Nightwing (12 page)

 “Some mother I am.” Willie sighed and stroked a hand down her back. “I forgot all about you. You okay?”

“Brruup,” Callie said, and began to purr.

It dawned on Willie that she hadn’t seen the cat since Johnny had shown up, that last night Callie had done the same thing, disappeared before Willie had seen Johnny in her bedroom mirror. Cats knew things, her grandmother
had
claimed. Like when it was best to make themselves scarce.

“Too bad I’m not a cat,” Willie murmured to Callie. Her hand was trembling, but just a little, as she petted Callie, listened to her purr and the rain drum on the windows.

Sure beat tranquilizers all to hell, hiding here under the desk. Little dusty. Might be a spider or two, but spiders didn’t scare her. Ghosts and vampires did. Maybe she’d just stay here until Johnny and Raven went away.

Fat chance. With eternity to kill, it wasn’t likely either one of them would get tired of waiting. She had to do something, but couldn’t make herself move. It seemed
like a
dream, or maybe a nightmare, that she’d kissed a vampire. It almost seemed as if it had happened to somebody else.

If Willie worked at it she could probably convince herself it had. She didn’t own a sweatshirt that said Call Me Cleopatra, Queen of Denial for nothing. She was no slouch at avoidance, either. She’d spent her life ducking and bucking her father’s autocratic rule, and six years and who knew how many tranquilizers denying that her job at
Material Girl
was driving her crazy.

She’d been a black belt in passive-aggressive behavior until Granma Boyle had willed her Beaches. She’d been standing up for herself and what she wanted ever since. If she cut and ran, to her parents in New York, to Whit in Boston, even to Frank four hundred yards down the beach, would she ever have the guts to break free again?

What could she tell them, anyway? What on earth could she say? “Gee, Dad, now I know why you’ve never felt comfortable at Beaches. It’s haunted!” What would Whit or Frank do if she called them up and said, “Guess what, guys? Raven isn’t a drug runner or a witch doctor. He’s a vampire!”

They’d drop a net on her, that’s what. No one would believe her. Everyone would think she was crazy. At last Willie understood why Granma Boyle had never told anyone about Johnny’s visits to Beaches.

She wasn’t crazy. But she wasn’t Buffy the vampire slayer, either. Nor did she want to be. She wanted Raven to go away before he broke her heart. Or she broke it herself thinking about what could have been. If only he wasn’t a vampire.

She wanted to help Johnny, too, though she couldn’t say why. Other than that he seemed to be a kinder, gentler version of Raven. She wanted to help him find the stairway to heaven, the light at the end of the tunnel—whatever he needed to stop wandering around like a lost soul.

Willie had a bad feeling that the only way to help herself and Johnny was to find out what Raven wanted from him. And why. Which she couldn’t do hiding under the desk.

Thank God she’d bought garlic for the coq au vin. She’d tie a clove of it on the chain with the little gold cross Granma had given her for confirmation. If she could trust the Boris Karloff movies she’d seen, the double whammy ought to send Raven screaming into the night. The image made Willie smile and her heart ache.

“But first we get some sleep,” she said to Callie, feeling suddenly bone weary—a sure sign of stress—as she crawled out from under the desk.

The crashing and booming had stopped, but rain still pelted the windows. Willie tucked Callie in her arm, turned off the lights and the AC and headed upstairs. A foghorn moaned, and the lynx screamed. Its eerie cry spun Willie around on the landing.

Callie growled, her tail bristling and brushing the gooseflesh spreading up Willie’s arms. Willie soothed her and scratched her ears. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, just the things that lived and hunted in it.

The lynx screamed again, reminding Willie that Lucy Pulver had told her there were still bobcats in Stonebridge. Lucy had said something about wolves, too. Willie shivered, murmuring prayers, and raced up the steps two at a time, unaware of the silvery shimmer that was Johnny outside a mirror stepping out of the shadows at the foot of the stairs.

Chapter 12

When he heard the bedroom door bang shut behind Willie, Johnny wheeled toward the front porch. He’d had enough of shrinking and cowering, a bellyful of Raven and his tricks.

The lynx screamed a third time, much closer to the house. Raven had done this before, taken some poor animal in Thrall to do his bidding. It would be, Johnny swore, the last time.

He undid the locks and flung open the front door. If Willie hadn’t latched the screen, too, he would have pushed through it into a fate worse than Raven, for the creature circling the house was not of his making.

Johnny knew it was a lynx. He also knew of Raven’s fondness for cats, but the rest of the creature’s signature was unknown to him. It stank of death and decay, of millennia-long entombment, hot and rusty sand.

A flickering memory stirred, of long, bronzed muscles and icy, numbing pain. Then the lynx slunk into view, bringing with it the reek of rotting vegetation, and the smell of something else—something fresh and wet, but not rain. It confused Johnny and shattered the memory that drifted away like smoke in the shape of a jackal with bared fangs. He shivered, drew back into the shadows, watched the lynx and felt a pang of sympathy for it.

It crept closer, moving stiffly, jerkily, not of its own volition, toward the porch steps. Its pelt glittered with rain, its tufted ears twitched. Johnny could smell its terror beneath the stench. As much as it feared man, it feared the thing that held it in Thrall more.

The lynx was searching but not hunting. It lifted its nose and sniffed as it skimmed up the steps, lowered its head and flared its nostrils. Johnny drew deeper into the shadows, but the lynx paid him no mind. It swung away, following a scent along the porch.

Johnny eased the door shut, turned the locks and raced to the French doors. From there he watched the lynx prowl the terrace and rise on its short, powerful hind legs. It sniffed the chair Raven had sat in and the table, one paw resting on the pebbled edge, its claws gleaming in the faint sheen of the moon.

Memory flickered again. Johnny had seen claws like that before. No, he’d been clutched mercilessly in claws like that, but he couldn’t remember where or when. He tried, but couldn’t hold the image. It slipped away yet again, like the fog beginning to curl around the white iron table legs.

The lynx dropped to all fours and stood, head down and panting, its flanks heaving, its breathing shallow and artificially quickened. Johnny wished he had his carbine. It would be a kindness to kill it. If the Thralldom didn’t do it in, its life span would be significantly lengthened, its metabolism skewed, its mind warped.

How did he know that? A shiver crawled up the back of his neck. He’d seen this before. Seen someone pull a carbine from a saddle holster and shoot... not a lynx, but a jackal. Several of them prowling the fringe of a firelit desert camp. A man with bristly muttonchops who seemed familiar, but whose face he couldn’t see, whose name he couldn’t recall.

He couldn’t remember, yet he had to remember. For Willie’s sake. God, let me remember, Johnny prayed, closing his eyes and focusing on the flames leaping in his memory.

He saw rocks ringing the fire, a brown hand grab and swing a flaming brand. He heard horses scream and mules bray, saw them tethered close by—a black Arab mare, a sorrel gelding and two dusty brown mules, their eyes white and rolling with terror.

He heard the bark of the jackals, the snap of their jaws, the groan of wood cracking under stress. He looked for the source and found it, a long, narrow box protruding from the back of a high, two-wheeled cart resting on its braces in deep, firelit shadow beneath a palm tree.

The cart was shuddering and rocking. Three men, two of them small and brown and wearing bright robes, the third the man with the carbine and muttonchops, were shouting and backing toward the fire. The jackals were closing in, their eyes glowing red in the half dark, their fangs gleaming.

The barrel of the carbine flashed; the crack of its discharge rang on the still desert night. A jackal fell, yelping, but its fellows leapt over it, intent on the men—until the cart turned over on one wheel and the box tumbled out with a thump. It was a coffin. The jackals wheeled toward it, whining and scraping their bellies in the sand.

The lid flew off and the sides splintered. The natives fell on their knees, praying, and the man with the carbine stared openmouthed with horror at the figure inside wrestling to be free of its shroud. Canvas ripped, a pale human hand emerged and dosed on the shattered side of the coffin.

In the lick of the flames Johnny saw a hook-shaped scar on the index finger and wanted to scream. He wanted to shut the memory off and run from it, but forced himself to look, for Willie’s sake, until Raven shrugged free of the shroud and sat up inside the splintered coffin. His face was gaunt and colorless, his eyes as red as those of the jackals as he turned his head, saw the men and smiled.

The lynx screamed. Johnny started and opened his eyes. They were blurred with tears. He dragged a sleeve across his face and saw the lynx shake itself, leap into the air and whirl around biting at its bobbed tail. A glittering finger of mist swirled up from the spot where the cat had been, melted into the fog and disappeared. The lynx snarled and bounded away into the darkness.

Johnny unlocked the French doors, took a tentative step outside and a deep breath. The stench was gone, and with it the creature that had Enthralled the lynx. There was only the smell of wet sand and dank earth in his nostrils. He picked up the sodden mail and the compact Willie had thrown, went back inside, locked the doors and, leaning a fist and his forehead against them, cursed himself.

He should have left Stonebridge and drawn Raven away while he’d had the chance, but he’d been selfish and craven. Now a monster far worse than Raven had come, searching for him and the ring he wore. Johnny knew that much, but he didn’t know how. Nor did he know who or what the creature was and why it wanted the stone.

He felt a tug at his senses and glanced up at the half-moon gliding behind a skiff of ragged, racing clouds. Two small stars winked nearby, like the dear stones flanking the jewel in Raven’s ring. Already his time here was shortening. He knew by Luna’s phase, felt in every atom of his being the first icy fingers of cold, black nothingness reaching out to drag him back. It terrified him more than Raven did, even more than remembering his grandfather’s funeral.

He’d been no more than seven or eight, his brother, Samuel, a plump, lace-skirted toddler sleeping and blowing milk bubbles on his mother’s black bombazine lap. He remembered playing with the ends of her heavy veil while he’d sat on the hard, unyielding pew in the Stonebridge Congregational Church listening to the drone of the minister’s nasal voice.

He remembered walking behind her, behind the plain wooden casket borne by his father and his father’s five brothers into the graveyard next to the church. It was winter; he couldn’t recall the month, and cold enough to make Samuel cry.

He’d clung to his mother’s skirts as she’d shushed Samuel and the coffin was lowered on creaking ropes. The edge of the grave was ragged and soft, from the work of the grave- digger’s pickax and the thaw freshening the wind. He’d felt the ground crumble beneath his feet and tried to scramble away, but his mother clamped a hand on his shoulder and held him fast at her side.

He couldn’t tell her that he was falling; his, throat was clenched shut with terror. He’d watched his father fling a spadeful of dirt on his grandfather’s coffin, heard it rain like pebbles on the wood, and the minister’s somber voice intone, “We commend into your keeping, O Lord, the soul of Jonathan William Edward Raven,” just as the ground gave way beneath him and he’d tumbled headlong into the grave.

He remembered his mother’s scream, but nothing else except ripping his right index finger open on a coffin nail. He looked at his hands, felt pain flash in his memory, saw blood well and drip on his grandfather’s coffin from the hook-shaped scar.

The same scar Raven bore. He knew now that he and Raven had once been one, but something had happened. Some abominable, horrible thing too terrible to remember had separated them and made Raven a vampire, a monster outside the laws of God and man.

He didn’t know what the thing was, and wasn’t sure it mattered now -- or if it ever had. He was tired of hiding and being afraid. It was best to bare his throat to Raven and end it. Best for both of them. Best for Willie.

He waited by the doors a while longer, made sure the lynx and the thing that had sent it were gone, then threw the mail and the compact in the trash can in the pantry and went upstairs. Willie was asleep, huddled on her side beneath the double-wedding-ring quilt with a pillow over her head. The cat was curled in the small of her back.

She’d left a lamp burning on the table between the bed and the half-open window, beside the brass wall mirror she’d angled to match the dresser mirror. The curtain fluttered in a damp breath of wind and overturned a small amber plastic vial on the table. Johnny picked it up and read the label. Tranquillizers. He didn’t blame her.

He turned off the lamp and watched moonglow backlit by lightning spill through the window and the uncurtained doors leading onto the widow’s walk. Thunder rumbled faintly; the trees outside the window rustled and bumped against the roof.

The cat raised its head, laid back its ears and growled. Willie rolled out from under the pillow onto her back and made a fretful noise in her throat. The cat hissed and shot off the bed, its tail bristling, and disappeared.

Johnny mouthed the words, “Good night, Willie,” and raised his left hand to the mirror. He intended merely to touch her reflection, as she’d touched his in the seashell mirror. Instead, he saw his hand reach
through
the glass, and jerked his arm back, stunned.