Nightwing

by Lynn Michaels

  “You can say that again.”

  “The storm blew a couple of branches off the fruit trees. I broke them up and bundled them.”

  “Thanks.” Willie took out a saucepan and lid, a measuring cup and salt, ducked into the pantry for the oatmeal and saw in the trash the mail and the compact she’d thrown to the four winds. Maybe Frank had picked it all up. She wondered, but instead asked him, “How about the oak in the side yard?”

  “Dropped a few leaves and some dead twigs. I’ll rake after breakfast.”

  “I’ll do it.” Willie gave him a bright smile as she came out of the pantry. “I like to rake.”

  Frank cocked his head at her. “Since when?”

  “Since it’s been too hot to do anything but run like hell for the car and turn on the air conditioner.”

  “Okay.” Frank shrugged and went outside for his cup.

  Willie sighed with relief, mixed the oatmeal and set it to cook on the front burner of the stove. She had about as much chance of sneaking off to Raven’s house with Frank raking the side yard as Raven did of buying or scaring her out of Beaches.

  “So, Will,” Frank said as he came back into the kitchen, “what’s with the mirrors?”

  She had to hand it to him. He managed to make the question sound as mundane as oatmeal. And almost as sticky.

  “Well, Frank, it’s like this.” Willie took the pan off the burner and put the lid on. “Beaches is haunted and the mirrors are ghost traps. And I’m pretty sure I was ravished by a vampire last night.”

  He stood in the doorway looking at her, his head tipped at a dubious angle and one eyebrow notched. Willie gave him a toothy smile.

  “I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” He said just as Johnny stepped into the dining room mirrors behind him.

  Willie’s heart shot up into her throat. She felt every touch, every caress Raven had stroked on her body last night, felt her knees go weak and her breath catch. She’d been afraid of this, of what she’d feel seeing Johnny, the phantom image of Raven.

  He was a good head and a half taller than Frank. His arms were folded and his face was a thundercloud. She’d never seen a pissed-off ghost before, and hoped Frank wouldn’t turn around and see one, either.

  Willie yanked her gaze away from Johnny and wagged her eyebrows at Frank.

  “Gotcha,” she said, turning toward the toaster. “Would you hand me the butter?”

  “Sure. So what are the mirrors for, really?”

  “The cat,” Willie lied, glancing over her shoulder as she peeled four slices of wheat bread out of a loaf. “Callie loves to chase herself in them.”

  Frank looked at her funny, but didn’t say anything, just handed her the butter out of the fridge. Johnny was still glowering at her. Why was he angry? What had she done?

  “You okay, Will?” Frank laid his hands on her shoulders. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  Willie laughed. What else could she do?

  “I’m fine, Frank. Just tired. The thunder kept waking me up.” She put her hands on his shoulders and walked him backward to the table. “Sit down and eat.”

  By the time Willie buttered the toast, put milk and sugar and orange marmalade on the table, Johnny was gone. Still, her oatmeal went down like library paste. She and Frank split the last piece of toast and then carried the dishes to the sink. She rinsed and he put them in the dishwasher.

  “I don’t know why you bother,” he said. “The dishes are clean when you load them.”

  “At least I,” Willie said archly, “have never dug half a bowl of spaghetti out of the bottom of my dishwasher.”

  “It wasn’t spaghetti. It was macaroni.” Frank winked at her. “And it was perfectly cooked.”

  “Yuk.” Willie laughed and passed him a fistful of spoons and butter knives just as Callie launched herself between them at the open window above the sink.

  Willie yelped, startled. The silverware went flying and clattered onto the floor. Frank picked it up, straightened and made a face at Callie. She sat on the sill, her tail twitching, her eyes riveted on the birds feeding on the lawn.

  “Oh, look,” he said. “It’s the great calico gull killer.”

  Callie gave him a drop-dead feline glare and turned back to the window. So did Willie, her heart skidding against her ribs when she saw the lone raven perched in the peach tree, its head cocked as it watched the other birds, gulls and grackles mostly, peck at the worms and grubs the storm had brought to the surface.

  “So,” Frank said. “How’d it go with Raven last night?”

  “Fine.” Willie bent her head, scrubbing the wooden spoon furiously with the dish brush. “Pronounced my ankle healed and left just before the storm hit.”

  “He put any moves on you?”

  “Nary a one,” Willie lied, since she’d already decided she wasn’t going to dinner or anyplace else with Raven. Tonight or any other night.

  “Not even “Hey, baby, come on up to the lab and see what’s on the slab’?”

  The wooden spoon leapt out of Willie’s fingers. Callie meowed irritably and jumped off the windowsill.

  “Raven’s not that kind of doctor,” Willie snapped. “And I’m in no mood to play The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

  Not so long as she was living it. Willie fished the spoon out of the disposer and slapped it into Frank’s hand.

  “You’re strung out is what you are. I thought you weren’t going to take any more of those pills.”

  “I took one, Frank, so I could sleep through the storm.” Willie snatched the phone off its receiver and thrust it at him. “Go ahead. Call Whit and tell him I’m on drugs again.”

  “Cheap shot, Will.” Frank took the phone away from her and hung it up. “We’ll talk about this later when you come down off the ceiling.”

  He put a kiss between her eyebrows and left. Willie stood at the sink gripping the stainless steel edge, watching the raven bob up and down in the wind, which was swaying the branches of the peach tree.

  “Go away!” she shouted.

  The flock leapt into the air in a flurry of wings and startled squawks. Willie ran, straight and unseeing, through the hand Johnny raised as she raced by him and out the French doors. He felt a flash of her panic, then a wrenching stab of envy as Frank turned around when she called his name and she threw herself into his arms.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Willie buried her face in Frank’s shoulder, felt his arms close around her and wanted to cry. He wasn’t tan and hot and sexy like Raven, but he was real. He was alive and warm and he was her friend.

  “What’s going on, Will? And don’t tell me nothing. I know you better.”

  “I’ll tell you later.” And she would, Willie decided, backing out of his embrace. “I’ll call you, okay?”

  “Okay.” Frank put another kiss between her eyebrows.

  Willie hugged herself and watched him walk away, then ran back inside for her purse and her car keys. She saw the yellow Post-It note stuck to the monitor as she came through the office door, peeled it off and read the single neat line of copperplate script: “I was born in this house on 19 July 1843.”

  The same day as Raven. He and Johnny had the same birthday, the same profession, the same name, the same face, the same scar. It stretched credibility too far, even for a gullible soul like Willie.

  “First reading, now writing,” she said, spinning away from the desk. “What’s next, Johnny? Arithmetic?”

  Willie waited, but the mirrors remained empty. Ready to scream, she tossed the note aside and slammed out of the house.

  Rain speckled the terrace; a stiff, salty wind tossed the trees lining the driveway. Willie opened the garage, dropped a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers and a flashlight into her purse and snapped the shell on the Jeep.

  She had no idea what all the similarities between Johnny and Raven meant, but she had a sneaking, frustrating suspicion the answer was right in front of her, that she simply couldn’t see it for looking at
it.

  Willie almost didn’t see the raven perched on the terrace wall, either, until she’d pulled the Jeep out of the garage. Her breath caught, and her fingers stopped in mid-reach for the seat belt. The raven hopped sideways and cawed at her, then flapped away into the lowering gray sky.

  “Damn bird,” she muttered, stomping on the gas hard enough to spin the tires and spit gravel halfway up the driveway.

  Rain and fog blew across the road in gusty sheets. Willie switched on the lights and the wipers. If she believed in omens like the weather, she’d go home and hide under the bed, but she wasn’t sure what she believed in. Except her own sanity and that Raven, for some reason, wanted her alive.

  She didn’t know why but she was determined to find out—even if she had to beat it out of him with the dove of garlic she’d tied with a thread to her cross.

  Raven lived in one of the stately old Cape houses built along a crookneck inlet of the sound, in an area that was mostly moorland, flat and featureless, its few trees stunted by salt and twisted by wind.

  Not quite a horror-movie landscape, but close enough to make Willie think twice about hiding under the bed—until she crossed the bridge spanning the inlet and the rain stopped, the fog lifted and watery sunshine gleamed through thin silver patches of cloud. Mist still hung over the marshes, but she had no trouble finding the address Hester Pavao had given her in the post office.

  Finding the courage to get out of the Jeep was something else. Willie parked in the driveway and sat listening to her heart pound in her ears. She should have left a note just in case she was wrong about Raven and she disappeared without a trace. And she should have changed her underwear, like her mother always said, just in case she didn’t.

  She tried but couldn’t read the sticker on the Corvette’s back bumper, gave up and got out of the Jeep. The bumper sticker said I’m A +. What’s Your Type?

  Vampire humor, Willie supposed. She turned up the curved brick walk, wiping her clammy hands on her jeans. There were white mini-blinds, all closed, on the windows, a dead-bolt lock, a bell and a knocker on the front door.

  She rang and banged as hard as she could for a good ten minutes. It was enough to wake the dead, but not a vampire. As the last chime of the doorbell faded, so did Willie’s faint hope that she wouldn’t have to break in to the house.

  Maybe she’d try the car first. She might get lucky and find something incriminating—say, a black cape or a road map of Transylvania. Willie turned away from the door, digging the flashlight out of her purse, and froze.

  The raven sat on the yard light watching her.

  Chapter 14

  Visions of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds danced in Willie’s head. She squinted nervously at the sky and then ventured gingerly onto the walkway. The raven swooped onto the bricks and hopped toward her. She scrambled back onto the porch and stayed there until it flew to the roof of the Corvette, cawed at her and flapped away around the corner of the house.

  Willie didn’t follow, even though she had a hunch that was what the raven wanted. Sure enough, it came back within a ten count, swooped onto the Corvette, spread its wings, ruffled its feathers and cawed again.

  “All right, all right, I’m coming,” she said, gripping her purse with both hands to keep them from shaking.

  The raven took off again. Willie followed, peering cautiously around the back of the house when she reached it. The raven perched on the rail of a deck overlooking the inlet. Mist swirled above the still, pewter surface.

  Something rattled above Willie’s head: an open window on the second floor. The raised blind banged the glass, but that wasn’t what the raven wanted her to notice. It flew across the deck and raked its talons at the handle of a sliding-glass door covered by a half-open vertical blind. Then it flew back to the rail and cawed at her.

  Willie had a nasty feeling she knew where this was going, but she opened the unlocked door anyway, then backed as far away from it as she could. The raven flew past her into the house. Swallowing hard and saying a prayer for her very mortal and very frightened soul, Willie stepped inside.

  She closed the door and leaned against it, rattling the blind slats and blinking to adjust her eyes to the shaded half-light.

  She was in the dining room. The kitchen was to her left, the living room and the raven, perched on the seat of a wing chair, dead ahead. A light-colored shirt and a pair of jeans were tossed over the back of the chair.

  “Now what?” she asked the bird shakily.

  The raven spread its wings—and spread its wings and spread its wings. Each time it seemed to grow larger, until Willie realized the bird was growing larger. And changing shape, shifting and wavering in and out of focus. One second it was a bird, the next it was—Raven!

  Willie clapped her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming, and wished she had two more she could clap over her eyes. She closed them instead; her throat choked with horror, until a firm voice said, “Look at me.”

  She didn’t want to, but she did, and saw the feathers retreating from the face. The beak elongated into a nose, then came a chin and the mouth she’d kissed last night. The wings were arms now, the talons toes. He was nude. Naked as a jaybird. Raven laughed, his voice still raucous, and crossed his dark-haired legs.

  Willie’s face was on fire and her hands, still clamped over her mouth, were like ice. She closed her eyes again. Rather, Raven let her close them. She felt it, almost like a finger lifting off a button inside her head.

  “You can open your eyes, Willow,” he said. She heard denim rustle, a zipper close. “I’m decent now.”

  “You’re obscene.”

  “I’m a vampire. Which you already suspected or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Willie wanted to be ten thousand miles away from here. Mostly she wanted to cry, but she’d be damned if she would, damned if she’d let Raven know he’d scared her half to death and broken her heart. She opened her eyes.

  Raven was shrugging into a shirt, a white one made of soft cotton with long, full sleeves. He buttoned it from the bottom to his chest—his well-muscled chest, thick with dark hair. Willie realized he always did that, that he never fastened a shirt around his throat.

  “You gave me the mirror. You put the idea in my head. Why?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Sorry. I gave at the blood bank.”

  “I don’t need that kind of help.”

  He came toward her, his shirt untucked, his feet bare. Willie gripped her purse strap and held her ground as Raven came around behind her to close the window blind, then rounded the oak table and took the lid off a ceramic jar squatting beside a red leather notebook. She’d seen pictures of others like it, recognized the faded hieroglyphs on the curved sides and realized it was a canopic Jar, an Egyptian funerary urn.

  “My God. You’re him,” Willie said on a sharp intake of breath. “The Jonathan Raven who was murdered in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings in 1878.”

  “I’m half of him.” Raven withdrew his moonstone ring from the jar. “The other half you know as Johnny.”

  “Don’t you mean better half?”

  “I mean mortal,” he said, slipping the ring on his finger. “I was attacked by a vampire who’d been sealed in a tomb for nearly two thousand years. Unfortunately, he didn’t kill me. He merely—separated me, split me in two.”

  Oh, sure, Willie thought, happens all the time. “Excuse me?” she said. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It means I became a vampire and the part of me you know as Johnny became my disembodied spirit. My soul, if you believe in such things. I prefer to call him my Shade.”

  No wonder Johnny seemed like a kinder, gentler version of Raven. No wonder she’d felt all along there was something not quite right about Raven, something missing. The answer had, indeed, been right under her nose. And she wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years.

  “I thought you were Johnny reincarnated,” she said.

  “An interesting noti
on,” Raven replied, and turned toward the kitchen.

  Thin bars of sunlight slanted across the floor through the half-open blind on the window above the sink. He walked through them, unscathed, and opened the fridge.

  “You give at the blood bank,” he said. “I take.”

  The shelves held nothing but blood in clear plastic bags. In the bright glare of the frosted bulb they gleamed like slabs of liver. Willie felt her gorge rise, and swallowed.

  “Don’t they miss that stuff?”

  “Blood has a finite life span. These bags were scheduled to be destroyed. I merely helped myself. No one misses a pint or two now and then.” He shut the door and shrugged. “It’s a little stale but it sustains me.”

  A light-headed rush surged through Willie. Her ears rang and the corners of the room started to wobble.

  “Sit down and put your head between your knees,” Raven said. “It will pass.”

  Willie dropped her purse on the floor, dragged a chair away from the table and did. When she straightened. Raven stood in front of her with a crystal snifter in one hand.

  “It’s brandy.” Willie took it and sipped, her teeth chattering against the rim of the snifter. “You’re perfectly safe with me, Willow. Fresh and sweet as your blood might be, I have other plans for you.”

  Willie shivered in spite of the fire seeping through her and glanced up at Raven. “What about Johnny?”

  “I want him back. I want to be mortal again. Before I forget how.”

  Her eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed with suspicion. “What do you mean, forget?”

  “I have—only a few memories.”

  They were faint and growing fainter, mere wisps of recollections, so vague they almost seemed like dreams. The one that welled up from Willow Evans’s mind caught him by surprise with its vividness. Apparently he wasn’t the only one with memories.

  “I was not,” he told her, “in your bedroom last night.”

  “Then who—” she began, but glanced quickly away, a flush traveling up her throat.