Heaven and Earth (29 page)

The scientist in him wanted to pursue it, but the man couldn’t follow through.

“Ripley, you’re not a little girl. I want you to stay in this time and place.”

“Mia and I had fun. If I didn’t have to grow up, we’d still be friends.” It was said sulkily, her mouth in a pout as she played the lights.

“I need you to stay in this time and this place.”

She let out a long sigh. “Yes, I’m here.”

“Can I touch one of the lights?”

“It won’t hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you.” She brought one down until it hovered above his hands.

He could trace it with his finger, a perfect circle. “It’s beautiful. What’s inside you is beautiful.”

“Some is dark.” As she said it, her body arched, and the lights flew around the room like bright stars.

Instinctively Mac ducked. The lights began to whistle shrilly and pulse bloodred.

“Close the spell.”

“Something’s here. It’s come to hunt. To feed.” Her hair began to twist into wild curls. “It’s come back. One times three.”

“Ripley.” Lights flew past his face as he rushed back to her. “Close the spell. I want you to close the spell and come back. I’m going to count back from ten.”

“She needs you to guide the way.”

“I’m bringing her back.” Mac gripped shoulders he knew were no longer Ripley’s. “You have no right to take her.”

“She is mine and I am hers. Show her the way. Show her
her
way. She must not take mine, or we are lost.”

“Ripley, focus on my voice. On
my
voice.” It took all his control to keep his voice soothing. Firm but calm. “Come back now. When I reach one, you’ll wake up.”

“He brings death. He craves it.”

“He won’t get it,” Mac snapped. “Ten, nine, eight. You’re waking up slowly. Seven, six. You’re going to feel relaxed, refreshed. Five, four. You’ll remember everything. You’re safe. Come back now. Wake up, Ripley. Three, two, one.”

As he counted down, he saw her come back, not just to the surface of consciousness but physically. As her eyelids fluttered, the lights vanished, and the room was still.

She breathed out, swallowed. “Holy shit,” she managed, then found herself plucked off the bed into his lap and crushed in his arms.

Seventeen

H
e couldn’t let
her go, couldn’t stop blaming himself for taking chances with her. Nothing he’d seen, experienced, theorized, had ever terrified him the way watching Ripley change in front of him had done.

“It’s all right.” She stroked his back, patted it. Then realizing they were both trembling, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held tight. “I’m okay.”

He shook his head, buried his face in her hair. “I should be shot.”

Since gentle soothing wasn’t working, she switched tactics into something more natural to her. “Get a grip, Booke,” she ordered and shoved at him. “No harm, no foul.”

“I took you under, left you open.” He pulled back, and she could see it wasn’t fear on his face but fury. “It hurt you. I could see it. Then you were gone.”

“No, I wasn’t.” His reaction had given her little time for one of her own. Now her stomach quivered. Something had come into her. No, she thought, that wasn’t quite right. Something had come
over
her.

“I was here,” she said slowly, as she tried to puzzle it
out for herself. “It was like being underwater. Not like drowning or sinking, but just . . . floating. It didn’t hurt. More of a quick shock, then the drift.”

Her brows drew together as she thought it through. “Can’t say I cared for it, though. I don’t like the idea of being tucked aside so someone else can have her say.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Fine. Actually, I feel great. Stop taking my pulse, Doc.”

“Let me get these things off you.” But when he started to remove the electrodes, she closed a hand over his wrist.

“Hold on. What did you get out of all that?”

“A reminder.” He bit off the words. “To be more cautious.”

“No, you don’t. Think like a scientist. The way you were when we started this. You’re supposed to be objective, right?”

“Fuck objectivity.”

“Come on, Mac. We can’t just toss the results out the window. Tell me. I’m interested.” When he frowned at her, she sighed. “It’s not just your deal now. I have a pretty personal interest in what went on here.”

She was right. Because she was right, he dug down for calm. “How much do you remember?”

“All of it, I think. For a minute I was eight years old. It was kind of cool.”

“You started to regress, on your own.” He pressed his fingers to his temples. Clear the brain, he ordered himself. Bag the emotion. And give her some answers.

“Maybe the game was the trigger,” he considered. “If you want a quick analysis, I’d say you went back to a time when you weren’t conflicted. Subconsciously you needed to go back to a time when things were simpler and you didn’t question yourself. You used to enjoy your gift.”

“Yeah. And for a while, the Craft—the learning, the refining, I guess you’d say.” Restless now, she moved her shoulders. “And then you get a little older and you start thinking about the weight. The consequences.”

He laid a hand on her cheek. “This, all of this, troubles you.”

“Well, things aren’t simple now, are they? They haven’t been for me for ten years.”

He said nothing, watching her patiently. Words trembled on her tongue, then began to spill out in a flood. “I could see, in dreams, how it might be if I took a step too far. If I didn’t strap it in, wasn’t careful enough. And sometimes, in those dreams, it felt good. Amazingly good to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Screw the rules.”

“But you never did,” he said quietly. “Instead you just stopped it all.”

“When Sam Logan left Mia, she was a wreck. I kept thinking, why the hell doesn’t she
do
something about it? Make him pay, the son of a bitch. Make him suffer the way she’s suffering. And I thought of what I’d do. What I could do. Nobody would hurt me that way, because if they tried . . .”

She shuddered. “I imagined it, and almost before I realized, a bolt of light shot out of the sky. A black bolt of light, barbed like an arrow. I sank Zack’s boat,” she said with a weak smile. “Nobody was in it, but they could have been. He could have been, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it. No control, just anger.”

He laid a hand on her leg, rubbed. “How old were you?”

“Not quite twenty. But that doesn’t matter,” she said fiercely. “You know that doesn’t matter. ‘And it harm none.’ That’s vital, and I couldn’t be sure I could keep that pledge. God, he’d been in that damn boat not twenty
minutes before it happened. I wasn’t thinking of him, wasn’t concerned about him or anyone. I was just mad.”

“So you denied yourself your gift, and your friend.”

“I had to. There was no one without the other in this. They’re too twined together. She would never have understood or accepted, and damn it, she’d never have stopped nagging at me. Plus, I was pissed at her because . . .”

She knuckled a tear away and said aloud what she’d refused to admit even to herself. “I felt her pain like it was my own, physically felt it. Her grief, her despair. Her desperate love for him. And I couldn’t stand it. We were too close, and I couldn’t breathe.”

“It’s been as hard on you as it has on her. Maybe harder.”

“I guess. I’ve never told anybody any of this. I’d appreciate it if we kept it between us.”

He nodded, and when his lips brushed hers they were warm. “You’ll have to talk to Mia sooner or later.”

“I choose later.” She sniffled again, rubbed her face briskly. “Let’s move on, okay? Or I guess it’s back. You got your readings, you got your tape,” she said, nodding at his equipment. “I didn’t think you’d be able to put me under. I keep underestimating you. It was relaxing, even pleasant.” She pushed back her heavy hair. “And then . . .”

“What then?” he prompted. He didn’t have to check his machines to know her heart rate and respiration were spiking.

“It was like something was trying to get it. Claw its way in. Something crouched and waiting. Boy, that sounds dramatic.” And though she laughed at herself, she drew her knees up protectively. “Not her. It wasn’t her. It was something . . . else.”

“It hurt you.”

“No, but it wanted to. Then I was sliding underwater, and she was the surface. I can’t explain it any other way.”

“That’s good enough.”

“I don’t see what’s good about it. I couldn’t control it. Like I couldn’t control what happened to Zack’s boat. Couldn’t control what I started with the lights tonight. Even though she was inside me, some part of her, it didn’t seem as if she could control it either. Like the power was caught somewhere between. Up for grabs.” She shivered and felt her skin grow icy. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“Okay, we’ll stop.” He took her hands, soothed. “I’m going to put everything away.”

Though she nodded, she knew he didn’t understand her. She didn’t want any of it any longer. But she was afraid, deeply afraid, that she wasn’t going to be given the choice.

Something was coming, she thought. For her.

He tucked her
in like a baby, and she let him. When he drew her close to comfort her in the dark, she pretended to sleep. He stroked her hair, and she felt the beginning of tears.

If she was normal, if she was ordinary, her life could be like this, she thought bitterly. She could be held close in the dark by the man she loved.

A simple thing. Everything.

If she’d never met him, she’d have been content to go on as she was. Enjoying a man now and then when he caught her fancy and her interest. Whether or not she would have embraced her powers again she couldn’t be sure. But her heart would have remained her own.

Once you gave your heart, you risked more than self. You risked the one who held it.

How could she?

Weary of the worry, she breathed him in, and gave herself to sleep.

The storm was
back, cold and bitter. It drove the sea into a frenzy of sound and fury. Lightning blasted over the sky, shattering it like glass.

Black rain gushed from the shards to be hurled like frozen barbs by the wicked wind.

The storm was feral. And she ruled it.

Power fueled her, pumping through muscle and bone with such glorious
strength.
Here was an energy beyond anything she’d known before, had believed possible.

And with this force at her fingertips, she would have vengeance.

No, no. Justice. It wasn’t vengeance to seek punishment for wrongs. To
demand
it. To mete it out with a clear mind.

But her mind wasn’t clear. Even in the throes of her hunger, she knew it. And feared it.

She was damning herself.

She looked down at the man who cowered at her feet. What was power if it couldn’t be used to right wrongs, to stop evil, to punish the wicked?

“If you do this, it ends in violence. In hopelessness.”

Her grief-stricken sisters stood in the circle, and she without.

“I have the right!”

“No one does. Do this, and you rip out the heart of the gift. The soul of what you are.”

She was already lost. “I can’t stop it.”

“You can. Only you can. Come, stand with us. It’s he who will destroy you.”

She looked down and saw the face of the man change, features over features that slid from terror, to glee, to plea, to hunger.

“No. He ends here.”

She threw up a hand. Lightning exploded, arrowed down to her fingertips. And became a silver sword. “With what is mine I take your life. To right the wrong and end the strife. For justice I set my fury free, and take the path of destiny. From this place and from this hour. . .” Thrilled, darkly thrilled, she lifted the sword high as he screamed. “I will taste the ripe fruit of power. Blood for blood I now decree. As I will, so mote it be.”

She brought the sword down in one vicious swipe. He smiled as its tip sliced flesh. And he vanished.

The night screamed, the earth trembled. And through the storm, the one she loved came running.

“Stay back!” she shouted. “Stay away!”

But he fought his way through the gale, reaching for her. From the tip of her sword, lightning erupted, and arrowed into his heart.

“Ripley, come on,
honey. Wake up now. It’s a bad dream.”

She was sobbing with it, and the wrenching grief in the sound worried him more than the trembling.

“I couldn’t stop it. I killed him. I couldn’t make it stop.”