The image made Willie shiver; Raven’s nearness made her weak. His grip on her arms was gentle, the brush of his chest against her breasts warm and seductive. The minty waft of his breath fluttered a chill across the nape of her neck as he bent his head over hers and murmured, “So lovely.”
A thrill coursed through Willie as she realized Raven meant to kiss her. She knew she shouldn’t let him, not until she’d figured out why he and Johnny had identical scars. But she wanted Raven to kiss her, more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. Enough to tell herself that maybe the scar was just coincidence, enough to lift her face to his and stare, mesmerized, at his oh-so-sexy lips parting over hers.
The wind died and the trees stopped tossing. In the steady, unbroken light she could see that his teeth were very white, and that his incisors, both top and bottom, were very long and pointed.
“Oh, my. Grandpa,” she murmured, a breathy catch in her voice, “what sharp teeth you have.”
“All the better to eat you with, my dear.”
What images that stirred in Willie’s head. X-rated and wild, of twisted satin and tangled limbs. Hers and Raven’s. A soft moan escaped her as his mouth slanted over hers. She parted her lips and edged her tongue toward his.
Raven managed not to shudder with revulsion, simply broke the kiss and said, “Let’s leave something for tomorrow night, shall we?”
“You mean for dessert?”
“If you wish.”
Willie was way past wishing, had left wanting in the dust. She ached, she throbbed, she needed. Heaven help her.
“Too late for that,” Raven murmured, catching her earlobe in his teeth. He felt her stiffen and draw away, raised his head and smiled at her startled, wary expression.
“What did you say?”
“I said don’t be late. I’ll pick you up at eight forty-five. Bring a scarf for your hair. I like the top down.”
“Eight forty-five,” she repeated, forgetting all about the coq au vin and lemon meringue pie she’d intended to make for Frank. “I’ll be ready.”
“Until then. Don’t forget your mail.” He nudged the watering can aside, lifted the pot of geraniums, tucked the envelopes inside the newspaper and handed her the compact. “Or your mirror.”
“Oh—yes. Thank you.” She tucked the mail and the paper under one arm, and held the compact between her palms, her head tipped to one side. “Good night.”
It was enough that he’d placed the mirror in her hands. He saw it in her eyes, in the brief flicker of her gaze from his face to the compact and back again, in the curious, I-wonder tilt of her chin.
“Good night, Willow.” Raven nodded and headed for the car, knowing she wouldn’t be able to help herself now. That she’d look in the mirror even if it killed her.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t. And then, because he knew what she’d see, he smiled.
Chapter 11
Nothing. That’s what Willie saw. Absolutely nothing in the mirror she aimed over her right shoulder at Raven’s retreating back.
“Wait a minute,” she muttered, tipping the glass higher.
She tipped it lower, angled it to the left, then the right, and still saw nothing in the mirror but the Corvette. Willie didn’t get it, not even when she saw the driver’s door open by itself. She thought there had to be something wrong with the mirror, so she turned around.
In time to see Raven glance up and wave at her as he slid behind the wheel and leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition. Willie frowned and waved back, turned and aimed the mirror at the Corvette. She still couldn’t see Raven, yet the engine started.
The powerful growl sent a shiver up her spine. What was it she’d thought earlier? That she didn’t know much about mirrors? Only that they were expensive to resilver and you couldn’t see vampires in them because they didn’t cast reflections.
“Oh, God,” Willie moaned, the compact slipping out of her suddenly boneless fingers.
It landed with a clunk and a tinkle of breaking glass on the flagstones. She dropped to her heels and picked it up, so suddenly her head spun, so violently she had to grab the table to keep from fainting. She clung to the pebbled-glass edge, her forehead pressed against her wrist, her eyes shut, her heart hammering. She could still feel Raven’s mouth on hers —and bile in her throat.
Dear God. What had she kissed? Not a man. But what? Raven couldn’t be a vampire. There were no such things as vampires. No such things as ghosts, either, yet she’d spent an hour talking to one in a mirror.
Willie wanted to run away screaming but forced herself to stand and open the compact. The glass was only cracked. One more jolt and it would shatter. So would Willie, but she forced herself to look in the mirror one last time. Just to make sure, just as the headlights came on all by themselves.
She winced at the glare; saw the Corvette turn around and steer itself up the driveway. Yet when she spun on one foot, she saw Raven’s hair ruffling in the wind, his pale cotton shirt shimmering in the dark.
A terrified mew escaped Willie. She threw the compact one way, the mail and the newspaper the other and flew inside. She locked the French doors behind her, the front door, too, and raced through the house locking all the windows—even the ones in the attic and the basement. It was a terrified, knee-jerk reaction, and nothing short of a miracle that she didn’t fall and break her neck on the stairs.
But maybe that’s what Raven intended. Maybe that’s why he’d put the mirror in her hand and the idea in her head. Did he want Beaches badly enough to kill her to get it? Was it a warning that if she didn’t give up, he’d get rid of her his own way?
The possibility inched an icy chill up her back. Seeing Johnny in the seashell mirror, standing with his arms spread across her office doorway, the billowy sleeves of his white shirt falling in soft folds like angel’s wings, sat her down on the edge of her chair.
She didn’t know where he’d come from, or how she’d ended up here. She didn’t remember turning on the lights, either, but her desk lamp and the white enamel torchiere in the corner blazed. Johnny looked just as solid in the bright light as he had in near darkness.
The sad, I-tried-to-warn-you expression on his face wrenched her still-queasy stomach. Now she knew what he’d been trying to tell her earlier.
“Raven doesn’t want Beaches, does he?” she said to him in the mirror. “He wants you.”
Johnny nodded, slowly and gravely.
Willie wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but asked, “Why?”
He shook his head, I don’t know.
“What d’you mean, you don’t know?”
Johnny touched his right thumb to his forehead and then drew a clockwise circle with his closed fist over his heart. Willie started to reach for the dictionary and remembered she’d thrown it in the air.
“Wait a minute.” She saw it under the desk, fished it out and opened it. “Say it again.”
He did, three times, before Willie deciphered the signs.
“You don’t remember?” she said incredulously into the mirror. “You’re sorry?”
Johnny nodded, spread his hands and lifted his shoulders.
“Let me get this straight.” Willie felt an iron band of panic and frustration tightening around her chest. She drew a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “You remember sign language, but you can’t remember why Raven is after you?”
Johnny nodded, watching her cautiously in the mirror, his head tipped to one side.
“Bullshit!” Willie slammed the dictionary against the desk so hard she knocked over the brass thermometer. “You have to remember!”
He shook his head, struck his left index finger with his right, twice, and repeated the circle over his heart.
“Don’t tell me sorry! Remember!” Willie shrieked at him. “Start with remembering how to talk! If a goddamn vampire can talk, so can you!”
Johnny’s hands were moving rapidly, but froze. He blinked at her in the seashell mirror, his lips parting slowly and his eyes
widening. Willie saw the sudden, sharp rise of his chest and his hands fly up to cover his face. He lowered them slowly, a stunned and horrified expression on his face.
Either he didn’t know what Raven was or he really had forgotten. Either way, she wished she hadn’t said it, or at least hadn’t screamed it at him.
He raised his right hand to his forehead and signed, “I remember,” his hand shaking visibly in the mirror.
Lightning flickered outside the office windows as he signed it again and wheeled away from her. He paced toward the pedestal mirror, swung back and repeated, “I remember. I remember.”
Then he dropped onto the trunk, bent his elbows on his knees, raked his fingers through his hair and clenched his head.
“Maybe I’m wrong,” Willie said, hoping to God she was. “Maybe I’m just hysterical. Maybe the mirror—”
Johnny threw back his head, still clenching it as if it hurt, and screamed. He made no sound, but Willie read his pain and anguish in the twist of his mouth, the distended veins and tendons in his throat.
She wanted to put her arms around him and comfort him, but she couldn’t. All she could do was press her fingertips sympathetically to the mirror. He jerked away, as if he’d felt her touch through the glass, leapt to his feet and bolted out of the room.
“Johnny, wait!” Willie spun her chair away from the desk and pelted after him. “Johnny!”
He wasn’t in the dining room. Or the living room, the kitchen, or any other room in the house. Willie didn’t see his telltale shimmer, either, yet she could almost feel him dodging away from her, away from the mirrors.
“Talk to me, Johnny,” she called as she raced from room to room. “Tell me what you remember. Maybe we can figure out a way to make Raven go away. Please, Johnny. If nothing else, just tell me your birth date.”
She ran through the house pleading with him until her ankle started to ache and thunder began to rumble behind the lightning flashing against the windows—dull, angry thunder that crashed over the house like breakers at high tide.
Willie gave up and limped back to her office. She set the thermometer up and dropped into her chair. Her grandmother’s notebooks were strewn across the desk. On the monitor, her “Star Trek” screen-save program was busily constructing the Tholian web around the Enterprise. She felt as hemmed in as the starship, caught in something so alien it was beyond comprehension. Not to mention belief.
Willie tapped a key and the cursor appeared, blinking at the top of the empty file she’d named JOHNNY. She hadn’t transcribed a single one of Betsy’s notes, and now she couldn’t. Not with rain pelting the windows and thunder rattling the shutters.
Willie didn’t save the file, just shut off the Mac and crawled under the desk to unplug it as she always did during thunderstorms. She was flat on her back wrenching the surge protector out of the outlet when she saw Callie cowering in the dark under the desk, her tail curled around her paws.
“Some mother I am.” Willie sighed and stroked a hand down her back. “I forgot all about you. You okay?”
“Brruup,” Callie said, and began to purr.
It dawned on Willie that she hadn’t seen the cat since Johnny had shown up, that last night Callie had done the same thing, disappeared before Willie had seen Johnny in her bedroom mirror. Cats knew things, her grandmother had claimed. Like when it was best to make themselves scarce.
“Too bad I’m not a cat,” Willie murmured to Callie. Her hand was trembling, but just a little, as she petted Callie, listened to her purr and the rain drum on the windows.
Sure beat tranquilizers all to hell, hiding here under the desk. Little dusty. Might be a spider or two, but spiders didn’t scare her. Ghosts and vampires did. Maybe she’d just stay here until Johnny and Raven went away.
Fat chance. With eternity to kill, it wasn’t likely either one of them would get tired of waiting. She had to do something, but couldn’t make herself move. It seemed like a dream, or maybe a nightmare, that she’d kissed a vampire. It almost seemed as if it had happened to somebody else.
If Willie worked at it she could probably convince herself it had. She didn’t own a sweatshirt that said Call Me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial for nothing. She was no slouch at avoidance, either. She’d spent her life ducking and bucking her father’s autocratic rule, and six years and who knew how many tranquilizers denying that her job at Material Girl was driving her crazy.
She’d been a black belt in passive-aggressive behavior until Granma Boyle had willed her Beaches. She’d been standing up for herself and what she wanted ever since. If she cut and ran, to her parents in New York, to Whit in Boston, even to Frank four hundred yards down the beach, would she ever have the guts to break free again?
What could she tell them, anyway? What on earth could she say? “Gee, Dad, now I know why you’ve never felt comfortable at Beaches. It’s haunted!” What would Whit or Frank do if she called them up and said, “Guess what, guys? Raven isn’t a drug runner or a witch doctor. He’s a vampire!”
They’d drop a net on her, that’s what. No one would believe her. Everyone would think she was crazy. At last Willie understood why Granma Boyle had never told anyone about Johnny’s visits to Beaches.
She wasn’t crazy. But she wasn’t Buffy the vampire slayer, either. Nor did she want to be. She wanted Raven to go away before he broke her heart. Or she broke it herself thinking about what could have been. If only he wasn’t a vampire.
She wanted to help Johnny, too, though she couldn’t say why. Other than that he seemed to be a kinder, gentler version of Raven. She wanted to help him find the stairway to heaven, the light at the end of the tunnel—whatever he needed to stop wandering around like a lost soul.
Willie had a bad feeling that the only way to help herself and Johnny was to find out what Raven wanted from him. And why. Which she couldn’t do hiding under the desk.
Thank God she’d bought garlic for the coq au vin. She’d tie a clove of it on the chain with the little gold cross Granma had given her for confirmation. If she could trust the Boris Karloff movies she’d seen, the double whammy ought to send Raven screaming into the night. The image made Willie smile and her heart ache.
“But first we get some sleep,” she said to Callie, feeling suddenly bone weary—a sure sign of stress—as she crawled out from under the desk.
The crashing and booming had stopped, but rain still pelted the windows. Willie tucked Callie in her arm, turned off the lights and the AC and headed upstairs. A foghorn moaned, and the lynx screamed. Its eerie cry spun Willie around on the landing.
Callie growled, her tail bristling and brushing the gooseflesh spreading up Willie’s arms. Willie soothed her and scratched her ears. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, just the things that lived and hunted in it.
The lynx screamed again, reminding Willie that Lucy Pulver had told her there were still bobcats in Stonebridge. Lucy had said something about wolves, too. Willie shivered, murmuring prayers, and raced up the steps two at a time, unaware of the silvery shimmer that was Johnny outside a mirror stepping out of the shadows at the foot of the stairs.
Chapter 12
When he heard the bedroom door bang shut behind Willie, Johnny wheeled toward the front porch. He’d had enough of shrinking and cowering, a bellyful of Raven and his tricks.
The lynx screamed a third time, much closer to the house. Raven had done this before, taken some poor animal in Thrall to do his bidding. It would be, Johnny swore, the last time.
He undid the locks and flung open the front door. If Willie hadn’t latched the screen, too, he would have pushed through it into a fate worse than Raven, for the creature circling the house was not of his making.
Johnny knew it was a lynx. He also knew of Raven’s fondness for cats, but the rest of the creature’s signature was unknown to him. It stank of death and decay, of millennia-long entombment, hot and rusty sand.
A flickering memory stirred, of long, bronzed muscles and icy, numbing pain. Then the lynx s
lunk into view, bringing with it the reek of rotting vegetation, and the smell of something else—something fresh and wet, but not rain. It confused Johnny and shattered the memory that drifted away like smoke in the shape of a jackal with bared fangs. He shivered, drew back into the shadows, watched the lynx and felt a pang of sympathy for it.
It crept closer, moving stiffly, jerkily, not of its own volition, toward the porch steps. Its pelt glittered with rain, its tufted ears twitched. Johnny could smell its terror beneath the stench. As much as it feared man, it feared the thing that held it in Thrall more.
The lynx was searching but not hunting. It lifted its nose and sniffed as it skimmed up the steps, lowered its head and flared its nostrils. Johnny drew deeper into the shadows, but the lynx paid him no mind. It swung away, following a scent along the porch.
Johnny eased the door shut, turned the locks and raced to the French doors. From there he watched the lynx prowl the terrace and rise on its short, powerful hind legs. It sniffed the chair Raven had sat in and the table, one paw resting on the pebbled edge, its claws gleaming in the faint sheen of the moon.
Memory flickered again. Johnny had seen claws like that before. No, he’d been clutched mercilessly in claws like that, but he couldn’t remember where or when. He tried, but couldn’t hold the image. It slipped away yet again, like the fog beginning to curl around the white iron table legs.
The lynx dropped to all fours and stood, head down and panting, its flanks heaving, its breathing shallow and artificially quickened. Johnny wished he had his carbine. It would be a kindness to kill it. If the Thralldom didn’t do it in, its life span would be significantly lengthened, its metabolism skewed, its mind warped.
How did he know that? A shiver crawled up the back of his neck. He’d seen this before. Seen someone pull a carbine from a saddle holster and shoot… not a lynx, but a jackal. Several of them prowling the fringe of a firelit desert camp. A man with bristly muttonchops who seemed familiar, but whose face he couldn’t see, whose name he couldn’t recall.
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