Valley of Fire
a novel
By
Bronwyn Archer
Copyright © Bronarch Books, 2019.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication or use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
For Noelle.
Again.
CONTENTS
Preface
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Part Two
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Preface
December 26, 2005
IN A FEW DAYS THE BLUE BEACON would go dark. But in the weak glimmer of a winter dawn, the Christmas light at the tip of the Transamerica pyramid still glowed. Below it, a bottomless pour of fog shrouded the city and the sea below the Golden Gate Bridge.
The pale woman on the bridge clung to the freezing metal handrail with both hands. She shivered. Locks of long strawberry blonde hair whipped around her head in the biting wind. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. A navy pea coat hung open on her thin frame.
Waves clanged against the pylons far below, sending a ghostly whoosh of salt-stung air up 486 feet.
The impenetrable fog blanket looked close enough to step on. She imagined falling on its springy surface and bouncing on its gray billows. She could forget just for a moment. Feel joy again.
Her seven-year-old daughter gave her joy, but every sweet smile of Lana’s was a reminder of what she’d lost.
A blast from a horn at the northern tip of the peninsula broke through her thoughts. A small void opened in the surface of the fog, revealing a sliver of black ocean.
It was so far down.
It’s time.
She released her grip on the metal railing and bent down to the canvas tote bag at her feet, pulling out a single lavender rose. She grew them in her garden for this moment. They were as close to blue roses she could find, the Blue Moon hybrid. Blue, for her dead little boy.
She pressed the blossom to her mouth and closed her eyes. Traffic was light on the bridge at that hour. No one would see what she was about to do. No one ever noticed her, all the years she’d been doing it.
She took a breath, swung her arm back and tossed the rose as far as she could away from the bridge. She half expected it to bounce softly on the thick fog, then gently sink into it. Instead it sailed out a few feet in a wide arc, flipped upside down, and plummeted, pirouetting all the way.
In a second it was lost below the fog.
“I love you, Liam,” she whispered. “Mommy loves you, darling.”
She only allowed herself to utter his name on this day, once a year. The muscles in her face seized up. Here, she could cry freely, without her husband or daughter watching. She never let herself cry around them. How could she tell them why?
Liam had been two when he died, drowned in her grandmother Claudette’s enormous claw foot bathtub. Tanith hadn’t been home when it happened. She’d asked Claudette and her sister Georgette to watch him while she ran out to pick up some last-minute Christmas gifts.
She should have known better. Claudette was vain and distracted, spending all day watching soap operas on the ancient television. Georgette was already stricken with dementia. Severine usually watched him, but she’d been in France visiting family for Christmas.
She hadn’t been gone long. By the time she let herself in to the vast apartment, her beloved Liam was dead.
It had been years, but the blunt, invisible knife that slid into her chest that day could not be pulled out. Even a marriage and a new baby hadn’t helped her dislodge the blade.
She’d tried to outrun the curse. Changed her name, started a new life, had a new baby, but she was tired of the pain. Nothing helped. Tanith fingered the handwritten note in her pocket. It explained everything to Lana. It was the story of who she was: heir to the cursed Ambrose fortune Tanith had been offered and refused. The note included instructions on where to find the diamond dove she’d carefully buried at her parents’ grave years ago. Her first act of rebellion against the Ambrose family she despised.
It would be the proof she might need one day. To prove who her mother “Annie” really was.
Lana will be better off. The curse ends with me.
Then, an anguished sob rang out in the damp air. A loud sniff.
But not from her.
It was coming from below the pedestrian walkway.
Tanith leaned as far as she could over the railing. There was a narrow metal grate walkway below the bridge used by the bridge workers, five feet below the roadway. A skinny figure dressed in filthy black jeans with a black hoodie pulled over its head sat on the grate, arms wrapped around its knees, rocking back and forth, crying. It took Tanith a few seconds to realize what she was looking at. She took a deep breath of frigid air.
“Hey! What are you doing down there?” Her voice sounded frail against the wind, but the figure’s head turned to look up.
It was a teenage boy. His sallow face was streaked with tears, eyes hollow and bloodshot.
“Go away,” he croaked. “Leave me alone.”
Tanith looked around for help, but there were no pedestrians. The nearest call box was fifty feet away. She hesitated.
“What’s your name?” she called out.
“Fuck you care,” he mumbled. He scooted to the edge of the grating and then in a heart-stopping moment he swung his legs so they dangled in the air.
“Stop! Wait!” she cried.
Tanith’s handwritten note ended with a declaration of her eternal love, and a promise to be her daughter’s guardian angel as long as she lived.
But his legs dangled over the water. He looked like he was Liam’s age.
If Liam had lived.
Tanith crumpled the note into a ball and tossed it into the air. She watched it bob on the wind and disappear. Not today.
She swung her leg over the cold, wet railing and started climbing down to the boy.
Part One
Draw me after you and let us run together.
—Song of Solomon 1:4
Chapter 1
Lacus Oblivionis ~ Lake of Forgetfulness
The searing sting of a needle bit into my wrist. My eyes flew open. A blinding white light bobbed in front of me. Icy cold crept up my arm and my legs jerked.
“Hold her legs,
please,” said a deep voice.
I kicked harder as a heavy blanket of sleep pressed down on me.
“Hang on, Lana. He’s almost done.” A different voice. I knew that voice.
“Done with what?” My voice sounded hoarse and far away. A warm hand stroked my forehead.
“Helping you.”
The strange man said, “Okay, that should do it. I’ll start cleaning the wound.”
Everything faded back to black.
#
When my eyes fluttered open, the room was dark. Numbers on an alarm clocked flashed next to the bed.
9:10 AM
I’m late for school!
I kicked off the sheet and sat up gasping. I have a final . . . and I forgot to study for it. Was it French? No, Calculus. Oh no.
Why didn’t my dad wake me up?
The room swirled around me before I could stand up. I put my head back down on the pillow.
This is not my pillow.
I ran my hands over the thick, silky sheets.
These are not my sheets.
My palms were scraped raw with red, jagged scrapes torn into the skin. There was a crescent moon of dark red dirt caked under all ten fingernails.
No—nine fingernails. The nail on my left pinky was gone.
YOU ARE NOT IN SCHOOL ANYMORE.
Thoughts and memories fluttered through my mind like scraps of paper falling from a shredder. I tried to reassemble the tattered pieces into a coherent story.
I’d made it from Sonoma all the way to the Valley of Fire State Park, the red rock mountains in the Nevada desert, before Victor Savitch’s Russian thugs had caught up to me. When I’d finally stumbled down from the mountain, I was cut and bleeding. Arkady was dead, lying in a pool of blood at the foot of the cliff. There had been a desperate struggle. He’d stabbed my shoulder, opening up the deep cut I’d gotten at my house when the enormous glass vase fell and shattered on Victor.
My father had stupidly borrowed almost half a million dollars from him—without knowing he was a violent Russian mobster. He’d had no choice—my former stepmother Ramona had made sure of that. She’d married him after my mother died, helped him open his vintage car shop, and sent him away on car buying trips constantly. Which had left me at her mercy in the forbidding Crawford mansion. I’d endured her abuse to make my dad happy—he wanted so badly to give me a better life.
Until finally, one awful, glorious morning, he came home and found out what she’d been doing to me. He left her and we’d moved back to the little house on Chauvet Drive.
But without Ramona’s money, he’d had to borrow heavily to keep his business afloat—and raise me as a single dad.
Right before my graduation from the exclusive Briar School for Girls, Victor had demanded payment for the debt. Threatened to kill my father if I went to the police. Threatened to kidnap me and take me away on his yacht. When he’d come to my house to collect, I’d been all alone. I’d gotten away with some bruises and a bad cut.
Victor hadn’t been so lucky. He was unconscious and bleeding when I made it to my car.
Out for revenge, his thugs chased me through the desert. Arkady, his best assassin, had stabbed me and nearly flung me off the cliffs of the Valley of Fire.
I’d survived. But for how long? They’d be out for revenge. Ramona Crawford wanted me dead so she could claim my inheritance.
Because I was, apparently, Georgette Ambrose’s sole heir. My late great-great-aunt Georgette—the last survivor of New York’s Gilded Age.
Who was also my godmother.
Who somehow was able to reach out from beyond the grave and intervene in her goddaughter’s life.
Like a fairy godmother. If fairy godmothers were dead and spoke only in French through Mexican psychics, that is.
As we’d struggled on the red cliffs of the Valley of Fire, Arkady had seen something behind me and backed away with a terrified look on his face. I’d stuck my leg out, and he’d tripped and fallen.
When I’d peeked over the edge he was there, clinging to the rock a foot below my head. He’d grabbed my long ponytail and pulled. I’d slid towards the edge, hair ripping out of my scalp, screaming in pain, clawing at the ground. Then somehow the knife, his knife that he’d dropped, flew into my hand BY ITSELF.
A second before I fell, I’d sliced through my ponytail.
A stunned Arkady had plummeted to his death.
Along with my lovely hair.
My relief had been short-lived; Ramona had been waiting at the base of the mountain for me. She’d practically thrown me into Officer Wade Jenner’s police car. Then there was a long drive through the night on a desolate, dark road, as I applied pressure to the cut on my shoulder, feeling the blood and the life slowly trickle out of me. I’d closed my eyes and replayed her words in my head.
Because they changed everything.
“Your foolish mother let those crazy old spinsters babysit him one day. He climbed into a bathtub full of water. Tanith found him in it when she got home. He must have been one or two.”
My poor mother had lost a child thanks to her grandmother Claudette and her grandmother’s sister, Georgette.
More of her words rushed back:
“Your father never finalized the divorce! He wanted you to remain my legal heir—for your protection, of course. Ironic, isn’t it?” She flashed a smile of pure malice. “Yes, I think my marriage to your father is going to work out, after all. For you too, Wade.”
She really did want me dead.
And my dumb dad was still legally married to her.
And she wanted my dove necklace.
“Remember what I promised you if you helped me, darling! Remember the dove! I know she has it. Georgette gave it to her. It’s worth at least a quarter million, Wade! It’s practically priceless!”
Jenner sneered. “Your uncle’s guys searched her house and didn’t find shit.”
Most shocking of all, Victor Savitch was her uncle. Ramona Savage Crawford, also known as Ramona Savitch, niece to a Russian gangster.
Ramona herself had sown the seeds of our financial ruin.
And he was recovering from a near-fatal heart attack.
She’d been planning it for a while—years maybe. She’d known my mother had a rich family. She’d taken advantage of her old friend’s death to marry her grieving husband.
Then she’d made herself the beneficiary to my assets in the event of my untimely death.
Which was looking more and more timely.
The nightmarish car ride had ended with a crash when Jenner swerved off the road. A terrifying plummet in the dark into a deep ravine. I’d kicked my way out of the smashed car and scrambled up ten feet of scrub and dirt. At the side of the road, I’d collapsed.
Then: bright lights and Alexander lifting me into his car and whisking me away.
Presumably to this place, wherever it was.
I gingerly explored my left shoulder with my right hand. The entire area was thickly bandaged. I ran my hands over the rest of my body parts to assess the damage. I gasped—all I had on was underwear and a thin white tank top. Had he taken my clothes off? I ripped the bandage off my wrist and saw a small puncture mark. There was another one on my inner elbow, and I ripped that one off too.
I swung my legs out of the bed and rested, dizzy. I sat still as blood returned to my head. Alexander brought you here. He must be nearby. I remembered a car ride, his voice calling to me in my darkness to stay with him.
I stood up and my legs trembled in the air-conditioned room. The expensively furnished space looked like it had been carved from a block of tan stone. Modern, sophisticated, and sexy. Like a movie set.
Or a dream.
The only mess in the pristine room was me.
I padded to the end of the room and peeked out the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a vast, featureless desert. In the far distance, sand-colored mountains glowed pink in the early morning sunshine. A hawk wheeled in the pale blue sky.
; I closed my eyes and tried to picture my room at home, my bedspread, the window that framed the mountains and sometimes the moon. It was all gone—the house and everything in it, burned to the ground. My dad’s business destroyed, his inventory of vintage sports car repossessed. You’re homeless. And penniless.
I was supposed to leave for college in two months. I’d received a thick packet of move-in checklists and what-to-bring lists just before graduation. A course catalog. A Barnard College bumper sticker. If the heiress fairy tale turned out not to be true, there wasn’t going to be any college. I just had a partial scholarship and there was no way I’d be able survive in New York City with my dad’s business shut down. He’d need me to stay home and take care of him. Maybe we could get a cheap apartment somewhere. Parts of Oakland were still affordable. He’d recuperate on the couch while I worked all day for minimum wage.
The reality that awaited me was grim.
We were completely screwed, thanks to Victor. No—thanks to Ramona.
WAIT.
There was one thing I had left. One thing that could keep my future alive, even without my supposed fortune.
The diamond dove.
Had it really been Marie Antoinette’s, like it said in Georgette’s obituary? The “Dove of Justice”? Ramona had told Wade it was worth a quarter of a million dollars. Georgette—her ghost, that is, speaking through Señora Isadora, the medium—had demanded rather insistently that I look for it.
It was not around my neck.
I remembered I’d stashed it in my backpack before Ramona had found me. Had my mother’s precious pendant made it to this place with me? I scoured the room and finally found my backpack stuffed into the closet. It felt lighter than it should have. The outside of the bag was streaked with orange dirt stains and drips of dried blood stained the shoulder straps.
Inside, I found my wallet, the keys to the Ferrari, my dead cell phone, and a dozen crumpled gas station receipts.
Valley of Fire (Valley of the Moon Book 2) Page 1