Nightwing (2 page)

He did and stumbled in the doorway, dropping his torch. The light fell by half and darkness engulfed Raven, swept him up in cold, fierce claws and sank icy fangs into his throat; two below his jaw, two more scraping the cervical bones in the back of his neck.

He felt the punctures, felt his flesh tear and hot, prickling pain shoot down his arms. He managed to lift them, somehow, his medical kit sliding off his shoulder, and flail his torch at the thing gripping him from behind. It bellowed and dropped him, leapt over him and Teddy and then whirled on them once again, shrieking with rage.

Through the haze filming his eyes, Raven saw Teddy roll on his back, torch and sidearm raised. He fired two shots, point-blank, into the chest of what appeared to be a man, a pharaoh come alive in a golden kilt and braided, black wig. It only roared and snarled, flexing bronze muscles in powerful arms. A tall, handsome figure of a man, except for the bared, bloody fangs gleaming in the torchlight.

Teddy fired two more shots, screaming something Raven couldn’t hear over the roar in his head. He saw the barrel flash twice more and Jolil and Yusef leap at the thing from behind, their swinging torches spraying trails of sparks through the dark chamber.

The creature spun around and flung out its arms, toppling Jolil and Yusef as it sprang toward the entrance to the tomb. The last clear thing Raven saw was a jewel, a fiery opalescent stone flashing in a heavy gold amulet around the thing’s neck, then its shape blurred out of focus, wavered and shifted like smoke onto all fours in the shape of a jackal.

Raven felt blood pooling in the back of his throat, felt an icy, deathly cold seeping through his veins from the punctures in his neck. He tried to swallow, but couldn’t. The muscles were frozen. So were his eyelids, wide open and staring at the low, stone ceiling and the pale, ghostly image of himself rising from his body.

Panic seized him. He felt it thudding wildly in his chest, though he knew his heart had stopped beating. He was dead. Oh, God, he was dead. Lying on the floor of the tomb with his throat torn out, gazing up at himself, at the bewildered, disoriented expression on his face.

He watched his mouth open to scream, but he made no sound, watched himself turn away from his body, reeling and staggering out of the tomb behind the thing—dear God, what was it?—that had killed him. Come back, he screamed silently at himself. Come back, come back.

We’re not dead.

Chapter 1

Stonebridge, Massachusetts Present Day

He found himself on the beach again, as he always did when he came back to Cape Cod, to the house near the town of Stonebridge where he’d been born. He came back every now and then, he wasn’t sure how often, usually within months but sometimes days of his birthday, July 19.

He was a Cancer, a child of the moon, but this time, he returned in sunlight on a blazing afternoon. The sky was white with heat, the sun a shimmering silver disk melting toward the horizon behind him. He felt it sizzle on his shoulders, felt the scorched sand throb beneath his boot soles.

He sat down facing the sea, his back to the withered salt grass wilting against the flanks of the dunes. He tipped his head back and looped his arms around his drawn-up knees. The heat was a balm to him after the long, numbing cold.

He was here for a reason, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Or where he’d come from. He used to know things like that, lots of things, but they were gone now, just simply not there—the way he was most of the time. He didn’t think he was dead. He didn’t feel dead, just disconnected. Something had happened to him, but he couldn’t remember what. He couldn’t even remember his name.

His senses still worked, though he didn’t know how. He could see and hear and touch and taste and smell. He could weep, but he shed no tears. He could laugh but he made no sound. He knew one other thing—that it was a blessing he couldn’t remember anything else.

He sat gazing at the sea until the tide began to crash on the beach and the swells behind the foam-headed breakers began to darken. He got up then and blinked at the sky, at the sun shooting long silver beams through the purple and gray clouds on the horizon. It was still hot, yet he felt himself shiver. It was nearly sunset. Time to get himself up to the house and hide until morning.

He didn’t know what he was hiding from, any more than he knew which one of the paths beaten through the beach grass to follow. He always picked the right one, always found his way through the maze of sandy hills that buffered the land from the sea. When the house came into view he stopped on the crest of the last dune and smiled.

Someone had given its clapboard sides a fresh coat of white paint and changed the color of its shutters from weather-beaten green to bright, cheery blue. There were clay pots of flowers on the flagged terrace, and pink and white and salmon geraniums atop a table with a glass top and a yellow umbrella.

Joy swelled in his chest. This was how the house was supposed to look, how he remembered it, when he could. He ran down the hill through the open French doors in the dining room. Sheer curtains fluttered in the offshore breeze.

It was wonderful inside. The heavy, dark furniture and scratchy woolen carpets were gone. Oak tables and bookcases filled the downstairs rooms. Ceiling fans whirred softly, fluttering the edges of a magazine left open on a chair.

In the kitchen, a jar of yellow poppies wilted in a blue mason jar on a white-tiled table. A pot of chicken flavored with tarragon and swimming with noodles and carrots bubbled on the stove. He put back the burning-hot lid he’d lifted without a potholder and raced up the stairs laughing, taking two steps at a time.

The bedrooms were beautiful, filled with brass-and-enameled beds covered with handmade quilts. There were only four instead of six. Two were bathrooms now. He rushed into one of the bedrooms, then outside through another set of French doors onto the widow’s walk.

The railing was new, waist high and painted white. Last time he was here, the old one had been broken and rotted. He remembered that now, but he didn’t remember if the chaise longue padded with yellow cushions had been there or not. Why couldn’t he remember?

His joy fading, he went back inside and sat on the foot of a bed made with pink sheets and a double-wedding-ring quilt. The iron spring beneath the mattress didn’t squeak. He clasped his hands between his knees and looked at himself in the mirror bolted to the wall above a cherry dresser.

His hair was wind tousled and too long, the ends curling just below the collar of his full-sleeved white shirt. The top buttons were missing, the gaped front exposed his throat and a fair portion of his chest. Rusty red stains splashed the front of his shirt. Dirt streaked his brown leather vest and buff-colored breeches. Sand caked his knee-high boots.

He didn’t like boots. He remembered that now. They were too damned hot, but they protected him from snakes. Only slightly more than he hated boots, he hated snakes, so he wore them. But not here. He never wore them here. He didn’t need them. There were crabs and starfish in the tidal pools, but not a single cobra or homed viper within two thousand miles of Stonebridge, Massachusetts.

He crossed his right leg over his left knee, reached for his boot and caught another glimpse of himself in the mirror. Disgraceful. He’d find a barber who spoke English when next he trekked the three days by mule cart to Cairo for supplies. He’d get a haircut. Or buy a ribbon in the bazaar.

A shiver laced through him and his hands froze on the heel and toe of his boot. What the hell was he doing in Egypt? How had he gotten here? It was a three-month trip by clipper ship from Nantucket, but he couldn’t remember a boat. He couldn’t remember anything but snakes.

And cold. But the desert wasn’t cold. It was vicious and merciless and filled with terrors far greater than cobras or sand vipers. He knew that better than anyone, but he couldn’t remember how he knew.

He didn’t remember the girl who came humming out of the bathroom wrapped in a yellow towel, either, her collarbones dewy and gleaming above the tuck between her breasts, her bare feet leaving wet prints on the pegged-pine floor. He leapt off the bed, catching the white-enameled frame in his hand as he backed hastily away from it. He expected her to scream, but she didn’t.

She didn’t so much as glance at him standing by the foot of her bed. She just kept humming, a song he didn’t know, or one he couldn’t remember, as she opened a dresser drawer and wiped a trickle of water from the hollow of her throat with an end of the towel.

Her hair was auburn and damp, pinned to the top of her head in rich, dark red curls. He could just see her full mouth and short, upturned nose in the corner of the mirror. He couldn’t see that her eyes were brown until she lifted them as she shut the drawer and turned around.

He expected her to scream then—she was looking right at him—but she didn’t. She simply walked
through
him, still dabbing at her throat, still humming. He felt her voice in every atom of his being, felt every hair in every follicle on his body stand on end, and realized with a jolt, and an anguished cry she couldn’t hear, that he was dead.

Chapter 2

The chill that shot through Willie Evans was as cold as a November no’theaster. It made her shiver and remember Granma Boyle’s caution against cool baths in summer.

“Warm all year round, no matter what the temperature,” she’d say in her starched Yankee accent. “Otherwise, you’ll give yourself the ague.”

Willie had always thought it was one of Granma’s wacky old wives’ tales. She’d never given herself the ague—whatever that was—and she’d been taking cool baths in the summer, in the house her grandmother had named Beaches, for most of her life.

She preferred showers now, rather than soaks in the claw-footed tub in the bathroom she’d turned into a combination bath and laundry room. Best money she’d ever spent, even though it had taken every dime she’d inherited from Granma along with Beaches last August, as well as a good chunk of her trust fund from Grandfather Evans.

Her father had thrown a fit. First that she hadn’t sold “the old wreck,” his term for both Beaches and Granma, and second that she’d sunk a bloody blue fortune into the house. Behind his back, her mother had rolled her eyes.

So did Willie, remembering, as she put on her underwear, rubbed the chill off her arms and opened the louvered doors of the walk-in closet she’d happily sacrificed twelve feet of space for. Her father had thrown a fit about the closet, too, but he’d done it long-distance, since by mid-January Willie was firmly entrenched at Beaches.

Three weeks before, on December 24, right after the public relations department Christmas party,
Material Girl
magazine had handed her a pink slip. When she’d called her mother in tears, Amelia Boyle Evans had slogged her way across Manhattan’s upper west side in a blizzard to comfort her. Two weeks later when her father left for Paris to attend a banking seminar, her mother had pleaded the flu to stay home and help Willie sublet her apartment, pack and get out of town. Not quite in a New York minute, but close.

Whitaker Evans hated Beaches—he said the old wreck gave him the creeps—and he’d come straight from Kennedy to drag his only daughter back to New York. By her hair if necessary, he’d warned, as he’d come through the door. It had been close, but Willie had held firm. She still had her independence and still had Beaches, too. And she was
determined to
keep both.

The house was her haven and always had been, just as Granma had been a warm-fuzzy extension of her mother, a much-needed second buffer between Willie and her well-intentioned but autocratic father. So was Zen, short for Zenobia Greene, her best friend from college and a certifiable New Age wacko. She’d come up to “get in tune” on the spring solstice and announced that Beaches had good vibes. Willie agreed. She felt safe here, watched over almost, which hadn’t made a lick of sense to her father.

Whitaker Evans hadn’t been able to budge her out of the house, and Dr. Jonathan Raven wasn’t going to, either. He could take the last will and testament of his great-uncle, Horace Raven, from whose estate Granma Boyle had bought Beaches, and shove it sideways. It wasn’t Willie’s fault the probate clerk dropped the will behind a filing cabinet in 1947 and forgot to fish it out and register it.

She had money enough to keep her fledgling public relations firm afloat and Dr. Raven’s claim to Beaches tied up in court for a good long time if it came to that. Willie hoped it wouldn’t, hoped her attorney-brother Whit Junior knew what he was talking about and wasn’t merely doing Whit Senior’s bidding when he’d suggested this evening’s meeting to try to work out an equitable settlement.

“If this is business,” she’d demanded, “why do I have to invite him to dinner?”

“Because you’re a damn good cook and it’ll soften him up. Make fried chicken. It’s my favorite.”

“You’re coming?” Willie had been amazed, since Whit shared their father’s distaste for Beaches.

“‘Course I am. You’re my sister and this Raven character could be an ax murderer for all we know.”

Willie doubted it, since he was a doctor. She’d agreed to the meeting, even though she hadn’t liked the idea of inviting into her house a man who was trying to take it away from her. She still didn’t, but she trusted Whit. Loved him, too, and was always glad to see him, which wasn’t often, even though he lived in Boston. He was like their father, a workaholic. Willie was a Boyle, and that said it all.

She put on a sundress with tiny yellow flowers printed on sage green cotton, tied the sash below her breasts, unpinned her hair and brushed it out to dry around her shoulders in its usual thick curls. It was too hot to do anything else but slip her feet into yellow sandals.

As she sat down on the bed to buckle them, Willie noticed a gray blur in the bottom left corner of the mirror. She’d paid a pretty penny to have it resilvered, because it was Granma’s and used to hang above the dressing table where she’d sat every night and brushed her snow-white hair. She retrieved her towel from the pull on the closet door where she’d left it, but by then the smudge was gone.