She lifted her other hand, laid it on Evan's wrist, lightly. "Let me go, Evan, and you'll walk away. We'll put all of this behind us. It's your chance. The last chance."
His breath hissed at her ear. "You stupid bitch. Do you think I'll ever let you go?"
"And your choice." There was pity in her voice. "Your last."
The chant was in her head, rising, as if it had only been waiting for her to free it.
She wondered how she could have been so afraid of him.
"What you've done to all and me, turns back to you, one times three. From you this night I'll forever be free. As I will, so mote it be."
Her skin glowed like sunlight, her pupils dark as stars. The knife trembled, whispered along her skin, away, then fell. She heard the choking gasp, the high whine that couldn't reach a scream as Evan collapsed behind her.
She didn't spare him a glance.
"Don't shoot him," she said quietly to Zack. "Don't kill him like this. It wouldn't be good for you."
Because she could see the intent, she walked to Zack as Evan began to moan. "It wouldn't be good for us. He's nothing now." She laid a hand over Zack's heart, felt its wild beat. "He's what he made himself."
Evan lay on the ground, twitching as if something vile slithered under his skin. His face was bone white.
Zack lowered the gun, wrapped his good arm around Nell. He held her there a moment as she reached out, clasping hands with Mia, and linking them all.
"Stay with them," Zack told her. "I'll deal with him. I won't kill him. He'll suffer more if he lives."
Ripley watched her brother walk toward the writhing man, take out his handcuffs. He needed to do this last thing, she thought, and she needed to let him. "He gets two minutes to secure and Mirandize that smear of slime, then I want him taken to the clinic. I don't know how bad he's hurt."
"I'll take him." Nell looked down at the blood, Zack's blood, on her hand, curled her fist over it, and felt life pump. "I'll stay with him."
"Courage"—Mia reached out, touched the pendant—"breaks the spell. Love weaves another." She pulled Nell into her arms for a fierce hug. "You did well, little sister." She turned toward Ripley. "And you found your fate."
~•~
Early on the feast of the Saints, long after the balefires were charmed away, before dawn broke the sky, Nell sat in the kitchen of the yellow cottage, her hand resting loosely in Zack's.
She needed to come back, to be there, to tidy away what had happened and what might have happened. She'd swept away the negative forces that had lingered and had lit candles and incense.
"I wish you'd stayed overnight at the clinic."
She turned her hand under Zack's, squeezed. "I could say the same."
"I've got a few stitches, you've got the concussion."
"Mild," she reminded him, "and twenty-three stitches is more than a few."
Twenty-three stitches, he thought. A long, nasty gash. The doctor had called it a miracle that no muscle or tendons had been severed.
Zack called it magic. Nell's magic.
She reached out to touch the fresh white bandage, then trailed her fingers over the gold locket. "You didn't take it off."
"You asked me not to. It got hot," he told her, and brought her gaze back to his. "An instant before he cut me. I could see, in my head, in that quick blur, the blade going toward my heart, then being deflected. As if it hit a shield. I thought I imagined it. But I didn't."
"We were stronger than he was." Nell brought their joined hands to her cheek. "I was afraid, drowning in fear from the minute I heard his voice. It took away everything I'd built, everything I'd learned about myself. He paralyzed me, sucked out my will. That was his power over me. But it began to come back, and when he hurt you, it flooded back. But I couldn't think, not clearly. Hitting my head was part of it, I suppose."
"You ran to save me."
"And you followed to save me. We're a couple of heroes."
He touched her face, gently. There were bruises on it that he felt throb in his own. "He's never going to hurt you again. I'll go in and relieve Ripley at dawn, and contact the prosecutor's office on the mainland. A couple of attempted-murder charges will keep him locked up, no matter how fancy his lawyers are."
"I'm not afraid of him anymore. He looked pathetic in the end, eaten up by his own cruelty. Terrified of it. His madness is staring back at him now. He'll never be able to hide it again."
He could still see Evan Remington's colorless eyes, wide and wild in a face white as bone. "A padded room's as good as a cell."
She got to her feet to pour more tea. But when she came back to the table, Zack wrapped an arm around her, pressed his face into her body.
"It's going to take a while for me to get the picture of you with a knife to your throat out of my head."
She stroked his hair. "We have a lifetime to put others in its place. I want to marry you, Sheriff Todd. I want to start that lifetime very soon."
She slid into his lap, sighing as she rested her head on his good shoulder. Through the window she could see the first streaks of color announcing dawn, the pale burn across the sky.
Laying a hand on his heart, she timed its beats to her own. And knew the truest magic was there.
--2 Heaven and Earth (02-2003)--
To all my sisters, not of blood but of the heart. There’s the magic.
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Prologue
THREE SISTERS ISLAND
SEPTEMBER 1699
She called the storm.
The gales of wind, the bolts of lightning, the rage of the sea that was both prison and protection. She called the forces, those that lived within her, those that dwelled without. The bright and the dark.
Slender, with her cloak streaming back like bird-wings, she stood alone on the wind-whipped beach. Alone but for her rage and her grief. And her power. It was that power that filled her now, rushed inside her in wild, pounding strokes like a lover gone mad.
And so, perhaps, it was.
She had left husband and children to come to this place, left them under a spell-sleep that would keep them safe and unaware. Once she had done what she had come to do, she could never go back to them. She would never again hold their much-loved faces in her hands.
Her husband would grieve for her, and her children weep. But she could not go back to them. And she could not, would not, turn from the path she had chosen.
Payment must be made. And justice, however rough, would be met at last.
She stood, arms outflung in the tempest she had conjured. Her hair flew free and wild, dark ribbons that slashed at the night like whips.
“You must not do this thing.”
A woman appeared beside her, burning as bright in the storm as the fire after which she was named. Her face was pale, her eyes dark with what might have been fear.
“It is already begun.”
“Stop it now. Sister, stop before it is too late. You have no right.”
“Right?” She who was called Earth whirled, her eyes glowing fierce. “Who has better right? When they murdered the innocents in Salem Town, persecuted and hunted and hanged, we did nothing to stop it.”
“Stop one flood, cause another. You know this. We made this place.” Fire stretched out her arms, as if to encompass the island that rocked in the sea. “For our safety and our survival, for our Craft.”
“Safety? You can speak of safety, of survival, now? Our sister is dead.”
“And I grieve for her, as you do.” Pleading, she crossed her hands between her breasts. “My heart weeps as yours weeps. Her children are in our keeping now. Will you abandon them as well as your ow
n?”
There was a madness in her, tearing at her heart as the wind tore at her hair. Even recognizing it, she could not defeat it. “He will not go unpunished. He will not live while she does not.”
“If you cause harm, you’ll have broken your vows. You will have corrupted your power, and what you send out in the night will come back to you threefold.”
“Justice has a price.”
“Not this. Never this. Your husband will lose a wife, your children a mother. And I another beloved sister. More, even more than that, you break faith with what we are. She would not have wanted this. This would not have been her answer.”
“She died rather than protect herself. Died for what she is, for what we are. Our sister abjured power for what she called love. And it killed her.”
“Her choice.” One that stayed bitter in the throat long after it was swallowed. “And still she harmed none. Do this thing, use your gift in this dark way, and you doom yourself. You doom us all.”
“I cannot live, hidden here.” There were tears in her eyes now, and in the storm-light, they burned red as blood. “I cannot turn from this. My choice. My destiny. I take his life for hers, and damn him for all time.”
And calling for vengeance, shooting it like a bright and deadly arrow from a bow, she who was known as Earth sacrificed her soul.
One
THREE SISTERS ISLAND
JANUARY 2002
Sand, frosted with cold, crunched under her feet as she ran along the curving shore. Incoming waves left froth and bubbles lying on the crusted surface like tattered lace. Overhead, the gulls called, relentlessly.
Her muscles had warmed, and moved fluid as oiled gears in the second mile of her morning run. Her pace was a fast and disciplined jog, and her breath rushed out in white plumes. And rushed in, sharp and cold as shards of ice.
She felt fabulous.
The wintry beach held no footprints but her own, and hers were stamped, new over old, as she jogged back and forth across the gentle sweep of winter beach.
If she’d chosen to do her three miles in one straight line, she could have crossed Three Sisters from side to side at its widest point.
The idea of that always pleased her.
The little clump of land off the coast of Massachusetts was hers, every hill, every street, every cliff and inlet. Deputy Ripley Todd felt more than affection for Three Sisters, its village, its residents, its well-being. She felt responsibility.
She could see the rising sun glint against the windows of storefronts on High Street. In a couple of hours, the shops would open, people would walk along the streets going about the day’s business.
There wasn’t much of a tourist trade in January, but some would come over from the mainland on the ferry, poke about in the shops, drive up to the cliffs, buy some fresh fish right off the docks. For the most part, though, the winter was for islanders.
She loved the winter best.
At the end of the beach, where it bumped the edge of the seawall just below the village, she pivoted and headed back across the sand. Fishing boats plied an ocean that was the color of pale blue ice. It would change as the light strengthened, as the sky deepened. It never failed to fascinate her how many colors water could hold.
She saw Carl Macey’s boat, and a figure, tiny as a toy in the stern, raised a hand. She saluted back, kept running. With under three thousand islanders year-round, it wasn’t hard to know who was who.
She slowed her pace a bit, not only to cool down but to prolong the solitude. She often took her morning runs with her brother’s dog, Lucy, but this morning she had slipped out alone.
Alone was another thing she liked best.
And she’d wanted to clear her mind. There was a great deal to think about. Some of which she preferred not to, so she tucked those annoyances and problems away for now. What had to be dealt with wasn’t precisely a problem. You couldn’t call something that made you happy a problem.
Her brother was just back from his honeymoon, and nothing could have pleased her more than to see how happy he and Nell were together. After all they’d been through, and what it had nearly cost, seeing them cozied up together in the house where she and Zack had grown up was pure satisfaction.
And over the past months, since summer, when Nell had ended her flight from fear on the island, they’d become real friends. It was a pleasure to see the way Nell had bloomed, and toughened.
But all that mushy stuff aside, Ripley thought, there was one little blight on the rose. And its name was Ripley Karen Todd.
Newlyweds didn’t need to share their love nest with the groom’s sister.
She hadn’t given the matter a thought before the wedding, and even after, when she’d waved them both off for a week in Bermuda, she hadn’t seen the whole picture.
But when they’d returned, all snuggling and flushed with a honeymoon haze, it couldn’t have been more clear.
Just-marrieds needed privacy. They could hardly have hot, spontaneous sex on the living room floor if she might stroll into the house any time of the day or night.
Not that either of them had said anything about it. But they wouldn’t. The pair of them might as well wear we’re-nice-people merit badges plastered on their chests. And that, Ripley thought, was something she would never be pinning on her own shirt.
She stopped, used the outcropping of rocks at the far end of the beach for support as she stretched out calves, hamstrings, quadriceps.
Her body was as lean and toned as a young tiger’s. She took pride in it, in her control over it. As she bent from the waist, the ski cap that she’d tugged on fell to the sand and her hair, the color of varnished oak, tumbled free.
She wore it long because it didn’t require regular trims and styling that way. It was just another type of control.
Her eyes were a sharp bottle green. When she was in the mood she might fuss with mascara and eyeliner. After considerable debate, she’d decided her eyes were the best part of a face made up of mismatched features and angular lines.
She had a slight overbite because she’d despised her retainer. And she had the wide forehead and nearly horizontal dark eyebrows of the Ripley side of the family.
No one would have accused her of being pretty. It was too soft a word—and would have insulted her in any case. She preferred knowing it was a strong and sexy face. The kind that could attract men. When she was in the mood for one.
Which she hadn’t been, she mused, for several months.
Part of that was wedding plans, holiday plans, the time she’d spent helping Zack and Nell unwind legal tangles so they could be married. And another part, she was forced to admit, was her own sense of annoyance and unease that lingered from Halloween, when she’d ripped open pockets in herself that she had purposely sewn shut years before.
Couldn’t be helped, she thought now. She’d done what needed to be done. And had no intention of a repeat performance. No matter how many cool, smirky glances Mia Devlin shot her way.
The thought of Mia brought Ripley back full circle.
Mia had an empty cottage. Nell had rented it, then moved out when she married Zack. As much as Ripley hated the idea of having any sort of dealings, even straight business, with Mia, the yellow cottage was the perfect solution.
It was small, private, simple.
It just made sense, Ripley decided and started up the worn wooden steps that zagged from the beach toward the house. It was irritating, but it was practical. Still, maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she took a few days, let the word out that she was looking for a place to rent. Something—something that didn’t belong to Mia—might drop in her lap.
Cheered by the possibility, Ripley bounded up the steps, jogged to the back porch.
Nell would already be baking, she knew, just as she knew the kitchen would smell like heaven. The biggest advantage was that she wouldn’t have to hunt up breakfast. It would just be there. Delicious, delightful, and on demand.
As she reached for the doorknob
, she saw, through the glass, Zack and Nell. They were wrapped around each other, she thought, like ivy on a flagpole. Wrapped around each other and wrapped up in each other.
“Oh, man.”
Hissing out a breath, she backtracked, then came back up on the porch stomping like a horse and whistling. It would give them time to peel themselves off each other. At least, she hoped it would.
But it didn’t solve her other problem. She was going to have to deal with Mia, after all.
She was going to keep it casual. To Ripley’s way of thinking, if Mia knew she really wanted the yellow cottage, she would refuse to rent it.
The woman was so damn contrary.
Of course, the very best way to lock in the deal would be to ask Nell to run interference. Mia had a soft spot for Nell. But the idea of using anyone to clear the path was galling. She would just casually drop in at Mia’s bookstore, the way she had almost every day since Nell had taken over the cooking and baking for the café section.
That way she could cop a righteous lunch and new digs all in one swipe.
She walked briskly along High Street, more because she wanted the business over and done than because the wind was up and blowing. It tugged playfully at the long, straight tail of hair that she habitually yanked through the opening in the back of her cap.
When she reached Café Book she paused, pursed her lips.
Mia had redone the display window. A little tasseled footstool, a soft throw of deep red, and a pair of tall candlestands with fat red candles were arranged with seemingly haphazard piles of books. Because she knew Mia never did anything in a haphazard fashion, Ripley had to admit the whole tone was one of homey warmth and welcome. And subtly—very subtly—sexy.
It’s cold out, the window announced. Come on in and buy some books to take home and snuggle up with.
Whatever else Ripley could say about Mia—and she could say plenty—the woman knew her business.
She stepped inside into warmth, automatically unwinding her neck scarf. The deep-blue shelves were lined with books, parlor-tidy. Glass displays held pretty trinkets and intriguing dust catchers. The fireplace was simmering with a low golden flame, and another throw, blue this time, was tossed artfully over one of the deep, sink-into-me chairs.
Books by Nora Roberts Page 172