Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition)

by Gail Roughton

  “Miss Serena—”

  “It’ll be all right,” she assured them. “I’ll be back. Jerry, you watch them.”

  She went into Sadie’s room for a shawl. When she returned to the bloody death scene, Paul held out a piece of paper. A check signed by P. J. Devlin representing most of the money held jointly by the brothers. The signature was neither his nor Joshua’s, but a manufactured uniform script they’d practiced for just such purpose.

  “Take it.”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I said take it. Joshua’d want you taken care of.”

  “What do you care? You’d love to kill me yourself, right this minute.”

  “Yes. I would. Now take this.”

  “How are we going to explain all this?” She waved her hand around the room at the pooling blood.

  “We aren’t. You are. And I don’t give a damn how you do it.”

  She held out her hand and took the check. Paul moved over to Sadie and picked her up. Even in his arms, she swayed. Her eyes stared into the dark invading her brain. Paul had never tried to carry another living person with him when he cast out and sure as hell wasn’t trying it with her. He walked swiftly down the hall, headed for the stables. The echoes of his boot heels floated back to Serena.

  She walked over to the bureau and picked up the picture of Joshua and his brother and sister-in-law. She’d never seen another one. This was all she had. She laid it on Joshua’s desk while she methodically tore P. J. Devlin’s check into very small pieces. She threw them into the wastebasket where Joshua consigned the first drafts of his sermons. Paul wouldn’t notice that it hadn’t cleared the bank for several months. When it did, he’d merely shrug.

  Then she picked the picture up again and walked down the hall to the children. Somehow she had to see them taken care of but she dared not do it herself. She didn’t think David’s cousin would ever breathe a word about her to anybody but she couldn’t take the chance.

  She knew, she’d known for several days, a small part of Joshua Devlin grew inside her. She wouldn’t risk losing it. She’d make sure the children were placed elsewhere and then she’d disappear into the streets of Macon.

  How she’d live, she didn’t know. But she knew she’d live as Serena Devlin because Joshua’s child was going to carry his name.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Paul pulled the wagon up in front of Tamara’s cottage at three o’clock in the morning. Light moved in the little barn at the rear of the yard.

  He got down and decided he could leave Sadie for a few minutes. Her eyes still stared at nothing as she rocked herself back and forth. He found Tamara struggling to harness her team to her own wagon. She turned at his step. The malignant invader in her body had been working overtime. A death’s head stared at him from gray-tinged skin.

  “Son!”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I woke up and I knowed. I’s got to get to Sadie.”

  “I brought her to you. She’s in the wagon.”

  “Joshua—”

  “C’mon.” He felt the radial bone through its covering of skin and sinew when he took her arm. There was nothing else left. He didn’t know how she still had strength to stand. He picked her up. She didn’t weigh as much as a child.

  “I ken walk!”

  “Barely. Now hush.” He took her to the wagon where Sadie still rocked on the seat, and set her on her feet.

  “Sadie?”

  “She doesn’t hear you.”

  “Joshua?” Tamara asked again.

  Paul stepped up into the wagon. He gathered Sadie into his arms and leaped down.

  “Let me get you both inside. Then I’ll bury him.”

  * * *

  Paul stood back in the woods by the carved bench where Tamara, so long ago, had read his destiny in his palm. He looked at the neatly covered mound. His brother rested under the dark and healing earth. He wanted to pray but no words came. Tomorrow night maybe. For now, it was done. Just as he’d never remembered a word of Chloe’s funeral service, he’d never remember actually digging Joshua’s grave, never recall the sound of the shovel sliding through the moist earth.

  He needed to check on the only two living people on earth who mattered to him. He cast back out into the dark.

  “Sit down, son. Have some hot tea for you in jest a minute.”

  “Don’t want it,” he said. He walked over to Sadie, seated in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace. It rocked with the same rhythm Sadie’d mastered since viewing Joshua’s body. He squatted in front of her and caught the arms of the chair in his hands, stopping the motion.

  “Mama?” he asked again, expecting no reply.

  Her eyes broke the fixed stare and turned to him. Her face split in a sudden smile.

  “Now whut’s dis? An’ who you be, suh? You puts me in mind of my oldest boy! He a doctor, you know, and he an’ dat pretty Chloe of his, dey fixin’ to have a baby! I jest loves babies! Been a long time since my youngest boy been a baby. He workin’ hard, my youngest boy, studyin’ all dem books wid his brother and he goan go to school up north pretty soon. Goan come back and I be done raised two doctors. Ain’t dat somethin’?”

  Sadie smiled again. As suddenly as the blackness lifted, it descended. Her face went blank. Her eyes resumed their fixed stare at nothing. Her body tried to resume its sway. Paul turned loose of the rocking chair’s arms and let the rhythm take over.

  He lowered his head. Tears dropped onto his pants leg, leaving small, wet circles. Tamara watched as the circle was joined by another, and another. She moved behind him and put her hand on his shoulder.

  “Son. Doan grieve for yo’ mama. She happy again. She got both her boys back.”

  Paul choked on the muffled sobs caught in his throat. He turned and threw his arms around Tamara’s legs, holding onto her through the folds of her long skirt.

  She dropped to the floor beside him and held him in her skeletal arms. She let him cry out the first ripping tears of grief, and when Paul felt his strength begin to drain with the first hint of the sun’s rays, she settled him in her root-cellar and soothed him as his own private darkness fell, just as she’d soothed him in the first dawns of his second life. She knew he felt neither heat nor cold but she covered him carefully nonetheless and went back to her sister.

  * * *

  Paul woke that sunset with the feeling something was wrong. Then he laughed harshly. His wife and infant son lay in a burial plot in Rose Arbor Cemetery and he’d never lie next to them. His father was dead of a heart condition precipitated by the sight of Isaiah Gorley’s bloody head coming through the window. His brother lay in an unmarked grave with his face blown off because he’d dared love a woman he’d have never met if Paul hadn’t insisted on turning him into a white man in a black man’s body. The woman he called Mama sat in a rocking chair alternating between spells of complete blankness and total retreats into the past. She didn’t even recognize him. And Tamara, the healer who dispensed comfort with her very touch, was dying quickly, inch by inch, before his helpless eyes.

  Wrong? Now what could be wrong?

  He materialized in front of the fireplace.

  “Tamara, how’s Mama doing?”

  He broke off abruptly, staring at the two figures lying side by side on the bed. He’d never remember moving, but he found himself holding first Tamara’s wrist and then Sadie’s, searching for the pulse. Nothing. Either of them. He dropped Sadie’s hand and backed away, his mind screaming denial.

  When he had some semblance of control again, he looked around the room. A white piece of paper lay on the table, held down at the corner by Tamara’s prized porcelain teapot, the one that sat on the mantle and was never used.

  He picked it up. Tamara’s handwriting had never been an example of copperplate penmanship but it had been firm. Clear and strong, it was an extension of her extraordinary personality. He’d seen it many times on the cards holding her scrawled notes and recipes for
herbal remedies.

  This handwriting was spidery, tentative, weak. Dying. He didn’t read the words, he heard them. He’d never be sure but it seemed she spoke to him.

  Son, I knows dis goan lie heavy on yo’ heart and I wish dere was some way you didn’t have to be de one to finds us. But dere ain’t no other way. I doan got long, Paul, and I knows it. I ken feel it. My life’s windin’ down, de way all life winds down, and dere ain’t but a few hours left. An’ I can’t leave my sister, son. Ain’t nobody to take care of her and you jest can’t tend to her. She wouldn’t want dat burden on you. So’s I’s fixed her a pot of tea. Special tea. Right now, she think she visitin’ me and she goan go home to you and Chloe and Joshua and yo’ Daddy. She happy, son, and it be time. Time for both of us to go home. Know dat both of us loves you. An’ know dis, too. I never tole you dis, ‘cause I can’t ‘splain exactly how it goan happen, but somewhere, sometime, you goan find dat a part of us is still alive. All of us. Me and yo’ Mama an’ yo’ brother an’ yo’ Daddy. Wait for us, son. We find you.

  Paul folded the paper carefully and stuck it in his shirt pocket. He opened Tamara’s cupboard doors and pulled out two quilts. He wrapped his last two links to human love carefully. Then his own merciful shroud of fog came over him again while he consigned the two bodies to the waiting earth beside Joshua’s grave.

  When memory returned, he stood in the middle of the big room of the cottage. Modern medicine would diagnose him as very close to a complete psychotic break. He wanted to cast himself out into the dark and materialize in the city streets of Macon. He wanted to hunt. He wanted to stalk and capture, bite and tear. And drink. And drink. And drink. But not among the shrouded trees of the thick woods. And not animals.

  He wanted new territory, city territory, human prey. He wanted somebody else, anybody else, everybody else, to hurt as badly as he hurt.

  He unleashed his fury in the confines of the cottage. He picked up every piece of furniture and smashed it against the walls. He grabbed every dish, every knickknack, every picture on the wall, and smashed them too, laughing as they shattered.

  And when nothing remained but wreckage, he stood and surveyed his handiwork. He grabbed the kerosene lamps, which he’d saved for last, and jerked off the glass globes. He upended them and sent the kerosene streaming across the debris.

  He went outside and struck a match, tossing it back in through the door. The cottage exploded like a tinderbox. The bonfire blazed high into the night sky.

  It wasn’t enough. He had to hunt.

  He cast himself out, turning toward town. He materialized in an alley off Cotton Avenue and peered out into the streets. Good prey here. He could smell it. He started out and stopped as the hand touched his shoulder.

  He swirled around. The night was empty but the voice was clear.

  “You is God’s own dark angel, son! You a child of de light dat walks now in de darkness an’ doan you never forget it!”

  He stood frozen.

  “Tamara?”

  “God’s dark angel, boy!”

  The voiced floated back to him.

  He never hunted again. Not in the streets, not in the woods. In the coming years blood never touched his lips. Thus began his third cycle of life, which would last until the night he’d wake to a young woman asking, “Dr. Devlin, I presume?”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “And they found you,” Ria said softly. “I found you. I’m the last living link. To all of them.”

  “Goddamn,” said Dr. Knight reverently. He stood up abruptly.

  “C’mon, Paul, let’s go.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “My office. Can’t do much tonight but I want some blood. Or whatever it is oils your motor. And some tissue samples.”

  “Daddy, it’s past three o’clock in the morning!” Ria protested.

  “Well, baby, let’s just make him an appointment for ten-thirty Monday morning.”

  “I hate a smartass,” Ria mumbled. “Let me get my pocketbook.”

  “No,” said her father shortly. “You stay here. We got some heavy duty medical consulting to do. We need a lawyer, we’ll call you.”

  “Daddy!”

  “I don’t stick my nose in when you’re seeing a client, do I?”

  “Stay here,” Paul said. He leaned over and kissed her cheek swiftly. “Get some sleep.”

  “Will you come back here? When you get through?”

  “If there’s time.”

  She watched them walk out, two men from different ends of the time spectrum of the Devlin medical tradition.

  Paul turned back and spoke in a sotto whisper over his shoulder.

  “Everett Devlin lives,” he said, gesturing toward her father’s back. “God, he’s Papa made over!”

  * * *

  An uncomfortable silence filled the car as Dr. Knight drove through the sleepy night streets toward the medical complex housing his offices. Paul didn’t know how to break the silence. He was far younger than Charlie Knight in appearance, far older in years. He’d practiced medicine when Charlie wasn’t a glint in anybody’s eye, but this doctor could perform medical miracles Paul Devlin would never have believed possible. And he’d spent the last month and half making love to the man’s daughter. That by itself paralyzed Paul’s vocal chords. He was from a different time.

  Dr. Knight glanced over at Paul as he drove down the streets. He felt the turmoil pouring from his mind. He’d always been able to sense other people’s thoughts and emotions but he’d never thought much about it. It was just part of him, like his dark brown eyes and his black hair, now threaded with silver. And a damn handy thing to have in the medical profession, too.

  He’d been tickled pink, as Ria grew, to find she did the same thing. Now he knew where it came from.

  “What sort of time frame are we looking at here?” Dr. Knight asked suddenly.

  “Sir?”

  Dr. Knight laughed. “Sir. I don’t think that quite works here. I’m Charlie and you’re Paul. The man my daughter’s in love with.”

  “Oh, shit,” Paul muttered under his breath, and Dr. Knight laughed again.

  “You know, Paul, I think I’ve picked up on a few things Ria hasn’t. Not ‘cause she couldn’t. ‘Cause she don’t want to. Joshua ain’t the only Devlin’s made a career out of being his brother’s keeper. Thinking about consequences to other people—that’s shaped your life more than maybe you shoulda let it. Like, for example, if you’d turned that police chief loose on Cain’s circle—”

  “I couldn’t do that, I told you—”

  “They’d have massacred everybody there. And as Sadie so accurately pointed out, neither one of her boys woulda been there. And then there’s my grandmother. Serena. You wanted to kill her the night her husband blew Joshua’s face off so what did you do? You wrote her a check for damn near the whole Devlin bank account. You didn’t know she wouldn’t cash it, and what the hell would you have done over the years if she had?”

  “Joshua would have wanted her taken care of.”

  “Oh, fuck what Joshua would have wanted. Just one time, what does Paul want? Which brings us to my daughter.”

  “I don’t intend for Ria to ever suffer because she met me.”

  “Un-huh. Thought so. So I ask you again, son, what self-imposed time frame did you give yourself to actually enjoy livin’ and lovin’ before you just pick up and boogey on out of her life?”

  “How did you—”

  “Shit! Anybody knows anything about you could figure that out. You just couldn’t resist, but since you don’t think you offer much in the way of normal lifestyle, there’s no way you’re going to make this a long-term thing. And what do you think that’ll do to her? When you don’t come back?”

  “She won’t remember me. Neither will you. Nobody will.”

  Dr. Knight sat thoughtfully under the parking lights.

  “Yeah, I kind of thought there might be some mental domination thing. Goes along with the teleportation an
d all that.”

  “Alright, it’s dishonest and it’s selfish. But I thought maybe, just this once, just for a little while—”

  “Shit, son. It sucks. I mean, it really sucks. You know?”

  “And you’d like for me to just go ahead and disappear now? Is that it?”

  “What I’d have liked, son, is for you and your Chloe to have lived out a long, happy life together with lots of kids and be side by side in Rose Arbor now. But since that just ain’t the way it happened, let me tell you a few things about my daughter. First off, you might make her forget. Make all of us forget. Well, you say you can, so I’m sure you can. But we’re talkin’ about Ria here. Last living link to the Voodoo Queen of Stone Creek Swamp, remember? And she’ll never forget what she feels. And way down deep, she’ll always sense—she’ll always know--that there’s something else, somebody else—somewhere. She won’t know what and she won’t know why but she’ll measure every man she meets for the rest of her life by a man she doesn’t even remember. And that I don’t like. Not worth a damn.”

  “And your point is?”

  “She’s right. This was meant, Paul. She was meant to find you. Even Tamara said so, one of the last things she ever told you, over a hundred years ago. In other words, son, you’re in for the long haul whether you like it or not and you better know it. Because no matter how bad you think you’re fuckin’ her life up by being in it, you’ll destroy her if you leave. And that will really, really piss me off.”

  Paul laughed. He couldn’t help it. He felt curiously lighter somehow, absolved of at least a little bit of blame for being irresponsible enough to start an actual human relationship.

  “And if you’re that pissed, then I better hope you don’t remember where to find me, huh?”

  “Damn straight. So what do you say, son? We have no idea what this thing is, but we won’t ever know if I don’t start tryin’ to check it out. I’m not a research specialist but I have friends I trust who are. And if it can’t be reversed—and we both know reversing something like this ranks somewhere between impossible and needs a miracle, maybe we can mitigate it a little bit so you’re at least a little more normal. We won’t know how much more normal ‘til we start lookin’. Can you trust me and the people I trust enough to try?”