“The more you clung to me, the more certain I was that I’d be swallowed up in your need. You were a chain I couldn’t break, but I could pretend you didn’t exist.”
Jesse’s breath came in short gasps. She no longer knew where she was; her face felt alien under her groping fingers.
It was Sophie’s face. Sophie’s tears wet her cheeks. Sophie’s dread and despair were her own.
“Once again I left you,” David said. “Once again I ignored your letters, even when you told me that Avery was attempting to seduce you. Avery, seduce a woman.” David grated a bitter laugh. “You said he threatened you openly when you refused him, and you had no protection against him. You said he hated me, but you were my wife and in his power.”
Overcome by a chaos of memory, Jesse felt for the sheets and pulled them up over her shivering body. A faint whiff of smoke hung in the air.
“I knew it was your own mad fancy. Avery’s passions had become dried up long ago. You’d tricked me before when you summoned me home, pretending to be ill—so I told myself. I didn’t listen, even when you wrote that Avery was scheming to take your life.”
Jesse’s shaking stopped, stilled by a coldness that turned her blood to ice.
“Your last letter,” David said in a harsh whisper, “came to me on the eve of battle. It was almost incomprehensible. Mad. I threw it in the fire that night and watched it burn.
“That was the night I killed you.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The last of the color left her face, and David saw the transformation complete itself.
The change had come on gradually as he’d watched her memories return. It was to Jesse he’d begun telling the tale, Jesse’s lithe body that crouched before him. But now it was Sophie’s eyes that met his, Sophie’s fear he was forced to witness, Sophie’s unspent hatred that answered him.
“You … killed me,” she repeated, her voice as hoarse and accented as his own.
“Yes.” The confession seared his throat like vitriol. “I could have saved you. Months later I received word that you had died in a fire that had destroyed the Hall. A fire set by my brother.”
“He burned me,” she said. A savage battle went on behind her wide and stricken gaze, and she jerked like a puppet with cut strings. David imagined that he saw flames dancing in her hazel eyes. They focused on him with terrible intensity.
“I begged you to save me,” she said, fingers curled into claws. “I told you, and you wouldn’t believe me.”
He didn’t allow himself the brief respite of looking away. “Yes.”
“He hated you,” she hissed. “He couldn’t bear to see me in his precious Hall. He was convinced that everything you possessed should have been his.” She spoke faster and faster, the long-dammed rage driving the words from her mouth like musket balls. “He hoped you’d die in the war; he prayed for it daily. He found a thousand ways to make my life hell. He knew you’d never believe what I said of him, because you were blind.”
David had no excuses to give her. He had been blind to what Avery had become, grown out of the bitter seeds planted in childhood. A stranger who could wish for his own brother’s death.
A murderer.
“He wanted me because he thought it would hurt you,” Jesse said. “But you wouldn’t have cared. You never did.” She laughed with a frantic edge. “You wanted to be rid of me, and you had your way. You both had your way.”
True blindness would have been a blessing in this moment. There was no forgiveness in the woman who wore Jesse’s face and body. She was the avenging angel bent on sending him back to perdition.
Where he belonged.
“You were everything to me,” she said. “My world, my life.” Her bent fingers raked at the sheets as if they were his flesh, and she laughed again. “That one time you came back to me—that last night we shared—you put another child in me.”
David had been naive to think there were limits to shame and anguish. “It … was true,” he said.
Her smile was grotesque and bitter. “You didn’t believe anything I wrote to you. But Avery did. He feared I would give you an heir. He said he would kill me before I robbed him of what should be his.”
The murder had been of two lives, not one. David bent his head, a cry of mourning trapped in his chest.
“I was ill,” she went on mercilessly. “Too weak to move from my bed. Avery would not send for the doctor. He was drinking the night he—” She paused, visibly struggling for words. “I heard the flames. The smoke was coming in. I tried to call for help—”
The control that had allowed her to speak with such devastating precision melted out of her voice, her face, her gaze like ice in the heat of a Spanish sun. She coughed, arms wrapping around her belly.
“The red light …” She shook her head, whipping hair into her eyes. “So hot. I can’t move. Can’t breathe—”
“Jesse,” he said urgently, “it’s not real—”
“The door—it’s open—” She thrust her hands out in front of her face. “The flames—David!”
Her shriek ripped through him, cutting out his heart. The plea choked off in a dry rattling wheeze, and she raked at her throat. “Help … me …”
He lunged toward her and she fell back, arched in a spasm of intolerable agony, her body convulsing and flailing among the sheets in the hopeless struggle of a woman reliving her own unspeakable death.
“Jesse,” David cried, pinning her with his body. She heaved under him in a parody of their lovemaking. Her eyes rolled up in her head, and he reared up to strike her white cheek with the flat of his palm.
She went rigid, frozen in an unnatural position like a woman turned to stone. David prepared to strike her again, frantic in his own dread of losing her.
She collapsed beneath him just as he raised his hand. The witless terror left her gaze, and she looked at him with total comprehension.
“You,” she rasped. Without warning, a new convulsion seized her, one of her own making. She bucked beneath him, her arms and legs imbued with uncanny strength, until he rolled away. He made no attempt to retreat when she pursued him like a banshee, her fists and feet pummeling every part of his body she could reach.
Sophie’s voice spat loathing at him, a litany of hatred that beat in time to her blows. All her fear had been transmuted in the crucible of fire, and the only purpose left to her was vengeance.
But gradually the energy drained from her, the mad force deserting the strike of her fists. Her hands flattened and hit his chest with hollow slaps. Her voice went hoarse and ragged on the hundredth “I hate you.” Tears fell, bathing his skin.
The change came last to her eyes. They were bleached, almost colorless as emotion subsided, the pupils wide and vivid in darkness.
Jesse’s eyes. Jesse’s mind reclaiming itself, reclaiming her body, slowly realizing what she had done. The last blow fell and she snatched back her hand. She bent her arms behind her back, tears drying on her cheeks.
He had never seen her face so blank. Not even a trace of hatred remained, but there was nothing else to take its place. Her gaze swept his body and fixed on his eyes with that same emptiness.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He wanted to laugh. He would have gladly borne her punishment, and far worse, for days on end rather than witness the cold void left in the wake of Sophie’s rage.
“No, Jesse,” he croaked. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t answer. He knew she still remembered everything he had told her, everything she’d experienced. Sophie’s memories were hers.
She gathered up the tangled sheets and tugged them from the bed. Carefully she wrapped them around herself, chin to ankle, like a shroud. She sat at the very edge of the bed with her back to him, and her voice reached him muffled and flat and lifeless as a tomb.
“I understand now,” she said. “The dreams. The things I was afraid of. And Gary—” Her breath shuddered out, the only movement in her body. “You knew who Gary was,
didn’t you?”
He’d prayed she wouldn’t make that connection, as she hadn’t recognized Megan in this life. Even that was not to be spared her. “I knew,” he said bleakly. “I’d hoped to protect you—”
“Of course. It’s as if it’s happening again. The dreams and memories started when Gary returned to Manzanita—” Her head lifted a little. “Is that why you came to me? Because Avery was here?”
So simple to lie one last time, give her one good thing to remember about him. But he couldn’t. “I didn’t know Avery had been reborn until after I came,” he said. “I knew more than I admitted, but not that.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Haven’t you guessed?”
“You said I held the key to your salvation.”
“Yes.” He smiled with self-contempt, though she couldn’t see. “Your forgiveness was to be my deliverance.”
“My … forgiveness?”
She had found some emotion—disbelief, irony, weary amusement. David forced himself to keep from touching her.
“Your forgiveness—for what I did to you. Only that will release me from limbo and allow me to … move on.”
“That easy?” The sheets pulled snug against her body. “Why come to me now, if you didn’t know about Gary?”
“It was your call that allowed me to return. You opened the way, Jesse.”
“Maybe you should thank Gary for that. He triggered it all. My dreams. My memories.”
He would have called it bitterness except for the indifference in her voice.
“I could have killed him the night of the party,” he said softly.
She hardly reacted beyond tilting her head. “Did he know who haunted him? Is that why he ran?”
“I don’t know,” he said. And he didn’t, save that Gary had, for a few moments in the room at the inn, shared his mind with Avery as Jesse did with Sophie. And that he’d sensed David’s warning.
“I always felt there was a pattern in the things that happened,” Jesse murmured. “I understand why you tried to make me love you the way Sophie did. Sophie would have given you anything you asked for if you’d only loved her—even forgiveness. But you never really did love her. You didn’t know how.”
It was chilling to hear Sophie’s intolerable realization reduced to such simplicity by the even, distant cadence of Jesse’s words. To hear her say what David had believed to be true.
Until he recognized what he was about to lose.
“Do you hate me, Jesse?” he asked, sick in his heart.
“Hate you? You didn’t hurt me.” She gave a broken laugh. “Are you worried I’ll send you back to limbo forever?” She shook her head. “It would have been so much easier if you’d told me this from the beginning. No deception, no entanglements, nothing between—” She stopped and the muscles in her jaw contracted.
No. Of course he hadn’t hurt her. Of course she was completely removed from Sophie’s passion and suffering, didn’t give a damn what he’d done in deceiving her. So she would try to make him believe, rather than give in to her own justified pain and anger.
Rather than let him continue to think she had ever truly loved him.
“Should I have expected you to accept so much at the beginning?” he said. “You weren’t even convinced I was real. You were already remembering pieces of your past, and they frightened you. Should I have—” But he stopped himself, hearing the excuses he made, just as he always had. Another way of escaping. Another disavowal of responsibility.
“I think you were the one who was afraid,” Jesse said into his silence. “All this elaborate game … was for nothing.”
David closed his eyes and raged inwardly—not at her for rejecting him, nor even at his gaolers who would chain him for eternity, but because he finally understood, to the very center of his soul, the only thing that mattered. The only thing worth living, or dying, for.
He understood too late.
“It doesn’t really matter if you lied to me,” she said with that same steady, uninflected dispassion. “You helped me. You saved Megan and tried to protect me from Gary. I owe you for that.” She half turned, allowing him a glimpse of her profile. It was white and still as a mask. “Whatever you did in that last life, it’s over. Long over. I don’t want your damnation on my conscience.”
He knew then she would give him what he hadn’t earned, present him with the gift as dutifully as she might dispatch some minor debt to an indifferent acquaintance.
“I forgive you, David,” she said in a whisper. “You’re free.”
At first he felt nothing. The cold hollow core in the middle of his chest had been expanding minute by minute, and it grew colder still as she released him. His celestial gaolers would require sincerity in her forgiveness; surely this wouldn’t qualify under their stringent rules.
But all at once he sensed a peculiar buoyancy in his borrowed body, the familiar pull away from the earthly plane. Familiar and yet different, for he knew, with a more profound conviction than any he’d experienced in life or death, that Jesse’s forgiveness had been accepted.
He was free. The force that drew him back came not from his limbo but from a far more wonderful place. It sang to him like a chorus of angels, promising the liberation he’d sought. Joy such as he’d never known. The severing of bonds he’d worn like chains.
Everything he’d wanted since the day he’d died.
For a moment he almost let it take him. And then he looked down at Jesse—Jesse, who stared at him with that blank, lovely shield of a face—and knew it was impossible.
He couldn’t go. That certainty was absolute, silencing the celestial chorus to a faint hum. The peculiar triumph of a decision made inevitable washed through him, lending him an unanticipated reserve of strength.
He couldn’t leave Jesse. She knew who Gary was, and had reason to hate her nemesis now more than ever. In her current state she would be capable of anything.…
And, by God, he loved her.
The words took shape in his mind for the first time, stunning him with their power.
He loved her. Not the casual, shallow love he’d given Sophie. Not the dutiful emotion he’d once owed his parents, or the camaraderie he’d shared with friends and fellow soldiers in the midst of battle.
He had no definition for this. It was a bolt of white lightning through his heart, setting afire everything it touched until his body was incandescent. In the emptiness at his core he found the other half of his soul.
Jesse was his salvation, and he was hers. Love made it possible. He was utterly unworthy of her; he’d betrayed and wounded her time after time, given her nothing but sorrow. But he would never abandon her again.
He concentrated on solidifying his body, summoning every scrap of energy to keep it in place. He held out his hand to Jesse, readying the argument that would make her believe.
But Jesse opened her mouth and cried out in deepest pain.
“Go,” she shouted. “Please, go!”
Her command hit him like a gale of arctic wind, shredding the outlines of his form as if they were made of mist. The force of her will allied with the pull of the other plane battered him, and he lost what little control he still maintained.
He became a creature of air, torn from Jesse’s presence and hurled skyward. Only his desperation allowed him to remain on Earth, a soul without shape, hovering over the cottage and the town like an invisible bird.
No amount of struggle could alter his condition. The best he could manage was this in-between, another kind of limbo, and he knew the state could not endure.
Jesse wanted him gone. His gaolers wanted him back and out of their guardianship.
No. He launched the refusal to whoever listened. No. No!
With senses far greater than earthly vision he looked down on Jesse’s cottage and watched her run to her truck. In her movements was all the anguish she’d refused to let him see. She drove down the lane and onto the main road. David knew where she was going.
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He tried to follow, but her denial of him worked like an unscalable rampart, a siege wall invulnerable to any attack. He searched for a way around it, under it, some chink in her defenses.
There was none. He retreated rather than exhaust his dwindling strength. The oblivious citizens of Manzanita were like scurrying ants far below, no part of his battles, and yet some prick of awareness caught his attention and set off warning bells in his mind.
He knew immediately what had summoned him. Who. At the edge of town, near the Manzanita Inn, two men were arguing. One of them was short and rotund and middle-aged, his face flushed with agitation.
The other was Gary. Gary, his suit rumpled and his motions angry, demanding something of the older man.
Gary was back. It had been inevitable, simply a matter of time before he and Jesse should meet again. David had known, and he’d passed up the chance to end the threat.
Now he could only observe as Gary’s voice rose to a shout, as the other man backed away, wide-eyed and wary. “You’re either with me or against me!” Gary snarled. “You’ll regret this, Wayne. When I win the election, you’ll still be nothing. Nobody, do you hear me?”
Wayne tripped over his own feet in his haste to retreat. “I told you I can’t help you!” he insisted hoarsely. “I’ve got to go.” He spun around and jogged for the car parked on the lane beside the inn. Gary pursued a few steps and stopped, fists clenching and unclenching, as Wayne set the vehicle in motion with a screech of tires and a wild swerve for the road.
Gary stood, eerily still, his gaze turned inward. In his handsome face David could see a kind of madness, and he knew what Gary would do even before the man strode to his own car.
It didn’t matter what drove Gary, whether reawakened memories of another life or the compulsion to eliminate a persistent nuisance in the one he lived now. Only a lucky guess could have sent him down the road, following the same route Jesse had taken mere minutes ago.
A guess, or instinct born of a connection he could no more resist than could Jesse. David saw the final pieces falling into place, the twice-told tale drawing to its inexorable climax.
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