Magick Rising (19 page)

established communication. The better to convince her it was time to move

on.

“Years of sensing his presence.” Her many-voiced despair shook the

tall attic windows. “Unable to be seen, to be heard. But you—you charm

him
immediatement
. How lucky you are.”

I got the feeling she meant to make me pay for that luck.

“What is she saying?” demanded Richard. “Penelope. Tell me!”

Poor me,
that’s what she was saying.
I still want Richard, and I don’t care who

I hurt to have him.
After experiencing his story, I really had to struggle to

remind myself that her violence had come from a place of pain, that she

likely had not been born evil, but had been raised into it, and that for the

sake of all our safety, she needed closure most of all. “I don’t think she’s

changed much.”

“He said he loved me,” she accused—or they accused,
they
being the

different versions of her voice. The tension in the air around us seemed to

vibrate with her insistence. “He lied to me. Tell him!”

Fine. “She says that when you said you loved her, you lied.”

“Of course I lied. She had massacred a city! How could I love such a

creature? How could anybody . . .” Richard stopped and would not meet my

eyes. “How could anybody love a killer?”

When I repeated his words, Manon’s scream blasted through the attic,

loud enough that I imagined the roof going again. I covered my ears,

cringed. Then I said, “Try?”

Now
Richard met my gaze, horrified. “Is that you or her?”

“Me! You don’t have to pledge your heart and soul to her.”
Please don’t

do that.
“But she needs closure. Try to see her as a human being who feels

loss, who feels unworthy. She can’t let go with those feelings. Help her

replace them with something better. If you could make a connection, any

connection, it might help.

“Manon, would that be enough for you to stop hurting people, hurting

yourself, if you knew that people—that Richard—could see that side of you,

that he cares about your loneliness?”

I almost cringed again from the wave of silence. That’s how foreign and

dangerous it felt.
She was thinking
.

“He must kiss me.” Her demand whispered and sang and purred, all at

the same time. “He must kiss me and say he is sorry.”

I reluctantly repeated her request, and Richard shook his head. “She is

invisible to me. How could we kiss?”

Manon’s next words chilled me. “You could make him welcome it,

girl.”

Whoa—wait a minute. I shook my head. “I think I know what you’re

getting at, but . . . no.”

“What?” asked Richard. “What won’t you say?”

“I could vow not to hurt you,” the suddenly honey-voiced Manon

tempted.

I said, “You’d have to vow not to hurt him, either.”

“What are the two of you saying?” Richard strode closer to me but was

bumped back by the force of my protective amulet. Frustration flashed,

angry, across his face. “How could she hurt me?”

“I so vow,” Manon Boulanger’s voices chirred, breathed, declared. “I

will hurt neither of you. But please, girl. Give us one kiss goodbye.”

I did not like this request—but not because I’d never heard of such a

thing. I’d seen Lance do it more than once. He’d insisted that, unlike in

movies, possession was more like hypnosis, and I have in the past been

hypnotized. People can’t be hypnotized to do something that they don’t

want to do, and as far as we knew, they couldn’t be possessed into it either.

No, my problem was that I didn’t want to be that close to the likes of

Manon Boulanger. But my goal was to give her the closure she needed in

order to move on. And where were all my other great options?

“Then you will leave this place?”

Even as Manon agreed—“I will leave”—Richard warned, “Don’t trust

her, Penelope. You cannot—No!”

He screamed that last, lunging for me.

Because I took off my protective amulet and, with a jingle, hung it on a

nail sticking out of the wall by one of the windows. Some things are worth

risking your life, gambling everything. This—saving lives, granting Richard

peace—definitely counted.

As a concession prize, this way I could kiss him, too.
One last kiss . . .

Except—the sensation of Manon possessing my body didn’t feel like

hypnosis. It felt like drowning. When an unexpected wave slaps you under,

rolls you onto the sandy bottoms, robs you of up and down, blinded and

beaten and unable to breathe, like that . . . Everything shifted. Everything

spun.

Then I sucked in a breath—
we
sucked in a breath—and the world

righted itself.

Slightly.

I wasn’t right, as we say in Texas. I felt swollen, my vision double, my

balance off. But I breathed.

What really unsettled me was how I shouted, “Richard!” and flung

myself into his stunned embrace. Because—although it was something I

wanted—
I
hadn’t done that at all.
We
hadn’t even done it.

She
had. And
I
, a puppet on strings, just went with it.

Luckily, Richard caught us. His arms felt as solid, as secure as ever. I

could feel his embrace. If this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done—

Okay, scratch that. This
was
the most stupid thing I’d ever done, good

cause or not. But if it also got me killed, then at least I’d gotten one last hug

from Richard.

“Pen . . .” He broke off, searching my face, and understood. “Manon?”

“Richard! Why could you not love me? I needed you, and you rejected

me. You are cruel! Our parting was cruel!” We began to scatter kisses all

over his unshaven face. “But you have another chance . . .”

Richard hesitated—then gave in and kissed us. It felt more forced than

any of his previous kisses. I could taste the
trying
. I knew he understood how

wrong everything might go if he couldn’t make her believe this time. Really

believe.

Then he made a mistake.

“If you release Penelope, I will love you,” he promised.
Tried
to

promise.

“If . . . ?” Rage washed over us,
her
rage squeezing
my
heart,
my
lungs,

stiffening
my
limbs. “No. No conditions. Not on love, not true love. You

must love me more than her, or I cannot forgive you.”

Again, we stretched upward to kiss him. This time, he pushed us back

by my shoulders. “Forgive . . . ?”

“But of course! You abandoned
me
. You killed
me
!” She must have

sensed my shock. I could feel her glee. “Did you not explain how you put

your hands around my throat and squeezed . . . ?”

Worse, I could see by the agony stiffening Richard’s face that he could

not contradict her.

Oh my God . . .

Manon laughed with my voice and spun in a happy circle, gulping deep

breaths of real air. “But now I live again. Now I breathe again. Now I can let

my Richard make it up to me, do penance for murdering of me.”

Show me that he did it.
I tried to make my demand with my mouth. My lips

wouldn’t move. Still, she perhaps sensed it, because she stopped dancing

around in my body and tilted her head, considered.

Remember
, I insisted. As I’d hoped, just dangling the memory in front of

her worked as well as saying,
Whatever you do, don’t think of elephants
. She

couldn’t
not
remember.

Finally I saw it, overlaid on my current view of the attic—and it was

worse than Richard had described. The roof had torn away, bombarded by

rain, black seawater undulating angrily beyond. Soaked humans, soaked

floorboards. In memory, Manon’s cramped hand kept retracing her spell

through the puddles with a charred stick. Her body shuddered with agony,

but her magic held death back like a tidal wave, building, ready at any time to

crash down and claim its price from her.

She mouthed a chant, a patois of language I did not recognize but, in

her head, could translate.
Love is pain. Feel my pain.

Each time she spoke it, the storm’s fury increased, striking out at

happiness, striking out at life all across the island.

Love is pain.
The memory of Richard crawled closer to the memory of

her, struggling against the gale-force nightmare. She’d thought he would

embrace her.
Feel my pain.

Another house, a glimpse beyond the remains of Sorrow’s End,

collapsed into the flood.

Love is—

Richard’s hands had closed around her throat, silencing her . . .

In a blink, I was back in the attic of my time. Sunlight. Safety—if you

could call this safe. Richard squared his shoulders, denied nothing. “How

may I repent, my darling?”
Darling?!

“Kiss me,” entreated Manon, through my mouth. “Give me now the

kiss you refused then.”

I saw and felt her remembrance of the moment she realized he meant

to kill her.
Stop it now
, he had commanded.
Stop it now!

But her lips had kept moving without voice.
Feel my pain . . .
As she

pulled back from the memory and focused on the Richard of my time, she

repeated the words aloud, as if they were a mantra she had to make him

finally understand. “Feel my pain. Kiss me.”

Without hesitation Richard drew us into the cradle of his arms.

“Me,” insisted Manon’s and my French-accented voice. “You see me

now, yes? Not her?”

“Yes. My
petit
Manon.” Richard kissed our lips, slid his cheek over ours.

“I was wrong to reject such love. I am yours now,
petit
. Come with me now.

Let us leave this place together . . .”

No. Wait. Don’t give her that. That was more than I’d wanted him to

offer.

“But why leave?” whispered Manon, nuzzling into his salty neck. “Why,

mon cher . . .
?”

One of our hands crawled across his sandy, hard ass. I savored the feel

of it along with her. We, Richard and my timeshare body, pressed closer,

tighter, greedy, hungry . . .

“I love you,” he whispered. The pain I heard could never be for Manon.

“I am so sorry that it could not be, my darling. My only love. I will always

hold you in my heart . . .”

I cherished the words, somehow sensing they were for me.

Now Manon was the one who stiffened, who pulled back.

“You speak to her,” Manon challenged, my lips trembling. My heart

agreed with her. He’d been speaking to me.

Richard spread his arms to us, gritting his teeth. “Come with me and

leave her behind, Manon, and I will speak only to you.”

“No! You do not love me, only her!” Her rage spasmed through my

body, and the way she slammed my own furious fist against my chest hurt.

Wait. I thought she couldn’t . . . ? “You have never loved me!”

“Well no duh!” Those last words had not come from Richard.

It was Lance. Somehow under the cover of remembered chaos and

with our attention focused on the drama unfolding, he’d managed to get

close, to surprise us.

I tried to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing—and I

couldn’t. Maybe Manon
couldn’t
make me do something I didn’t want to

although, dizzy with the force of her spirit inside me, I would no longer bet

on that. But neither could I seem to move without her willing it.

Richard didn’t take his eyes off me, but he said, “Lance, get out of

here!”

“I can’t. You don’t understand. You can’t help her understand.” Then

Lance ignored Richard to look at me. At Manon,
in
me. “You can’t force

love,” he insisted. “That’s what I wanted to tell Penny, today. I get it. If

someone doesn’t love you, you can’t make them, even if their love is the

only thing keeping you alive . . . or here.”

Manon stared at him through my eyes, lip curled, then said, “Who is

this?”

And my fingers twitched.

My
fingers twitched. Because of
me
. Between Lance and Richard,

Manon was just distracted enough that I could apparently move my fingers

without her noticing
.

And not far from me, still hanging on that ugly nail, dangled the

anti-ghost talisman that Dawn had made for me.

RICHARD WISHED Penelope had not let Manon take over her body. He

did not trust the witch, and despite the full knowledge of his crime against

her, he struggled to find in himself any sympathy for her. He would rather

tell Manon what Lance was saying. Similar arguments had screamed through

his head with every
I will love you
and every
I am yours
he had forced out of his

mouth to calm the sociopathic ghost. Every word had tasted bitter as vomit,

but he’d done it. And now, when he did try to lie, apparently she heard the

falseness in his voice.

She sensed the emotion absent in his heart.