by Nora Roberts
“Promise me you’ll never get rid of this couch.”
He laughed, nuzzled her cheek. “You’re going to regret that.”
“No, I won’t. I’m not going to regret a thing.”
WITH the two women who had become her friends and partners, Malory sat on the front porch of the house that would be one-third hers.
The sky had clouded up since she’d arrived, clouds stacking on clouds to make a multilayered sweep of grays.
Storm brewing, she figured, and found herself pleased with the idea of being inside with rain pounding on the roof. But first she wanted to sit while the electricity gathered in the air and those first puffs of wind bent the trees.
More than anything she’d needed to share her joy and her nerves with her friends.
“He loves me.” She didn’t think she would ever tire of saying it aloud. “Flynn loves me.”
“It’s so romantic.” Zoe dug a tissue out of her purse and sniffled into it.
“It was. You know, there was a time I wouldn’t have thought so. I’d have had a very detailed outline in my mind. Candlelight, music, with me and the perfect man in some elegant room. Or outdoors, in some spectacular setting. It would all have had to be arranged, just so.”
With a shake of her head, she laughed at herself. “That’s why I know it’s the real thing. Because it didn’t have to be just so, and elegant and perfect. It just had to be. It had to be Flynn.”
“Jeez. It’s hard for me to equate the stars in your eyes with Flynn.” Dana rested her chin on her fist. “Nice and all, because I love him too. But it’s Flynn, my favorite moron. I’ve never pictured him as a romantic figure.” She turned toward Zoe. “What the hell’s in that meat loaf? Maybe I should get the recipe.”
“I’m going to take another look at it myself.” She patted Malory’s knee. “I’m really happy for you. I liked the way you two looked together right from the start.”
“Hey, you moving in with him?” Dana perked up. “That would set Jordan out on his butt that much sooner.”
“Sorry, we didn’t get to that stage yet. We’re just basking in the we’re-in-love moment for now. And that, friends and neighbors, is a real change for me. I’m not making schedules and lists. I’m just going with it. God, I feel like I could take on the world! Which brings me to the next part of this session. I’m sorry I haven’t contributed to any of the plans for the house here or done anything about moving forward with ideas for fixing it up, putting it all together.”
“I wondered if you were going to bail,” Dana admitted.
“I was thinking about it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I guess I had to work out for myself what I was doing and why. Now I know. I’m starting my own business because the longer you put off dreams, the less chance you have of making them real. I’m going into a partnership with two women I like a lot. Not only am I not going to let them down, but I’m not going to let me down either.”
She got to her feet, and with her hands planted on her hips, turned to look at the house. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this, but I’m ready to try. I don’t know if I’m going to find the key in the time I have left, but I know I’ve tried there, too.”
“I know what I think.” Zoe rose to join her. “If it weren’t for the key, you wouldn’t be with Flynn now. We wouldn’t be together, and we wouldn’t have this place. Because of that I’ve got a chance to make something special, for myself, for Simon. I wouldn’t have had that without the two of you.”
“Let me start off saying we can skip the group hug.” Still, Dana walked over to them. “But I feel the same way. I wouldn’t have had the chance for this without both of you. My idiot brother has a classy lady in love with him. All that starts with the key. I say you’re going to find it.”
She looked up as rain began to splatter. “Now let’s get the hell in out of the rain.”
Inside, they stood in a loose semicircle.
“Together or separate?” Malory asked.
“Together,” Zoe answered.
“Top or bottom?”
“Top.” Dana glanced over, got assenting nods. “You said Flynn was coming by?”
“Yeah, he’s going to slip over for an hour.”
“We can use him as a pack mule, then, for anything we want to haul out of the attic.”
“Some of the stuff up there is great.” Zoe’s face shone with enthusiasm as they started up. “I know it looks like junk at first glance, but I think once we get to it, we’ll be able to use some. There’s an old wicker chair that could be rewoven and painted. It’d look good on the porch. And there’s a couple of those pole lamps. The shades are trash, but the poles could be cleaned up and antiqued.”
Her voice faded away as Malory climbed the steps. The window at the top was wet with rain, dull with dust. And her heart began to thud like a fist against her ribs.
“This is the place,” she whispered.
“Yeah, it is. This is it.” Dana set her hands on her hips as she looked around the second floor. “It’ll be ours and the bank’s in a few weeks.”
“No, this is the place. From my dream. This is the house. How could I be so stupid not to realize, not to understand?” Excitement pitched into her voice, rushing the words out. “It wasn’t what was Flynn’s, but what was mine. I’m the key. Isn’t that what Rowena said?”
She whirled back to face them, her eyes brilliant and bright. “Beauty, knowledge, courage. That’s the three of us, that’s this place. And the dream, that was my fantasy, my idea of perfection. So it had to be my place.”
She pressed a hand to her heart as if to keep it from leaping free. “The key’s here. In this house.”
In the next instant she was alone. The staircase behind her filled with a thin blue light. Like a mist, it rolled toward her, crawled along the floor at her feet until she stood ankle-deep in the damp chill of it. Rooted in shock, she called out, but her voice rang hollow in a mocking echo.
With her heart drumming, she looked at the rooms on either side of her. The eerie blue fog snaked and twined its way up the walls, over the windows, blocking even the gloomy light of the storm.
Run! It was a frantic whisper in her mind. Run. Get out now, before it’s too late. This wasn’t her fight. She was an ordinary woman leading an ordinary life.
She gripped the banister, took the first step down. She could still see the door through that sheer blue curtain that so quickly ate the true light. Through the door was the real world. Her world. She had only to open that door and walk out for normalcy to click back into place.
That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? A normal life. Hadn’t her dream shown her that? Marriage and family. French toast for breakfast and flowers on the dresser. A pretty life of simple pleasures built on love and affection.
It was waiting for her, outside the door.
She walked down the steps like a woman in a trance. She could see beyond the door, somehow through the door, where the day was perfect with autumn. Trees a wash of color gilded by sunlight, air brisk and tart. And though her heart continued to gallop inside her chest, her lips curved in a dreamy smile as she reached for the door.
“This is wrong.” She heard her own voice, oddly flat and calm. “This is another trick.” A part of her shuddered in shock as she turned away from the door, turned from the perfect life waiting outside. “What’s out there isn’t real, but this is. This is our place now.”
Stunned that she’d nearly deserted her friends, she called out for Dana and Zoe again. Where had he put them? What illusion had separated them? Fear for them had her rushing back up the steps. Her flight tore the blue mists, only to have it gather back into nasty ribbons behind her.
To orient herself she went to the window at the top of the stairs and rubbed away those frigid mists. Her fingertips went numb, but she could see it was still storming. Rain whipped down out of a bruised sky. Her car was in the drive, just where she’d left it. Across the street a woman with a red umbrella and a bag of groceries dashed toward a
house.
That was real, Malory told herself. That was life, messy and inconvenient. And she would get it back. She’d find her way back. But first she had a job to do.
Chills crawled along her skin as she turned to the right. She wished for a jacket, for a flashlight. For her friends. For Flynn. She forced herself not to run, not to rush blindly. The room was a maze of impossible corridors.
It didn’t matter. Just another trick, one meant to confuse and frighten her. Somewhere in this house was the key, and her friends. She would find them.
Panic tickled her throat as she walked. The air was silent now, even her lonely footsteps were smothered by the blue mist. What was more frightening to the human heart than being cold and lost and alone? He was using that against her, playing her with her own instinct.
Because he couldn’t touch her unless she allowed it.
“You’re not going to make me run,” she shouted. “I know who I am and where I am, and you’re not going to make me run.”
She heard someone call her name, just the faintest ripple through the thick air. Using it as a guide, she turned again.
The cold intensified, and the mists swirled with wet. Her clothes were damp, her skin chilled. The call could have been another trick, she thought. She could hear nothing now but the blood beating inside her own head.
It hardly mattered which direction she chose. She could walk endlessly in circles or stand perfectly still. It wasn’t a matter of finding her way, or being misdirected now. It was, she realized, nothing more than a battle of wills.
The key was here. She meant to find it; he meant to stop her.
“It must be lowering to pit yourself against a mortal woman. Wasting all your power and skill on someone like me. And still, the best you can do is this irritating blue-light special.”
An angry red glow edged the mist. Though Malory’s heart plunged, she gritted her teeth and kept moving. Maybe it wasn’t wise to challenge a sorcerer, but aside from the risk she realized another side effect.
She could see another door now where the red and blue lights merged.
The attic, she thought. It had to be. Not illusionary corridors and turns, but the true substance of the house.
She focused on it as she walked forward. When the mists shifted, thickened, swirled, she ignored them and kept the image of the door in her head.
At last, her breath shallow, she plunged a hand through the fog and clamped her fingers around the old glass knob.
Warmth, a welcome flood of it, poured over her as she pulled the door open. She started up, into the dark, with the blue mist creeping behind her.
OUTSIDE, Flynn navigated through the mean-tempered storm, edging forward in the driver’s seat to peer through the curtain of rain that his wipers could barely displace.
In the backseat, Moe whimpered like a baby.
“Come on, you coward, it’s just a little rain.” Lightning pitchforked through the black sky, followed by a boom of thunder like a cannon blast. “And some lightning.”
Flynn cursed and muscled the wheel in position when the car bucked and shuddered. “And some wind,” he added. With gusts approaching gale force.
It hadn’t seemed like more than a quick thunderstorm when he’d left the office. But it worsened with every inch of road. As Moe’s whimpers turned to pitiful howls, Flynn began to worry that Malory or Dana or Zoe, maybe all three of them, had gotten caught in the storm.
They should have been at the house by now, he reminded himself. But he would have sworn that the rage of the storm was worse, considerably worse, on this end of town. Fog had rolled down from the hills, blanketed them in gray as thick and dense as wool. His visibility decreased, forcing him to slow down. Even at a crawl, the car fishtailed madly on a turn.
“We’ll just pull over,” he said to Moe. “Pull over and wait it out.”
Anxiety skated up his spine, but instead of easing when he nudged the car to the curb, it clamped on to the back of his neck like claws. The sound of the rain pounding like fists on the roof of the car seemed to hammer into his brain.
“Something’s wrong.”
He pulled out into the street again, his hands vising on the wheel as the wind buffeted the car. Sweat, born of effort and worry, snaked down his back. For the next three blocks he felt like a man fighting a war.
There was a trickle of relief when he spotted the cars in the driveway. They were okay, he told himself. They were inside. No problem. He was an idiot.
“Told you there was nothing to worry about,” he said to Moe. “Now you’ve got two choices. You can pull yourself together and come inside with me, or you can stay here, quaking and quivering. Up to you, pal.”
Relief drained away when he parked at the curb and looked at the house.
If the storm had a heart, it was there. Black clouds boiled over the house, pumped the full force of their fury. Even as he watched, lightning lanced down, speared like a fiery arrow into the front lawn. The grass went black in a jagged patch.
“Malory.”
He didn’t know if he spoke it, shouted it, or his mind simply screamed it, but he shoved open the car door and leaped into the surreal violence of the storm.
The wind slapped him back, a back-handed blow so intense that he tasted blood in his mouth. Lightning blasted like a mortar directly in front of him, and the air stank with burning. Blind from the driving rain, he bent over and lurched toward the house.
He stumbled on the steps and was calling her name, over and over like a chant, when he saw the hard blue light leaking around the front door.
The knob burned with cold and refused to turn under his hand. Baring his teeth, Flynn reared back, then rammed the door with his shoulder. Once, twice, and on the third assault, he broke it in.
He leaped inside, into that blue mist.
“Malory!” He shoved his dripping hair out of his face. “Dana!”
He whirled when something brushed his leg, and lifted his fists, only to lower them on an oath when it turned out to be wet dog. “Goddamn it, Moe, I don’t have time to—”
He broke off when Moe growled deep in his throat, let out a vicious bark, and charged up the stairs.
Flynn sprinted after him. And stepped into his office.
“If I’m going to do a decent job covering the foliage festival, then I need the front page of the Weekender section and a sidebar on the related events.” Rhoda folded her arms, her posture combative. “Tim’s interview with Clown Guy should go on page two.”
There was a vague ringing in his ears, and a cup of coffee in his hand. Flynn stared at Rhoda’s irritated face. He could smell the coffee, and the White Shoulders fragrance that Rhoda habitually wore. Behind him, his scanner squawked and Moe snored like a steam engine.
“This is bullshit.”
“You’ve got no business using that kind of language with me,” Rhoda snapped.
“No, this is bullshit. I’m not here. Neither are you.”
“It’s about time I got treated with a little respect around here. You’re only running this paper because your mother wanted to keep you from making a fool of yourself in New York. Big-city reporter, my butt. You’re a small-time, small-town guy. Always have been, always will be.”
“Kiss my ass,” Flynn invited and threw the coffee, cup and all, in her face.
She let out one short scream, and he was back in the mist.
Shaken, he rounded once again toward the sound of Moe’s barking.
Through that rolling mist, he saw Dana on her knees with her arms flung around Moe’s neck.
“Oh, God, thank God. Flynn!” She sprang up, wrapped herself around him as she had the dog. “I can’t find them. I can’t find them. I was here, then I wasn’t, now I am.” Hysteria pitched and rocked in her voice. “We were together, right over there, then we weren’t.”
“Stop. Stop.” He yanked her back, shook her. “Breathe.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry.” She shuddered, then scrubbed her hands over her face
. “I was at work, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been. It was like being in a daze, going through the motions and not being able to pinpoint what was wrong. Then I heard Moe barking. I heard him barking, and I remembered. We were here. Then I was back, standing here in this—whatever the hell this is—and I couldn’t find them.”
She fought for calm. “The key. Malory said the key’s here. I think she must be right.”
“Go. Get outside. Wait for me in the car.”
She breathed deep, shuddered again. “I’m freaked, but I’m not leaving them here. Or you either. Jesus, Flynn, your mouth’s bleeding.”
He swiped the back of his hand over it. “It’s nothing. Okay, we stick together.” He took her hand, linked fingers.
They heard it at the same time, the hammering of fists on wood. With Moe once again in the lead, they rushed through the room.
Zoe stood at the attic door, beating on it. “Over here!” She called out. “She’s up there, I know she’s up there, but I can’t get through.”
“Get back,” Flynn ordered.
“You’re all right?” Dana gripped her arm. “Are you hurt?”
“No. I was home, Dana. Puttering around the kitchen with the radio on. Wondering what to fix for dinner. My God, how long? How long were we separated? How long has she been up there alone?”
Chapter Twenty
SHE was afraid. It helped to admit it, accept it. To know that she was more afraid than she’d ever been in her life, and to realize she was determined not to give in.
The warmth was already being eaten away as the light took on that harsh blue hue. Fingers of mist crawled along the exposed beams on the ceiling, down the unfinished walls, along the dusty floor.
Through it, she could see the pale white vapor of her own breath.
Real, she reminded herself. That was real, a sign of life. Proof of her own humanity.
The attic was a long, wide room with two stingy windows at either end and the ceiling rising to a narrow pitch. But she recognized it. In her dream there had been skylights and generous windows. Her paintings had been stacked against walls done in soft cream. The floor had been clean of dust, and speckled with a cheerful rainbow of paint drops and splatters.