Johnny, not Raven; a dream, not a nightmare. She should have known. Should have realized when she’d seen him in the dining room mirror. Oh, Johnny, I’m sorry, she wailed silently. Oh, God, get me out of here alive.
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“I want you to tell Johnny.” Raven pulled out a chair and sat down, resting his left arm on the table.
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“He’s terrified of me.” Raven turned his gaze toward the leather notebook. It slid across the table on its cracked and sun-faded cover and stopped in front of Willie. “Give him this. It’s one of my diaries. It contains the Riddle of Rejoining. It’ll help convince him.”
“You keep diaries?” Willie couldn’t believe it.
“I’m a doctor. If nothing else, my present state is scientifically fascinating.”
“What is your present state? Clinically speaking.”
“As a mortal would say, dead as a doornail. Or a mackerel. And if the fates smile on us, the grunge look.”
“But you look so—alive.”
“Most of what you see and react to, say, the warmth of my body, is a projection. Vampires are very good at projection. We can make you believe almost anything. Even that we’re every bit as alive as you.”
“You know what’s going on in my head, don’t you?” Her smile faded. Raven could feel her heart banging, her pulse skip and race. “You can make me do things. Like the other day. You sent me to see Lucy.”
“I suggested it. I can’t force you to do anything. I can encourage you, but I can’t control you.”
Her heart rate and her pulse slowed. She took a sip of brandy and eyed him warily. “Does that mean you can’t force me to help you if I don’t want to?”
Raven nodded, lying to her. If she refused he’d take her in Thrall, and take his chances with Nekhat.
“Let’s get one thing straight. You can’t have Beaches.”
“The house is mine. Willow. It always has been.”
“The hell it is. My grandmother bought it from—” Willie stopped, stunned, and blinked at him. Hadn’t she thought in the museum that in thirty years Raven would look just like his great-uncle? “Horace Raven. That was you, too.”
“I have to appear to die every so often. Otherwise, eyebrows are raised. And questions I obviously can’t answer.”
She drained her brandy in one gulp, choked and pushed the snifter away, her hands trembling.
“I don’t care if Beaches is yours, you’ll have to kill me to get it.”
Her bravado was amusing, all the more because he knew it was bravado. Raven laughed and slapped the table, startling her. She reached inside her sweatshirt and plucked out a gold cross and a dove of garlic on a thin gold chain.
“Willow.” Raven looked at her askance, tsked and raised an eyebrow. “Really.”
Willie never saw him move. One minute the cross was around her neck, the next it was in Raven’s hand. She clutched the front of her sweatshirt reflexively, watched him raise his hand and the cross turn and flash in the cracks of pale sun filtering through the blind behind her.
“Lovely.” He broke the thread, tossed the garlic clove into the air, caught it in his teeth and crunched it.
He was playing with her, as a cat would toy with a mouse. Oh, God, why had she come? Because she hadn’t believed it, that was why, hadn’t believed he wasn’t what he appeared to be: a tall, handsome and rich young doctor. Now she knew better. Still, he made her pulse thud, stirred her senses and made her yearn for things she shouldn’t want. Not with a monster.
For a horrifying second Willie thought he was going to eat her cross, too, but he simply held it out to her by its chain. She snatched it back, careful not to touch him, and closed it in her fist.
“I cannot enter consecrated ground,” he told her, “but I do not wither or spontaneously combust at the sight or the touch of a crucifix. Garlic does no more to me than it does to you. It gives me heartburn and bad breath.”
“But you’re dead,” she blurted out, her eyes widening with panic. “You’re a monster, a—a thing.”
“A vampire, yes.” He nodded and smiled a faint, sad smile. His mouth still seemed terribly sexy.
Willie shuddered and looked away. Raven took the snifter back to the kitchen to refill it. The bar pattern on the floor had brightened considerably and crawled closer to the refrigerator. Raven avoided it.
Willie swiveled in her chair and pushed one of the blind slats aside. Cheery yellow sunshine poured into her lap. The sky was so blue it hurt her eyes.
“Don’t do that,” Raven said sharply.
Willie let the slat fall and looked at him over her shoulder. He stood in the doorway, blinking and pinching the bridge of his nose with his left hand. The snifter in his right hand trembled.
“You would go up in flames in sunlight, wouldn’t you?”
He waited until the slat stopped swinging, then came back to the table and put the snifter down. “I’m vulnerable to sunlight only in this form.”
Willie had already figured that out. Raven was still blinking, though she couldn’t see any change in his eyes. They were as dark and luminous as always. With no discernible pupil or iris. Willie hadn’t noticed that before, not even in the emergency room.
“You’re very observant.” Raven sat down and rested, his left elbow on the table. His hand trembled. “Most mortals never notice my eyes. I can make those who do forget, so I don’t bother with the projection. It’s difficult to sustain and very draining.”
Willie wished he wouldn’t use that word. “Do you need to lie down for a few minutes? In your— uh— coffin?”
“I don’t need sleep.” Raven smiled, amusement glimmering in his dark, strange eyes. “When I do rest,” he explained, “I don’t lie in a coffin. I still have horrors of being nailed into one.”
“Johnny’s eyes are just like yours.”
“I wasn’t aware of that, but I’m not surprised. He is, to a degree, a reflection of me.”
“Maybe that’s why I can only see him in a mirror.”
“Perhaps.” Raven shrugged, an expectant half smile on his face.
He was waiting for her answer. Willie was scared but she wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t told her everything and she knew it. She did know who Johnny was, and why Raven hadn’t killed her. Not yet, anyway. He probably would if she refused to help him. The thought ought to have terrified her, yet she felt oddly calm as she looked at Raven.
“Why are you bothering with me? Why don’t you kill me?”
“When I discovered the Riddle of Rejoining and the possibility of regaining my mortality, I chose not to hunt my own kind. My conscience was hardly dear when I lost it. I don’t want to sully it further with murder.”
“What noble bullshit.”
Raven’s fingers closed and opened. Twice. She was pushing him. Willie knew it and gripped the cross tightly in her hand.
“I took this from Nekhat, the vampire who attacked me.” Raven raised his left hand. A stray beam of light caught the moonstone ring, flashing on the ankh Willie hadn’t noticed on its surface. “If I’m forced to use it, to bind my Shade to me until the second night of the full moon, when the Ritual of Rejoining must be performed, Nekhat will know precisely where it is. And he will come for it.”
“So?” Willie shrugged, trying to appear nonchalant, though her heart was racing.
Raven never moved, but the Sunday Boston Globe levitated from the living room onto the table. It opened in front of her, to the “World News In Brief’ column, the same one she’d read in yesterday’s Stonebridge Chronicle. She still couldn’t pronounce the name of the Central American country torn by civil war, but she shivered as she read about it and the cattle mutilations in the Yucatan.
“This is how Nekhat feeds. He could wipe Stonebridge, Massachusetts, off the map in the span of a single night.”
“You’re lying,” Willie said, hoping to God he was.
“What if
I’m not?”
“I think you are. I think you’re as terrified of Johnny as he is of you. You’re petrified he won’t want any part of you. That’s why you want me to play go-between.”
“Don’t push me, Willow.” Raven made a fist that didn’t open. “A bird has an incredibly high metabolism. A raven must eat at least four times its body weight in a day just to stay alive. I’m very hungry and your throat is much closer than the refrigerator.”
Scare tactics. Not a good sign. Neither was the faint red gleam in his eyes.
“Let’s see how much you remember about being mortal.”
Willie picked up her purse, rose and pushed her chair in, mindful of his lightning reflexes. Everything he’d told her could be a lie; maybe he just wanted to get his hands on Johnny, or Beaches, or both. If he was lying he’d kill her now—diary or no diary—unless she could find the blind cord. She inched toward the door, fumbling for the string.
“Let’s see how badly you want to be a nice guy and not dirty up your conscience.” She found the cord and clutched it in her fingers. “I’ll take the diary to Johnny, but I’ll leave the decision up to him. I think that’s only fair.”
One hundred and seventeen years as a vampire, and still the swiftness of what mortals called his temper surprised him.
She never had a chance to pull the cord. In a flash she was pinned against the door, frozen with terror at Raven’s red, whirling eyes, her arms crushed in his grip. She wanted to scream with pain, but could hardly breathe.
“Drop the cord.”
He growled at her, as Callie had last night when she’d heard the lynx. Willie felt the growl reverberate up her spine, opened her lingers and felt the cord swing free against the glass. Raven threw his head back, flared his nostrils and closed his eyes. Willie could see every tendon, every vein in his throat.
“Don’t ever do that again,” he snarled, his grip on her arms easing. “I’d kill my own mother if she threatened me with sunlight.”
How about a wooden stake, Willie wondered, but didn’t dare ask. Raven lowered his head and looked at her. Tiny red pinpoints still leapt in his eyes.
“Or a wooden stake.” He let her go, reached over her shoulder and snapped the blind cord.
Willie managed, just barely, to hold herself up. She watched Raven brush his thumb across the moonstone and close his eyes again. They were dark and luminous when he opened them, shoved the diary into her hands and said, “I’II give you until nightfall.”
Chapter 15
At six minutes past four and forty-seven miles per hour, Willie skidded the Jeep off the beachfront road. Gravel strafed the mailbox and terror drummed in her veins.
The sun would set at three minutes past eight, eastern daylight time. She knew because she’d checked the almanac this morning before she’d gone out to the beach. That gave her roughly four hours to figure out how much of what Raven had told her was the truth and what she was going to do about it.
She hoped the diary would prod Johnny’s memory, that she wouldn’t have to hop a plane for Alaska, the land of the midnight sun, the safest place she could think of to hide from a vampire.
“Johnny!” Willie shouted as she raced through the house looking for him. “I’ve been with Raven and he—”
Willie lost her voice as she shot through her office doorway and came to a stunned halt. The room was full of flowers: tiger lilies on the filing cabinets, wild lavender on her desk, Shasta daisies on the bookcases and Queen Anne’s lace on Betsy’s rocking chair.
Fresh-washed sunshine poured through the windows, filling her nose with the sweet, wild scents of flowers and the sea. Filling her heart, too, as she moved into the room and dropped her purse. This was a lover’s gift. She’d received one or two in her time, but she’d never seen anything like this.
Or any man, alive, dead or in between, look at her the way Johnny did when she saw him behind her in the pedestal mirror. She could see her freckles, frizzy hair and not much of a nose in the glass, but not in Johnny’s eyes. His dark, strange eyes were so much like Raven’s and yet so different.
“Oh, Johnny,” she said, her eyes filling. “Thank you.”
He touched his fingertips to his lips. Willie didn’t realize he’d moved the mirrors until he stepped behind her and she saw their double reflections, one in a wall mirror above the bookcase, the other in the pedestal glass.
“This is beautiful,” Willie said on a shaky breath. “But we have to talk. Raven’s coming at sunset. He said—”
Johnny shook his head, raised his left wrist above her shoulder and pointed at it as if he were wearing a watch.
“No, there isn’t time. Raven says you’re his mortal half. He wants you back. He says it’s possible, that the two of you can be reunited. He gave me one of his diaries, and the Riddle of Rejoining.”
Willie dropped to her heels, pulled the cracked red notebook from her purse and felt her head spin. Too much brandy, she thought, shaking it off as she stood. Too quickly, she realized, when the room spun and her knees wobbled.
If Johnny hadn’t caught her she would’ve fallen. If he hadn’t swept his arm around her when it hit her that she could feel his hand on her shoulder, she would have fainted. She gazed at him, wide-eyed, in the mirror, the diary slipping out of her fingers and bouncing onto the carpet.
“The mirrors. This is how you made love to me.”
He nodded and brushed a kiss behind her right ear. A rush of awareness, of his body solid against hers, made her heart flutter. She felt Johnny lift her hair, felt the graze of his lips as he kissed the nape of her neck.
She felt as fragile as she looked cradled against Johnny, caught in the nimbus of sunlight reflecting off the mirror. She closed her eyes, imagined her turtleneck was a lace collar and savored the feel of Johnny’s mouth as he kissed her hair. She felt the chill in his arm as she gripped his wrist, tried to imagine it warm, and swayed against him.
He moved with her, looped his arm around her throat and held her against him at shoulder and hip. She could almost hear lace rustle, the slow tick of a wind-up dock, the whinny of a horse, carriage wheels crunching on gravel.
Oh, it was heaven, but it wasn’t real. Johnny wasn’t real, except in a mirror. He was trapped in time and she was trapped in his eyes, her heart catching as he raised his head and looked at her.
A lock of his long dark hair curled over his forehead, gleaming in the glass. His eyes gleamed, too, dark and heavy lidded, as he smiled again and dragged his mouth down the curve of her jaw.
Her lips parted on a mew of longing and she rolled her head against his chest. She thought he meant to kiss her mouth and strained to meet him, but he kissed the tip of her nose instead, tenderly, keeping one eye on the mirror.
It felt like a tiny electrical tingle. Just as it had all those years ago when he’d kissed her on the beach—when the starfish had stung her, Willie realized, the rest of the memory rushing out of her subconscious: the shimmer she’d seen in the air, the dizzying sweep she’d thought was the poison in the sting.
“It was you,” she breathed. “You kissed me on the beach. When I was a little girl and a starfish stung me.”
He smiled, the bittersweet curve of his mouth making her heart catch.
“The monster in Whit’s closet. The pirate on the beach. That was you, too, wasn’t it?”
Johnny nodded. Willie’s eyes filled again. He’d been here always, the man Raven was and claimed he wanted to be again. Watching out for her, keeping her safe, bringing Granma flowers and sand dollars.
“Oh, Johnny,” she said again.
He laid his right hand against the mirror, thumb, index and little fingers raised. “I love you,” he said, and all the tears Willie had been too afraid to shed in front of Raven burst out of her in a throat-wrenching sob.
She pressed her hand next to Johnny’s, thumb, index and little fingers raised. His fingers were strong and brown, sunbaked over a century ago by the Egyptian sun. Her own never tanned, and w
ere splashed with nutmeg freckles.
“I love you. I always have. I thought it was Beaches, but it was you. I was just too dumb to know it.”
Johnny mouthed no, no, turned her and folded her into his arms. Willie felt the rough weave of his shirt against her cheek, smooth, well-toned muscle beneath the brown skin of his chest, but no warmth, no heartbeat. He felt like marble, beautiful but lifeless marble. She threw her arms around his waist and almost howled with sorrow.
Johnny laid his cheek against her hair, rocked her and let her weep. Willie cried until she’d soaked his vest and shirt, until she tasted salt and rust on her tongue, raised her head and saw the bloodstains she’d smeared with her tears. In the mirror she saw that she’d bitten her lip, and she wasn’t sure if the blood she tasted was hers or Johnny’s.
“This is wonderful but it isn’t real,” she said. “It can’t ever be real. Not unless—”
Willie’s breath caught and her eyes went wide in the mirror. It hadn’t dawned on her, not once, while she’d listened to Raven tell her about the Ritual of Rejoining. It did now, and it dawned on Johnny, too. She saw it in the slow, miraculous smile spreading across his face.
It was possible—if Raven was telling the truth.
They dove for the diary together. Johnny’s hand closed on it first. He snatched it up and opened it, skimming the pages. A piece of illuminated, age-yellowed parchment fluttered out. Willie caught it before it hit the floor.
“Well, this is swell. It’s in Arabic or something.”
Johnny tapped his finger against a page of the diary and passed it to her. Raven had entered the translation in the same precise copperplate with which Johnny had written the note he’d left on the monitor. Even in English it made no sense. Still, Willie felt gooseflesh rise as she read.
Eternal is the Power of Three,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Sun and Moon and Earth Eternal.
When the Three are One, the One will be Three.
Then the Dark will be Light,
Made One by the Sacred Cedar.
The Dead Shall Live and Stand Unscathed
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