Books by Maggie Shayne (274 page)

“You can. I can help. I don’t think he wants this any more than you do, Raven.”

“He has no choice, Duncan.”

Duncan closed his eyes. What now? Would she tell him more far-fetched tales?

“Didn’t you understand what I told you last night, Duncan? The Dark Ones take hearts, and keep them, and eventually, they use up the power. The hearts weaken, perhaps even die if they’re tapped long enough in this vile way. I don’t know. But I do know they weaken, and as they do, so does the Dark Witch who holds them. They need to take more, to kill again and again, in order to continue living.”

He swallowed hard. “You can’t truly believe this,” he said, but in a hoarse whisper, because somewhere inside him, he knew it was true. It
couldn “t be.
But it had to be.

“It’s why he wants me,” she went on. “He could have taken your heart, Duncan, but you’re young, and you’ve never even wielded the power of nature. Your heart might sustain him for a few decades at most. Mine would give him centuries.”

He only stared at her, wrestling with what she’d said. Arianna came in with the tea. She set the tray down and stood there looking from one of them to the other. “He’s never going to believe you until you show him, Raven.”

“I know.”

“So?”

Sighing heavily, Raven got to her feet. She bent to a drawer in an end table and pulled it open. And then she pulled out a small-caliber weapon. It looked like a derringer. Duncan’s blood rushed to his feet.

“What the hell are you—”

Raven handed the weapon to Arianna, then stood facing her friend. “Go on, do it. Let’s get this out of the way.”

Arianna pointed the gun squarely at Raven’s chest, from a distance of no more than two feet.

“My God, no!” Duncan lunged between them just as Arianna pulled the trigger.

Fire tore through his chest even as the explosion rang in his ears. Warmth oozed and he drew a hand upward, pressed his palm hard against his sternum, and felt the blood pulsing from beneath it. “Jesus Christ,” he said, but the words were slurred, and he sank to the floor. “Jesus Christ, you shot me. You freaking
shot
me.”

Raven snatched a towel from somewhere and pressed it to the wound. But she seemed more interested in keeping his blood from staining her carpet than in halting its flow. “I’m sorry, Duncan,” she whispered. Sitting down, she cradled his head in her lap. “You’ll be all right. In a moment.”

Her words were fading. Why wasn’t someone calling 911? My God, were they just going to sit there and watch him… ? “I’m
dying.
…” he rasped.

“Only for a moment,” Arianna said. “You’ll be a believer very soon, Duncan. I swear, I don’t know why Raven didn’t just shoot you in the first place. Would have saved so much time.” Then she grimaced at his chest. “It is
messy
, though.”

“The phone… Someone call… an amb—”

“Oh, you’re well beyond that, Duncan. No ambulance would do you any good now.” Arianna tipped her head back and laughed, and Duncan tried to call her a bitch, but he wasn’t sure the word was audible.

Raven bent closer, pressed her lips to his. And everything went black.

It felt as if he’d grabbed a bare wire with about 220 volts going through it. The jolt split him, surging up his breastbone, and for an instant he figured he must be in some operating room somewhere, with a surgeon opening his chest.

He arched up, tipped his head back, and dragged in a ragged gasp, starved, it seemed, for oxygen. And then his body relaxed and the power surge faded. He opened his eyes.

He was still in Raven’s house. On the sofa now, stretched out, shirtless. His head felt achy, light, still buzzing with the remnants of whatever current had zapped through him.

“For the love of Christ,” he muttered. “You still haven’t called an ambulance?”

“No need, Duncan.” Raven sat beside him, brushed his hair off his face. “Come on, sit up.”

“Yeah, right.”

“Sit up, Duncan.” Her hands slid under his shoulders, and she eased him into an upright position. Arianna sat nearby. A basin of blood-tinted water at her side, with a pink-stained washcloth floating in it looking like a donor organ. His heartbeat quickened at the sight, and he instinctively pressed a hand to his wounded chest to keep himself from bleeding to death.

And then he frowned, because there was no pulsing warmth oozing now. No sticky residue on his skin. His fingers probed, and then he bowed his head, staring at his bared chest. His
clean
bared chest.

No blood. No wound. He blinked, pressing both hands to his chest now, moving them, pressing again, searching for the bullet hole. It had seemed gaping before. Maybe it was just smaller than it seemed, and…

“There’s nothing there, Duncan,” Arianna said. “You died. Right there on the floor. We cleaned you up, and put you on the couch. In less than an hour the wound healed and you revivified. You’re alive now, and there’s no hole in your chest because you’re immortal.”

He gaped at her, then stared up at Raven.

“I know it’s shocking the first time,” she whispered. “I know how difficult this is for you to believe. But, Duncan, we didn’t mean to. Arianna was aiming at me—”

“Oh, but this is so much better. Really drives the point home.”

“Arianna,
please
!”

Arianna shrugged, making a lip-zipping motion with one hand. Raven turned to him again. “From now on, you won’t age. You’re going to start noticing other changes, as well. You’ll get stronger. Your other senses will sharpen. And your ability to manipulate nature, to do what we call magick, will be far stronger than it was before. Although, since you’ve never
been
a practicing Witch, I don’t suppose you’ll notice that.”

Again, he looked at his chest. “I can’t believe this.”

“Get him a mirror, for heaven’s sake,” Arianna said in exasperation.

“You have to believe it, Duncan. It’s true.”

“It’s true,” he whispered. “It can’t be… but it’s true.”

“Yes.” He searched her eyes, and she repeated the word. “Yes, Duncan.”

His head was whirling. Unreal. It was all so unreal.

“I want you to read this,” Raven said. And she pressed a very old book into his hands. So old its pages were curled and yellow, and the leather cover cracked in places. “This is three hundred years old. It was what my mother left for me.”

“Your mother?”

She nodded. “You see, I didn’t know, either. Not until Nathanial Dearborne hanged my mother and me in a snowy square as you looked on, fighting to prevent it, but unable to. That was the first time we met, Duncan, on the gallows just before I was to die. And something happened between us there, some connection was made. But it was over before it even began, or so I thought. We were hanged. Our bodies were pitched into a heap of the dead, where criminals and victims of the plague were dumped. That’s where I awoke. But my mother didn’t. Nathanial came for me there, intent on taking my heart before I could revive. And he must have been desperate then, because as young as I was, it wouldn’t have sustained him long. I
was
a powerful Witch, though, even then. And perhaps it was my magickal skill he sought. Or perhaps it was because you’d turned against him that day. You’d taken my side over his, and when he killed me, you hated him for it. You went to the place of the dead, too, looking for my body. You intended to give me a decent burial. But I awakened before either of you arrived, and I carried my mother into the woods and buried her there. And then I went home to find this book. Our cottage was ruined, had been plundered. My mother’s sacred cauldron, with the rose painted on the front, was gone. But the book she’d left for me, hidden behind a loose stone in the hearth, remained.”

Duncan opened the book reverently, scanned the first page—and knew, though it seemed impossible, that these really were her mother’s words… and really had been written some three centuries ago. So sad, his eyes grew damp as he read them, and then he met Raven’s again. “But I found you again after that, didn’t I, Raven?”

She nodded. “I booked passage on a ship to the New World. You boarded the same ship. And later came to this very town, as its new minister, and met me again. But even then I didn’t tell you the truth. I didn’t trust you enough, Duncan. So when they pitched me from the cliffs for the crime of Witchery, you lunged after me, trying to save me.”

Yes. Because it had seemed better to die trying to save her than to go on living without her.

How did he know that
?

“If you’d known that I couldn’t die… you wouldn’t have fallen from those cliffs. You died because I didn’t trust you with the truth. And that’s why I’ve been so determined to tell you everything this time.”

He stilled as the one memory that had remained intact came rushing back to him. The dream he’d had as a child, the one he’d thought had to be of his birth mother, came back to him now. Clearer than before.

“You found my body on the rocks,” he said. “You were crying. God, it hurt me to see you crying. I wanted to touch you, to tell you it was all right, but I couldn’t. I was… hovering above, somehow. You held me. You wouldn’t let me go.”

“Yes,” she breathed, tears springing into her eyes. “Yes, Duncan, that’s exactly the way it happened.”

“And..
.you
were there,” he said, turning to Arianna. “You protected her, told her they were coming for her, made her let me go, and took her away from the danger.”

Arianna nodded.

“The last thing I remember is watching the waves sweep my body away, swallow it up.” He closed his eyes as a chill rushed through him. It was a terrifying memory. But real. And there. He recalled the clothes she wore, and those he’d been wearing. He remembered the differences in her speech as she held him and spoke to him. Old, arcane.

“My God, it’s true, isn’t it?”

Raven nodded. “Yes, Duncan. It’s true.”

“And my father…?”

“Is one of the Dark Ones. He wants my heart, and likely yours, too.”

Duncan shook his head slowly. He knew it was all true, all of it. And still…

He blinked his burning eyes dry. “People can change,” he whispered, and he knew he was grabbing at straws. “If it’s been as many years as you say it has, Raven, then how do you know he hasn’t changed?”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, Duncan, I know you want that to be true, but he can’t change. If he stops taking hearts, he’ll weaken and die.”

“But save his own soul.”

“He sold his soul long ago.”

“But there’s a chance, Raven. There’s a chance you’re wrong about him. I’ve
seen
the changes in him since he came here. He’s been kinder, more
real
than before.”

Arianna got to her feet. “Why would the old man change after all this time? What motive could he possibly have to suddenly value his soul at all?“

Duncan looked at her squarely. “He has a son now.”

The sorrowful looks the two women exchanged let him know they didn’t believe him for a minute. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself. But he wanted to. God, how he wanted to.

“I have to give him a chance,” he said, turning to Raven. “I
have to.
He’s the only father I’ve ever known, Raven. I… I care for him.”

“Even though he might have killed your birth parents to get his hands on you, Duncan?”

“I don’t know that,” he insisted. “I… don’t
want
to believe that.”

Raven’s eyes went round and soft, and she nodded. “All right. I… I understand.”

“You’re giving him a second chance,” Arianna snapped. “A second chance that’s liable to cost Raven her life, do you realize that?”

“Let him be, Arianna.”

But something cracked in Duncan’s heart. Was Arianna right? Was he making a huge mistake? He stared into Raven’s eyes and hoped to God he wasn’t. “I won’t let him hurt you,” he promised. “I swear it, Raven.”

“I know you’ll try,” she whispered. Then she lowered her head. “Go on, go to your father, Duncan. Do what you feel you must.”

Duncan supposed he must have walked back into town. The evidence was there. He stood on the cobbled circle, the fountain on his right splashing as if the entire world hadn’t just tilted off its axis. The courthouse loomed in front of him like some big, shadowy giant. No curtains yet on the lower floors. Nathanial had never been fond of frills or fluff. So the windows stood empty…just like the old man’s eyes.

So he was here, and he hadn’t brought the car in the first place, so he must have walked. He didn’t remember the trip. Only the haze that had been descending over his brain—or was it a haze burning away, revealing a light too bright to look upon?—ever since he’d finally understood that Raven St. James was
not
delusional. But immortal. And so was he.

Immortal.

My God. It was so immense a concept his brain couldn’t seem to grasp it. He kept thinking it must have been a dream, that it couldn’t really have happened. No one had shot him. He hadn’t bled. He hadn’t died only to come back to life again on Raven St. James’s sofa. But he knew that was bull. It
had
happened. And he needed to swallow it before it choked him. Swallow it, get over it, and figure out what the hell to do next.

Stop this ridiculous urge that kept surfacing… to test it. Jump off a roof or step in front of a bus just to see what would happen. Stupid. If a bullet in the chest wouldn’t kill him, what the hell would?

He closed his eyes and swallowed. Damn, it was as if he had to think about every step. Go to the door, open it up, step inside, speak to his father. His mind was so busy turning this over and over, examining it from every angle, he kept forgetting to pay attention to what he was doing. Forgetting to
breathe,
for God’s sake.

“Duncan?”

He looked up, drew himself out of his mind, and met his father’s darting gaze. An old man. A weathered, careworn face, a little paler than it was a couple of weeks ago. He was no killer. And he certainly had aged, hadn’t he? Didn’t Raven say immortals stop aging? So why hadn’t Nathanial?

Who are you kidding, Duncan? Can you remember him ever looking any different? He’s
always
looked like a man in his sixties.
Always.

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Father,” was his greeting.

“Did you see her?”

Duncan nodded.

“Well? What did she say? Did she fill your head with lies and fantasies again? Did she—”

“She said she’d like peace as much as you would, Father,” Duncan interrupted. Tired—he sounded tired.
Felt
it, too. “She said if you’d be willing to drop this ridiculous feud, so would she.” It wasn’t
precisely
what she’d said, but he was confident he spoke nothing but the truth. And she
did
say she wasn’t pursuing this battle because she
wanted
to.

His father’s brows bent, eyes narrowed, but instantly all of that stopped. His face went as still as stone, and slowly he averted his eyes. “Good,” he said, and then he let his shoulders slump a little. “You can’t imagine my relief.”

Duncan studied the old man with a practiced eye, but he couldn’t judge a thing, couldn’t be objective, was all too aware that he wasn’t in control of the situation. He never had been.

“Relief?” he asked Nathanial. “Is that what you’re feeling?”

Slowly his father’s head came up. “You think
I’m
the one who started this with her? She’s the one who came in here screaming accusations and trying to come between us!”

“Come between us? You could park a semi between us, Father, and that’s been true all my life. Long before she came into our lives.”

“She’s
always
been in our lives.” Nathanial’s head lowered. “I’ve been trying to change that, son.”

“Why?”

The brows crooked, the face puckered. “Why do you keep asking that?”

“Because I want to know. Was this a change of heart,
Dad?
Or is that just where it’s leading?”

He held his father’s pale eyes for once, willing the man to look at him, face him. And slowly he saw the knowledge dawn there. The realization that Duncan knew the truth.

“I was shot tonight, Father. Right in the chest.” He touched the spot with one hand. “Point-blank.”

His father seemed to go even whiter. “That’s… that’s ridiculous. Look at you, you’re… you’re fine.”

“Yes, I know. Because I’m immortal.” Nathanial’s eyes fell closed. “And so are you,” Duncan added.

There was a long taut strand of silence hanging in the air between them. Until it was broken by his father’s ragged sigh, and this time when the old man’s shoulders slumped, Duncan believed it was for real.

Duncan bent his head, knowing by his father’s reaction that it was true. His father was immortal. And if he’d kept that truth to himself all this time, how could Duncan expect him to be honest now?

Sighing deeply, Nathanial said, “I can’t talk to you about this now.”

“No, not now,” Duncan agreed tightly. “Not for the past thirty-five years, and not now.”

“Duncan, you don’t understand—”

“Or maybe I just don’t want to.”

Nathanial faced him. “I’m no immortal, Duncan,” he said, and suddenly Duncan saw the shadows underneath his eyes. “Far from it, in fact. I’m sick, Duncan. I’m… I’m dying.”

Duncan actually reeled backward at those words.“But—‘“

“That’s why I came here, bought this place. To be close to you. To make up for all that time… to be your father just once… before it was too late.” Shoulders shaking, the old man sank into a chair. And the sounds he made were as close to heartbreak as anything Duncan had ever heard.

Slowly, questions swirling still, he stepped closer. A hand went to his father’s shoulder, and then he knelt and stared up into the old face. “That can’t be.”

“It is. I… I don’t know what fantasies that pretty young thing has been weaving, Duncan. She’s… she’s disturbed. And tricky. I’ve dealt with her before, it’s true. I don’t know how she made you think you’d been shot, and convinced you of all this nonsense. Starter pistol, blanks, blood capsules… perhaps even some kind of hallucinogen. She does claim to be a Witch, you know. Maybe it was a spell of some sort. I don’t know. I don’t care. It doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things.”

Duncan swallowed hard. He tried to fit what his father said with what had happened this morning at Raven’s, knew intellectually that it didn’t fit, didn’t make sense, but set it aside for now. He’d hear what his father had to say. He’d listen to the lies. One last time. And it
would be
the last time.

“Every day I get weaker, son. I don’t have much time left. I don’t want to spend it arguing over some girl.”

Just as Raven said… They weaken in time, and have to kill again
…

Nathanial lifted his head, eyes imploring, looking suddenly very much like the eyes of a dying old man.

“I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry for that.”

Duncan knew better, he
knew
better. Hadn’t he just been wondering about his father’s unusual strength? Hadn’t he just been noticing how the man had never changed?

“This confrontation has taken a lot out of me, I’m afraid.”

“Rest, then,” Duncan said. Because he needed time, time to think, to figure out what Nathanial could have to gain with this latest ruse. “I’ll, uh… I’ll make us some dinner.”

“I’ve no appetite,” his father said, and he got slowly to his feet. “I’d like to go to bed.”

“But there’s so much more to talk about.” He faced his father, made his voice firm. “I want the truth, and I’ll have it before this night is over.”

“And what does it matter now? I told you, Duncan, I’m
dying
.”

“So you’ll take the truth to your grave with you?” He felt mean. Cruel. Hell, he was being heartless, but he’d had it with the lies. “I know damn well it was no parlor trick Raven pulled on me this morning. I
felt
the heat of that bullet that plowed through my chest, Father, and I had a hole the size of a golfball to show for it. It was my blood all over me, not some trick capsule.”

His father closed his eyes, shook his head, and turned toward the stairs. “You won’t let up on me, will you? Even now?”

“I’m sorry. I need to hear the truth, and I’d like to hear it from you.”

“All right, then.” Nathanial mounted the bottom step, moved up one, then another. “You’ll hear it. But not now. Come back in an hour, Duncan. Come back in an hour and I’ll tell you everything.
Everything.
I promise.”

Duncan breathed deeply, trying to clear his head. His father was dying. It would have been easier to believe than anything else he’d heard today. But he didn’t believe it. Oh, he might be weak, maybe feeling poorly. Raven said the hearts wore out in time.

He swallowed the bile that rose in his throat, marveled that he was referring back to conversations he’d considered nothing more than symptoms of mental illness only a few hours ago. He was exhausted, drained.

“All right. Rest. But I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be here waiting. And we
will
talk.”

Without looking back, his father climbed the stairs, seeming old. Weak. Sick.

Duncan sank to the floor, glanced at the empty crates all around him. Crates that had held the most cherished possessions of murdered women. It was wrong, what his father was doing. Just wrong. He’d known it from the beginning.

And he knew other things, too. Raven wasn’t lying to him.

She wouldn’t. The things she said about Nathanial were absolutely true. If she said he’d killed, then he had. If she said he wanted her heart, then he did. He’d hoped his father could be capable of change, but he doubted that now.

As for his father… he would lie to Duncan without batting an eye. Duncan sighed. He’d give the old man some time, let him rest or get his story straight or whatever he was doing up there. And then he’d get the answers he needed. He’d insist on that. An hour. Two at the most, and then he’d make Nathanial tell the truth, for the first time.

I picked up the phone when it jangled.

Nathanial Dearborne’s voice rasped at me. “I need a heart. I wanted yours, but I’m out of time, Raven. Duncan’s will have to do.”

My throat went dry. I swallowed, tried to speak. “No,” was all I managed.

“You or him, darling. You or him. I won’t wait long.”

Lowering my eyes to shield them from Arianna’s probing ones, I said, “Where are you?”

I tried to keep my face expressionless as the man who’d been hunting me for most of my life told me where to meet him.

Slowly I replaced the receiver, keeping my eyes carefully turned away from Arianna’s curious, probing brown ones.

“Who was that?” she asked.

The lie stuck in my throat. I loved her—lying to her made me physically ill. But I forced the words anyway. “Duncan. He… wants to see me. To… talk.”

“Does he?”

“Yes. I, um, said I’d meet him.”

“Where?”

I looked up quickly, knowing I’d stumbled, and forced a smile that felt as weak as it probably looked. “Someplace private. Perhaps he’s beginning to remember after all.”

“Why are you lying to me, Raven?”

I looked away fast. “I’m not. Is it so hard to believe he might want some time alone with me?”“

“It is when I combine it with the look on your face. You look shaken.” She gripped my chin, tilted my head to the side and stared down at me as if she were a sergeant inspecting some soldier’s rifle. “No, Raven, this isn’t the face of a girl rushing off to meet her lover.”

“I’m no girl.” I pulled myself free of her grasp, tried to act huffy when all I felt was guilt for lying to the best friend I’d ever known. My sister. “I’m over three hundred, for heaven’s sake. And you know how important this is to me. Can you blame me for being nervous?”

She only kept looking at me.

“I’d better get ready.”

“Yes. Don’t keep him waiting.”

I swallowed hard and headed from the room into one of our countless corridors and up one of the many sets of stairs. Arianna didn’t follow. My room was my refuge, and I needed it right now. I think she sensed that.

The small, oval portrait I’d labored over for months stood on the night table beside my bed, bearing little physical resemblance to Duncan, but holding his essence all the same. The face I’d blurred, but his dark gleaming eyes shone from their deep wells, and his tumbling satin hair tempted my fingers just as it always had. His shadowed jawline spoke of feelings, immense feelings, all bubbling inside him in search of escape. It captured him, my experiment in painting.

I paused a moment, to run my fingertip over the image of Duncan’s face. “For you,” I whispered. “I do this for you.”

A tear burned at the back of my eye. Sadness welling up, not because I might be about to die, or worse. I hated to think of what that sort of death was truly like. For it wasn’t death, really, but a kind of limbo. The body alive, but inanimate. The heart beating, but captive, providing life force to a foreign body. And yet that wasn’t why I cried.

I cried for the love Duncan and I had once shared. The love I’d spent so many lifetimes searching for, only to realize, at long last, that it wasn’t coming back to me. A once-in-a-lifetime kind of love like ours had been was just that. Once in a lifetime. I’d never find it again. All these years I’d naively believed that Duncan would feel just the way he had before when I finally found him again. But he didn’t. Perhaps he couldn’t. Oh, he was attracted to me, drawn to me—even claimed to love me. But it was only a faint echo of what we’d had before. And that was all it would ever be. I supposed it was time I accept that.

Yes. Difficult though it was, it was time.

And this was not the moment to let the knowledge weaken me. I needed to acknowledge, accept, and move beyond it. Tonight I would fight for my life, as I’d done so many times before. My opponent was the most powerful foe I’d ever be likely to face. He could kill me very easily. I’d need to be sharp, to be quick. I’d need to be smart and I’d need to be ruthless.

Or I’d die.

Sniffling, I drew my hands away from the portrait on the stand and opened the table’s drawer. From inside I took a velvet pouch and, pulling it open, removed the agate pendant. No stone was more protective than agate, and this one had been charged with a spell to make it even more so. I fastened the chain around my neck, then turned to the door.