Haunting Beauty (45 page)
Stunned, Rory looked from the dead man now sprawled on the floor to his naked twin to the woman who watched from between spread fingers. She rushed toward his twin with a look of horror on her face. Rory spun and saw that his double was on his knees now. His hands clutched his gut and something dark and viscous ran through his fingers. Blood.
Rory crouched beside the woman as she stared at a gaping wound across his twin’s abdomen. Blood gushed from it, splashing her bare skin, seeping into the straw and twigs covering the floor. There was so much of it. Too much.
“Why?” she breathed the question, those eyes scanning his twin’s face.
Yes, why? Rory wanted to know as well. Why had the intruder attacked them without provocation?
His twin was bent with agony and didn’t answer. The woman tried to staunch the blood with the red blanket from the bed, but Rory could see it was pointless. The cut was too deep, too wide.
As his twin reached out a bloody hand to the woman, Rory knew the life was draining from him. It was like watching his own death, unbearable and inescapable. The look in his twin’s eyes cut him as deeply as the gash in the other man’s flesh. There was rage and there was pain. Desolation. Realization. And something deeper, more agonizing. A wound more painful than the one emptying his life onto the floor.
“It’s the both of us he’s betrayed, isn’t it?” the woman said, her words so soft Rory thought they were imagined.
His twin closed his eyes and nodded once. Then he looked up and for a cold instant, it seemed he stared right at Rory. There was comprehension in the look—comprehension and shock. Then relief. Rory felt the
how
forming on his lips, but he had no voice here, in this nightmare that had morphed into something no longer symbolic but terrifyingly real.
His twin stumbled to his feet, and now he clutched an object in his hands. Rory gaped at it, reeling again from the shift this dream world took.
It was the Book of Fennore. Rory would recognize it anywhere, even here, in this warped fantasy he couldn’t escape.
The Book had a black cover made of leather, beveled with concentric spirals, and crusted with jewels; gold and hammered silver twisted and twined around the edges and corners. Three cords of silver connected in a mystifying lock fixed over the jagged edges of thick, creamy paper. As old as the earth and sky, the Book was more than a bound text, it was an entity with its own consuming desires and twisted needs. Just touching it gave it access to the heart, mind, and very soul. Its call was irresistible. Its promises, unimaginable. Rory knew better than anyone.
A low humming had swelled around the three of them, a sickening buzz that lodged in the pit of his stomach and blocked out the sounds on the other side of the curtain. He felt hot and cold . . . and scared. The dream breached what little barrier remained between nightmare and terror.
The humming whine throbbed and pulsed—too low to be heard, too insistent to be ignored. With it came a blistering heat that burned like a coal in his head. A reasonable, alien part of him began to cite calming words—
It will be all right. It’s just a dream. Just your imagination
. And once again, dream Rory recognized that the input was coming from his wakeful self. Dream Rory found that even more terrifying because that implied a plurality that went beyond the symbolic twin.
This can’t be a fucking dream if I’m thinking all of that . . .
Everything began to shimmer, became the stuff dreams are supposed to be—translucent, then transparent, then transcendental. . . . Before he could wrap his thoughts around it, the woman turned her head to where he knelt beside her. The cold fear on her face struck an answering chord within him. She saw him.
She saw him.
She lifted a hand that shook and set it against his chest, as if to test his solidity. Her eyes widened; her mouth rounded into an “oh” of disbelief.
And the shock of her icy fingers against his hot skin jerked him awake.
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