it wasn’t a deer, he swore after he passed the alcohol test, but a white horse that disappeared in front of his car. Shock, the EMTs said when he went delirious on the way to the hospital, and bad driving.
A bunch of kids at a beach party in Amagansett trampled each other when three white horses trampled their driftwood campfire and vanished into the surf. Mass hysteria, the police said, and bad weed.
Three fishermen driving out to Montauk before dawn saw three white shapes flickering in and out of sight. They pulled over to argue about what they’d seen and beat each other bloody. Beer for breakfast, everyone said, and bad blood.
The trouble did not end there. Tempers flared all over Long Island’s East End and the fabled Hamptons, especially in little Paumanok Harbor, the site of the recent weirdness. Nestled on the northern, bay side of the South Fork, east of East Hampton, Paumanok Harbor was mostly ignored by the press and the police, more so since the recent weirdness.
No one nearby could sleep at night, troubled by horrible, sweat-inducing, throat-closing, ripping-the-sheets dreams, and not just because the economy was in the toilet and summer rentals were way down. The Season had arrived; the rich tourists had not. Which meant restaurants stayed empty, boats stayed at their moorings, farm stands and art galleries stayed full of unsold merchandise, and the locals stayed cranky. Fistfights broke out all over town, plus divorces, lawsuits, road rage, spite fences, and nasty letters to the editor. Meanness clung to the little village like a cold, damp fog.
I couldn’t sleep either, so I was just as bitchy as everyone else in the Harbor. Maybe more so, because I didn’t want to be here in the first place. I should be back in Manhattan, writing and illustrating my latest Willy Tate graphic novel in my cozy East Side apartment. I should be going to free concerts in Central Park, gallery openings, sample sales, and art movies. Instead, I was in a backwoods fishing village that didn’t even have a movie theater of its own. It did have a bowling alley, though. Oh, boy.
Someone had to look after the dogs, my mother said. She rescued abandoned animals from shelters, then kept the ones she couldn’t find homes for. Right now she was in Florida, not trying to reconcile with my father the way I hoped she would after his heart surgery, but crusading against greyhound racing. So I was elected to watch over a pack of ancient mutts no one wanted, the snippy three-legged Pomeranian I’d kind of adopted, and Grandma Eve, whom no one wanted either, but that was another story.
According to my doting mother, I could scribble and doodle just as easily in the country as in the city. Scribble and doodle? I’d been supporting myself for years with my books, and was damned proud of them. I got great reviews, even awards. I had long lines at my book signings, and almost more fan email than I had time to answer. I wanted to tell my mother I was saving kids from video games and illiteracy while she was out saving canines, but I’m a grown woman, just turned thirty-five, and I didn’t need my mother’s respect. Sure.
Besides, I liked dogs better than kids, too, which was half the problem. Mom didn’t want a shelf full of books; she wanted grandkids.
On the o
ther hand, my mother and her nagging were in Florida, and New York City wasn’t at its best in the heat of summer. The air was unbreathable, the park was crowded, the galleries were elitist, the movies pretentious, the sale prices still exorbitant, and everyone who could leave for long weekends did. So I wasn’t altogether unhappy to be spending a month or so minutes from a secluded beach, in a comfortable old house down a private farm road, but don’t tell my mother.
Even the little village had its own kind of charm, once you got over the fact that the librarian knew what book you wanted to read before you asked, the harbormaster predicted the weather better than NOAA, the town clerk was ninety-five percent accurate about the sex of an unborn baby, and the police chief always found your lost keys. Oh, and a bunch of the natives could tell truth from lies, and another bunch spoke to friends around the world, living or dead, without telephones or knowing the language. And my grandmother was a witch.
You get used to it.
You don’t get used to the bad dreams.
My cousin Susan did not seem to be affected. “You’re not grouchy because you’re sleep deprived,” she announced over lunch of lobster-corn salad. “You’re sex deprived, that’s what you are. And you look like shit.”
Eight years younger than me, Susan was a pain in the ass as a kid and still had a bratty streak about her that everyone tolerated because she’d had cancer. She also had a promiscuous streak that her parents could not tolerate, so she spent a lot of time at my house. Not that she spent the time with me. She brought home a steady stream of surfer dudes and haul-seiners and laid-off stockbrokers when she got off work as the chef at Uncle Bernie’s restaurant. I put up with it because she was my cousin. And her cooking was spectacular.
“I’ve been having nightmares, that’s all. Some of us can go a month without a man, you know.” That’s how long it had been, not that it was any of Susan’s business. “You ought to try it.”
“Why? I’m having a hell of a lot more fun than you are.”
Judging from her radiant good looks, with a hint of freckles across her nose and not a shadow under her eyes, I couldn’t disagree. I kept my mouth shut, except for another mouthful of the herb-seasoned salad.
Susan licked mayonnaise off her fingers and grinned. That was another thing about Susan: she never got fat, no matter what she ate. Sometimes I hated her. “Don’t the bad dreams bother you?”
“After having cancer, surgery, chemo, and radiation, to say nothing of having my hair fall out, you think a little anxiety is going to keep me awake?”
“I guess not.”
“Damn right. Besides, I don’t sleep much at night, you know.”
She got off work about eleven, then went drinking or dancing until the bars closed, and spent the rest of the night with whatever lucky guy she’d found. Sometimes the same one for a whole week. “I know. You make more noise than a rhinoceros stamping out a fire.”
She grinned again. “That’s the loose headboard in the guest room. I’ve been meaning to tighten the screws before the whole thing collapses.”
I didn’t want to think about Susan’s guests or screws or how she was daring me to loosen up. I guess being so close to her own mortality gave her the right to be reckless. Kind of like self-affirmation. I had nothing to prove. And I wasn’t her keeper, no matter how my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother always expected me to look after her just because I was older.
“Have you ever seen the horses?” By now, everyone agreed that three white horses, mares, someone said, had taken to flickering in and out of sight around Paumanok Harbor in the dark. The nightmares started at the same time.
“No, but a lot of the locals have seen them. None of the tourists or summer people do, which is even freakier.”
Not really, if you accept that anyone born in Paumanok Harbor, or related to someone who was, or who’d attended a certain college in England, had eccentricity in their genes. An odd kick to the gallop, in equine terms. Talented, sensitive, gifted with extrasensory perceptions in pseudo-scientific lingo. Nut jobs, in other words. I hadn’t decided what I thought. Or where I fit in.
Susan had it all figured out. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Me?”
“Of course you, dummy. Who else can save the town?”
“Me?” I choked on a piece of celery in the salad. Susan hit me on the back, far harder than needed. “You’ve been watching too much TV,” I told her. “This isn’t save the cheerleader, save the world crap. I’m no hero.”
Susan took away the plates and brought out a piece of the molten chocolate cake that was on every restaurant’s menu these days. And on my hips, thighs, and butt. I groaned.
Susan mistook my whimper. “I didn’t think so either, but you’re all we have.”
“I can’t even sleep at night. What do you think I can do about some phantom horses?”
She shrugged. “It’s not me. The whole town thinks you’ll fix things. They’re just wishing you’d get on with it already.”
“Get on with what? I don’t know anything about wild horses and mind games.”
“You got rid of the troll, didn’t you? Of course you brought the troll here, so it was only right.”
“I didn’t bring—”
“And you rescued the missing kid and got that bastard Borsack fried before he could hurt anyone else. That was cool. And brave.”
Someone with an eyebrow ring thought I was cool? I sat up straighter. But brave? “I was so scared I almost peed my pants. Just thinking about that night still gives me chills. We could all have been killed then. The storm, the lightning, the guns and bombs.”
I shook off the tremors before Susan ate the whole cake. I waved my fork at her before stabbing a big chunk. “You’re as crazy as the rest of the kooks in this town. I’m not brave, and I can’t do anything about some wild horses except pull the covers over my head.”
“Mm.” She licked her fork. “So why do you think you’re here?”
I looked around my mother’s kitchen, at the old dogs sprawled on the terra cotta tiles to keep cool, at Little Red back to sleep in my lap after I told him chocolate wasn’t good for Pomeranians. Then I looked out the window to my grandmother’s herb farm, where the old bat was watering some new sprouts in pots, likely with eye of newt and dragon’s tears.
“I’m here to take care of the dogs and make sure Grandma Eve doesn’t poison anyone.”
Susan took the last piece of cake before I could get my fork on it. “You’re dumber than I thought if you believe that.”
“Yeah, I know Grandma Eve’s a world renowned herbalist, but the woman still scares me.” A lot of things scared me, to be absolutely truthful. This whole conversation was turning my stomach.
“Not Grandma. The crap about staying here to watch the dogs. Do they look like they’re going to run away or attack the mailman?”
They were snoring, all of them.
Susan went on: “Anyone could come in to feed them and put them out in their pens. I offered. So did my mother, now that school is out. Un-uh. It had to be you. You’re here to save the town and the horses, Willy. And you need to start soon before more trouble breaks out. I hear Mrs. Terwilliger bought herself a pistol.”
“The librarian?”
“Don’t be late bringing those books back.”
“But I don’t—I can’t—”
She got up and took the plate to the sink. “You will. You’re the hero.”
Me?
CHAPTER 2
I AM NOT BRAVE. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT. My mother thinks it’s because my father spoiled me, not making me face my fears. My father thinks I can walk on water; my mother thinks I’ll sink like a lead weight every time. I know I can swim. If the surf isn’t too rough and there are no jellyfish in the water.
Snakes, thunder, dark alleys, driving in snow, Grandma Eve, taxi drivers with eye patches, choking on a chicken bone when no one is around, doing something stupid when everyone is around, loving the wrong man
, not being loved by the right man, plane rides—I could go on and on, with what I’m afraid of. Most times I rise above it. I’ve been on planes, thanks to modern pharmaceuticals. I’m not afraid to leave my house, or my apartment, though I have to admit I’m happiest there. Spiders are okay as long as they are not big and hairy and in my bathtub. Superstitions, black cats, ladders, and stuff don’t bother me at all. Not after spending most summers of my life in Paumanok Harbor. I might not be as comfortable among strangers or crowds as Susan—hell, she’d talk to anyone, then bring him home for drinks or more. I spoke in public at the last graphic books convention, even if I did puke afterward.
I do what I have to do, like it or not. Like now, I had to call Agent Thaddeus Grant of the Department of Unexplained Events, and I really, really did not want to.
Not that I had a choice. Save the town? How about if I spun straw into gold? But let people, my friends and neighbors and relatives, start using each other for target practice?
If they all believed I was what they needed, it sure as hell wasn’t because of my books or because I had some magnificent talent for manipulating the forces of another dimension, the ether world, magic. Call it what you will, I didn’t have it. What I had was connections. Important connections to the Royce-Harmon Institute for Psionic Research, the geniuses who understood paranormal woo-woo. Cripes, they might have invented it, they went so far back in time. DUE was their international investigation and action arm; Grant was one of their agents. Think 007 with ESP.
Grant was also my lover, my almost fiancé. He was a hero and a TD&H stud and a master of so many talents—normal and para—that he kept my head spinning. Even though he swore he wasn’t a telepath, sometimes I thought he was in my mind, he was so good at knowing what I wanted and when. He was gorgeous and rich and smart and kind, and I was afraid to call him.