Everafter (Kissed by an Angel) (20 page)

I deserve more,
Gregory had insisted,
than watching her
die a quick and painless death.
Gregory had primed Ivy’s mind with the waking vision at the Baines family plot. It had been a kind of dress rehearsal; tonight was the performance.
Think about it, Tristan,
he had said.
It’s the dying that’s so entertaining.
Just as entertaining to Gregory’s warped soul would be watching Tristan watch Ivy slowly and painfully die.

Tristan stood back, then hurled himself against the door, determined to break out. He tried again and again, smashing his shoulder into the door, then sank to his knees. “Lacey!” he cried out. “I need you. Ivy needs you. Lacey, where are you?”

HALFWAY UP THE LONG DRIVEWAY LEADING TO HER
Stonehill home, Ivy tried Tristan’s phone again. She was growing uneasy. It was nearly 3 a.m.—too long for Tristan to be out of touch. As soon as she saw Lacey, she’d ask her to check on him.

Running the rest of the way to the top of the ridge, Ivy skirted the large clapboard house and turned toward the stone wall that marked the edge of the property. When she saw the blackened maples, her heart fell. A short distance from the trees lay a pile of burnt wood, the broken skeleton of Philip’s wonderful tree house.

The tree house had been Gregory’s as a child. Hoping to win the love of his newest son, Andrew had rebuilt and
expanded it for Philip, never guessing it would become one more thorn to prick Gregory’s jealousy. Ivy recalled the day Philip, stepping on a loosened plank, nearly fell from the walkway. She could still see the glow of wonder on her brother’s face when he told her his angel had saved him. A year later, one of Ivy’s first clues that Tristan had returned to her was his description of a tree house identical to Philip’s. Just a few weeks back she had slept there with Tristan beneath a canopy of leaves and stars. But for Gregory, every symbol of love, every sign that people cared about one another, diminished him and must therefore be destroyed.

Turning away from the scorched trees, Ivy ran across the lawn to the back door. After disabling the house’s alarm system, she crept up the steps, entered her own room, then crossed through the joint bathroom to Philip’s. She looked around but couldn’t spot Lacey’s glow. Philip stirred in his bed, rolling onto his side.

“Ivy?”

“Shhh! Yes,” she said softly. “Where’s Lacey?”

Her brother sat up, blinking his eyes for a moment, as if trying to remember. “She said she had to go.”

“But I told her—” Ivy bit her tongue.

“She said you’d be mad,” Philip added.

Ivy nodded and smiled a little.

“I’m supposed to tell you that Tristan kept calling to her
and she had to see what kind of mess he had gotten himself into.”

“When was all this?” Ivy asked quickly.

Philip looked at his bedside clock uncertainly. “She came after I called you. She left before I fell asleep again.”

Ivy sighed. “Did she come back after she saw Tristan?”

He shook his head.

“Did she mention where she was going?” Ivy asked hopefully.

“Somewhere close. I told Lacey where he lived on the Cape, but she said he was somewhere close by.”

Close by . . .
The cemetery,
Ivy thought.

Gregory could have frightened her with a lot of different waking visions, but he had chosen the setting at Riverstone Rise to send a message to her, to tell her where he could be found. He had drawn her back to Connecticut, where it had all started, with the one action that he knew would make her come home: threatening Philip. Now he counted on her to recall her waking vision, dangling it like a fishing lure in her mind’s eye, the moment she feared for Tristan.

If she went to the cemetery, she would be taking Gregory’s bait. But how could she not go? Lacey hadn’t returned, and Tristan wasn’t responding to Ivy’s call: Something was very wrong.

“I’ll help you look for him,” Philip said, pushing back his sheet.

She caught him. “No!”

He raised his chin to argue with her.

“Tomorrow, Philip. I want you to get some sleep now so you’re ready to help tomorrow.”

He set his jaw.

“It could be a long day,” she added.

“Why?”

She laughed and sat down on the bed next to him. “Because tonight’s already been a long night. Do you remember the prayer we used to say?”

He shook his head no, but he was tired and finally relented, nodding yes. Together they said, “Angel of light, angel above, take care of me tonight, take care of everyone I love.”

“That’s you, Ivy,” Philip added, as he had when he was a little kid.

Ivy rested her forehead against his. “Turn over. I’ll rub your back.”

He snuggled down with his pillow, and his eyes quickly closed. Asleep, he looked like the little boy she had mothered years back, when Maggie had to work long hours at her job. Ivy smoothed his hair and ran her fingers along his cheek. For a moment she felt as if she couldn’t bear to leave him.

But he would be all right. The weight of Gregory’s hate seemed to have only one effect on her brother: to
make him stronger. She tiptoed out of the room.

Downstairs, Ivy quietly reset the house alarm. The moment she stepped out the door, she felt the change in the weather. The wind was damp and coming from the west now, a storm brewing. Ivy ran to her car. She checked the cell phone that she used for Tristan. No calls. Checking her other phone, she saw Will and Beth had texted her: They had gone directly to the police station and were waiting for Rosemary Donovan to arrive. Ivy slipped Tristan’s phone in her pocket, set the other one on the passenger seat, and headed for the cemetery.

By the time she reached the entrance to Riverstone Rise, the sky in the west was flickering with lightning. Ahead of her, illuminated by headlights, the tall iron gates appeared to be chained, but when she got out of the car and pulled on the steel links, she discovered one of them had been pried open. She hurriedly slipped off the chain. After driving through, she stopped and glanced in her rearview mirror. The wide-open gates offered an invitation to anyone who noticed them to follow her, but she continued on.

She tried to remember the way to the Baines plot. “Lacey,” she called out, “where are you? Where’s Tristan?”

She turned right, passing the oldest graves, then followed the narrow road as it climbed higher. When she
reached the crest of the hill, she heard the dark rumblings of the approaching storm. A vicious streak of lightning buried its root in the next ridge. Ivy rolled down her car window. The smell was familiar: green—verdant—mossy.

The road before her suddenly dipped. At the bottom she veered onto Ravine Way, stopping her car where the row of mausoleums began. She leaned forward in her seat, hoping for some sign of Tristan, but she couldn’t see beyond the two misty paths her headlights made in the humid air. The rest of the landscape was lit only by flashes of lightning. For half seconds at a time, the statues in the cemetery came alive, then turned back into faceless actors on a darkened stage.

If Gregory was hiding, her car lights had already told him where she was, but they had revealed nothing useful to her. She cut them and the engine, then got out. Walking quickly, she felt the first splinters of rain on her face. She imagined the eyes of the dead peering out the barred windows of their stone houses. She shifted her gaze to her right. Although the grave plots opposite the mausoleums were flat, the land rose sharply behind them; she felt as if she was passing through a ghostly gap in the fabric of the living world.

The wind picked up, suddenly finding its way into the ravine. Ahead of her and to the far right she saw the dark mass of the beech tree that marked a corner of the Baines
plot. A crooked wire of lightning seared the sky to the west, thunder cracked, and the rain came down.

“Tristan!” she called out. “Tristan, are you here? Lacey? Where are you?”

Ivy . . . Ivy.

She started running.

Ivy.

At the edge of the Baines plot, she tripped over a low stone and tumbled forward, tasting grass and mud. Pulling her knees under her, she quickly stood up. In a sharp flash of violet white, she saw him.

“Oh my God! Tristan!”

He stood at the top of the Baines monument, more than twelve feet off the ground. Another flash of lightning showed her the heavy ropes that bound him to the stone angel. Ivy stared up with amazement and fear, wondering how she could reach him. Why wasn’t Lacey here?

“Ivy, hurry!” A double flash of lightning showed the anguish on Tristan’s face. Something dark stained his shirt, oozing from his chest. He was bleeding. He was going to die.

Ivy reached in her pocket for her cell phone and hunched her shoulders, sheltering it from the rain.
911. 911. 911.
She pressed the buttons over and over, but nothing happened.

“Tristan, try to hold on!”

The sound of laughter spun her around. In vain she
looked for Gregory. There were too many hiding places, too many stones for him to crouch behind. She turned back to Tristan. “I’m coming! Hold on!”

If Tristan died, fallen from grace—

“IVY,” TRISTAN CALLED, HIS VOICE HOARSE FROM
shouting. He peered through the blowing rain, his fingers gripping the window grate of the mausoleum. Lacey had been able to untie his hands, but she didn’t have the physical strength to break the padlock that Gregory had placed on the door’s hasp.

“I tried to stop her,” Lacey said. “I tried to keep her from getting out of the car. I ran down the road right next to her, fully materialized—”

“I saw you.”

“But she didn’t!”

“She was already in his power,” Tristan said, watching Ivy as she stood at the base of the monument, staring upward yet seeming oblivious to the dangerous lightning. Her mouth moved, but the storm drowned out her voice.

“What is it?” Tristan asked, his soul filled with dread. “What is she seeing?”

“You,” Lacey said softly. “I’m just guessing—I can’t see the waking vision any more than you can. But who else would hold Ivy’s attention like that?”

“I’ve got to stop him! He’s going to kill her!”

“Stop him, but don’t kill him. Remember, Tristan—”

A sharp streak of lightning caught Tristan’s eye. He heard the strike, felt the crack of thunder shaking the hillside.

“Get me out of here, Lacey. There must be a way!”

“There must be a—a key,” she said.

Her voice trembled, making Tristan turn to look at her. Despite all her bluster, he knew Lacey was afraid of Gregory.

“Gregory must be watching too,” Lacey continued, her voice steadier. “I’ll look in his pocket. I can carry and turn a key.”

“Lacey, what would happen to you if he—?”

Before Tristan could finish his question, she faded into a purple mist and was gone.

IVY GAZED UP AT TRISTAN, HER HEART BREAKING. SHE
had to reach him.

The base of the monument was made of granite, rising in three tiers, its smooth surfaces made slick by rain, with no decorative carving to hold on to. The first tier, four feet above the ground, was too high for her to kneel on. Planting her hands on the shelf of stone, she jumped and used her locked arms to lift herself up. Her hands slipped on the wet surface. Sliding off, she scraped her arm along the stone edge from elbow to wrist and bit back a cry of pain.

“Ivy!”

“I’m here.”

Drying her hands on the inside of her shirt, she tried again. This time she succeeded.

The next tier was shorter, and she could raise her knee high enough to get on it, but the ledge was even narrower than the one she was standing on.

“Ivy!”

She could hear Tristan’s agony in the raggedness of his voice. “I’m here,” she called back to him. “I’m coming.”

She moved torturously slow. One tiny shift of weight in the wrong direction, one slip on the wet surface . . .

She was sitting on the second tier, with one foot tucked under her. The ledge was too narrow for both. She rose carefully to a staggered stance. The wind and rain whipped her clothes. She looked up at Tristan. He grimaced with pain.

“Oh, love, I’m almost there,” she said.

“I’m going to die, Ivy.”

“No. No, you’re not!”

Seven feet up, seven to go. Ivy stood on her toes. Her fingers could almost touch the round base of the statue, but the narrow ledge made it impossible to get to the next tier. Yet somehow she had to!

The end of a coil of rope, part of the ropes that bound Tristan, was knotted at the base of the statue and hung
loose below it, dancing in the wind tantalizingly close to her fingertips.

It was the only way: Jump, grab it, pull herself up. Flexing her knees, Ivy trained her eyes on it and leaped. Her hand reached wildly, grasping nothing but air. She banged her shoulder against the vertical rock, caught an edge with her foot, and tumbled to the ground.

For a moment she lay stunned, the breath knocked out of her. Above her, Tristan screamed in pain, and she struggled to her feet. Her foot kicked something, a small but heavy object. She leaned down, groping in the wet grass. Her fingers felt the barrel, then the handle of a gun.

“Ivy—Ivy, look—” Tristan called, his voice weak and broken up by the wind. “For the gun.”

“I have it.”

“Use it. . . . Kill me.” His words came slowly, as if he was fighting for each breath.

“Tristan, I can’t!”

“I’m begging you, Ivy. Finish it!
Please
.”

She stared at the gun in her hands.

“It’s no sin, Ivy. It’s kindness. If you love me, please!”

Tears streamed down Ivy’s cheeks. She couldn’t bear for him to be in such pain. “Tristan, you’re fallen. If you die—”

“There’s no greater hell than my life now,” he cried. “Kill me! Then kill yourself, and we will be together forever.”

Kill me. . . . Then kill yourself.
Ivy silently repeated the
words. She took a step back. “Tristan?” she asked softly, uncertainly.

“Here.”

It sounded like his voice, but—

“Help me, Ivy!”

She took another step back, gazing up at the monument, then she turned and searched the gravestones around her. Her Tristan might ask to die—excruciating pain drove people toward death. But he would never ask her to kill herself, to give up her soul. This nightmarish vision was Gregory’s. “Angel of love, free me,” she prayed.