Realm of Shadows (Vampire Alliance)
Page 34
She left.
But there was really no way to leave Finn behind completely. She had always loved the look of him, the feel of him, the deep quality of his voice, the sound of his laughter. The scent of him. Her folks had been living in Maine at the time, and she’d gone home, and taken work with an old friend who was a guitarist, singing light rock and folk music at a coffeeshop. The pay hadn’t been great, but the hours and perks had been wonderful—great coffee, good food, and time to work on the songwriting that was her true love and passion in life—as far as her career went. Living with her parents wasn’t difficult, their home in Maine was large, and she had an entire area of the place to herself, a carriage house that had been beautifully remodeled into an apartment.
But when she should have been working, she spent her time wondering about her estranged husband, and the flutist.
Maybe the flutist was no longer with him. Maybe he had moved on to a keyboard player.
She had been away for six months, wondering whether or not to sign the divorce papers, when he had shown up one night at the coffeeshop. Civil at first, but cold. He had quizzed her about her friend, Harry, with whom she was working. She thought about letting him think what he wanted to think. Harry was handsome. Gorgeous. Dark haired, blue eyed. Really nice. So was his boyfriend. When Finn cast off his mantle of cool detachment, she found herself admitting that Harry would never be more than a friend, though a very good friend. And when they stood in the summer breeze outside the place, he told her very seriously that there had never been anything between him and the flutist, any other musician, or any other woman, period. She had suspected; he had denied, and then been angry that she had suspected, and . . . it just hadn’t been a good time. He couldn’t live without her, and he wanted her back.
She could have melted on the spot, and in her way, she did, throwing herself into his arms, practically sobbing, ready to strip him in the street. She didn’t tell her parents he was there that night; she was just grateful that her apartment was an annex, far to the left of the main house.
They’d gone home to New Orleans the next week, where he’d had great work lately, fronting a number of well-known groups at the House of Blues. Many of their friends had been skeptical. Mainly because of the bread episode.
In the midst of one of their arguments, he’d backed her against a table on their balcony, which overlooked the street. She had been about to make sandwiches. The bread was there, and she had furiously grabbed the loaf by its plastic cover, and struck him over the head. Naturally, they’d been seen. Rumor spread. He’d been pushing her around. She’d struck him not with bread, but a bottle of wine. According to rumor, she’d desperately attacked him with the wine because he’d been about to use violence against her. No matter how many times she’d tried to tell people it had been a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine made a better story. When they’d split, it hadn’t seemed to matter too much. Now, explaining the episode was tiresome.
Friends had called friends . . . had called relatives ... had called her parents. So naturally now that they were back, her folks were concerned.
It was possible to understand Finn’s anger when she had screamed so ...
But he should have understood as well.
She wished she hadn’t screamed here, in Salem.
She had actually grown up not in Salem, but in close-by Marblehead. And though she was able to see many members of her extended family, they hadn’t come for that reason. Finn had come home one day to tell her that he’d received a really top quality financial offer to entertain at a hotel in Salem for the entire week before Halloween. The money was truly impressive; the prestige of being offered such a solo gig was equally persuasive. First, they were going on a vacation, taking the honeymoon they’d never had before, and spend time in Florida. Sunny Florida, and then spooky old Salem. While they were gone, the workmen could do some of the necessary repairs on their home in the French Quarter, and it would all be perfect. Perhaps he hadn’t realized just how far rumors had gone, and that her family members would all stare at him, wondering if he was a wife beater, if Megan shouldn’t have stayed as far away from him as she could.
She turned, wanting then to make amends, wishing she’d never touched that loaf of bread.
To her surprise, he was no longer lying awake. His eyes were closed, lips slightly parted, and he was breathing deeply and evenly.
“Finn?”
He didn’t answer.
Megan slipped out of the bed, frowning, but he still didn’t wake. She walked over to the big, overstuffed antique chair by the fireplace and found her heavy velour robe, wrapping it tightly around her. She pulled back the draperies to the balcony door, hesitated, then slipped out.
October in Massachusetts. A cool breeze was softly moving, but it wasn’t uncomfortably cold outside. The sky was beautiful and strange, a deep blue, almost black in places, and light, almost ethereal in others. As she looked down at the street below, she saw a slow whirl of fog, and she found herself remembering the words of the crusty old storyteller who had been at the fireside tale-telling earlier in town.
Ah, but though those caught, hanged, and pressed to death, as old Giles Corey, were most probably true innocents, those earlier guardians of justice might not have been so foolish in their fears of evil, though they were daft in their methods of discovery. Think my friends, when there is goodness, there must be evil, and evil is rooted in the very history of mankind. Throughout the years there have been stories of man, and of beasts, and of those creatures who fall somewhere in between them. As there have been angels, there have been devils. There is the Good Book and there are works of the greatest demonic frenzy, and there have always been, as there are now, those who seek the secrets of the Devil, of imps and demons from beyond, of the salvage of beings we remember only in the deepest, darkest, recesses of our hearts ... it’s said, you know, that on Hallow’s Eve, it is the night when the dead may rise ... especially if they are so bidden, if, perhaps, they are called from the fires of hell to walk upon the earth once again, to inhabit the lives and souls of man.
A log had fallen in the fire then; half the old man’s audience had jumped and cried out, and then laughed. Megan had done so herself. She hadn’t imagined that she would come back to their rented room, dream of evil, and scream in the night.
The fog below appeared to be blue. It seemed to spiral, puff, curl, and move like some living thing itself.
She wasn’t afraid of fog ...
She felt the lightest touch against her nape. Fingers, lifting her hair, softly, gently. She closed her eyes and smiled.
Finn had awakened. He was behind her.
That was his ritual. He would come to her. Stand in silence. Touch her hair, lift her hair, press his lips against the flesh of her nape. She felt him touch her then. The hot moistness of his lips, the warm, arousing moisture of his breath. In seconds, his arms would come around her. He would tell her that he loved her. And being Finn, he would bring his hips hard against her while he held her, and probably whisper that if she was going to scream, he should see to it that she was screaming for all the right reasons, because the things he could do to her were just so good that she couldn’t begin to help herself ...
She felt his hands, sliding over the velour, under it, touching her flesh ...
His touch fell away. She thought she heard him breathing . . . waiting. Waiting for her to turn into his arms, melt into them as she always did.
“Finn . . .”
She spun around, ready to do just that.
He wasn’t there.
She was alone on the balcony.
The breeze suddenly turned colder. The eerie blue fog was rising from the street, moving quickly, coming higher, as if it were eager to engulf her.
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
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Copyright © 2002 by Shannon Drake
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ISBN: 978-1-4201-3145-1
ISBN-10: 1-4201-3145-1
eISBN-13: 978-1-4201-3280-9
eISBN-10: 1-4201-3280-6
First Electronic Edition: November 2003
Previously published under the name Shannon Drake.