Covenant (13 page)

Angelica had prayed that this day would never come. But as she hustled Joe into her bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him, she knew she was shutting that door on him, and on the rest of her life—forever.

He was calling the circle together again.

He wanted her daughter. The last of the children.

And she couldn’t deliver.

When she’d given the child up for adoption, she knew that someday her own life might stand ransom for that of the child’s. But she didn’t care. She wasn’t weak like the others. She didn’t cling to life and pleasure so strongly that she would give up her firstborn to the vampiric demon of the mountain.

They pounded on the door.

She couldn’t even try to run. Where would she go? There was only one way out of town, and she’d tried that before. She would only end up naked and rutting with God knows what by the end. No, this time she had to face them. Face the anger of their betrayal. She had negated the bargain and He was calling for payment due.

“Open up,” echoed the shrill voice of her childhood friend, Rhonda. A friend no more.

Angelica walked slowly to the door, every step a point of no return. Her heart pounded in desperate fear.
Don’t open it!

But she really had no choice. She felt Him grinning in the
back of her brain. He’d let the women do His dirty work, but if they failed, He was ready. She’d rather suffer their punishment than His.

She turned the knob, and a bloated, piggish face greeted her with a steely smile of success. Rhonda Canady pushed her way into the room, and Karen and Monica followed. The circle was as complete as it could be. Melody O’Grady wouldn’t be joining them.

Couldn’t.

After her son Bob’s death, after carrying out her part in the bargain, Melody had begun to paint on the walls of her house. Some thought the resulting mural was genius. There had been photographers and psychiatrists and art critics all at once stepping back and forth across the floor of the O’Grady living room. She’d made the national magazines.

But the fame came after they’d committed Melody. After they’d given her transfusions to replace the blood she’d used as pigment.

Her husband had come home to find the garishly realistic bloody shades of hell tattooed on the wall behind his television set. Melody’s demons, all teeth and decay, looked deadly. The fires they danced in, scorching. And on each and every one of the disemboweled children she had depicted the finely etched nose and features of Bob. His open lips screamed silent, bloody accusation from every corner of the room where Melody lost her mind.

“Are you ready?” Rhonda spit out, once the three were inside. “I know you got my note. It’s time for you to keep your part. We’ve waited for years. We’ve been patient. But He won’t let us leave you alone anymore. Where is your daughter? Where have you hidden Andi?”

Angelica stepped back from the other women, retreating into the living room. She’d spent twenty-plus years hiding from this day. And she still wasn’t ready to face it.

“No,” she said simply, and sat down on the couch, her back to her former friends.

“We have all kept our part of the promise,” Karen’s voice reminded her. She was quiet, but undeniably firm. “You’ve used your gift more than any of us. And paid nothing.”

“I won’t keep a promise with the devil,” Angelica insisted.

This time it was Monica who answered. Her voice cut the air like a telephone ring. “You won’t have much choice.”

She began to laugh. “Actually, I have a lot of choice,” Angelica said. “I don’t know where she is. I can’t turn her over to you because I have absolutely no fucking idea where she is. So get the hell out of my house and leave me alone.”

She screamed the last, but her anger met deaf ears. Rhonda, Monica and Karen stood stock-still in the middle of the room, staring at her blankly. As if they were listening to something else.

“Did you hear that, you fucking monster?” Angelica screamed at the women, though she wasn’t actually talking to them. “
I
don’t know where she is. So leave me alone
.”

Karen Sander’s eyes suddenly focused. A slight, pained smile crossed her lips. “How could a mother not know where her child has gone?”

“Because when I gave her up for adoption, I
gave her up.
I never inquired about where she was taken. I didn’t
want
to know, for just this reason.”

“A mother could find a way to know,” Karen said slowly, as if the idea took time to brew. Her face twisted into a devilish show of teeth. “Could trace her. Very simply. Go to the adoption agency. Give your name. Give hers. They’ll find her. I’ve seen it on
Geraldo
.”

Her teeth gleamed wide in triumph.

“Could,” Angelica said. “But won’t.”

“Rachel,” Monica squeaked, and then came around to sit by her old friend.

Angelica shook her head. “My name is Angelica now. I gave all of this up. I changed my name, gave away my daughter…I want nothing to do with any of this. I started a new life.”

“You can call yourself whatever you like,” Karen said,
pushing a stubborn wisp of gray from her cheek. “But it won’t make any difference. Whatever you call yourself, He knows where you are, and He made a bargain with you. Your second sight, your fortune-telling, for the life of your firstborn.”

Monica put her arm around Angelica’s shoulders. “Do you think we
wanted
to do this? Do you think He let us have a choice? Our choice has been gone since the day Bernadette died. Your choice was gone long before you gave up your old self and became ‘Angelica.’ You sealed the bargain when you used the gift He gave you. But we could finally end this thing. Once you turn over Andi, the bargain is complete. The promise is over. We can all, finally, rest.”

“Her name isn’t Andi,” Angelica said. “There was no name on her birth certificate. I wouldn’t give her one. I only told you that name to make you feel safer—I knew you might try to find her someday. And we’ll never
rest
,” Angelica murmured. “That much I can tell you for certain. My gift, you know. Seeing.”

“Don’t make us do this,” Karen said, again, soft. And cold.

“I won’t find her for you.”

“Then you’ll stand in her place.”

Hands gripped Angelica’s arms and feet, and she let out one long “
Nooooo
” before a towel was stuffed into her mouth. She shook and kicked, but the women’s fingers only dug deeper into her flesh. They carried her out of the front door and down the dark driveway to Rhonda’s van.

As they dropped her on the floor of the backseat, a familiar caress moved down the back of her neck beneath the skin. The soft fingers of a lover.

“
It will be so nice to see you again, my dear. I’m looking forward
to it
.”

And then, deep inside her mind, He laughed.

Cindy felt Him touching her thoughts and smiled. It was a light feather on her brain, a stroking that tickled her teeth and warmed her from collar to crotch. She shivered in pleasure.

He’d become so much a part of her these last few weeks that she didn’t know what she’d done in the past, when her head had only held her own tired thoughts. His soothing touch had smoothed away her sadness over James; in fact, in a way, His touch
was
James’ touch because James was a part of Him now. In that sense, she was closer to her late boyfriend than she’d ever been before. Maybe Joe’s wish for her that night on the gazebo had come true! Sometimes at night, as she sat on the cliff staring over the edge at the rock-strewn surf below, she could close her eyes and feel James stroking her hair, touching her inside and out. It made her consider joining him. Jumping…to freedom.

But in her mind, a voice always convinced her to stay earthbound for now.

“
Not yet
,” He would tell her. “
I may need you on the side of
the living soon
.”

She would edge back from the drop-off when He said things like that, and lie back on the wind-and rain-polished rock to stare up at the stars. The ocean breeze massaged her like a lover, and it occurred to her that she’d never felt so happy to be alive. Not only did she have a secret protector, a soul friend in her head, but she had an older man who showed
undeniable interest in her. Not that she hadn’t inspired a glance or two from men in the past, but this one was just so…so cuddly-cute. She smiled as she thought of his reaction to her French bikini. It was nothing she would ever have dared wear at a normal public beach. But she’d known that Joe would likely be the only one to see her in it on the beach near Terrel’s Peak. Almost nobody ever swam there, despite a good stretch of clean sand. History spoke too loudly.

In the past, she’d always scoffed at the fear that kept people away. Now she knew they were right to be afraid. But she also knew that the source of their fear wouldn’t hurt her. Hell, the fuckin’ monster of Terrel’s Peak was currently her
boyfriend
.

Beat
that,
Jill Cheerleader
. She smiled and rolled away from the edge of the deadly drop. It was almost time to go home.

Joe tossed Angelica’s diary/scrapbook into the backseat of his car, and pulled away from the house. His headlights skimmed the dilapidated front of the house and then rested on the
READINGS BY ANGELICA
sign as he backed out.

He was torn.

Should he try to find where Angelica had been taken, or head home to read her book before she returned—
if she
did
—and realized he’d stolen it? Could he even hope to find where they’d gone? And could he learn something by finding them? He could go house to house looking for a van, listening at windows, hoping to find out why Bernadette’s name was resurrected here, now. Why it still held power after twenty-five years. Why Angelica had screamed
Nooooo
and left without a good-bye. Had they tied her up to take her away, or had she, in the end, gone willingly?

When he reached the turnoff for Highway 31 he made a left without even thinking. The lights of Main Street disappeared almost immediately as the trees grew thick and still around him. The shelter of the forest was the quiet embrace of night’s tomb. He was heading toward the cliff.

Where else would they go?

Ken Brownsell was a cautious caver.

Normally.

He’d been fascinated with the underground since he was a kid. If he’d bothered to trace his obsession with tunnels carefully, he would have admitted that it all began with volcanoes. When he was five years old, WBNX-TV used to play old episodes of the Japanese live-action kids show
The Space
Giants
in the afternoons. Goldar and his family, the
original
Transformers, lived in a volcano, and turned into rocket ships when the need arose to fight evil. When the call came, they became metallic, majestic superheroes and shot out of the depths of that volcano, human jets of power and might. Ken hadn’t cared as much about what they did aboveground. When he had watched
The Space Giants
, he had wanted to escape down into the caverns with them. Live near the glowing fires of liquid rock.
Magma
. He’d been so proud to learn that word as a kid. Rock turned to boiling magma deep in the earth, where diamonds were forged and strange-colored creatures without eyes crawled. There was mystery there, and Ken wanted to be the one to solve it.

Now Ken rarely thought of Goldar, or even of venturing into the depths of an active volcano. But he still got a rush of excitement every time he pushed through a tiny, grimy opening in the earth to discover another hidden chamber on the other side. The dreams of lava and diamonds had turned
to ones of mud and basalt. But the childlike thrill was the same.

Ken had joined the Spelunkers of America Club in high school, and during college had taken trips to Kentucky and California and Arizona to burrow underground with others who shared his interest. But his main object of exploration had always been closest to home. The cliffs of Terrel offered hundreds of entryways into the earth. The carvings of salt and spume from a millennium ago. Most proved to be dead ends in short order. But Ken had spent months of weekly expeditions charting some caverns before they petered out into blank, rocky walls.

He’d almost always used the buddy system. You never knew when an apparently solid floor would give way under your weight and cast you into a pit. Dying alone underground wasn’t one of his preferred caving fantasies. He did, however, often fantasize about the “big find.” Emerging from a slick narrow shaft into a cavern of Mammoth Cave proportions. Of blundering into a hall of natural splendor as beautiful and breathtaking as leading an expedition into the heart of a cathedral-size geode.

And when the masses streamed in to pay their ten dollars in order to walk the path he had forged, it would bear his name.

COME TO TERREL’S PEAK AND SEE THE WONDER OF BROWNSELL CAVERN
, the billboards along Highway 31 would read.

The thought always made him glow.

Today he was hoping to make that dream come true.

The entry point he’d been mapping with the help of the Cliff Combers these past weeks was perfectly positioned for tourists. Relatively easy access. And so far the interior hadn’t been rough going. Oh, there were points that would have to be blasted wider if a public walking tour was ever to be inaugurated, but that was easily doable. But the best part was, it was still active. They had found the access path of the river. The cave was
alive
. Water was still carving its bowels clean. Somewhere, in a sheltered burrow, Brownsell Cavern might
exist. Just before that freak show had taken a dive into the river on the last Comber outing, Ken had seen a likely entryway into a side room. He’d heard the call of the cave too. And it kept him awake at night with visions of stalagmites and stalactites.

Ken was in love with the earth, and it was doing a striptease for him that he couldn’t ignore.

Come on in, the water’s fine
, it said.
Want to see my ’tites?

He almost called Jeff Avery to partner him, but then the cave showed him another vision:

COME TO TERREL’S PEAK AND SEE THE WONDER OF AVERY-BROWNSELL CAVERN
, the billboard said.

“Uh-uh,” he murmured to himself. Ken packed the VW bug for a party of one.

He was sharing this discovery with no one.

The day was bright with hope as Ken unloaded the trunk in front of the cave mouth. The sun beat hot on his shoulders, and sweat ran rivers down his armpits before he was ready to go below. He was dressed for the damp, fifty-degree chill of the underground, not the sunbathing eighties of the beach-front. Shrugging the pack onto his shoulders and strapping on his Nevada miner’s helmet (one of his souvenirs from spelunking in the Rockies), he strode confidently toward the dark, weed-covered mouth in the hillside. He could smell the earthy breath of the underground as soon as he ducked his head to step inside its shade. The fetid aroma of mold and worms was sweet musk to him. With a smile, he flicked on his lamp, and began the now-familiar path toward the heart of Terrel’s Peak.

Through the narrow passage that he’d had to coax the freak show through—Joe, his name had been.

“Won’t be seeing him again anytime soon,” Ken laughed out loud.

“
Don’t be too sure
,” a voice in his head answered.

Ken stopped suddenly. Had he just thought that? Or had
somebody spoken to him? He shone his light around to the gray lime walls. Shook his head. The underground did strange things to you sometimes. Especially when you went in alone.

“A stupid thing to be doing,” he mumbled to himself, but instead of turning back and calling for a partner, he pulled a strong, thin nylon rope from his belt dispenser and attached its anchor clip to a pinion the Combers had hammered into the rock face nearby. He was entering the last stretch of familiar territory, and it was time to assure some guidance for his return. Ahead he could hear the soft murmur of the underground river. He could only hope that the walkway he’d been treading continued to parallel the water, instead of being absorbed in its path.

Now he was next to the point where Joe had tumbled down, and knew the water was only yards away. The sweat had dried to his flesh, and Ken shivered slightly as he peered over the embankment. The cone of light from his helmet disappeared into the inky blackness below without revealing a thing. The crack in the rock face seemed to continue downward forever, a fissure into hell. The narrow tunnel’s far wall remained blank, offering no clues as to the geography below or ahead. Ken stepped back from the edge, then began to move forward again into the black mystery of the mountain.