The voice in Willie’s head snapped off, so suddenly she had to grip the edge of the table to keep her knees from buckling. She blinked at Raven, who was stretching to his feet with a scowl on his face.
“Oops.” Frank stepped past the ring of luminarias, a sheepish smile on his face, his hands in the pockets of his cut-offs. “I didn’t know you had a guest.”
“Dr. Jonathan Raven, Frank Chou,” Willie said. I’ll get Whit for this, she thought.
“Nice to meet you, Doctor.” Frank stepped forward, pulling his right hand out of his pocket.
“A pleasure, Mr. Chou. The key lime pie is excellent.” Raven shook his hand, and then glanced at Willie. “If you’re free tomorrow evening, Miss Evans, I’d like very much to take you to dinner.”
It was tempting—Raven was tempting—but he wasn’t interested in her. Just in Beaches. He hadn’t said so, but he didn’t have to. The cool distance he kept said it for him.
“I think you’d better ask my attorney, Dr. Raven,” Willie said. “He likes French cuisine, by the way.”
“He’s not my type, but I’ll give him a call.” He smiled again, this time with an arched, dark eyebrow. “Thank you for dinner, Miss Evans. Good evening to you both.”
He walked across the sandy lawn rather than up the steps and along the porch. Willie watched him go, his white shirt shimmering in the warm summer darkness. She watched until the headlights came on, swooping around in a half circle as Raven backed up the car. When the Corvette purred away down the driveway, Willie rounded on Frank.
“The next time I see Whit, I’m going to smash his cell phone over his head.”
“Won’t do any good, Willie. He’ll just buy another one.”
“Then I’ll smash yours over your head. How’s that?”
“C’mon, Will, lighten up. We love you.”
“Love me, Frank.” Willie stacked the dishes on a tray and glared at him. “But don’t smother me.”
“You mean it?” His dark eyes lit up and he wagged his eyebrows. “At last?”
She laughed. Frank grinned, picked up the tray and carried it into the kitchen. Willie stayed behind to blow out the luminarias, and got enough sand in her eyes to make them water like crazy.
Which is exactly what she thought she was when she looked up and saw a man standing on the porch, gazing down the driveway toward the thin ribbon of road that wound along the beach toward Stonebridge. A man wearing breeches and knee-high boots, a vest and a shirt with full sleeves billowing in the offshore breeze— transparent sleeves she could see through.
Willie’s heart leapt and raced in her throat. She shut her eyes, counted to three, wiped the tears away and opened them. There was no one there, just the shadow of the porch swing rocking back and forth and squeaking in the wind.
“No more daiquiris tonight,” she said firmly.
Then she ducked into the house, shut off the terrace lights and locked the French doors behind her.
Chapter 3
Raven felt the locks click as if he’d turned them with his own fingers. He wanted to throw back his head and howl, but gripped the wheel instead and punched the accelerator.
The red Corvette slithered through an S-curve as neatly and quickly as a snake. Raven hated snakes. He’d bent them to his purpose from time to time, but he always killed them after. Usually hacked them to bits from tail to head. Slowly.
He had to get rid of the meal he’d swallowed. Even cooked, and so minute they’d be hard to detect with the most powerful microscope, the traces of animal blood in the food were enough to send his system raging. He despised puking on the roadside, but there was no choice. He had to halt the blood madness now, while he still could. It was that or wheel the car around and lure Willow—no, Miss Evans—from the house, rip out her throat and hand it to her.
The bitch. The silly little carrot-headed bitch.
The warning red tinge was already pulsing at the corners of his vision. He took his foot off the gas, eased the Corvette onto the sandy shoulder and kicked the door open. It sailed through the warm summer night, whistling, and landed, kicking up sand as it bounced end over end, forty yards up the dunes on the other side of the road.
The steering wheel was still in his hands—only he was standing beside the car. He tossed it onto the seat and ran for a small copse of scraggly pines, fell on his knees, hands buried to his wrists in the sand, and emptied his stomach. He scraped sand over the mess like a cat, crawled out of the trees and sprawled on his back on the beach, one arm flung over his eyes. If he’d been able to, he would have wept.
It always took a long time for the residue of the blood madness to fade. He was already late for his shift in ER, but he’d see to it that no one would notice or even remember.
Guilt used to come to him easily. Now he had to reach for it, remind himself he was a doctor, that he’d taken an oath of responsibility. When guilt failed him completely, amorality would consume him, destroy everything he’d once been and yearned to be again before he forgot how. If he’d been able to, he would have prayed, but prayer was forbidden to him.
He could only lower his arm and let the moon bathe his face. The pale light was a balm to him. He was Luna’s child now, more than he’d ever been.
A trill of whale song rippled through his senses. It was a blue, breaking the surface and blowing far offshore. Raven could feel him, could almost see the tall, bandy-legged old man who used to bring him here to listen to the whales sing. The memory was faint, as all his memories were, and growing fainter with each passing full moon.
Raven sat up, looped his arms around his knees and saw the lynx crouched nearby, watching him through slitted eyes. He raised his left hand and the cat arched beneath his palm, its rough fur bristling. The moonstone on Raven’s finger swirled with pale, opalescent color.
In India once, his despair had drawn a Bengal tiger. He’d spent the night in the jungle hunting with the great cat. He’d used the skills he’d learned from the tiger to stalk and take the moonstone from Nekhat, from the amulet he wore around his neck. Once he’d dealt with Miss Willow Evans, he’d stalk Nekhat again. And this time he’d send him back to Hell where he belonged.
The lynx rubbed its jowls against his leg, peeling back its lip and exposing its curved fangs. They shimmered in the feeble light of the first-quarter half-moon. So did the ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for eternal life, carved into the moonstone on Raven’s finger.
He asked the lynx if it had seen his Shade. The cat sat on its haunches, flicked its ears and began to purr. Raven listened. At sunset the lynx had risen to hunt, had tracked the shadow of a man whose scent matched his, making his way through the dunes toward the house.
Raven felt his senses quicken, much as the lynx’s would when he sensed prey. This was the closest he’d come to his Shade in the 117 years since he’d lain on the floor of Nekhat’s tomb and watched it rise from his body.
He’d been tracking his Shade since 1898, since the Vatican scholar he’d held for a time as a Thrall had brought him an illuminated manuscript from the twelfth century. It was a copy of a papyrus once cataloged in the library at Alexandria. In it he’d found the Riddle of Rejoining.
The monk who had translated the scroll from the original Aramaic had substituted the word soul for shade, but the meaning was the same. Raven preferred Shade, for he wasn’t sure he believed in a God who allowed an abomination like Nekhat—or himself—to live.
He’d realized that what he’d seen rising from his body was his soul, the essence of his humanity, and for the first time he’d felt hope—of regaining his mortality, of ending his tortured existence. From there, it had taken him two years of fevered study to decipher the rest of the Riddle, to determine the items needed to perform the Ritual of Rejoining, the where and the when and the how.
The first step was gaining the moonstone, the second capturing his Shade. He’d thought he’d sensed its presence when he was on the terrace, but his awareness of it had been faint. As the moon
waxed toward fullness, so would his Shade, gaining the focus and strength to resist Raven and the power of the moonstone to bind it to him until the time of the Ritual.
It was imperative that he catch the Shade now, while it was too weak to fight him. From the long years he’d spent tracking it and learning the pattern it followed, Raven knew the Shade was most vulnerable when it Cycled here in Stonebridge, where long ago he and Raven had been one. And happy. Now the Shade was terrified of him. He didn’t blame it. He was terrified of himself.
He supposed it was ironic that a mortal had made herself an obstacle in his path. He’d almost gotten rid of Willow Evans tonight, and would have if the Chinese man hadn’t interrupted. Much as he loathed the idea of taking her in Thrall, of enslaving her to his will, it would be necessary for the sake of expedience. She was wary now, so it would be more difficult. And it would take time he didn’t have—another irony, for his Shade had come late.
It should have arrived nearly a week ago with the new moon. Raven had spent the past six nights sweeping the beach and the dunes with his senses in search of it. He knew from the Riddle that the pattern of the Shade’s Cycle never varied, yet it had. A worrisome wrinkle.
Raven stretched to his feet. The lynx wound around his ankles, purring and inviting him to hunt. It was tempting, and simple to shift his shape, safe then to ingest animal blood, so long as he spent the day in stasis and gave his system time to metabolize it. But it also hastened the descent into bestiality, so Raven declined, softening the refusal by dropping to his heels to cup the cat’s head and use his own rough tongue to lick its ears.
The lynx purred more deeply and returned the favor. The sandpaper scrape along his temples and his eyebrows raised no shivers and stirred no senses, for Raven had none. Not by mortal definitions. He was aware of it, but that was all.
When they parted, the lynx slipped away into the dunes to hunt. Raven walked back up the beach to the road, stretching his awareness into the night. He could feel every heart that pulsed in Stonebridge and a goodly area beyond, could tell the age and condition of the muscle. The sensitivity was often useful in the ER, though that was not its purpose.
If he were to hunt in his present form, he would isolate those already marked for death, much as a lion stalks the old or infirm and cuts them from the herd. Most of those like Raven hunted in the same fashion, preferring an easy kill. But not all. Nekhat was one who did not.
He hunted and fed in binges, when the mood or the hunger struck, in rampages of blood and terror. His feeding patterns were an aberration, a horror even to those like him. Raven had spent years studying Nekhat, carefully and from a distance. He possessed the scientific skills and knowledge and had little else with which to occupy himself between the Cycles of his Shade. He’d even returned to Egypt to research, though he’d ventured no farther than the Cairo Museum.
He’d spent three mortal years there in deep, nonstop study, inhaling the dust of millennia from crumbling papyrus scrolls in arid storage rooms, for he did not require sleep, and needed stasis only when he ingested animal blood. He’d left Cairo knowing all there was to know of Nekhat and the abomination of his creation, how the ancients had managed to trap Nekhat and seal him in the tomb.
By the time Raven reached the ruined red Corvette, he was mostly himself again—calm and controlled, without feeling and as cold as the moon. He took his cell phone out of the glove compartment and called a tow truck, then Stonebridge General to report he’d had car trouble but would be there soon. It was the mortal thing to do. Then he ripped the CD player out of the dash, drew back his arm and hurled it into the sea.
Next he retrieved the car door, erasing the marks it had left in the sand with a glance. He puzzled over what to do with it for a moment, then tossed it onto the shoulder behind the car, folded his arms and leaned against the rear fender. He left the steering wheel on the seat.
While he waited, he stretched his awareness one last time, far beyond the confines of Stonebridge. Nekhat still lay in stasis, not on this continent but near enough that when he rose Raven would know. The uneasy ripple in his senses, stirred by the tardiness of his Shade, edged away.
When the tow truck approached, the beams of its headlights swirling in the fog beginning to wisp around his ankles, Raven leaned off the car. He put a bewildered smile on his face as Jake Smith, who owned the only tow service in Stonebridge, swung out of the cab. He was a big, beefy man with a strong, booming heart despite the roll of fat overhanging his belt and the cigar clamped in his teeth.
“What the hell happened, Doc?” Jake lifted his grease-stained Boston Red Sox baseball cap, scratched his head and walked slowly around the Vette.
“Beats me, Jake.” Raven shook his head and ran a hand through his hair. “I stopped to walk on the beach and this is what I found when I came back.”
“What ‘er you doing clear out here this time of night?”
“Willow Evans invited me to dinner. I was on my way back to town, on my way to work, actually.”
Jake chuckled and grinned around his cigar. “Don’t tell me you was mad enough to do this yourself.”
“Hardly.” Raven laughed. “I was mad enough to kick the tires a couple times and go for a walk to cool off.”
“Cute little gal, Willie, but provoking’. Just like her Granma. Betsy Boyle was a real pistol.” Jake took a flashlight out of his back pocket and shone it into the car. “Took your CD player, Doc. But, jeez.” He picked up the steering wheel and shook his head. “How the hell’d they do this and tear off the door?”
“I can hardly wait,” Raven said mournfully, “to call my insurance agent.”
“Mebbe it was aliens.” Jake winked and put the wheel in the back seat. “I seen on TV where some goofballs out in California claim they come and took ‘em outta their beds.”
“What will they think of next?”
“Damned if I know, but I been haulin’ folks outta ditches and snowdrifts for near twenty year and I ain’t never seen anything like this.” Jake walked behind the car, grunting as he bent, heaved the door over and ran the flashlight over it. “Looka here, Doc. Had to use a crowbar or somethin’, but there ain’t a scratch or a dent no place.”
Oops. “Pull the other leg,” Raven said. The light is poor, he thought to Jake. You’re mistaken. Just put the door in the car and forget about it.
“I’ll show you when we git to the garage.” He rose with the door in his arms and laid it in the back seat. “Got anything you need in here, get it out while I winch it up.”
While Jake swung the truck around and backed it up to the Corvette, Raven leaned into the back seat. With one hand he retrieved his bag, slipping the phone inside it, and his white lab coat. With the other he dented the door, near the hinges where it would look pried, and dragged scratches in the vivid red finish with his nails.
“Yep,” Jake said, swinging out of the truck again to attach the winch. “I definitely think it was aliens.”
“How about fairies?” Raven called over the whine of the cable as he opened the passenger door. “Or werewolves?”
Jake laughed. Raven swung into the cab, ripe with the smell of cigar smoke, laid his bag on the floor and draped his lab coat over his knees.
What’s the world coming to, he wondered as he peeled red paint out from under his fingernails, when aliens are more believable than vampires?
Chapter 4
By eight-thirty Friday morning, when Willie finished her third cup of coffee, it was seventy-eight degrees and the humidity was 82 percent. She gave up, shut off her Macintosh computer and called Jim Eggleson at Eggleson Heating and Cooling.
“You know Beaches as well as you know me, Jim,” she said. “Bring whatever you think’ will work best and hook it up.”
“I thought ahead when you bought the new furnace. Ductwork is already in. Me and the boys’ll be there directly.”
“Terrific. I’ll give you lunch.”
“Got any key lime pie left? Jake said y’baked o
ne.”
“When did Jake get to be clairvoyant?”
“That Dr. Raven’s car quit on him after he left your place last night. Jake towed him in, a course.”
A course. Willie thought briefly, but not wistfully, of Manhattan and its anonymity.
“If it ain’t poisoned,” Eggleson went on, “me and the boys’ll be glad to polish off that pie.”
“It’s not poisoned.” Willie laughed. “It’s yours.”
She hung up, and the phone rang. She answered it and Whit said. “You forgot to call me.”
“Your office doesn’t open for half an hour.”
“I’ve been here since seven. What happened with Raven?”
“Promise you won’t tell Dad?”
“Did he make a pass?”
She should be so lucky, Willie thought. “He offered me five million dollars for Beaches.”
“Good God!” Whit exclaimed, and then groaned. “You said no, didn’t you?”
“Of course I said no.”
“Willie, Willie—”
“Why do you suppose Beaches is worth that much to him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I should dig a little deeper into Dr. Raven. An offer that size means he knows as well as I do that his uncle’s will gives him a feeble at best claim to the house.”
“So why investigate him?”
“Beaches is pretty isolated and right on the water. Maybe he’s a drug dealer or something.”
“He’s a doctor.”
“That doesn’t mean he isn’t a crook. It just means he’s been to medical school. You wouldn’t happen to know where?”
“Hardly. Jake Smith might. He’s the resident clairvoyant in Stonebridge.”
“Good idea. Poke around town. See who knows what. I’ll run his social, but I’ll only get facts and dates. You can put flesh on the bones.”
“So you can strip it off again?”
“Do you want Raven to leave you alone?”
“All right, all right. Hey, Whit. What’s the difference between a dead lawyer in the middle of the road and a dead snake in the middle of the road?”
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