Lord's Fall (38 page)

He has escaped and left our world. We have to stop him.

The circle said good-bye to their home. With power and arcane fire, their leader prepared a potion from which they drank to transform and travel to a strange world.

Her mate confronted his final moments with strength and courage. As his beautiful eyes closed, he vowed,
I will see you soon.

They had fit together with such perfection. They had been born at the same moment and had journeyed together through life, contrast and confluence, two interlocking pieces that sustained and balanced each other. But no matter how connected they were in life, they each had to cross that midnight bridge on their own. Her energy bled ribbons of bright red as she faced the final moments of the only life she had known.

She tried to reply but the poison had already disconnected her from her physical body. She sent him one last shining pulse of love and faith as darkness descended.

She had died such a long time ago.

Thousands of years ago.

Wait. No.

Mary flung out a hand and cracked her knuckles against something hard. Pain shot up her arm.

She surged upright. Shards of color surrounded her, like fractured pieces from the ruins of a chapel’s stained-glass window. After several uncomprehending moments, she realized where she was. She was sprawled on her bed in a chaotic nest of comforter, pillows, clothes and scraps of material.

She wobbled where she sat. Her heart erupted into a congo drum medley then slowed to a more normal tempo. Her head, not so much. It pulsed with a steady throb of pain.

The bedside clock read six thirty
A.M.
For Christ’s sake. She’d only gotten home five hours ago. Her ER shift had been twenty-six hours long. It had involved a five-car accident and two gunshot victims, one of whom, a seventeen-year-old single mother, had died.

Some people played golf in their downtime, or went hiking or took aerobic classes. She dreamed of glowing, rainbow-pulsing creatures that drank poison Kool-Aid in some kind of bizarre suicide pact. Was that better or worse than dreaming of the gunshot victims?

She thought of the dream-criminal the creatures had pursued. Sweat broke out as dread, mingled with a sense of unspeakable loss, ricocheted through her body with the intensity of a menopausal hot flash.

She sucked air into constricted lungs. Maybe she shouldn’t try to answer that question right now.

Something stuck to her face. Her fingers quested across her skin. She pulled a scrap of cloth from her cheek and stared at it. The cloth had a blue-and-green paisley design. A blurred memory surfaced, like the smear of color atop an oily roadside puddle. She had found the cloth a couple of days ago in a clearance bin at the fabric store, and she was planning to incorporate it into the pattern of her next quilt. She had been wound up from her overlong work shift when she had gotten home, so she had released some of the nervous energy by doing household chores. She had fallen asleep in the middle of folding laundry.

Adrenaline had destroyed any chance at getting back to sleep. She dragged herself off the rumpled bed and yanked at her wrinkled T-shirt and shorts. She attempted to finger-comb her hair, which crackled with electricity as she coaxed her fingers into blind alleys and dead ends. The shoulder-length tawny strands hinted at a mixed-race ancestry and were so thick and wavy they were layered by necessity. At present her hair seemed to have more energy than she did. She gave up trying to untangle the mess. It sprawled across her shoulders unconquered, a wild lion’s mane.

Mary scooped up her house keys and sunglasses from the hall table, slipped on tennis shoes and grabbed a hooded sweatshirt. She was outside in the early warm spring morning in less than a minute. Bright sunshine stabbed at her before she slipped on her sunglasses.

She lived in an ivory tower near Witch Road. The ivory tower was a squat, crooked building in a wooded working-class neighborhood, located by the St. Joseph River in southeast Michigan. It was a shabby, unfashionable river dwelling, built almost a century ago, with a two-bedroom living area on the second floor over the garage that protected it from the river’s periodic flooding. She had been renting it since her divorce five years ago.

The ivory had become dingy over the years, the aluminum siding loose at one corner. The outside concrete stairs to her dwelling were narrow and crooked. They were dangerous in an ice storm. Once, while she was at work, a heavy rain had turned to sleet. When she’d gotten home, she’d been forced to crawl up the icy stairs in order to get inside. Still, the interior was warm, with old pine paneling and scarred but beautiful hardwood floors, and it had a brick-and-flagstone fireplace. The first time she had stepped inside, something seemed to flow over her, embracing her in an invisible hug. She fancied it was the spirit of the place, welcoming her. Despite its dirty condition and the many ways in which it was inconvenient, she had known she would live there the first time she’d seen it. Sometimes she wondered if she would die there.

For all its shabbiness the ivory tower embodied an ordinary yet powerful magic. In the view from the picture window, there was no sign of the street below or of the neighboring houses that dotted the dead-end road. It gave the generous illusion she was in a cabin in the woods, far away from anyone else. She could stare out the window for hours at the evergreens, oaks and sycamores, watching flurries of white snow swirling in a snowstorm, or shadows moving in the trees as daylight changed and faded.

Witch Road, as she had named it, was a nearby street in the same neighborhood, part of a loop she had mapped for a daily two-mile run. The route cut close by the nearby river and had gradually pulled her under its spell as she jogged it through the change of seasons.

Small houses were overpowered by tall, thick, deciduous trees whose bones were uncovered with the death of every year, from the ones with straight willowy lines to those that had a more arthritic beauty, with their gnarled joints and twisted limbs that shot in unexpected directions, ending in thousands of spidery-thin fingers grasping at air. The underbrush was secretive and tangled. Thick vines and fallen limbs discouraged trespass from outsiders. The trees met to whisper overhead in the ebb and flow of restless days, enclosing the narrow asphalt road in the summertime with a leafy green canopy.

She was too tired for her normal run. She walked the route instead.

The leafy canopy was fast returning with the warmer weather. On the other side of the green-edged lattice of tree limbs, fluffy cumulous clouds traveled across the sky at such speed, they seemed to be running from some unseen menace. The trees shifted and rustled. Leaves and twigs, the detritus from the death of the forest last autumn and winter, danced in circles that followed her down the street.

The swirling circles whispered to each other in small voices.

She’s not the one, stupid.

How do you know? She smells like blood.

She paused and turned to look behind her. What a thing to fantasize. She was imagining that, wasn’t she? The only sounds in the silence were the murmurous trees, the distant report of a car door slamming, the sound of the wind tumbling sticks and leaves around like a child playing at jacks.

She shook her head, turned back around and resumed walking again.

You saw! She looked. Does that mean she heard us?

Normal people don’t hear us.

She jerked to a halt and broke out in a fresh sweat.

I didn’t just make that up.

I’m hearing voices.

I’m. Hearing. Voices.

An internal quake rattled her bones. She turned backward in a circle, staring around her with wide eyes. There was no one else close by. Down the street, two children with their school bags exploded out of the front door of a house.

A couple yards away twigs and pine needles tumbled in a tiny pagan dance.

Everything else had stopped. There was no wind, no lick of breeze against her skin. Even the trees overhead had gone silent, waiting.

There was nothing to cause that turbulence of air. It was wrong, impossible. The hair at the back of her neck raised and her teeth clenched. She stamped her foot at the dancing sticks and leaves, and hissed, “Stop it!”

The small voices burst into chatter.

Yes, she heard us. She did.

We must go!

As abruptly as they had started, the voices stopped. The leaves and twigs dropped to the ground.

Nothing else disturbed the stillness, just a few cars pulling out of driveways as people headed to work under the watchfulness of the looming forest, as some of the trees only tolerated the humans who had moved into their territory—

Where had that thought come from? Why would she think such a thing?

Panic clawed her. She was used to dreaming strange dreams. She’d done it her entire life. Hearing voices though, and seeing what she saw—seeing what she thought she just saw—that was psychosis.

She clamped down on that. No. She was just too tired. She wasn’t fully awake yet. She was still half caught in a dream state where Escher’s clock melted and stairways led on an endless loop to nowhere. Coffee would shake off this crazy fugue. She started back in the direction of her house, working to a lope as she rounded the corner.

Her ex-husband, Justin, stood on her deck at the bottom of the concrete stairs. His dark hair shone with glints of copper in the early morning sun, his narrow, clever face bisected by dark Ray-Ban sunglasses. He was dressed for the office in a functional yet elegant suit, the jacket unbuttoned in the unseasonal warmth of the spring morning.

She groaned and slowed as she saw him. Justin caught sight of her before she could pivot and jog away. Caught, she continued with obvious reluctance toward him and the house.

“Oh that’s flattering,” he said with a grin. “Good thing my ego is so preened and shiny. Good morning, and screw you too.”

“You show up uninvited, you get what you get,” Mary said. Her voice sounded rough. She cleared her throat. “For pity’s sake, man. It’s not even seven
A.M.
yet. I never talked to you this early when we lived together.”

“Then why don’t you answer your phone?” he said in exasperated reply. “If you’d pick up, I wouldn’t have to stop by unannounced.”

She squinted at him then jogged up the stairs to unlock the door as he followed. “Because it didn’t ring.”

“Is it even in the house?” he retorted. He peered past her at the riotous mess inside. “How can you tell? The hood of your car is cold but you weren’t answering when I knocked. I was going to let myself in to make sure you were all right.”

She sighed. “Don’t make me regret giving you that key.”

“You’ll have to arm-wrestle me to get it back, and you know I cheat.” Once inside, he looked at her again more closely. Something in his face changed, the humor dying away. “Are you okay? You look really pale.”

“I’m fine.” She removed her sunglasses and rubbed at her face. She could still feel creases on her cheek from the cloth she had slept on. The pounding in her head had gotten worse. She turned to walk to her kitchen and said over her shoulder, “I need coffee. Do you want a cup?”

“Yeah.” Justin followed her. “Look, do me a favor. Make an appointment to see your doctor, okay?”

“What? No. I said I’m fine.” Mary stopped in the middle of her kitchen and looked around in confusion. She knew exactly where she was but everything suddenly seemed alien.

She didn’t belong here. Panic tried to clutch at her again, like a drowning victim being pulled underwater. She flung it off, shaking herself hard like a wet dog as she headed for the coffeepot.

“I don’t think you’re as fine as you say you are.” Justin frowned at her.

“I just had a day from hell yesterday. My shift was twenty-six hours long. We had a multiple car accident and a couple of gunshot victims.”

He shook his head. “That’s rough. What happened?”

“The accident was a pileup on I-94. No fatalities. The shooting was a different story. Some girl found out her Baby Daddy had another Baby Mama. She borrowed her brother’s nine millimeter and emptied the clip into them while they sat outside at Dairy Queen. Now she’s in jail facing murder charges. Baby Mama Two is dead and Baby Daddy is in ICU. He may or may not make it, and all the babies have been taken by child protective services, which, when you think about it, might be the best thing that’s happened in their little lives.”

Justin’s voice turned hushed. “I heard about that on the news.”

She yanked open a cupboard, pulled out the coffee and a filter. She said over her shoulder, “To top it all off, I got maybe four hours’ sleep, so I look like shit. It’s no big deal.”

He sighed. “Look, I don’t have time to argue with you. I’ve got twenty minutes to get to work—so just promise me you’ll go get a checkup and shut up already.”

She filled the coffeepot with water, poured it into the machine and started it. She slammed the pot onto the burner. “Seriously, Justin,” she snapped. “Do I come over uninvited to your house and tell you and Tony what to do?”

“Honey, I’m sorry,” he said in quick contrition. She startled as he put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It’s just—hell, even I know you’re never supposed to talk to a woman about her weight but you’ve lost weight you couldn’t afford to lose. You were always a little bit of a thing, the original five-foot-two-and-eyes-of-blue gal.”

She gave him a grim smile as the pungent aroma of coffee filled the kitchen. “Don’t start inflicting Dean Martin songs on me again at this time in the morning, or I swear I won’t be responsible for my actions. I’ll be sure to tell the police that when they arrive with the body bag.”

He didn’t smile back. Instead his handsome features took on a mulish expression. “I’m being serious here. You’re not looking good, Mary. You’re all bones and nerves. If you won’t have a rational conversation about it, I’ll have to make an appointment for you myself to go see Tony.”

“The hell you will.” Her smile turned to a glare.

He pulled out his cell phone, turned his back and ignored her. After a few moments he started to speak on the phone. He moved down the short hall to the living room.