by Rebecca York
"I'll bet. I was thinking that this dialogue would be perfect for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest."
She laughed, and he liked the sound.
They shared a grin, probably the first relaxed moments of their short relationship. He wanted to slide toward her, reach for her hand. Trust her. Although he stayed where he was, he asked the question that had been hovering in his mind since their first meeting.
"When I came to your house, and you opened the door, I felt like time stopped. Like we were caught together in some kind of time bubble. Did you experience that?"
"Yes," she whispered. "That's part of what scares me."
"Yeah." Her shaky voice and her admission made it possible for him to add, "It happened again later that day. When I was looking for Lily. I found her and a friend hiding inside a little playhouse. A mad dog was trying to get at them."
"The dog!"
He felt a shiver travel up his spine. "What do you know about it?"
She shook her head. "Yesterday, I kept hearing a dog barking. I felt like something bad had happened. But I couldn't see anything. And then suddenly it stopped."
"You heard it? It was miles from your house."
She could only stare at him, shrug. "Maybe it was some other dog."
"Sure."
"Jack—don't make it sound like I did something wrong. I don't even know what happened. Please tell me."
He sighed, watched her closely. "The dog turned on me, and I thought it was going to snap me in half."
Her exclamation sounded genuine. Like she truly was finding out about this for the first time. Still, he kept his gaze fixed on her as he added, "Then that time thing happened again. The extra seconds let me get my gun into position and fire."
She opened her mouth, and to his surprise, the first thing she said was "You must have hated shooting a dog."
His chest went tight. "Yeah."
"I guess you had to do it. Thank God you're all right. And Lily."
He nodded, caught up in remembered emotions. He jerked himself back with another question. "With you—was the time-stopping experience only once, when I came to the door?"
"Yes."
"So for you it was just when we met. And for me it happened again—when I was in danger."
She had clasped her hands together in her lap, and he saw that her fingers were locked so tightly that they looked bloodless. "What does that mean?"
He shrugged. "My best guess, the first time—somebody wanted to make sure we noticed each other. Then they wanted to make sure I didn't buy the farm."
"Somebody? Who would have the power to do that?"
"Someone with psychic powers."
She gave a nervous laugh. "I thought cops were too down-to-earth to worry about stuff like that. Just the facts, ma'am."
He shrugged. "I used to be like that—until I found out that one of my best friends is a—" He stopped abruptly.
"A what?"
"It's better if I don't go around discussing his situation. He's got enough problems without my blabbing his secret. The important point is that he's made me look at the world a little differently."
"Okay," she agreed—too quickly—and he knew she wanted to ask about Ross. But she didn't, which immediately boosted her in his estimation. He relaxed his guard a little, thinking that there wasn't anything wrong with some personal questions. Once the idea had taken hold, he heard himself asking, "So if this is a dream—is that what you wore to bed?"
"No. A tee shirt. Don't tell me you went to bed dressed like Mark Antony."
"Hardly."
"Then what?"
Trapped by his own line of questioning, he answered, "Briefs."
He had made a mistake, getting personal. His body was starting to respond, and he knew the conversation could get out of hand very quickly. Yet he was unable to resist another intimate query. "Are you in a relationship?"
"No."
While he was still wallowing in a wave of relief, she said, "I was managing my life just fine—until you knocked on my door. I haven't gotten in any trouble with the law. I support myself. I keep in shape. I'm a volunteer art teacher at the local elementary school."
There was no reason he needed to know any of that. But he was glad to hear those facts and he wanted more.
Inwardly, he cursed himself. He should be sticking to business. Deliberately making his voice hard, he asked, "Did you have something to do with Heather's disappearance?"
Her reaction was swift and angry. "How dare you! I reported her missing."
"That's the way it works sometimes. The person responsible calls the police—to deflect suspicion."
"Thanks for the heads up," she answered, her voice thick with sarcasm.
Before she could marshal more defenses, he shot her another question. "Why were you so on edge when I found that porn material in her dresser? Are the two of you into something together?"
"Of course not!" Anger flashed in her voice—and in her eyes.
"So you're not into whips and chains when you make love," he pressed.
"I'm not like my father, if that's what you're getting at. I think you have a pretty good idea of what I like when I'm with a man."
His throat constricted, but he stood his ground. Still watching her closely, he switched subjects quickly. "I talked to Swinton yesterday. He told me you talked to Heather about him—about stuff that was none of your business."
"Like her abortion?"
"He wasn't specific."
He had more questions he wanted to ask her, but she cut him off with a brusque "I've had enough of your interrogation."
As she spoke, she got up and walked away, out of the lounge and into the corridor of columns.
"Wait," he called out, then started after her. But when she was about thirty feet away, she vanished into thin air. And he was left standing in an empty fantasy landscape.
CHAPTER EIGHT
« ^ »
THE SCENE WAVERED. He wasn't sure why he tried to hang on to it, his hands clawing at empty air. But the effort was wasted.
Less than a minute after Kathryn disappeared, Jack was back in his bed, the sheets twisted around his sweat-drenched flesh. His body felt strangely heavy. His mind felt like it might fly right out of his skull.
He glanced at the glowing numbers on the clock radio. It was four in the morning. He knew he wasn't going back to sleep anytime soon.
Heaving himself out of bed, he stood for a moment in the briefs he'd told Kathryn he was wearing, the night air cooling his damp skin. Once he'd slept in the buff, but now that the kids might come bursting into his room at all hours of the night, he'd opted to cover up just a bit.
He reached for his robe, then stopped, remembering something he'd deliberately done in the dream. In the bathroom, he turned on the light and held up his left arm. Below his elbow was a small red line. He knew for damn sure it hadn't been there when he'd gone to bed. It was the mark he'd scratched with the rock—unless he'd somehow scraped himself on the sheets.
He stared at the injured skin, feeling a prickle at the back of his neck.
A dream. But not a dream!
After pulling on his robe, he padded down the hall toward his home office. Before he got there, he stopped outside Craig's room, pushed open the door, and stepped into his son's world.
Stooping, he picked up a tee shirt and a pair of jeans from the carpet and carried them to the hamper in the corner, under a poster of Cal Ripken. There were other posters on the wall. All sports figures. His favorite players from baseball, hockey, football. He was really into sports. Which was great. Better than pot or sex.
Lord, it made his chest tighten to think of those things in the same breath with his son. Yet he knew damn well how young a kid could be and still get into serious trouble.
He crossed to the bed, looking down at the sweet, innocent face, wanting to reach out and make physical contact with his son. Not with a dream, with something real and important.
But he kept his hand at
his side, afraid to wake the boy. Long seconds passed before he turned toward the door again.
The warm, fatherly glow was punctured on the way back across the room when he stepped squarely on a Lego piece and had to bite back a curse. Craig might be growing up, but he still played with some of the toys he'd enjoyed as a little boy.
Hobbling into the hall, Jack leaned against the wall and lifted his foot, inspecting the damage. They were overdue for a chat about room cleaning. He'd let that slide, but he had to focus on discipline—as well as the fun stuff.
Until a few days ago, Craig and Lily had been the center of his emotional life. Suddenly, Kathryn Reynolds was taking up a lot of his attention.
He didn't want to think about her now. Not while he was focused on his son—on his children. But he found it impossible to get the redheaded siren out of his mind. And as he stood in the hall, leaning against the wall, he felt his breathing accelerate once more.
Although he barely knew Kathryn Reynolds, there was no way to kid himself about wanting her. He burned to possess her body. And he would have made love with her a little while ago, if something hadn't stopped him. He didn't even know what that was.
A vibration in the air? A sense of some evil presence? He shook his head. He only knew that he'd stopped on the brink of making a bad mistake.
His hands squeezed into fists. He was treating this like it had been real, when it had only been a dream.
A dream. No, much more than a dream, he admitted. An experience with the sharpness and vivid flavor of the most intense reality.
Deliberately he backed away from the sunlit landscape where he'd almost ravished Kathryn and reached back into his own past—trying to recapture the feel of his late teens and his early twenties. Actually, there had been some pretty memorable sexual escapades. Before Laura, he hadn't been into commitment, just getting what he could. But the drive to score had changed with Laura. He'd still wanted to make love. But he'd kept that desire in check, because he sensed that she could mean so much more to him than all the other women who'd passed through his life.
He'd been horny. But he'd been in control.
Now he felt like he was in a speeding truck, heading toward an inevitable crash. Somehow he had stopped. In the dream. In real life, would he have the same control?
He cursed softly under his breath. He should have fucked her a little while ago. In Never-Never Land where there were no real consequences. Instead, he'd pulled away and made it harder—yeah, harder—to maintain his self-control.
Jack Thornton, you're a jerk, he told himself as he strode down the hall to his office, where he firmly closed the door and booted up his computer.
Grim-faced, he accessed AltaVista, then asked the search engine to find web sites that included Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Some had only essays about the artist. But others belonged to art dealers who offered prints and posters of the artist's work.
Jack paged through them, then came to the scene that was now burned into his memory. The painting was called Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather. With a strange sense of uneasiness, he studied the details: the marble structure, the bush behind the low wall, the sea, the sky. It was exactly what he remembered from the dream—except that the people were missing. He and Kathryn had been the only two figures in the scene. They hadn't been dressed exactly like the models in the picture. The people had been wearing a bit more. Draped, flowing dresses for the women. And a cloak covering the man's tunic.
But when he paged through other works by the artist, he found women in various stages of undress and Roman soldiers wearing outfits similar to what he'd been wearing in the dream.
He brought back Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather and stared at the scene. It was the place, all right. And he knew more about it than what was in the picture. He'd climbed over that low wall, used a stone to scratch his skin, then tossed the stone into the sea and heard it splash far below.
Weird.
So how had he and Kathryn gotten there? Had some outside force directed his dream? The same outside force that had stopped time twice?
He tapped his knuckles against his lips. The speculation was absurd, yet he'd learned not to dismiss facts simply because they were inconvenient. Two very strange things had already happened to him. Then the dream tonight.
He glanced at the clock again. It was four-thirty. An obscene hour for a social call. Or even a business call.
Yet he was pretty sure that Kathryn would be as wide awake as he was now. Edgy. Sexually aroused, the way he was, even though he was still trying to ignore the persistent sensations.
Should he call her? Part of him said no. But another part screamed yes.
His hand rested on the receiver, and he was thinking he should go ahead and pick it up.
He had valid reasons. Professional reasons. She was involved in a case, and he couldn't let go of the feeling that she was holding back information. But he knew damn well that professional concerns weren't motivating him now. So he pulled his hand back, then got up from the chair and headed for the bathroom and a cold shower.
SIMON'S jaw was clenched as he drove toward Sugar-loaf Mountain. When he'd discovered the place, he'd liked the juxtaposition of the name with his private graveyard.
Sugarloaf Mountain. A confection of a private park. And a great place to get rid of the bodies that tended to pile up from his rituals.
The dead woman from tonight's debacle was in the trunk, sealed in plastic, so there was no worry about bodily fluids or trace evidence contaminating the carpeting.
He drove carefully, not taking any chances of some cop finding his latest victim.
Rolling his shoulders, he tried to relax, but it was impossible to let go of the tight feeling of his muscles. He was angry—with himself most of all.
He'd had few setbacks in his life since he'd clawed his way out of his miserable early years.
He had been born in Dundalk, a poor neighborhood at the northeastern edge of Baltimore. He'd lived in a cramped row house with Mom and Dad and eight brothers and sisters. It had been like living in a chicken coop. He hadn't even had his own bed until he'd pulled off his first job and moved out.
While the rest of the family was gathered around the television set, eating their junk food and watching their mindless sitcoms, he'd withdrawn into the books he got from the public library. Mostly he stayed in the reading room. When it was closed, he hung out on the back stoop of his house, unless it was so cold that his hands began to freeze as he turned the pages.
His interests were far-reaching. He read about theater, magic, faraway places, the finer things in life. Books showed him there was another kind of life besides the dysfunctional family into which he'd been born. The dysfunctional family that laughed at his books and teased the shit out of him.
Ignoring them, he sucked up information like an industrial vacuum cleaner. The magic, particularly, drew him. Not parlor tricks. Real magic. Dark rituals that brought power. But he knew there was danger as well as potency in the ceremonies. He understood that the potential for disaster was greater than the potential for gain. He'd seen that cartoon with Mickey Mouse. The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Most people watched it and laughed. He knew it was based on an important truth: a little bit of knowledge was a dangerous thing.
So he studied and bided his time. And the older he got, the more he looked for excuses to stay away from home. He worked in the stockroom and did odd jobs for an antique dealer downtown. And he kept track of the owner's money flow. After a major antique show, he was likely to have a lot of cash around.
Even back then, Simon had been patient. During three years as a trusted employee, he had carefully worked out how to acquire that cash—all the time planning his disappearance into another identity.
It was only a first step, of course. But he'd gotten away with twenty thousand dollars—a small fortune, back then. Seed money he'd used to pull off other jobs, steadily improving his living standard and giving himself the leisure he needed fo
r his most important research—into the rituals of the Golden Dawn.
It was a discipline that fascinated him. A discipline that few had mastered. He'd put in years of hard work and watched his success grow. But everything he'd done so far was only a prelude.
So many magicians down through the ages had tried to enslave a demon and failed. He'd thought he knew why. He'd done everything right. Using the sexual energy of orgasm and releasing the life force of a living sacrifice weren't some half-baked ideas he'd come up with on his own. He'd studied the nineteenth-century rituals. And the ancient texts before them. He'd known what he was doing. But he'd thought that following everything to the letter would neutralize the demon's defenses.
He'd been overconfident, and he'd been wrong.
At the turnoff for the park, he switched off his headlights, then stopped to open the chain. After fastening it again, he drove toward the East View parking lot.
When he reached the far end of the lot, he cut the engine and sat in the darkness, fighting a tinge of uneasiness.
His eyes probed the shadows under the trees, and he wondered what he was looking for. Nothing! He was just overwrought from the fiasco of the ceremony.
After releasing the trunk latch, he climbed out of the car. It was no problem to heave the body over his shoulder and pick up the shovel he'd brought along.
The ground here was broken by rock outcroppings. But there were open places where the soil was easy to turn. He found one and set down his burden.
A few minutes after he started to dig, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stir, and he looked up sharply, his eyes and ears probing the darkness once more.
He saw nothing. Heard nothing. Yet his heart was pounding in his chest.
To his right, the moonlight shimmered on—
On nothing but a place where the tree branches were thick, he decided as he took a step closer.
Still, he couldn't completely let go of his fear.
Could the demon be here?
Impossible, he told himself. The demon couldn't live in the world of men. Not yet. Not until the two of them had established the link of master and slave. And it couldn't come to him of its own will. It had to wait until he was focused on it.