Nightwing (27 page)

“I don’t think so,” Johnny said, and drew back his arm.

He threw the ring toward the sky, the ankh carved into it flashing in the gleam of the full moon riding high above the temple. A thousand screams tore through Willie, or maybe it was just the terrible roar Nekhat made as he leapt to catch the moonstone.

He held it for only a moment, scarcely more than a single terrified beat of her heart, before streams of light so vivid they all but blinded her shot from between Nekhat’s claws and he dropped the ring. His bellow of agony knocked Willie off her feet and shattered a nearby column.

She fell on all fours, still gripping the stake, felt Johnny’s hand close on her arm and pull her up, staggered to her feet beside him and saw the ring pulsing like a strobe at Nekhat’s feet. She winced and looked away from it. Nekhat clutched a ruined, smoking paw to his chest. The vivid, blood red sheen in his eyes made her want to scream, but she couldn’t. Her throat was clenched with terror.

 “What did you do to my moonstone?”

Nekhat’s voice shook the temple. One column shattered and fell. Another cracked. Fissures raced up its length and across the mosaic floor like the shivers racing through Willie.

“I did nothing,” Johnny told him, a puzzled edge in his voice. “Nothing at all.”

“Come to me!” Nekhat roared, flinging his good hand at the ring, palm up, claws half-curled.

A laser beam of light shot from the moonstone, caught him in the chest and knocked him back, bellowing and wavering out of focus, shifting from the prince in white khakis to the monster in a gold kilt. Jeweled beads flashed in a braided wig, then his image steadied into four tusk-like fangs snarling in the face of an angel.

“Hallelujah!” Johnny shouted, laughing. “Your toys have turned on you. They’ve had a taste of freedom and they won’t go back to being your slaves.”

“I’ll kill you!” Nekhat roared, first at the moonstone, still pulsing and warning him away at his feet, then at Johnny, his whirling red gaze almost stopping Willie’s heart. “I’ll kill you all!”

He dived at the moonstone, claws extended, and again it shot a beam of blinding white light, this one strong enough to knock him off his feet. He landed on his back with a roar that broke the altar stone and shattered the dais. Johnny leapt after him, snatching the stake from Willie’s hand.

“No!” she screamed, but he was already diving at Nekhat, the Sacred Cedar clenched above his head in both hands, its dull tip razor sharp and flashing in the moonlight.

He brought it down in a single, swift stroke. Willie knew by Nekhat’s earsplitting scream and the A-bomb flash that the Sacred Cedar had found its mark.

The temple leapt into the air around her, causing her to tumble backward and scrape her chin on the shattered floor. She managed, somehow, to push herself up on her knees and fling a look over her shoulder.

In time to see Johnny lurch upright, the Sacred Cedar in his hand, Nekhat writhing on the floor at his feet. Nekhat’s body was a nightmare of writhing animal shapes and faces.

Willie swung her head away, saw the moonstone ring lying close by, the ankh carved into it winking. She grabbed it just as Johnny took her arm and pulled her up. They ran toward the temple wall. She didn’t look back, just clutched the ring in her hand and ran for her life, slipping and nearly falling down the hill, only Johnny’s hand on her arm keeping her on her feet.

The explosion came when they hit the beach, and set Willie skidding out of his grasp onto her scraped chin in the sand, the shock wave roaring in her ears. She reeled up on her knees, saw the hillside crumbling, rolling tons of earth and rock over the temple.

The tide was booming on the beach, crashing eight-foot breakers on the sand while great chunks of rock rained down the hillside. Johnny fell on his knees beside her, rolled her onto the wet sand and threw himself over her to protect her from the fallout.

When it stopped, he pulled her up beside him. They were both were breathing hard and shaking; Johnny’s face streaked with sand and dirt. Willie gasped for air and blinked at the raw, still-rolling hillside. Johnny got up on his knees and cupped her face.

“Are you all right?”

“Y-yes,” Willie stammered shakily.

“Thank God.” He wrapped her in his arms and held her until they’d both caught their breath, then rocked back on his heels and said, “Give me the chrysocolla.”

“You can have this, too,” Willie said and opened her fist. Johnny smiled at the moonstone glowing on her palm, kissed her and slipped it into his pocket. “We’ll give it to Bertie on our way home.”

With shaking fingers Willie unfastened the chain around her neck and gave Johnny the chrysocolla. He took off the azurite and winked at her. “Behold. This is real vampire magic.”

When he touched the terminals of the two stones they began to glow. When he drew them apart, Willie blinked, surprised, at the sky lightening toward dawn, at the hillside above the beach, and caught her breath.

It was healed and whole, dotted with dewy gorse. There was no sign of the temple, no trace that it had ever existed. It was simply gone, as if it had never been.

“I buried it deep enough so no one will ever find it,” Johnny said. “And I made sure none of the tour guides will ever remember it was there.”

“A tidy night’s work,” Willie said around a yawn. “How did you do it?”

Johnny blinked at her, his eyebrows drawing together. He glanced in a puzzled way at the stones in his hands and then at Willie. A slow, joyful smile spread across his face.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “I can’t remember.”

Epilogue

Stonebridge, Massachusetts

One Year Later

He found himself on the beach again. Since it was his birthday, it seemed only fitting.

He sat on the flank of a dune, arms looped around his drawn-up knees, his face tipped up to the hot July sun. The baseball cap his wife wouldn’t let him out of the house without sat on the sand next to him. He’d catch hell if he went back without it. He smiled and rubbed his thumb across the gold band she’d slipped on the third finger of his left hand on their sixth-month anniversary.

Tomorrow they’d be married a year. In his sock drawer he’d hidden the zircon-and-moonstone-studded band he’d had made for her. “You have my heart,” the inside engraving said, “now here’s my soul.”

His father-in-law wouldn’t be impressed, but he’d given up trying to woo Whit Senior when he’d raised a dubious eyebrow at the four-carat diamond he’d given Willie at Christmas when they’d visited her parents in Manhattan. His mother-in-law would love it and that made him smile. He could almost see Amelia Boyle Evans’s brown eyes, so much like her daughter’s, pooling with tears.

He opened his eyes long enough to glance at his watch, a plain, no-nonsense model on a leather strap. The chronometer he’d worn a year ago had been smashed beyond redemption on Sardinia. He didn’t miss it, or the knack he’d always had for knowing the time. It was five-thirty. His in-laws weren’t due until six, but he had a feeling they were already here.

Sometimes he still knew things, but not often enough to bother him. That sensitivity was fading, as so much of what he’d been and done was already gone, just simply erased from his memory. He still had his diaries—rather, his wife did, put away in a glassed bookcase in her office—but he felt no desire to even open them.

He’d caught Willie reading them once, avidly. She’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, a whole stack of them around her. She’d jumped, almost guiltily, her heart pounding visibly in her throat, when he’d come into the room.

“I was just curious,” she’d said quickly.

“What about?”

“Oh—nothing in particular,” she’d said and shrugged.

He’d known she was lying, but he’d let it pass. He’d made love to her instead, on the floor in front of the pedestal mirror she still kept in her office.

He felt the sun fade against his closed lids, opened his eyes and saw the swells behind the foam-headed breakers beginning to darken toward sunset. He rose and picked up his hat, brushed sand off it and the seat of his jeans, put it on and squinted up at the long silver beams of sunlight shooting through the purple-and-gray twilight gathering on the horizon.

It was time he got himself up to the house. He knew it when he saw Frank striding toward him through the knee-high beach grass, an aluminum can swinging in each hand, their silver labels catching and flashing the last of the sun.

“The warden sent me.” Frank grinned and tossed him one of the cans. “She was afraid you’d get lost again. On purpose.”

“I only got lost twice.” He made a face and held up the beer Frank had thrown him. “What’s this for?”

“Fortification.” He popped the top on his and took a swallow. “If we play our cards right, we’ll both get lost.”

He laughed. “How long’ve they been here?”

 “Couple hours.” Frank shrugged and took another swallow.

“It’s her father, you know,” he said, falling into step beside him. “He still thinks he’s going to catch me beating Willie or something.”

“Or something,” Frank said, his eyes laughing over the top of the can.

“Stuff it, Chou,” he said and tried not to laugh.

The last time Willie’s parents had come to Beaches they’d arrived four hours early, just in time to catch him swaggering down the stairs in nothing but his ruined white shirt, lovingly mended by his adoring wife. Just as Willie’s mother had come through the front door, with Frank on her heels, of course, he’d shouted, “Ahoy, my love! Let’s play pirate!”

The can of beer was still cold in his hand. It made his mouth water, but thirsty as he was, he didn’t dare. He had even less tolerance for alcohol than he did for sunlight, though he was working on that. On days like today, when his wife wasn’t around.

“Better not,” he said wistfully, handing the can back to Frank. “I might tell you something I shouldn’t.”

“You mean like last time?” Devilment gleamed in Frank’s dark eyes. “So, tell me. Doc. Do you still cry in bed?”

He groaned, his face flaming, and Frank laughed.

“I won’t tell Will, honest.” Frank sighed and hung a companionable arm around his shoulders, though he had to reach up to do it. “You’re a lucky man, Johnny. She must be some hot mama.”

Wisely he kept his mouth shut. Not yet, he thought sadly, though not for lack of trying.

Unlike most evenings with his father-in-law, this one passed almost pleasantly. The man actually smiled twice, once when he shook his hand and wished him happy birthday. Sometimes he wondered if Whit Senior sensed something, if he knew, deep inside, what he was—or what he’d been—if he remembered on some subliminal level the Christmas Johnny had followed him around in spirit form and made him jump.

 “Thank God they’re gone.” Willie sighed, snuggling into his arms as they stood on the porch and watched the taillights of her father’s Cadillac wink away into the darkness toward the road. “Thank God I talked Mother out of staying over for our anniversary tomorrow.”

“Indeed,” he murmured, nuzzling her hair, his nose filling with its wondrous green-apple scent.

“Tonight’s the night,” Willie said in a singsong voice as she raised her face to his, her eyes dancing. “Tonight you get to see Bertie’s wedding present.”

“At last,” he said and grinned, lacing his fingers together in the small of her back, feeling himself harden as the soft curve of her belly pressed against him.

“Wait right here,” she murmured against his mouth.

“I won’t go anywhere,” he said.

Never again, he thought, leaning his shoulder against the roof post at the top of the stairs when the screen door slapped shut behind her. The swing creaked in a soft breath of wind and he smiled, remembering sitting here with Betsy in the warm summer dark listening to the whales sing.

Callie the cat jumped up on the porch rail, blinked at him and said, “Brruup.”

“Yes, he’s gone.” He smiled and held his hand out. Callie rose, purring, and arched her back beneath his palm.

The cat was waiting for them when they returned from Sardinia, sitting on the porch step with her tail curled around her paws. Willie had burst into tears, jumped out of the Corvette and swooped the cat up into her arms. Over Willie’s shoulder, Callie had laid back her ears and hissed at him.

He vaguely remembered sending the cat away to save her from Nekhat’s wrath; still, she’d been skittish around him for weeks. Cats know things, Betsy had told him. 

One morning in late August he’d wakened with a weight on his chest, opened his eyes and saw Callie, her gold eyes slits, peering at him, her nose inches from his. 

“Brruup,” she’d said and licked his whiskered chin with her sandpaper tongue.      

A trill of whale song broke through the still night, springing gooseflesh on the back of his neck. If he thought about it hard enough he could almost see his grandfather’s face, could almost feel the rough scrape of the old sailor’s hand around his. He rubbed the hook-shaped scar on his index finger, closed his eyes and felt tears slide past his lashes.

Oh, God, it was good to be alive.

“Happy birthday, Johnny,” Willie said softly behind him.

He wiped his eyes hastily and turned around. She stood in the half-open door, the spill of light from the living room lamps outlining her slim body in the voluminous folds of a plain white nightgown with a lace hem and beribboned neck.

“It’s, ah—lovely,” he said haltingly. “But isn’t it a little on the big side?”

“For now.” Willie plucked the front of it between her fingers and gave it a tug away from her stomach, her eyes shining. “But not for long.”

He cocked his head at her in puzzlement. “You plan to put on weight?”

“Oh, Johnny.” Willie laughed, flapping her arms and making the scooped neck slide off her shoulders. “It’s a maternity nightie. I’m pregnant, you darling dunce. Two months and counting.”

“Oh, my God,” he breathed shakily. “Oh, Bertie, you wise old devil.”

It had been a year, almost to the day, Willie thought, since she’d watched such a glorious smile spread across Johnny’s face. He laughed, leapt across the porch and swept her into his arms.