The Key Trilogy

by Nora Roberts

  Of course he’d gone by to help.

  “She really appreciated it,” Dana told him, but kept it light. “Especially since you don’t make her nervous the way Brad does.”

  “I don’t? I think I’m insulted and will now be honor-bound to work harder to make her nervous.”

  “What kind of watch you got there?”

  “Watch?” Baffled, he turned his wrist. “I don’t know. It tells time.”

  She shook her hair back and laughed. “That’s what I thought you’d say. Sorry, you’re never going to make her nervous.”

  She slowed, reluctantly, as they approached the gates. Then she stopped, looking at the house through them as she dug her brush out of her purse. “Some place,” she commented, brushing out the knots and tangles the wind had tied into her hair. “You live in a place like this, you could have that classic ’Vette. Keep it in a big, heated garage like it deserves. I wonder if Pitte and Rowena drive.”

  “That’s some segue.”

  “No, really. Think about it. They are what they are, and they’ve been around since way before anybody even thought about the combustible engine. They can do what they do, but has either of them ever taken driving lessons, stood in line at the DMV, haggled over insurance?”

  She dropped the brush back in her purse, looked over at Jordan. His hair was as windblown as hers had been, yet, she noted, it didn’t look unkempt. Just sexy.

  “How do they live?” she continued. “We don’t really know what they do, when it comes to ordinary things. Human things. Do they watch TV? Play canasta? Do they cruise the mall? What about friends? Do they have any?”

  “If they do, there’d be a regular turnover. Friends, being human, would have that annoying habit of dying.”

  “That’s right.” She said it quietly as she looked back toward the house. “It must be lonely. Painfully lonely. All that power doesn’t make them one of us. Living in that great house doesn’t make it their home. It’s weird, isn’t it? Feeling sorry for gods.”

  “No. It’s intuitive. And just the kind of thing that’s going to help you find the key. The more you know and understand them, the closer you come to figuring out your part of the puzzle.”

  “Maybe.” Suddenly the iron gates swung open. “I guess that’s our invitation.”

  She drove, in the twilight, toward the great stone house.

  The old man she’d come to think of as the caretaker hurried up to the car to open her door. “Welcome. I’ll see to the car for you, miss.”

  “Thanks.” She studied him, trying to get a gauge on his age. Seventy? Eighty? Three thousand and two? “I never got your name,” she said to him.

  “Oh, I’d be Caddock, miss.”

  “Caddock. Is that Scots, Irish?”

  “Welsh. I’d be from Wales, in the original way of things, miss.”

  Like Rowena, she thought. “Have you worked for Pitte and Rowena long?”

  “Yes, indeed.” His eyes seemed to twinkle at her. “I’ve been in their service a number of years now.” He looked past her, nodded his head. “There’s a fine sight, isn’t it, then?”

  Dana turned, and stared at the huge buck that stood on the verge between lawn and forest. His rump seemed to glimmer white in the soft haze of twilight, and his rack shone silver.

  “Traditional symbolism,” Jordan said, though he was no less struck by the buck’s magnificence. “The seeker sees a white deer or hare at the start of a quest.”

  “Malory saw it,” Dana murmured over the lump in her throat. “The first night we came here. But I didn’t, Zoe didn’t.” She walked to stand beside Jordan. “Does that mean it was already ordained that Malory would search for the first key? That it had nothing to do with the luck of the draw? That was just show?”

  “Or ritual. You still had to choose to reach into the box for a disk. You decide to follow the deer, or turn away from it.”

  “But is it real? Is that deer really standing over there, or are we imagining it?”

  “That’s something else for you to decide.” He waited until the deer faded back into the shadows before he turned.

  Both the old man and the car were gone. After the initial jolt, Jordan slid his hands into his pockets. “You’ve got to admit, that is very cool.”

  The entrance doors opened. Rowena stood dead center, the foyer lights spilling over her fiery hair, glinting on the long silver dress she wore. “How lovely to see you both.” She held out a hand in welcome. “I was just pining for company.”

  Chapter Seven

  PITTE was already in the parlor, wearing a black shirt and trousers that echoed Rowena’s casual elegance.

  Dana wondered if they sat around looking beautiful all the time. Something else to think about, she supposed. Like did they ever have bad hair days, indigestion, sore feet?

  Or were those things too mundane for gods living in the mortal world?

  “We were just enjoying the fire, and a glass of wine. You’ll join us?” Rowena asked.

  “Sure, thanks.” Welcoming the heat, Dana walked toward the snapping fire. “You guys hang like this every evening?”

  In the process of pouring wine, Pitte stopped, frowned at her. “Hang?”

  “Hang out. You know, sit around in great clothes, drinking fine wine out of, what is that, Baccarat?”

  “I believe it is.” Pitte finished pouring, offered the glass to Dana. “We often take an hour or so to relax together at the end of the day.”

  “What about the rest of the time? Do you just putter around this place?”

  “Ah. You wonder what we do to entertain ourselves.” Rowena sat, patted the cushion beside her. “I paint, as you know. Pitte spends time on our finances. He enjoys the game of money. We read. I’ve enjoyed your books, Jordan.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Pitte enjoys films,” Rowena added with a glance of affection toward her lover. “Particularly ones where a great many things blow up in impressive explosions.”

  “So you go to the movies?” Dana prompted.

  “Ordinarily no. We prefer settling in at home and watching at our leisure.”

  “Multiplexes,” Pitte muttered. “They call them this. Like little boxes stacked end by end. It’s a pity the grand theaters have gone out of fashion.”

  “That’s something you’d both be up on. The changes in fashion. There’d have been a lot of that in a couple of millennia.”

  Rowena lifted a brow at Dana. “Yes, indeed.”

  “I know this sounds like small talk,” Dana continued, “but I’m just trying to get a handle on things. It occurred to me that you know everything about me. You’ve had my whole lifetime to watch. Did you watch?”

  “Of course. You were of considerable interest to us from the moment you were born. We didn’t intrude,” Rowena added, running the jeweled chain she wore around her neck through her fingers as she spoke. “Or interfere. I understand your interest in us now. We are more like you than you may think and less like you than you could possibly imagine. We can and do indulge in what you’d call human pleasures. Food, drink, warmth, vanity. Sex. We love . . .” She reached up for Pitte’s hand. “As genuinely as you. We weep and laugh. We enjoy much of what your world offers. We celebrate the generosity and resilience of the human spirit, and mourn its darker sides.”

  “But while you’re here, you’re of neither one world nor the other. Isn’t that right?” There was something about the way they touched each other, Jordan thought. As if they would wither away without that small contact. “You can live as you choose to live, but within limitations. Within the boundaries of this dimension. Even so, you’re not of it. You might feel the heat, but you don’t burn. You might sleep at night, but when you wake in the morning, you haven’t aged. The hours haven’t changed you. Millions of hours can’t.”

  “And do you see that kind of . . . immortality,” Pitte inquired, “as a gift?”

  “No, I don’t.” Jordan’s glance shifted to Pitte’s face and held. “I see it a
s a curse. A punishment, certainly, when you’re locked out of your own world and spend those millions of hours here.”

  Pitte’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes seemed to deepen, to heat. “Then you have excellent sight.”

  “I see something else clearly enough. The penalty, if Dana fails to find the key, is a year of her life. A year of Malory’s and Zoe’s as well. From your standpoint that’s nothing. But it’s a different matter when you’re human and your life is already finite.”

  “Ah.” Pitte draped an arm over the mantel. “So, have you come to renegotiate our contract?”

  Before Dana could speak, tell Jordan to mind his own business, he shot her a look. “No, because Dana’s going to find the key, so it won’t be an issue.”

  “You have confidence in your woman,” Rowena said.

  “I’m not his woman,” Dana said quickly. “Has Kane watched us, too? From the beginning of our lives?”

  “I can’t say,” Rowena answered, then waved an impatient hand at Dana’s dubious expression. “I can’t. There are, as Jordan said, certain boundaries we can’t cross. Something has changed—we know this because he was able to draw both Malory and Flynn into dreams and to cause Flynn harm. He wasn’t able, or perhaps didn’t choose, to do so before.”

  “Tell them what he did to you.”

  It wasn’t phrased as a request, and this time Dana’s anger was sparked. But before she could snap at Jordan, Rowena took her arm.

  “Kane? What happened?”

  She told them, and found that this time her voice remained steady throughout the telling. More distance, she thought, less fear.

  At least there was less until she saw a flicker of fear cross Rowena’s face.

  She didn’t care to think what it took to frighten a god.

  “There wasn’t any real threat, right?” Her skin was prickling, icy little ants rushing down her back. “I mean, I couldn’t have drowned when I jumped into the sea, because the sea didn’t actually exist.”

  “But it did,” Pitte corrected. There was a grim chill to his face. A soldier’s face, Dana thought, as he watched the battle from a rise and waited for the time to draw his sword.

  And she was the one down in the field, she realized, waging bloody war.

  “It was conjured first by your fantasy, then by your fear. That doesn’t make it less than real.”

  “That just doesn’t make sense,” she insisted. “When he had Malory in that fantasy, when she was painting, we could see her. We all saw her, just standing there in that attic.”

  “Her body, perhaps part of her consciousness—she has a strong mind—remained. The rest . . .” Rowena drew a breath. “The rest of what she was had traveled to the other side. And if harm had come to her. To her body,” Rowena explained, holding out one hand. “To what you can call her essence.” Then the other. “On either side, the harm would be to all of her.”

  “If she cut her hand in one existence,” Jordan said, “it would bleed in the other.”

  “He could prevent it.” Obviously troubled, Rowena rose to pour more wine. “If, for instance, I wished to give you a gift, a harmless fantasy, I might send you into dreams, and watch over you to keep you from harm. But what Kane does is not harmless. He does it to tempt, and to terrorize.”

  “Why didn’t he just shove my head under the bathwater while I was out of it?”

  “There are still limits. To maintain the illusion, he can’t touch your corporeal body. And as it is your mind that forms the texture of the illusion, neither can he force you to harm yourself. Lie, yes. Deceive and frighten, even persuade, but he can’t make you do anything against your will.”

  “That’s how she broke back through.” It was the answer that Jordan had needed confirmed. “First, by choosing to see it as a trick, she changed the texture, as you said, of the world. Instead of paradise, nightmare.”

  “Her knowledge and fear, and Kane’s anger, yes,” Pitte agreed. “The fruit you dropped,” he said to Dana. “Your mind saw it then as rotten in the center. This was not your paradise but your prison.”

  “And when she dived into the sea rather than let him take what she was, rather than accept the fantasy or the nightmare, she broke through both,” Jordan concluded. “So her weapon against him is staying true to herself, whatever he throws at her.”

  “Simply put,” Pitte agreed.

  “Too simply.” Rowena shook her head. “He’s wily and seductive. You must never underestimate him.”

  “He’s already underestimated her. Hasn’t he, Stretch?”

  “I can handle myself.” His easy confidence went a long way toward quieting her nerves. “What’s to stop him from hitting on Zoe, screwing with her while we’re focused on him screwing with me?”

  “She is not yet an issue for him. But precautions can be taken,” Rowena mused, tapping a finger on the rim of her glass. “She can be protected, to an extent, until her time begins.”

  “If it begins,” Pitte corrected.

  “He’s pessimistic by nature,” Rowena smiled. “I have more faith.” She walked back to the sofa, sat on the arm with the fluid grace some women are born with. Reaching down, she took Dana’s face in her hands.

  “You know the truth when you hear it. You may turn your ear from it, close your mind to it. As my man is pessimistic, you are stubborn by nature.”

  “Got that in one,” Jordan muttered.

  “But when you choose to hear it, the truth rings clear for you. This is your gift. He can’t deceive you unless you allow it. When you accept what you already know you’ll have the rest.”

  “You wouldn’t like to be a little more specific?”

  A smile touched the corners of Rowena’s mouth. “You have enough to think of for now.”

  LATER, when they were alone, Rowena curled on the sofa beside Pitte, rested her head on his shoulder and watched the fire. In the flames she studied Dana, her hands competent on the steering wheel as she drove through the night toward the quiet valley below the Peak.

  She admired competence, in gods and mortals.

  “She worries him,” she said quietly.

  Pitte watched the fire, and the images in it as well. “Whom does she worry? The soul-stealer or the story-spinner?”

  Absently, for comfort, Rowena rubbed her cheek against Pitte’s shoulder. “Both, certainly. And both have hurt her, though only one with intent. But a lover’s blade slices deeper than any enemy’s. She worries Kane,” she said, “but the man is worried for her.”

  “They have heat.” Pitte turned his head to brush his lips over Rowena’s hair. “He should take her to bed and let the heat seal old wounds.”

  “So like a male, to think bedding is always the answer.”

  “It’s a good one.” Pitte gave her a little shove, and when she fell, it was onto the big bed they shared.

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. Her silver dress had melted away so that she wore only her own skin. Such things, she knew, were one of his more playful, and interesting, habits.

  “Heat isn’t enough.” She spread her arms, and dozens of candles flared into flame. “It’s warmth, my love, my only love, that heals the wounded heart.”

  With her arms still open wide, she sat up and welcomed him to her.

  DANA had hardly gotten back in the door—and kept Jordan out—had barely settled down with Othello again and cleared her mind enough to focus on the task at hand, when there was another knock.

  Figuring Jordan had come back with some new ploy to wheedle his way in, she ignored it.

  She was, by Jesus, going to spend two hours working on this book angle, and then she was going to think about the drive to the Peak, what had been said there. What hadn’t been said on the drive home.

  If she had to think about Jordan, she sure as hell wasn’t going to do it when he was around.

  He’d sniff it out of her head like a bloodhound.

  There was another knock, more insistent this time. She merely bared her teeth and k
ept scanning the play.

  But the barking got her attention.

  Realizing that she would get nowhere until the door was answered, she got up and opened it. “What the hell are you doing here? Both of you.” She scowled at Flynn, then leaned down to rub Moe’s floppy ears and make kissing noises. “Did Malory kick you out? Poor baby.” Her sympathetic tone turned icy as she straightened and peered at her brother. “You’re not sleeping here.”

  “Don’t plan to.”

  “Then what’s in the bag?”

  “Stuff.” He squeezed inside, around his dog and his sister. “I hear you had a rough one last night.”

  “It was an experience, and I’m not in the mood to rehash it. It’s after ten. I’m working, then I’m sleeping.”

  With, she thought, every light in the apartment burning, just as she had the night before.

  “Fine. Here’s his stuff.”

  “Whose stuff?”

  “Moe’s. I’ll haul over the big-ass bag of dog food tomorrow, but there’s enough in there for his breakfast.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She looked in the bag he’d shoved into her arms and saw a mangled tennis ball, a tattered rope, a box of dog biscuits on top of about five pounds of dry dog food.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “His stuff,” Flynn repeated cheerfully, and grunted when Moe leaped up to plant his paws on his shoulders. “Moe’s your new temporary roommate. Well, gotta go. See you tomorrow.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” She tossed the bag on a chair, beat him to the door by a step, and threw herself against it. “You’re not walking out that door without this dog.”

  He gave her a smile that was both mildly quizzical and wholly innocent. “You just said I couldn’t sleep here.”

  “You can’t. Neither can he.”

  “Now look, you’ve hurt his feelings.” He looked sorrowfully at Moe, who was trying to nose his way into the bag. “It’s all right, big guy. She didn’t mean it.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “You don’t know what dogs understand. Scientific tests are inconclusive.” He gave Dana a brotherly pat on the cheek. “So anyway, Moe’s going to stay for a couple weeks. Play guard dog.”