Oates’ face screwed up in anger. “Don’t cross me, witch. I’ll break you in two. I own your soul.”
“Your hold is gone.” She wheezed gray dust. “Your contract is broken. You lied to us.”
Around the Portal, the four wasted witches each reached out a shriveled hand and touched the edge of the circle on the ground. From each, a faint rose-colored pulse cut around the curve. They raced around and simultaneously met where Camille’s staff touched the arc. The goat’s head glowed. She moved her left hand over Allie’s heart.
“You bitch!” Oates screamed.
“What black magic does, only black magic can undo.” Camille mumbled an incomprehensible incantation. Red light flashed under Camille’s palm and she pushed Allie’s heart through her chest. Camille’s head sagged, and she rolled to the ground on her back.
The five spurned witches transformed into solid black statues, then collapsed into piles of dust.
Scott scooped Allie up with both arms. He buried his head against her cold, still neck.
“You come back to me, Allie Cat,” he whispered. “Losing you once was more than enough.”
Her pulse bumped back to life and did a slow beat against his cheek. Her skin warmed. She took a jagged breath so deep she nearly burst from his arms. Scott practically exploded with relief. He checked Allie’s arms, her chest. No trace of all the damage she’d been through. He looked up. The vision of Oates was gone.
The clouds above shrank, first in on themselves like tumors in the sky, then contracted to black pinpricks. When they vanished, only a clear cobalt-blue sky remained.
Allie’s eyes opened, washed out, weak. A hint of color returned to her face. She raised one hand and patted around her chest. Her brow furrowed in confusion.
“All back in one piece?” she said. “How…?”
“You’ll really be happier if I tell you about that later.”
A police cruiser came screaming up the road, lights ablaze, Milo at the wheel. Scott’s heart skipped a beat at the deputy’s apparent resurrection. The car hopped the curb and flew across the Greenes’ front yard. It skidded to a stop a few feet from Scott in a spray of grass and earth. Milo jumped out and ran to Scott and Allie’s side. He looked down at Allie and grimaced.
“Is she okay?” Milo asked.
“She’s alive,” Scott said. “And apparently so are you. I saw Kyler shoot you.”
“I’m sending Kevlar an endorsement about that.” Milo knelt beside Allie. “Let’s get you to the clinic.”
“The roads?” Scott said.
“Clear. Oates’ men are dead. Bewildered dogs are slinking back home. I saw that black speedboat tear-assing out of the harbor so I’m guessing Oates escaped.”
“Like cowards always do.”
“The coven?” Milo said.
“Uh, gone. I’ll explain that one later, if I can. Kyler?”
“Face-down outside your hardware store, I’m afraid.”
“Face-down is perfect.” Scott turned to Allie. “Let’s get you checked out.”
Scott helped her over to the cruiser and into the back seat. He sat down beside her and pulled the door shut. Milo climbed into the driver’s seat. Allie lay down and rested her head on Scott’s thigh. Milo gunned the engine and rocketed them out into the street.
“Whoa!” Scott said. “Slow it down! Don’t get us killed now.”
Milo flashed a sheepish grin in the mirror and eased off the accelerator. Allie touched Scott’s knee.
“I was dead,” she whispered. “Really dead. I did it all. The floating out of my body. The bright light. Everything.”
Scott had heard the scientific explanations for that kind of experience. Something about oxygen deprivation to the brain and triggered memories. He reached down and massaged her shoulder. “I’m glad it didn’t take. Did St. Peter meet you at the gates?”
“No. It was your father.”
Scott stopped rubbing her shoulder. “What?”
“He told me it wasn’t my time. That I had to return. Then I was back in my body.” She paused. “He had a message for you. He said someday you’d understand the deal. That was it. What deal?”
Scott stared out the window as Milo stopped in front of the clinic. The backup generator had kept the lights on inside. A nurse cautiously stuck her head out of the front door. Milo got out.
“Scottie?” Allie said.
“I don’t know what he meant,” Scott said. He so wished that statement was true.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Captain Montgomery looked out the front window of the state police cabin cruiser at Stone Harbor as the boat entered the harbor channel. He wasn’t sure what to expect.
Since Friday morning, when the returning ferry had delivered a .38 pistol murder weapon from the island for analysis, Montgomery had been trying to raise Scaravelli with disturbing results. All day Saturday, there was no radio or telephone communication with the island, and according to the power company, the island wasn’t pulling one volt of juice through the cables under the Sound. He had decided to gather a few troopers, take the police boat over to the island, and see what the hell was going on.
His first view of the town exceeded his worst fears. Several vessels in the harbor looked like victims of explosions, their charred hulls resting in the shallow water near the marina. Smoke rose from the town near the top of the hill. No vehicles moved in the streets.
He raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the dock. A beheaded corpse lay across the planks near the end. He made out the unmistakable outline of an M4 on the planks by the body.
He turned on the boat’s flashing blue lights, and through the PA told the officers onboard to stand ready for action. He didn’t have any idea what they’d be stepping into.
He couldn’t know that it was already over.
Chapter Sixty
When Scott brought Allie into the clinic, they were the only people there except an LPN and one of the island EMTs. The combination of armed gunmen, wild dogs, and a pillar of light turning the sky purple was more than enough to keep the rest of the town inside in safety.
Scott shortened the nurse’s line of questions and avoided having to explain the inexplicable by just saying Allie was having chest pains. The nurse led them to a corner bed, pulled the fabric divider around them, and after a quick check, said her heart sounded normal. She left to get an EKG for a more detailed diagnosis.
Scott stood by the bed and held Allie’s hand, still too cool to the touch for his comfort. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“But it shouldn’t be,” she whispered. “I had my heart ripped out of my chest. I saw it happen.”
The clinic outside their little curtained room went berserk. Scott glanced through a slit between the curtains. The casualties of Oates’ three-day visit began to arrive. Dog bites. Gunshot wounds. The nurse and EMT went into triage mode.
Allie squeezed Scott’s hand. “Whatever you did worked. I knew I could count on my white knight to come through.”
Guilt bubbled up inside him. He hadn’t saved her at all, and on top of that, he’d been seconds from selling his soul to Satan.
“It wasn’t me,” Scott said. “The witches did it. At the last second, they double-crossed Oates and used what little power they had left to put your heart back.”
“I should be dead anyway. I took enough pills to kill us both, and I saw my heart stop beating in Oates’ hands.”
“I guess we’ll chalk that up to a power higher than the witches’.”
She squeezed his hand again and managed a weak smile. “Still, you were there to save me.”
And almost threw everything away to do it, he thought, just like my father. He couldn’t take more of this underserved praise. Their renewed relationship had to have no secrets.
“Allie,” Scott said, “whe
n you were laid out on the ground, with your dying heart on your chest, Oates appeared.”
“Wait, you told me Camille returned my heart.”
“She did, but before that, Oates returned. He offered me a deal. He’d heal you in return for my soul.”
Allie closed her eyes. “It’s a good thing you had Camille on your side.”
“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I didn’t know she was. I was a split second from saying yes.”
Allie opened her eyes again. The edges of her mouth turned down. “Why would you do that?”
Scott held her hand with both of his.
“For all of this,” he said. “For the dream I’d always had of you and me and a perfect life together here in Stone Harbor. Because a wonderful lifetime with you was worth whatever miserable eternity purchased it.”
“But you didn’t take the deal. And you might think you were going to, but in the end you wouldn’t. Giving in to evil just isn’t in your nature.”
His last secret boiled inside him, begging to be told, to admit to his father having killed someone in cold blood, selling out to Oates, and acting as his eyes and ears on Stone Harbor. Shattering Allie’s reverential image of the man was all that kept him from blurting it out. Scott wouldn’t keep anything about his life a secret from her, but his father’s life could be something else. He leaned forward and kissed the top of her head. “You are amazing.”
A look of shame crossed her face.
“Hardly,” she said. “I was part of that ritual because I’m anything but amazing.”
“You aren’t responsible for what you were forced to do, especially when it would have killed you.”
She looked away. “You know Satan couldn’t make me to do anything, couldn’t even teleport me, not without leverage.”
Oates had said he owned Allie’s soul. Scott had dismissed it as a lie. It had to be a lie. If it wasn’t, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He especially didn’t want to hear it from her own lips.
“In LA, I was driving home late at night. I was so exhausted. The studio offered me a driver, but I turned them down, didn’t want to leave my Jaguar on the lot over the weekend.” Tears welled in her eyes. “There was a little girl on the side of the road outside her house. I mean, it was so dark and then all of a sudden she was there.”
A tear rolled down her cheek. Scott squeezed her hand for support. She didn’t squeeze back.
“I killed her. And then I drove off, praying that somehow I’d get away unseen, that my career wouldn’t be ruined. And that prayer got answered by the wrong guy.”
She pulled her hand away from Scott’s and tucked it up to her chest. She exhaled and her body seemed to shrink inside her clothes.
“He’s got my soul. I deserved to die out there.”
Scott reached over, grabbed her hand in both of his, and squeezed it tight.
“But you didn’t. Your sacrifice of your life to stop Satan earned it back. He said so before he disappeared. Reverend Snow used to preach that the cornerstone of Christianity was forgiveness, that it was available unconditionally. You are alive and whole. I’d say that’s a sign of forgiveness.”
She turned her pleading eyes to him. Brown and deep and beautiful as they had ever been.
“Do you really think so?”
“Events speak for themselves.”
“I hid what I did from you. If you want to walk away now that you know….”
“Allie Cat, there’s the person you were ten years ago, who is the same person you are right now. I don’t know who the person was in between. But it wasn’t you.”
A smile flickered across her lips. Color rose in her cheeks.
Down the hall, a fresh flurry of commands echoed as a new batch of injured townspeople entered the clinic. The nurse yelled to have people who weren’t bleeding wait outside.
“Let’s clear this space for someone who needs it,” Scott said. “Feel strong enough to move?”
“Let’s find some quiet. Please.”
“I know just the spot. It’s got a front porch with a view of the stars.”
“Does it have a swing?”
“I’ve been meaning to get one.”
“Let’s go.”
Scott helped Allie up, and led her out the clinic’s back door.
Chapter Sixty-One
It took two weeks and a rail crash in downtown Baltimore for the media to finally let go of the story of Stone Harbor. The normally reticent townspeople redoubled their efforts to avoid discussing anything with outsiders. The collective duty to the town that made their forefathers suppress the story of the first coven of witches on the island was still deeply ingrained, and the few who knew made no mention of Camille and her coven. The psychotic dogs event also went without acknowledgement, thought that might have been driven more by owners wanting to live in denial.
Scott, Allie, and Milo, the only three who really knew the whole story, were content to let the press create their own fictional cover story. The reporters settled on Scaravelli as the antagonist. The Dickey girl’s necklace in his desk tied him to her disappearance and the supposition was that he killed Natalie Olsen as well and framed Carl Krieger for both. The pistol Krieger had supposedly used turned out to be a former NYPD revolver, signed out to and reported lost by Scaravelli years ago. They spun the story that the chief brought Kyler and the gang of thugs onto the island, where they got way out of hand. The justice system bought it. Scaravelli was arrested and sent to the mainland. That left Milo as the de facto chief of police, and no one in town said a word against it.
* * *
The second Saturday after the aborted ritual, Scott rolled over in bed and found the other half empty. He patted it twice before opening his eyes to confirm that for the first time since Allie moved in last week, she was up and awake before he was.
The clock read 9:10 a.m. That revelation sent a bolt of panic through him until he remembered he’d closed the hardware store today to pour the floor for the new detached garage. Comfortable as the bed was, he needed to get up and get that concrete poured. Sure as sunrise, everyone in town who complained that he’d closed the store on a Saturday would drop by to make sure their minor inconvenience had been for a good cause. Plus, the rented concrete mixer was ready and waiting beside the pile of formers. He rolled out of bed with a groan and headed into the kitchen.
He expected Allie to be there, coffee in hand. The kitchen was empty, the coffeepot still pristine in the machine.
“Allie Cat?”
The silence he got in response sent a sick feeling through his stomach. There were a dozen normal reasons Allie would be out early, but a black feeling of dread blotted all of them out. Something felt very wrong, very empty.
His phone rang from its charger on the kitchen counter. The number was local, but not familiar.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Scottie,” said Allie.
Scott sighed with relief. “Jesus, Allie. You scared the crap out of me, waking up to an empty house. Where are you calling from?”
“My new cell phone. I bought it yesterday.”
“Welcome back to the twenty-first century. What a pleasant surprise.”
“I have an unpleasant one too.”
The dread in his gut went back to full boil.
“I’m heading back to California,” she said. “The parents of the girl I killed deserve closure. I’m turning myself in to the police.”
In anyone else, Scott would have commended such a noble and selfless decision. But the first emotion to flash through him was desolation. The woman he’d lost for ten years was about to be lost again. The last week had exceeded every high school fantasy he’d had about his future life with Allie. Surviving the nightmare Oates spun out across Stone Harbor had strengthened their bond in ways the decade they’d lost never could have. The house was a
live again. He felt complete.
“Allie, come home and let’s talk this through a bit. That’s a big decision out of nowhere.”
“It’s not out of nowhere. From the moment Oates made me relive that night, I knew this was what I had to do. Black magic or not, it’s a miracle I didn’t die when Camille plunged my near-dead heart back into my chest. My life wasn’t saved just so I could do happily ever after in Stone Harbor with you. I have a debt I need to pay.”
That was the Allie he fell in love with over a decade ago, the one who always did what was right, the one who put others before herself. And she was completely right.
“Well, let’s spend today together, just you and me.”
“I’m already on the ferry, Scottie. I had to wait until now to tell you, because we would have that one last day, and it would be enough to let the selfish part of me convince me to stay.”
Scott shook his head at her being right again. “And the selfish part of me would be completely on board with it.”
“It’s all planned out,” she said. “My old agent knows a good lawyer who’ll take the case. He thinks the charge will be vehicular manslaughter.”
“Damn, Allie Cat. What’s the penalty?”
“As little as a year, as much as fifteen. Depends on the judge. Whatever it is, I earned it.”
“All right, then we’ll do this together. Last time, you were out on the West Coast going through hell by yourself. This time I’ll be there to support you.”
“No, you won’t! You have a life here in Stone Harbor, and you are going to live it. And you need to do something with the Portal, or have you forgotten that?”
The dreaded thing was still in the basement, wrapped in the altar cloth that saved the world.
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