Her heart quailed. She was too far away. The fair folk were on the other side of the cemetery, following a track in the hills that probably existed before the Cherokee. She would never reach them in time.
As we pass the churchyard, watch for your love by the queen’s side.
No. She was too late. She was too afraid. She couldn’t possibly . . .
But she was already running over the sunken ground of the graveyard, dodging to avoid the humped headstones, the obelisks shining in the moonlight. Her heart pounded. Her breath escaped in gasps. She ran, one hand flattened to the curve of her stomach, as if the danger were at her heels instead of riding to meet her on the other side.
When she reached the low brick wall bordering the churchyard, she slipped in the fresh dirt piled by the wall and had to steady herself against a monument. Her ankles hurt. Sweat trickled down her back and between her breasts.
She squinted toward the beautiful, terrible, motley procession winding past the graveyard.
Her racing heart mocked her. Too late, too late . . .
Her breath caught. There.
Lilith shone among her court like a red coal at the fire’s core. The silver light turned her gown the color of dried blood and her face as pale as the moon. She rode a shaggy pony. It should have been funny, the sight of the tall, strong queen on that short, sturdy mount, but it wasn’t. Muscles rolled beneath the pony’s shaggy coat. Rocks rattled under its small, round hooves. It was black, all black, without a whisper of white, and its eyes were the eyes of a goat.
Janet tore her gaze away before she fell under the spell of those golden eyes.
And there, at the queen’s side, just as Puck had said he would be, was Ross.
Janet nearly wept with relief.
He rode a black and silver motorcycle, idling the engine. His long legs were encased in black leather. His dark hair flowed loose around his lean face. He didn’t seem frightened, like a man dragged to sacrifice, or despairing, like a man who had lost the love of his life. His expression was flat. Wooden.
If you pull him down and hold him, hold fast, it may be he will live to be the father of your child.
Janet gulped back a sob.
She had always blamed him. For leaving—God, she had blamed him for that—but also for not loving her enough, for not giving her enough, for not making the commitment she wanted.
She crouched in the shadow of a monument, and the crack that opened in her heart almost swallowed her whole. What if Puck was wrong? What if Ross didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with a thirty-six-year-old pregnant librarian?
They were close enough now that she could see Ross’s knuckles, white on the throttle, and the unbearable beauty of the queen’s face.
Janet drew a shaky breath. She wasn’t going to be pregnant forever. In five months, she would have a child. In five years, that child would ask questions: Who is my daddy? Where is he?
She had always blamed Ross. It was less painful somehow than accepting responsibility for her own failure to tell him what she wanted, what she needed.
She’d been afraid, then, of his rejection.
She was afraid now.
But there was no way she was explaining to their child that Mommy let Daddy go to hell because she was too big a coward to take a risk.
The riders were almost even with her hiding place.
Pull him down and hold him . . .
Oh, right. Panic sputtered through her. How did a five-foot-four pregnant woman pull a much larger man off a really big motorbike without killing them both?
She looked around wildly for inspiration and spotted a shovel stuck into the pile of dirt under the wall. Okay, if inspiration failed her, at least she had a shovel.
Grabbing it with one hand—it was surprisingly heavy—she swung a leg over to straddle the wall and practically fell off at the queen’s feet.
She was right there. Lilith, passing on her pony, dragging the scent of old, slow, growing things after her like a cloak. The ground shivered under the pony’s hooves.
Janet flattened herself to the top of the wall and turned her face away. Her cheek ground against the rough brick. She squeezed her eyes shut. She was pretty sure she’d stopped breathing, but her heart thundered in her ears.
Oh, God, they would hear her, they would see her, they would smell her and drag her down. . . .
Nothing happened.
Cautious seconds later, she opened her eyes. An engine growled by her ear. Turning her head, she saw the black and silver wheels of Ross’s motorcycle glide by.
She had no time to think. She barely had time to act.
Flinging herself from the wall, she stumbled forward, the shovel in her hand. With all her might, she thrust it into the rear wheel of the bike.
Metal crunched and screeched. The shovel ripped from her grip, dragging her forward onto the ground. Pain lanced her shoulders, speared her knees and elbows. The rear of the bike slid away in a shower of sparks. The ground pitched and shrieked. The bike tilted.
Janet watched, wide-eyed, as time stood still and the front end of the bike torqued toward her head. She was going to die.
The engine roared in her ears. Its hot breath blasted her cheek. Ross’s boot slammed in front of her face. He wrestled the bike away using his own body as a pivot. And then the motorcycle skidded across the grass, and Ross pitched off and fell heavily on top of her.
They both grunted. She grabbed him with a fist in his shirt and a hand on his thigh.
Everything got quiet. For a second Janet dared to hope that was it. She was done. He was safe.
But it wasn’t that kind of quiet.
This was the awful, restive hush that seizes the air before a storm, the shadowed silence that waits for you at the top of the stairs. Janet struggled to her knees to meet it, clenching her hands in Ross’s shirt. He lolled half across her. A gash bled blackly across his forehead. His eyes were dazed and dark.
Please, she caught herself praying, although it had been years since she’d prayed outside of church. Please.
The fairy queen’s voice rattled into the silence.
“It’s mine,” she said like an imperious child. “Give it back.”
Janet gaped at her across Ross’s body, almost relaxing her hold in surprise. She tightened her grip. “No.”
“He does not want you. Why do you want him?”
“Why do you?” Janet asked. Her shoulders hurt, and she was pretty sure her knees were bleeding. They stuck to her skirt.
The petulance left the queen’s face. She drew herself up on her shaggy pony, and the look she gave Janet should have turned her to stone.
“My reasons are mine. As he is and has chosen to be.”
Hard to argue with that.
Janet glanced down at Ross’s white face streaked with blood. His lashes were dark against his gaunt cheeks. I’m sorry if this isn’t what you want, she thought at him. I’m sorry if I’m not what you want.
She looked back at the queen. “He can’t choose anything now. I’ve got him and”—she drew a deep breath—“I’m keeping him.”
A sigh rippled through the assembled fair folk like wind through the grass.
“Let’s see if you can hold him, then,” said Lilith almost casually.
And with no more warning than that, he changed in her arms.
Instead of a man, Janet held a copper snake with moss green eyes that writhed and slithered in her grasp. Shock made her scream. Fear almost made her fling it to the grass. But she seized it behind its broad, flat head and supported its twisting body with her arms, and after a while it coiled around her forearm and was still.
Janet shuddered with relief.
The sidhe sighed again and swayed closer.
The snake turned into a red-tailed hawk that beat her with its wings and raked her with its claws and screamed in rage. Blinded, buffeted, Janet grabbed a taloned foot with one hand and shielded her eyes with the other. The hawk almost fought free. But she yanked the
hem of her skirt up over its head and talked to it softly until it subsided sulkily against her breast, its hooked claws drawing blood from her arm.
The fair folk whispered and rustled together.
Not good, Janet thought.
The bird burst into a blue flame that crackled and blazed and seared her hands with terrible pain. Janet gasped. But she was prepared this time. Although the fire scorched her face and scalded the tears from her eyes, her skin did not blacken or blister. If she held on now, if she held on just a little longer, she would have Ross always. Ross and her baby. And she twisted her fingers in the fire and breathed through the pain until she couldn’t feel it anymore.
The ring of sidhe pressed nearer. If she looked up . . .
But she didn’t look up, and the flame melted to water in her hands. Janet was shaking so hard she was afraid the water would run away before she could catch it. But she cupped her palms and held them low and close over her lap, and every drop that trickled through her fingers she replaced with a tear.
The sidhe crowded at the corners of her vision.
Janet flinched in anticipation. Her shoulders ached. Her hands burned. Her arms were bleeding. She thought of the baby curled under her heart and squeezed her fingers together. They couldn’t take much more.
From the water in her palms rose a mist that floated and formed above the ground. Janet held her breath. How could she hold on to a mist? But the cloud gradually took on the shape of a man; and the man was Ross.
Janet cried out in gladness and flung her arms around him.
He turned his head and looked at her with hatred in his eyes.
Chapter Seven
“YOU lose,” Lilith said.
Janet waited for Ross to say something, anything, to allay the loathing in his eyes, but after that one brief, searing glance he wouldn’t even look at her. He watched the queen like a dog waiting to be let out.
Janet’s heart shattered.
“Release him,” Lilith ordered, and the fair folk murmured and shifted in their circle. “He has made his choice.”
She sounded so sure Janet almost obeyed. Ross’s skin was warm where it pressed against hers, but his face, in profile, was distant and cold. The gash on his forehead had stopped bleeding. It was shrinking, healing, even as Janet watched.
The queen could do that for him. Could make him forever whole, could keep him forever young. What could Janet offer to compete with magic except her love and their child?
And he didn’t want either one. Didn’t want her.
A sob, dry as despair, swelled in her chest.
The sidhe watched and waited.
Movement crept in the corner of Janet’s vision. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the queen. But if she turned her head just a little she could see Puck, there in the circle, huddling between two tall tree people as if hoping to escape notice. When the little man saw her, though, he rubbed the side of his nose and nodded. To acknowledge her? Encourage her?
It’s every seven years on Halloween we pay our tithe to hell. And this year, I fear young Ross is to be our sacrifice.
Janet swallowed hard. Okay, so Ross didn’t want her. She could live with that. She could live without him. But maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t live without her.
Even if he never loved her, she could not let him die and be damned. Because she loved him.
Lilith sat her sturdy pony, her face a mask of triumph, unshakable as the earth in her feminine power.
Janet stuck out her chin. “Go to hell,” she said.
Her words rippled through the sidhe like stones cast in a pond. Janet held her breath.
The queen’s expression never wavered. But the air around her thickened, and the ground cracked beneath her pony’s hooves. The chain slithered from around Ross’s neck and fell gleaming to the grass.
He turned his head and smiled wryly at Janet. “You’ve done it now,” he said.
She gawked at him. Something was different. He looked different. His forehead was bleeding again. “Done what?”
He shook his head. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?”
Lurching to his feet, he held out his hand to help her up. “Come on, honey. Move it.”
The night eddied around them. The fair folk stirred restlessly.
Bewildered, Janet put her hand in his.
As if that were some kind of signal, the sidhe gathered themselves like the sea and flung themselves forward in a wave, whooping, cawing, rushing, roaring.
Janet stood transfixed, waiting for the flood to crash down on her.
“Come on,” Ross said through his teeth, and yanked on her arm and dragged her after him.
The fair folk swarmed behind, banging and yammering.
The church wall bought them a little time. Ross half lifted, half threw Janet over. She landed in a pile of dirt. Ross grabbed her arm again and they scrambled over the bumpy ground as the fair folk’s charge broke against the brick and swirled back uselessly on itself.
Janet didn’t get it. She could see how the wall would stop the motorcycles. But the others . . . The queen’s pony could have jumped the low barrier in one bound.
Lilith spoke. She wasn’t yelling, but her voice shook the earth. The ground hunched like a stretching cat, and the wall tumbled down.
The sidhe rushed through the gap.
Janet ran. She had a stitch in her side and she stumbled into things—trees and headstones—but Ross kept pulling her arm, urging her on. Toward the church? Wherever he was going, he could have gotten there a lot faster without her. But he never left her side.
The fair folk clamored behind them, no longer a procession but a hunt. They were in the sky now, too, fluttering and swooping like kites, diving through the dark-leaved magnolias.
Janet stepped into the hollow over a grave and turned her ankle. She fell, right onto her bleeding knees, and that hurt so much she almost threw up.
Ross grasped her elbow. “Come on, honey. Almost there.”
She couldn’t get her breath to answer him. The night whirled sickly around her. Even with her eyes closed, she saw stars.
Ross picked her up—not a gentle lover’s hold, either, he threw her over his shoulder like a bag of fertilizer—and ran with her, his shoulder bruising her stomach, his hard arm clamping her thighs, her head bouncing dizzily over his back.
But she could see their pursuers now, and that was enough to make her hang on for dear life. Compared to that, the jouncing was almost bearable.
Ross’s gait changed. Hanging over his shoulder, Janet saw brick steps under his feet. Somehow, they had reached the church. Ross dumped her on her feet in the shallow archway that shielded the entrance, and she gasped in pain and clutched him for support. Her ankle throbbed. Propping her with his body, he reached past her to open the tall double doors.
They were locked.
Janet’s heart plummeted to her stomach. Of course they were locked. No parish administrator would leave a historic church open to vandals on Halloween.
Ross turned, putting her behind him. He was breathing hard—well, it couldn’t have been easy, lugging her through the graveyard—and his shirt was damp with sweat. Janet pressed her cheek to his shoulder blade and felt the faint tremor of his muscles. He was afraid. He had to be afraid.
But he faced the sidhe, for her sake, and his voice was firm and calm.
“Go back,” he said. “She won me. I’m free now.”
All the whooping, all the racket, all the clamor died. In some ways, the silence was worse than the noise, a heavy, breathing, waiting silence.
Janet peeked over his shoulder.
Lilith strode through the circle of the sidhe in her blood red dress, terrifying in her beauty, confident in her power. Her face shone like the moon.
She stopped at the bottom of the steps. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but it seemed to Janet she was somehow taller. Her head was almost level with Ross’s.
Her black gaze bored into his. “If you go wi
th her, manling, I will be in your every thought.” Her voice was deadly. Low. “When you sleep beside her, you will dream of me. When you make love to her, you will see my face. You will never be free of me.”
It was all horrible and horribly convincing. Ross shuddered and Janet closed her eyes in despair.
And then he laughed, the sound young and amazingly care-free. Janet started. Alone before the church steps, the fairy queen stiffened in surprise.
“No,” Ross said. “You lose. Go away.”
He turned his back on Lilith, turned his back on them all, and took Janet in his arms.
She touched his face in wonder. He looked different. Older. Lines crinkled the corners of his eyes and creased his forehead. He seemed more solid, broader at the waist and shoulders.
“How do you know?” she whispered. “How can you be sure?”
Ross grinned at her, and his grin was the same, confident and young. Her heart stuttered crazily.
“Like I’m really going to think of her when I’ve got you,” he said.
Janet was concentrating so fiercely on his face that she didn’t spare a thought for the fair folk behind him, fading away like streaks in the sky.
“I was afraid,” she confessed. “Fourteen years is a long time. It would be perfectly natural for you to—to think of her sometimes.”
Ross shook his head. “How can my head be full of her when my heart is filled with you? All I can see when I close my eyes is you.” He spread his hand over her stomach. “You and our baby. No, what worried me was that you wouldn’t see through her last illusion.”
Janet thought back. “When she changed you into water?”
“No. When she changed me.”
“Because you’re older? Younger? What?”
“The mist-to-man thing. Remember?”
She remembered that. Oh, she remembered. “You looked at me like you hated me.”
“That was the last of Lilith’s deceptions. I was afraid you wouldn’t see through it, that you wouldn’t believe I loved you.”
Behind his head, the sky was lightening to a faint pearl gray like hope. It was almost dawn.
“Do you?” She knew now how to ask for the words. “Do you love me?”
Man of My Dreams Page 31