Joan clutched the bottle in both hands, her eyes dull with resignation. It was then that Jesse noticed there was water on the cabin floor. It began as a trickle that made its way across the braided living room rug and onto the kitchen linoleum, seemingly come out of the wall itself.
But then there were more trickles, rivulets that became streams, streams that became rivers. They joined together, and the floor was covered in an inch of water, two inches, rising to lap about Joan’s ankles.
Gary watched, his face expressionless. He walked to the front door and paused there. The water didn’t so much as dampen his feet, even as it rose higher and higher, to Joan’s knees, her hips, her waist, tugged at her body with increasing force.
The river. The river had come into the cabin, and it was pulling Joan under. She held the bottle above the flood, then above her head, as if it were something precious she couldn’t let go even to save her life. Her eyes were empty.
As if she were floating somewhere separate and apart, Jesse saw herself frozen against the window, unable to move. Shock was some great invisible force pressing her shoulders, locking her throat.
“Mom,” she croaked.
But Joan didn’t hear. She didn’t even struggle as the water reached her neck and then filled her mouth and covered her head. Her hair stirred at the eddying surface of the flood, and then that too was gone. The bottle, finally released, floated and bobbed in circles.
And Gary watched. With no remorse he saw her drown and did nothing.
A scream tore from Jesse’s throat.
Immediately the river vanished, the water and cabin and resort along with it. Between one moment and the next, Jesse found herself in the cemetery. It was dark, terrifying, sinister with its gravestones and solemn attendants. The aspens leaned over Joan’s grave, rustling leaves like bones rattling, whispering words no one dared say aloud.
Everyone knew Joan Copeland was a drunk. She’d gone down to the river and had a few too many, and she’d fallen in. Gary had arrived too late to save her.
Gary.
He looked at Jesse, smiling, wearing false sadness like a mask. False, fake, evil. Now, standing beside the minister, dry-eyed and numb, she felt the heat building up inside her. Heat, crackling and snapping like leaping flames along her nerves, searing her from within.
Flames. Fire. Panic and fear and rage. She felt herself begin to cough as black plumes of smoke wreathed around her, invisible fingers squeezing her lungs and robbing her of oxygen. No one saw her struggling to suck in air, no one came to help her.
But Gary kept watching. Watching and smiling, satisfaction in his eyes.
Hate. Hate moved Jesse then, propelled her across the burning grass though her feet singed and cracked with every flying step.
He would pay. By God, he would pay for what he’d done. He’d killed her. He’d killed her and the child as well, poor innocent, who might have been saved.…
She screamed. The words came out of her mouth as if another moved her lips. Her fingers curled to rake and tear at that loathed face. A face that changed. Blond hair became dark, and brown eyes blue. Not Gary. Jesse stopped her headlong rush an instant before she struck him.
Sorrow. Sorrow in those eyes now, in an achingly handsome countenance she knew as she knew her own soul. He spoke her name without sound. He offered his hand, and she reached out to take it. Her own hand burst into flame, grew charred and black and began to crumble.
Her body was collapsing, disintegrating, and even her will couldn’t keep her from falling into the fearful void. He left her, as he always did. She loved him, she hated him; with her last breath she shrieked his name.
“David!”
CHAPTER TWO
David!”
The cry echoed in his mind as he crossed through the portals between life and death and found himself in the World again. Even before he became aware of the faint shape of his own body, of the unfamiliar room around him, he knew he was Back.
Back from the limbo where he’d heard that desperate appeal. The limbo that had been his home for uncounted years, where he knew the passage of time only from those souls who journeyed through his private perdition on their way to the next existence.
He knew it wasn’t 1815, nor even the century into which he’d been born. He’d known it before his own name had summoned him to the earthly plane. But not one of his temporary visitors had made him feel how long he’d been gone, or how much he’d lost.
She did. She no longer cried out but tossed on her narrow bed, throwing the sheets from her body. Her back was turned to him, sweetly curved, the bedclothes just brushing the swell of her hips. In the morning light he could see that her hair was nearly straight, falling a few inches below her shoulders, cut simply and left uncovered to tangle about her head as she slept. It was golden in color; guinea-gold, begging a man to touch the thick strands.
Her body, petite and compact, was clothed in something like a man’s nightshirt. Fine-boned hands clutched at her pillow as if it were a lifeline.
He moved closer to the bed. He thought he could feel his booted feet connect with the paneled wooden floor, but it might have been imagination; imagination and longing for what he’d once taken for granted. The ordinary pleasure of walking on solid earth.
Or the pleasure of seeing a woman. After so long in limbo, he would have found her lovely had she been a crone of ninety years.
Her body was no crone’s. She pushed the sheets down around her legs and kicked them loose. Her calves were bare. Bare and taut with the smooth muscle of one who did much walking. Her feet were small and strong, each toe flawless. David stared at her feet, reveling in the sensuous perfection of them. No mud, no blood, no cracked boots full of holes. Only feminine softness.
He might have thought he’d found his way to heaven at last. But heaven was not for David Ventris. Never for him.
Unless …
The key to his salvation rolled over with a sigh, her arm flung above her head on the pillow, and he saw her face.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. If she’d looked like Sophie it would have been difficult. But this woman was nothing like. Her face held none of Sophie’s delicate, petulant prettiness. It was stubborn and firm jawed, handsome rather than beautiful in its unadorned simplicity. Yet in this body was the soul of the woman he’d betrayed.
The woman to whom he must atone. The woman who must grant him forgiveness and set him free.
David caught his breath—if breath it was. To win his freedom he’d do anything.
But it all rested on her.
He knelt beside the bed. Her lips were slightly parted, the lower fuller than the upper, revealing the hint of straight white teeth. Her skin had seen much of the sun, but it was youthful and smooth, or so he thought it would be should he dare to touch it.
Lashes darker than her hair shadowed her cheek. He began to wonder about the color of her eyes. Would they be brown as Sophie’s, or blue as his own?
If she opened those eyes, would she see him?
He rocked back, wondering if he’d imagined the click of his boot heel on the floor. His hands, resting on the bed for support, seemed to feel the coolness of cloth where the woman’s body hadn’t warmed it.
He touched his chest. It felt solid. He could put his finger through the hole where the musket ball had pierced his jacket, though the wound was long since gone. He could see his fingers brush the braid at his sleeve, the saber at his hip.
Air seemed to enter his lungs. He heard the beat of his own heart. With every passing moment it seemed that his form grew more solid, more fully in this plane.
But he could still sense the cord that bound him to limbo, a chain he could not break. A chain he himself had forged. It tugged at him, unrelenting. Reminding him what he had to lose.
They had told him little and promised him nothing, his silent and invisible wardens. They didn’t speak in words at all, but he understood the conditions that defined his presence here. He’d waited for this
call, and they’d let him come. But they wouldn’t help him. And if he failed …
I cannot fail, he told the woman. I won’t go back. She didn’t wake. He tried to see Sophie in her, tried to remember when they’d been happy. She’d loved him once. And she’d died hating him.
He laughed, though the rough sound didn’t make it past his throat. He was afraid. He knew himself for the coward of cowards, all his so-called heroism in battle a sham.
After countless years she’d called him, opened the door, and let him return. But she was no longer Sophie. The girl he’d known was long dead, six years before he himself had stopped a French ball at Waterloo. There was no certainty that this woman would remember anything of her former life, and a very good probability that her call had been a fluke, the mere shade of a memory that fixed on his name in the midst of a dream.
But if she did remember, she could hate him still. She could refuse to help him. She had the power. There was no running this time.
Except back to the anteroom of hell.
He heard birdsong outside the window, smelled green grass and a hint of pine, felt sunlight on his cheek. The world called to him, summoned him away to experience the joy of life again.
He had almost forgotten what joy was. Those last few years on the Peninsula had taught him to think of the world as sere brown hills, ceaseless dust, the stink of unwashed bodies and blood. In the very struggle for survival, he’d put the past away where it couldn’t touch him, even as he sought the oblivion of death.
But death didn’t bring peace. He had been trapped in a prison worse than any torment an earthly enemy could devise.
Endless nothingness. Endless loneliness, with only the memory of Sophie’s fate to haunt him. Waiting for another chance at life that had finally been offered.
But without this woman’s forgiveness there would be no life.
She murmured something in her sleep, some faint protest, and without thinking he reached for her. His fingers found her lips and connected with warmth and softness.
He snatched his hand away when he realized what he had done. He had touched her. He had felt her.
And then she opened her eyes.
They were hazel—browns and grays and greens all intermingled, shot with gold light that matched her hair. They didn’t see him, didn’t focus or throw off the tranquil void of sleep.
He looked for Sophie in those lovely eyes, for her sadness and desperation and that terrible need for him. A need he had not been able to fulfill.
I can’t give you what you want, he told her silently. But you can release us both.
Her eyes were closed again, her breathing deep and regular. David rose and went to the window, pushing aside the thin curtains. Mountains rose up on every side of this narrow valley, mantled in green and brown, brilliant with color and energy. The scent and sound and feel of life was in his nostrils and ears and mouth and eyes.
God. He could get drunk on the world and forget everything else, no matter how short his stay here.
The irony left him breathless, and he laughed once more. He was not truly alive, had no right to walk this earth except by dispensation. The chain would always pull him back.
He’d thought to evade his guilt in death. Now he knew there was no escape. Not as long as Sophie held him.
“Sophie,” he said, and went to stand over her again. She didn’t hear him, didn’t wake.
But he felt a more potent stirring of his newly recovered senses, the leap of desire in his veins. More bitter irony. Sophie or not, she moved him. He could not be immune to the sweet feminine shape of her body, the warmth that radiated from her like the essence of life itself. She was water to a man dying of thirst.
Thirst he could not assuage until he was allowed to pass on and live again. He could not, would not feel more than he must to achieve his goal. Everything he did must be to that one purpose.
He had learned discipline in the war. He knew how to lead men on the battlefield: how to inspire them, to lend them courage even when he was drowning in his own terror; how to treat their wounds, how to help them die.
This slip of a woman was a more daunting opponent than any he’d faced on the battlefields of the Peninsula.
Recklessly he sat down on the edge of the bed, feeling it give under his weight. “Well, my lady?” he whispered, his voice hoarse with long disuse. “We gamble for high stakes, you and I, and I don’t know all the rules of the game.” She’d called him; he knew she’d be able to see him, that he could speak to her and be heard. But how would she react to the presence of a ghost?
He skimmed his hand a hairsbreadth above her hip. “Who are you?” he asked. “Will you remember?”
But he willed her not to. Not until he found the way to make her believe in him, accept him, trust him as a benevolent visitor. A spirit, perhaps, come to help her in her earthly tribulations. He would learn what she most wanted to believe and use it to his advantage.
And then, when the time was right, he would tell her the truth—just enough to fulfill the conditions of his unearthly bargain. Enough to get what he wanted.
He smiled bitterly. “I give you fair warning, my lady,” he said. “I haven’t changed. I never change.”
He hadn’t meant her to hear him, but she did. And this time when she opened her eyes they centered directly on him.
He acted on instinct, willing himself to insubstantiality. He snapped to his feet and retreated across the room.
The woman blinked and sat up, body rigid with shock. Her gaze swept back and forth across the place where he stood, searching for what she could no longer see.
“Oh my God,” she said. She put shaking hands to her mouth, then to her cheeks. She squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her temples fiercely.
“Dreams,” she muttered. “That’s all it is.” But her skin was very pale, and her fingers trembled as she fumbled for a smooth, narrow object on the table beside her bed.
David knew she’d seen him. She’d seen him and was afraid, as anyone would be afraid to find a ghost at her bedside.
Belatedly he moved toward her, hoping to ease her fear, but his second thoughts were overdue. Suddenly he felt his energy, his tentative life drain from him, sucked back into the chain that bound him to his immortal prison.
There was no way to fight it. He hadn’t the strength, not yet. He’d bent the laws that governed life and death, and there was a price for that liberty.
But even as he lost his grasp on the earthly plane he knew it was but a temporary defeat. He would return.
The last he saw of the woman was her wild eyes as she spoke urgently into the object she held in her hand, begging for help. As she’d unwittingly called him with the power of his name.
He carried the image of her troubled face into limbo, knowing it would not leave him.
Until she set them both free.
“It can’t wait, Al. I need your help. Tonight.”
Jesse gripped the receiver in a white-knuckled fist, staring at the wall where she’d seen him.
Him. There was no one, nothing there now but a zebra-stripe pattern of sunlight cast by the window blinds, and still her heart pounded as though she’d been running a marathon straight up a mountain.
“What happened?”
Al’s voice was calm and blessedly sane, but it didn’t quiet the shaking that ran in spasms through her body. “Nightmares,” she said, forcing her gaze to the comforting solidity of her unremarkable table lamp.
“About Gary?”
“Yes.” That was the truth. She had dreamed of Gary, but she wasn’t about to mention the incongruous end of the dream—the bizarre hallucination that had brought her up out of sleep convinced someone had been standing beside her bed. Someone almost translucent, and yet utterly real. A vision of perfection who spoke to her in a rich, musical voice. Not Gary, but a man so authentic, so exquisitely detailed that for a moment she had believed he existed.
David. That was the name she’d called in her sleep. His
name. She felt as if she’d spoken it a thousand times, and she had never seen the man before in her life.
The man for whom her body, her heart, her entire soul yearned. Whose touch still burned her skin. Who left her panting with need, wanting what she’d never wanted, defenseless and afraid.
She had called that name expecting an answer. She sat on the edge of her bed, wide awake and longing for a dream, certain that she had missed some vital message, that she’d given up a part of herself when he’d vanished into thin air before her deluded eyes.
She knew who to blame for the delusion. She’d never hallucinated like this, not even during her worst periods in the hospital.
Gary was the source of the maelstrom that drove her to the edge of the abyss, the catalyst that pushed her mind to create imaginary apparitions who answered her frantic, unconscious cries for help. This was her warning, and she wouldn’t ignore it.
“Jesse?” Al’s voice rumbled in the earphone.
“You told me to sleep on it, and I have. Will you help me?”
Al’s hesitation was weighted with reluctance. “I don’t know if I’m … the right one for this job, Jesse. Maybe you should—”
“Go somewhere else? The next nearest shrink is probably in Redding—and I trust you, Al.” She spoke with every ounce of persuasion she could muster. “I want to try the hypnosis, as we discussed. I have to do this.”
If she hadn’t known Al Aguilar better, she’d have sworn he was uneasy. True, he’d left his career as a therapist, but Jesse had absolute faith in his competence. His composure wouldn’t be shaken by anything she could throw at him. He wouldn’t call her crazy.
But it was hard, so hard to ask for help. It was only possible because her need for Al didn’t go beyond this, wouldn’t consume her or make her weak and vulnerable. Not like the way she’d felt when she’d called out to the man of her dreams.
Impossible. Dangerous. Crazy.
“What do you know about hypnotherapy?” Al asked after a pause. “It’s no magic cure, Jesse. It’s only a deep form of relaxation. Guided imagery. There are no guarantees that—”
Body and Soul Page 3