“It’s got to be better than my own feet,” quipped the gray-haired man of the couple. “Haven’t had the energy to look up for the past mile.”
There was a chorus of sympathetic chuckles. The man’s wife leaned against him companionably and grinned. “That’s nothing to what I’ve had to look at. I’ve been behind you all the way!”
Laughter rippled among the hikers once more, but David noted the way Jesse gazed at the couple with a shadow amid the shifting green and gray and brown of her eyes. “I’m not worried about you two,” she said. “You’re going to outlast us all.”
“That’s the nicest piece of malarkey I’ve heard in a long time,” the man said. He glanced at his wife. “Well, Dee? Think we’re too set in our ways to adopt this young lady?”
Jesse made some appropriate jest in reply, but that sadness was still there in her eyes. She moved from one to another of her charges, tightening a pack strap here and sharing a quiet word of encouragement there.
At last the troop began to walk, moving up the hill in a staggered line, Jesse lingering to help the elderly couple. Then they too went ahead, and only David waited behind her.
The set of her shoulders betrayed her. She sensed him, felt his presence as surely as he’d felt her sadness. But she refused to turn, hitching up her pack and marching forward to join the others.
“Sophie,” he whispered.
She came to a sudden halt. The people ahead of her were just rounding the bend and entering the stand of trees; as the last of them slipped out of sight she turned slowly to face him.
He had yet to learn fine control of his spectral body, or how much it could affect the world around him. He had thought to remain invisible to her in this place. But it was as if her searching eyes found the part of him in hiding, dragged him like some furtive night hunter into the inevitable light of day.
“You,” she said. “Oh, God.”
He might have offered up a prayer himself if he’d still believed that anyone listened. Instead he moved toward her—carefully—and smiled. He could see the mountain through the ethereal substance of his raised hands.
“Jesse,” he said. “I mean you no harm.”
Most society women he’d known would have swooned upon being presented with a ghost. Sophie certainly would have done so. Jesse only planted her feet more firmly on the brown earth and her hands on her hips, though her legs were shaking and her mouth trembled.
“Go away,” she said. “I refuse to give in, so you might as well beat it right now.”
“You do see me, Jesse,” he said softly.
“You’re not real,” she insisted, clamping her jaw against any telltale quivering. “I don’t know how I conjured you up, or why, but there’s not a thing wrong with my sanity. So—” She drew in a deep breath and glanced over her shoulder at the copse of trees. “Go away.”
He expected her to spin on her booted foot and start back up the hill. The need to escape was in every line of her supple body—God, how well he recognized that impulse. But she stood very still and glared as if she were waiting for him to defend his presence, explain himself, make her believe …
“I am here, Jesse,” he said. “I’m real.” He flexed his fingers, willing them to greater solidity. They stayed uncooperatively translucent. “I fear I’ve become a bit rusty at this sort of thing. I’ve been … too long away.”
Away, her lips formed. She looked at his feet, up the length of his legs, past the belt at his waist and the braided jacket with its high, snug collar. Her gaze came to rest on his chin, and he lifted his hand to touch the stubble he was sure would be there. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d shaved. One had no need for such mundane activities in limbo.
One never … changed at all.
“Why?” Jesse asked in a strained voice. “Who are you?”
“You called me,” he said.
“A dream,” she muttered. “Only a dream.”
“You aren’t asleep now, Jesse.” He smiled crookedly. “I’ve botched it, haven’t I? Do you remember my name?”
Once again her lips formed the word, unwilling to give it voice. David.
He snapped to attention. “David Ventris, Captain Lord Ashthorpe, late of His Majesty’s Light Dragoons.” Very late, he almost added, but doubted that she was in any case to appreciate his black humor.
“You—” She wet her lips. “You’re some kind of soldier.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was a soldier. In a war that I suspect was very long ago.” He looked up at the mountains, too rough and thick with trees to be the ones he’d known at the Lakes, yet so beautiful. “This is America, isn’t it? and it’s been—” He met her gaze again. “How long since Waterloo, Jesse?”
“Waterloo?” she repeated. “The battle with Napoleon? Why would I—” She caught herself, closing her eyes and sucking in great lungfuls of air. “I’m not. I can fight this. I’m not going back—”
Not going back. Oh, yes. He understood that vow.
“I know about madness,” he said. He focused on a pebble near the toe of his boot, gauged the amount of effort it might take to kick that pebble. “You have no reason to fear for your sanity. Not that I blame you.”
She laughed, a brief and broken sound of sheer disbelief. “You don’t blame me. That’s just great. I have nothing to worry about now, do I?”
But her bravado was all show. David had seen that kind of performance many times in war, when men were so terrified that they might commit the rashest of acts to assuage the fear.
A miscalculation now could send her over the edge. He crouched to lessen the threat of his presence and hung his arms over his knees. “Not from me, Jesse. Didn’t you ever believe that there might be things in the world that can’t be explained by mere logic?”
She looked at him—at him, not through him—with a fierce, suppressed panic. “You know what I think. I made you.”
“Did you?” He couldn’t laugh anymore, not past the knot in his throat. She thought she’d made him, and yet it was the other way round. If Sophie’s soul hadn’t come into this new life shaped by what he’d done, she couldn’t have called him.
But if she didn’t acknowledge his reality, he could go no further. He had to get through to her. When he saw how much she despised her own fear, he thought he knew the way.
“If you made me,” he said, “then you must know why I’m here. Or are you afraid to find out?”
The challenge worked. He felt her stare as a shaft of radiance, blinding in its intensity, piercing all the way to his own restless soul as surely as he had looked into hers. There was a change in her expression, a stern and fixed concentration that made him wonder if he had risked too much.
If she saw too far, if she could read his heart and know everything he’d done—everything he must do—he was finished.
But she let him go, breaking free of any tentative binding between them. “No,” she said coldly. “No. I won’t let it happen.”
There was no warning of her charge. She strode directly at him, fists clenched, and the impact of her touch stunned David into immobility. At first there was a resistance, as if the very air had taken on solidity. Then the barrier was breached, and for a heartbeat two bodies shared the same overlapping space.
It was ecstasy—beyond sexual, beyond anything physical. The essence of life itself poured from Jesse into him, a flow of warm light and glorious sensation. In that moment David held Jesse’s heart in his cupped hands. Exaltation peaked and shuddered through him, shaking him apart.
And then it was over. Jesse stood behind him, her face white, her eyes glazed with shock.
David stumbled, fighting the weakness in legs that possessed all the frailty of human flesh and blood. The realness Jesse had given him.
“Jesse,” he croaked, and stretched his hand out to her, as if somehow she could understand what he required and give it to him without pain, or struggle, or any need of the dark and terrible truth.
She flinched from his ha
nd and started away, jogging up the hill. He rose to follow, cursing a body that wouldn’t obey him.
Between one instant and the next it betrayed him completely. The brief union with Jesse had been too much, drained the energy from him as surely as a mortal wound had drained his life’s blood into the earth.
“No,” he shouted. “Curse you, no.”
But limbo tugged at him, the only enemy with the power to tear him away. His legs lost form, his hands became transparent, even the beating of his heart went still. His spirit had no anchor to the world, no bridge to reach her.
He thought he saw Jesse turn to him, but his vision was fading. The sunlight, too, was dim, the mountains replaced by the grim, infinite battlefield that was his personal Hell. They mocked him, the merciless wardens of that place, who remained mute and showed themselves only in the reflection of his despair.
“David?”
As her name had called him back, so his name on her lips almost held him, though she stood a hundred yards distant. She lifted her hand, slow and uncertain in her fear. But her hesitant offer wasn’t enough; the winds of limbo swept him into their icy embrace, and his answer was as lost as his soul.
CHAPTER THREE
There were times, when Al knew he’d detached just a little too much from the world, that he could look at Jesse Copeland and remember he was human.
Today was one of those times.
She’d swept into his study on a cool wind from the mountains, flushed with exercise, vibrating with energy. But there was a hectic color in her cheeks that signaled her distress. She moved with stiff restraint, as if she were holding herself together behind a brittle shell that might crack at the slightest provocation.
Al pointed her to the leather recliner and observed her with a faint frown. He couldn’t erase her anxiety; he’d learned long ago the dubious value of mouthing platitudes and reassurances that everything would be all right.
Jesse would not have appreciated them. She had always been so self-reliant, so determined not to need anyone. But she, unlike Al, hadn’t learned the peace of indifference, the inertia of resignation. For all her efforts to become unmoved by the world, she was far too much alive to adopt the dispassion Al had carefully cultivated for the past twenty years.
And now she asked for his help. As he watched her settle into the recliner, he remembered her as a child: so vulnerable, so confused, virtually abandoned by a mother who’d either been drinking or living to fulfill Gary Emerson’s every whim. Gary had disliked Jesse, and the feeling had been mutual—even if most of Manzanita was convinced that Jesse was the one with the problem.
Gary Emerson was still Jesse’s problem.
Al’s fist clenched on the desk, and he was remotely interested to observe his own anger. He might damn Emerson to hell, but it wouldn’t help Jesse. When all was said and done, she could only help herself.
“Make yourself comfortable,” he told her. Awkwardly he maneuvered his desk chair closer to the side of the recliner. “This is our first session to explore your response to hypnotherapy. Are you clear about what we’re going to do?”
She nodded against the padded headrest, but her jaw was set, her eyes squeezed shut too tightly. For Jesse to attempt this was a measure of how profoundly Gary’s return had affected her. To need was to be afraid. To let go was to lose yourself. She wasn’t one to give up control, or trust another person with her innermost thoughts.
Yet she trusted Al to guide her into the still, fathomless waters of her unconscious mind. He wondered if he trusted himself.
“Did you see Emerson today?” he asked.
Her head jerked to the side. “Not him,” she said in a muffled voice.
Not him. But the emphasis on the second word had meaning. Al had known from the minute she’d walked into his house that something new had happened. Something that had frightened her badly.
“Do you want to talk about it, before we begin?” he prompted.
For a moment she seemed ready to say more, and then she clamped her lips together. “No. I’m ready.”
Al rubbed his palm on his knee. Jesse was tense; a series of relaxation and breathing exercises seemed the best method of induction. Even that might not calm her enough.
It was a start. “Jesse, I’d like you to relax as much as you can. Listen to my voice and don’t try to concentrate. Be aware of your body’s responses, but don’t fight them.”
She nodded again, brows drawn. Al suppressed a sigh. Jesse was bound to demand too much of herself in this first session.
“I want you take three deep, slow breaths,” he said. “Think of the air moving in and out of your lungs. Let go of your tension, let it flow out of you.”
She obeyed with the earnest concentration of an Olympic athlete trying for a world record. He repeated the breathing exercises several times; each time she relaxed a little more, until the knotting of her muscles began to loosen. By the end of the fourth exercise, the crease between her brows was gone, and her lips parted gently.
He’d held no great hope that he would succeed this first attempt, and he’d been prepared to try other methods if necessary. But Jesse had surprised him.
“How do you feel, Jesse?” he asked.
“A little sleepy,” she said, her words soft around the edges. “My arms are tingling.”
“Good. Everything is just fine.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “When you feel ready to begin, to explore the past, I want you to lift your little finger.”
Her finger twitched. Jesse had confounded all his expectations and was already in a medium trance. In theory it could happen this way; in fact such a rapid induction was rare.
Al felt a flash of excitement, a hunch that he was on the verge of something he hadn’t anticipated. But he pulled himself back from the precipice with the ease of habit and well-honed discipline. There was nothing remotely mystical in what he and Jesse were doing. Solid ground lay in the objectivity of the mind. He was here to help Jesse find that solid ground.
“As you journey into your past,” he told her, “you’ll experience only as much as you feel comfortable with. At any time, you have the power to rise above your memories. You always have control. Your memories are unable to hurt you.”
“Hurt,” she murmured. “It … hurts.”
Al stared at her hand, relaxed against the armrest. Her voice was still distant, untroubled. He had planned to guide her slowly, step by easy step, into her own childhood, but it seemed she had already gone ahead of him.
He could bring her out now. It wasn’t too late. But Jesse wanted this badly, and he couldn’t let her down.
“Can you tell me what hurts, Jesse?”
Her eyelids trembled. “Why did you leave me?”
She wasn’t speaking to him. He thought quickly of who she might mean: her mother was the most logical contender, or her father, who’d left Joan and Jesse when she was only seven. He’d been unable or unwilling to deal with Joan’s severe mood swings and drinking—
“I love you,” Jesse said with sudden vehemence. “If you leave me, I’ll die.”
With an eerie, thoroughly irrational sense of foreboding, Al heard in her words not the cries of an abandoned child but something else entirely. “Jesse,” he said. “Can you tell me who you’re talking to? Who you love so much?”
Her throat worked. “He won’t listen. He said he loved me. Our child—” She moaned. “Gone. I’m so alone.”
The prickles along Al’s spine redoubled. “Jesse, can you tell me where you are? What year it is?”
“David,” she whispered. “Don’t go back. Please.” Her breath came rapidly now, in short pants. “I won’t ever see you again. I know. I know!”
She didn’t hear Al, was so engrossed in whatever memory or delusion she’d found that she couldn’t or wouldn’t answer his questions. He leaned over her, willing her to listen.
“Jesse, you are able to see yourself protected and separate from what you’re experiencing now. You’re safe. Yo
u can—”
“No!” She tossed her head. “I’m not safe! He hates me. I can feel it! When he comes into the room …” A long shudder racked her body. Her hand shot out to grasp at air. “David!”
“Who hates you, Jesse? Is it Gary you’re afraid of?”
She lapsed into silence, as if she’d finally heard his instructions. Al let her rest, considering how best to bring her out of trance. This was too much, too intense. It wasn’t her childhood she spoke of.
Another part of her life, perhaps. When she’d been on her own, in college or the Corps, before her return to Manzanita.
“There’s nothing to live for,” she said dully.
Al gripped the arm of his chair. “Where are you now, Jesse?”
“In my bed. I’m always in my bed. It hurts to get up. I don’t care. The roses are all dying.”
“The roses. Can you tell me about the roses?”
“In the garden. I don’t go there anymore.” Her lips stretched in a thin, bitter smile. “When he left I told the gardener to let them die.”
“Why are you in bed, Jesse? Are you ill?”
Her hand lifted to touch her flat stomach. “He didn’t believe me. Something is wrong. But when the doctor comes—” She broke off, and Al saw her eyes look sideways beneath her lids. “You,” she gasped. “Go away. I don’t want you here. Get out!”
“Who do you see, Jesse?”
But she grasped her stomach, pressing down and wrapping her arms about herself as if to protect it from attack. “Send for the doctor. Please. It hurts.” She whimpered, the cry broken by a cough. “There’s something wrong with the air. I … can’t breathe.” She coughed again, a weak and strangled sound. “There’s smoke. I can’t get up. I know—I know he did this. He did this.” Her face contracted in a grimace of rage. “They both did it. I hate them. I hate them!”
“Listen to me carefully, Jesse. I want you to prepare yourself to leave your memories now. I’m going to begin counting backward from five to one. With each number, you’ll feel yourself coming a little closer to consciousness. At the count of one you’ll find yourself fully aware, relaxed and able to—”
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