Ever Tempted (24 page)

Grace shoved me out the door. “If they only knew how selfish you were, they wouldn’t love you as much as they do. You’ve always taken everything I’ve ever loved and kept it for yourself.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You act as if I remember the past. That’s your fault.” Nausea abated and anger replaced it as she bit into my upper arm with Sage’s long, cracking nails.

“You’re a pitiful excuse for a wife. You know that? You can’t even keep your hands to yourself for a week. You’ve already cheated on my sweet Colby. Add that to the list of reasons you don’t deserve him.” She jerked me down the last few steps.

I almost stumbled onto the floor.

Just as the idea to think to Cole crossed my mind, Grace turned on me. With her moldy hands, she jerked me out the front door, slammed it shut, and shoved me against it with so much force it knocked the wind out of me. “And don’t even think about doing that mind talking stuff. I know Colby can hear you. It didn’t take long to figure out that you all have a secret way of communicating. As much as I hate to hear all your voices, there are too many times that you’re silent. So if you think one thought in his direction, and I find out about it, I’ll be sure to make his untimely death as painful as possible.”

I clamped my mouth shut as if that would stop the thoughts. I thought of sunny days and humid nights on a beach far from my current location.

“Grace is gone! Are you okay? Please tell me she’s not with you.”
Cole’s sensual voice broke as it reverberated through my head.

What could I think back to him and not purposely give away my situation? Being abducted by a demented bitch who was playing puppet master to a dead body sort of made it hard to focus.

Cole didn’t give me long to respond before he pressed the thoughts into my head with a force I’d never felt.
“You sounded weird a few minutes ago. I’m on my way up. You had better be in the shower where you can’t hear me. If not, I’ll tear this place apart searching for you.”

I held both sides of my temple. With every word Cole forced into my head, the pressure became painful.

Grace tugged me along but stopped when she saw my reaction to whatever was going on inside my head.

“You had better make damn sure he doesn’t interrupt us.” The stench of her breath slammed into me.

I wretched but found the breath to respond aloud. “Can’t a girl take a shower in peace?”

“Good girl.” Grace’s clammy hand dug into my skin. “Hurry up. We haven’t all day.”

In a pace so quick my calves burned, Grace yanked me stumbling and tripping on anything that appeared in our path all the way to the pond. “You’re probably dying to know what the importance of the pond is. First of all, I want to show you the exact spot where Colby and I made love. I want to see the look on your face and absorb your pain when you realize how erotic it was. I want to see your eyes when you picture our naked bodies writhing all over the overgrown grass. And boy did he ever writhe. I feel sure he’ll never forget our night together.”

Blood pulsed through my temples, threatening to burst through.

No thoughts, Allie. No thoughts.

“And when he was slick with so much sweat that it dripped off of him, I caressed every inch of his skin. It was the most amazing night I’ve ever had. And I had plenty of men to compare him with. They lined up. That’s probably why Colby felt so intimidated. I don’t blame him. My prospects were alarming in number.” Grace sighed but it came out as a death rattle.

Weak with disgust and the length in which we’d traveled, I gripped the railing to the new steps I’d built to the pond.

Grace shoved me down the steps.

One thing I could think and not give away my location was that Grace was more demented than I ever thought she was. She had deluded herself into thinking Cole loved her and he was just passing time with me. It would have been sad if she hadn’t turned herself into such a vile excuse for a human. Spirit or not.

There had been times I’d felt sorry for her.

Tonight that ended.

Now that I’d witnessed her true mental sickness, I could see why Colby and Grace’s mother would have concocted such a plan to commit her to the confines of an asylum. At first it seemed devious, but I saw what they had to contend with.

It would have sucked to live around her. Then, she had to have been at least half as dangerous as she was now. It still eluded me how I had, and couldn’t remember any of her outrageous antics.

“You’re too quiet. You’d better hope you didn’t do any of that telepathy.” Grace shoved me to the ground when we got to the pond bank. “Lie on your backside.”

I did as she ordered.

“Now, imagine him beckoning me to him as he lay there. Picture it.” Grace paced, gesturing emphatically as she droned on. “And that night in the motel room. He didn’t stop immediately the way he proposed to you that he did. We were well into the act of foreplay before he stopped. He was so scared he’d harm me, he sent me away until we could do away with you. He says differently, but I know him much better than you.” Grace glared at me.

“Now, since I know you weren’t upstairs to witness Thing One and Thing Two gathering the ingredients for my demise, you wouldn’t be aware that they would have to exhume my remains. If they can’t find my body, then they can’t send me to hell. Little do they know, we’re going to fetch my body and hide it. I know it’s dark under that murky water, but you’ve done this all before in a dream. I’m sure it will be second nature.” Grace used invisible force to shove me over the pond bank.

I sputtered water from my mouth and held on to roots. She just had to throw me into the deepest side. The cold water wrapped around me and took me deep into the dream I’d had on the airplane.

I had done this before, and I sure as hell wasn’t going down there again. Not for her, anyway.

With the same ability she used to shove me in, she shoved me under. I fought my way up and grabbed mud, roots, and rocks to pull my head above the water.

I shook my head frantically as I coughed.

Grace planted her hands on her hips and sent me a malicious grin. “I’ll give you a rest. I don’t want you to drown before you retrieve the sacred remains. Don’t you want to know why they need them?”

With a stare full of contempt, I didn’t give her the satisfaction of fighting anymore.

Maybe fetching her body would help more than I realized. If it could be used against her, then throwing up for hours afterward would be worth the retching.

Grace rattled off more of her delusions. “Your devout followers plan to do something even worse than what Cole did to me. Thinking back, I can’t blame him. I’d killed myself. He saw me as a monster for mutilating our chances of ever truly being together. So he mutilated me. It was symbolism. He’s so poetic. At the time, I probably shouldn’t have been so harsh, but I was furious beyond reason too. He lay in the bed, holding your dead body instead of mine. Of course, he didn’t want the locals and our family to know he’d been involved with me. He was afraid it would ruin his good name.”

It would have helped if they’d told me what use her bones would have been or if she’d just shut up with her rabid delusions and tell me herself.

“Colby acts as though he hates me, but he would never tell any of you that he loves me so much he wants to put my body in the ground so my soul can be put to rest. He probably thinks that’s what I want. What I need. He always did put my feelings before his own. I was so mad at him when he broke our engagement off that I could barely hold on to my sanity. If you think about it, though, I’m sure he considered being a poor farmhand wasn’t good enough for me. Even now, he probably feels the same way. When we meet our maker, he’ll understand my true devotion.”

Her maker was Satan and her permanent home would be hell when I was done with her.

“Where the hell are you? If you’re with Grace, you have to control your anger so I can hear you.”
Cole’s furious thought-speak throbbed through my head.
“Your shirt is the only wet piece of clothing in your room. I know you didn’t decide to take a stroll around the property wearing wet pants. Allie!”

“I can’t tell you. She’ll do even more horrible things to you all if you try to find me. Please don’t.”
I finally gave in. “I’ll bring you your body. Just don’t hurt any of them.”

Grace’s incensed face melted into a pleased expression. “You’ve got a deal.”

The cold, murky thickness surrounded me as I delved under the water. Seconds felt like minutes, and my lungs ached. Thick mud suctioned against my feet as I landed on the bottom of the pond.

Through the frothy murk, a rectangular box emerged, a casket of rotting wood and rusted latches embedded in green sludge.

My heart did a staccato against my chest, and my lungs burned deeper. I hurried toward the wooden hatch on the coffin.

With little force, the latches broke free.

I pushed the lid upward. The wood fell away from Grace’s remains.

Grace’s stringy hair lifted with the current. Through the settling hair, leathery gray skin stretched across a deformed skull.

Cole had in fact beaten her so badly the bones of her face were unrecognizable.

The mud on the floor of the pond became even more difficult to work against. It trapped my feet as I reached forward.

My own hair tangled around my face, making it difficult to see. I tugged at a large rock, the only thing that held her bones at the bottom of the pond.

Pushing off from the bottom and fighting the suction of mud to do so, I flailed against the water.

Air. I had to get air.

After gasping and coughing at the surface, I didn’t bother with Grace. I tread water long enough to gain the strength to dive again.

When I thought I might have the breath to go back, I used all the force I could muster to reach the bottom. With a final angered jerk, I slung the rock away. Just before I tugged at her corpse, something caught my eye. I swam over to it, swiped it from the pond floor, and stuffed it into my pocket. With new determination, I scooped one arm around her bones.

Once at the surface, I dragged the slimy bones to the edge of the pond where the water was the shallowest. I tossed the remains onto the bank and began to pull myself up.

“No, no, no. Remember. My hands are down there. You have to search for them too.” Grace pointed to the pond. “They were just off the bank. It’s pretty shallow. You should have no trouble.”

That was it. Every ounce of my moral fiber had never made up the strength I found in that moment. “Maim me. Torture every person I love. Do whatever you have to do. Cole might not care, but my friends love me enough to die martyrs. That’s something you never had. Not because people didn’t want to love you. You shoved them all away. You did everything in your power to make your family hate you. Mama even hated you. The person who spent hours birthing you into this world and nurturing you into a young adult she could be proud of. But you took all her efforts and spit them back in her face with your treachery and lies. I won’t be a part of your life any more. And no one who loves me would want me to do the things you ask. Even if it meant their own personal pain and suffering. How does that feel? To know they love me that much.”

In my hand, I clenched something Grace had forgotten lay at the bottom of the pond beside her. All I had to do was anger her enough to catch her off guard and then convince her I’d surrender. The stone was warmer than the air around me. It still had power.

It had worked once. Why couldn’t it work again? This time I’d put it in a jar of water, bury the jar in cement and hope she was rotting in some very hot place for eternity.

“Take me. Do what you will with me. Isn’t that the way it goes? If you can get into my body, then you can live out a lifetime inside it? Inside here, you can touch the man who I now realize is the only person who loves you. You’ve said so yourself. And when you’re inside me, you can go in after your hands. Then you can hide the remains and have Cole by your side. I don’t want him if he loves you.” I pulled myself closer to the bank.

“In 1879, I would have fallen for that. But I’ve lived a few years. Enough to know you wouldn’t give up that easy.” Grace sauntered toward me and with her rickety hand yanked me out of the pond.

“I’m serious. I’m tired of fighting. Tired of being scared to look behind me. I’m done.”

She tossed me onto the wet grass. “It’s about time you surrendered. You were never going to win.”

“Grace Rollins, I invite you to inhabit my body.” I closed my eyes and waited for the cold, grimy feeling of her soul to enter me.

Please let this work.

“Nooo!” Cole jumped from the top of the embankment and landed in cat form right on top of Grace. He clamped his long razor sharp teeth around her neck. Bones cracked and skin tore as he yanked his head back and forth. An angry growl rumbled from his jaws as he flung her to the ground like a sack of manure.

She hit with a thud that sent ripples through the water.

Behind Cole, Shelby, Kaitlyn, and Anna Marie skidded and tripped down the embankment.

Grace’s mangled throat was still able to produce garbled screams.

I covered my face with trembling hands.

Cole ripped and tore at her throat until he had her head dangling by a single piece of skin. He backed up and crouched into a stalking stance.

Grace’s limbs jerked with the last control her mind had on them, then came to a sudden halt. In a puke green cloud of muck, Grace’s spirit floated from the corpse. Her scream cut through the night. “What have you done?”

Cole’s panther form began to tremble as the line of his body became hard to make out.

Grace turned to Cole and leaned down as her feet dangled just over the grass, but not quite touching. “Your week is up. Come to me now or your whore of a wife will pay.”

In seconds, Cole had gone through the popping and creaking it took to be a man again. He sprang up and stood before Grace. “You’ll have to kill me first.”

“Earth, wind, air, and fire. We call on you to bring equilibrium.” Ceremoniously, Anna Marie lifted her arms as Shelby and Kaitlyn dashed to form a triangle with her.