Ravensong

Ravensong

ML Hamilton

Ravensong

ML Hamilton

Copyright 2011 by ML
Hamilton

Smashwords Edition
1

All rights reserved. No
part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means without written permission from the
author
, except by a reviewer who may quote
brief passages in a review to be printed by a newspaper, magazine
or journal.

All Characters appearing in this work
are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is
purely coincidental.

“
Music expresses that
which cannot be put into words and cannot remain
silent
.”

--Victor Hugo

PROLOGUE

Joshua stared at the tear tracking down
Jennifer’s face, noted the shape of it, the way it flowed over the
contours of her cheek and rolled toward her chin. Her hands beat
the window in slow motion, the glass reverberating with the impact,
the sound reaching him a moment later. Her voice sounded muffled,
underwater, her mouth moving in distortion, widening, narrowing, as
she screamed.

He closed his eyes and turned away. The
pounding translated to streaks of light against his eyelids, each
beat a pulsation of energy. He felt his hand lift, the muscles
moving without conscious thought, and he curled his fingers around
the key. Turning the ignition, he heard the motor chug, then catch,
the car roaring to life.

He opened his eyes. They fixated on the tree.
It rose massive and arching in the yard, its bows shading the house
and the sidewalk, its roots pressing up through the lawn, gnarled
and twisted. In the darkness, it was a contrast of shadows,
hollows, the only solid thing in the world. While all about it were
frantic motions, frantic sounds, pitiful humans flitting about like
moths around a light, it stood implacable, impenetrable,
unconquerable.

Lifting his gaze, he saw his mother running
from the house, saw her mouth open and knew she called his name,
but he couldn’t hear her. Jennifer’s pounding against the window
had become a wash of noise in his head, drowning out everything
else.

His hand rose to
the gearshift and he looked back at the tree.
End this. End this now
, he told
himself.
Free everyone
.
Free yourself.

He slammed the car into drive with a squeal of
gears. His foot shifted and pounded down on the accelerator. He
felt the wheels slip, then catch, felt the car lurch forward. It
bounced violently as it left the driveway for the road, knocking
his head on the ceiling. He wrenched the steering wheel to the
right and the tires spun again without traction, then grabbed. The
car struck the curb and rose over it, lifting him from the seat and
slamming him down again.

The oak rose before him, branches stretched
across the night sky, the trunk a wall of bark. Just before impact,
he thought to wrench the steering wheel away. There had to be an
easier way to go. But it was already too late. He stared in
fascination as the car met tree, the bumper folding around the
trunk, the impact thrusting him forward.

His body rammed into the steering column and
his head impacted with the windshield. He heard glass shatter and
instinctively closed his eyes. Then he was forcefully thrown
backwards into the seat, but the forward momentum folded both the
steering wheel and the seat around him, pinning him so that the
steering column rested against his breastbone.

For a moment, he simply lay. His breath came
out as a strange whistle and he heard someone moaning. He didn’t
remember anyone else being in the car, then he realized that he was
the one moaning. He felt numb. He wanted to open his eyes, but no
part of him would respond. He tried to flex his fingers, tried to
curl his toes, but nothing happened.

He wanted to think about his mother, Jennifer,
James, but the pressure against his chest was distracting and now
pain was beginning to radiate along nerve endings, along his
forearms, across the small of his back. He gasped and the pain
ground into him, making him want to squirm, but he couldn’t
move.

He felt his heart
pick up speed, beating frantically inside his chest, and he felt
something hot oozing down his face, into his eyes.
I’m going to die.
The
realization was ironic. Even in pain, he knew it was a ridiculous
thought. Hadn’t that been the purpose, hadn’t that been what he
wanted?

The roar in his head was dying and he became
aware of a new sound – carrying over his own whistled breath, over
the sound of steam rising from the engine, over the distant wail of
sirens. He heard his mother screaming.

“Joshua!”

CHAPTER 1

Joshua watched the woman. She was
small with chestnut brown hair wound in a bun, stray tendrils
trailing down the back of her neck. A flash of white showed him an
almost perfect smile. He moved through the crowd of male bodies to
catch a closer look.

“
Ah, there you are,” said
David, touching the woman on the elbow and moving her toward
Joshua.

She shifted and stared him point blank
in the eyes as if challenging him to look away. Joshua wasn’t one
to surrender from any challenge, but the scrutiny of her green eyes
unnerved him. Deliberately he squared his shoulders and lifted his
jaw.

“
This is Elena Harris, our
new Assistant Manager,” said David. “And this is our resident
genius, Joshua Ravensong.”

Her green eyes swept over Joshua’s
body as if she were measuring him against the image he presented in
his movies. If she approved of what she saw, he didn’t know, for
her gaze fixed on his face again without a glimmer of the usual
desire Joshua had come to expect from women.

“
Hello,” she said, holding
out a hand for him to take.

“
Hello, welcome
to
Avalanche
,” he
answered.

She smiled and turned away, asking
David a question Joshua didn’t catch. Instead his eyes moved down
her body, taking in every curve. Elliot’s sudden nudge in the ribs
annoyed him.

“
She’d make a priest hard,
eh?” he muttered.

Joshua was used to Elliot’s crude
remarks about women and normally he ignored them, but something
about this remark rankled.

“
I’d be careful what you
say, El. She looks like she could knock you on your ass with a
look.”

Elliot laughed. “I’ll take even that
much attention,” he said, watching her walk away with David,
trailed by the rest of the band members.

Joshua’s frown deepened. They were all
acting like a bunch of dogs after a bitch in heat, scampering
around her, trying to gain her fleeting attention. Shaking his
head, he turned away.

“
Keep your pants zipped,”
he said. “She looks cold to me.”

“
I guess so,” remarked
Elliot, falling into step beside him. “She’s engaged.”

Joshua stopped walking. “She’s
engaged?”

Elliot nodded. “To a
doctor.”

Enough said. Joshua slid
her into the
unavailable
category.

“
We need to finish that
song, El,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. “We go to
the studio in less than three weeks.”

“
Just waiting for the
genius to take you,” answered Elliot, dropping his arm over
Joshua’s shoulder.

Immediately Joshua began worrying over
the lyrics to the song. Music had a way of shutting everything else
out of Joshua’s mind. It was just as well. He didn’t need any more
complications in his life.

* * *

Elena kicked her shoes off in the
entryway and bent to stroke the cat. Savanna purred and rubbed
against her leg, following her as she walked toward the kitchen.
Elena thumbed through the mail as she went, dodging the
couch.

She tore open one of the letters and
began reading it as she fished a glass from the cupboard and
wandered to the refrigerator, pulling out the bottled water. She
poured herself a glass and then filled Savanna’s water
bowl.

Glass in one hand, mail in the other,
she maneuvered back through the kitchen and living room, picking up
her shoes and heading to the stairs. Savanna followed her to the
landing and then raced ahead to jump in the middle of Elena’s
bed.

Elena placed the glass on her dresser
and dropped the letters on the bed, lifting her hands to unbutton
her silk blouse. As she discarded her business suit for some faded
jeans and a flannel shirt, she punched the button on the answering
machine.

The first message was from her mother,
wanting to know how her first day on her new job had gone. Next was
a message from John.

“
Hey, babe, wondering where
you are at six on a Monday?”

“
I started a new job,
remember,” said Elena to the machine, but the voice
continued.

“
Have a cocktail party to
attend, so I’ll try to catch you tomorrow morning, around five your
time. Spent the day learning about digital reattachments, got some
great slides to show you.”

Elena grimaced.

“
Anyway, made contact with
a plastic surgeon who specializes in full thickness grafts.
Interesting fellow, has a house in the Caymans he invited us to,
his wife’s a lawyer. Fancy that - a chief of Orthopedics and a
lawyer. Bet they’re rolling in it. Talked to the girls and they
plan to come out at the end of the month. Hope you can do the same.
What ya think? Tell me tomorrow and I’ll get you a ticket on the
same flight.”

“
I started a new job,
John,” said Elena.

“
Anyway, love ya.
Bye.”

Elena drew a deep breath and turned
away, picking up her suit and heading toward the closet. As she
placed the hanger on the bar, her engagement ring caught in the
light and sparkled. She drew back her hand and stared at it
critically.

The diamond was enormous, too big. It
dwarfed her hand and made her fingers look too short. It had been
John’s mother’s ring. Elena had tried to talk them both out of
giving it to her, but they’d insisted. John’s mother had looked so
hurt when Elena said she couldn’t accept it. Elena’s argument about
starting memories of their own had seemed remarkably
petty.

Fly out to
Colorado.
Didn’t John remember she’d
started a new job? No, he never seemed to remember anything that
was important to her. Fly out to Colorado with his two daughters,
one eighteen and the other twenty-one. What was he thinking there?
He knew they hated her, and he knew Elena wasn’t overly comfortable
with them.

She moved back to the bed and took a
seat beside the phone. Savanna pushed her head under Elena’s hand,
forcing her to pet her. Elena stroked the cat with one hand and
searched for John’s hotel number with the other. Just as she found
it, the phone rang again. She picked it up and leaned back against
the pillows.

“
Hello.”

“
So what’s he
like?”

Elena frowned. “Who,
Katie?”

“
Ravensong. Is he as
gorgeous in person as he looks in his movies?”

Elena laughed. At
least
Kate
had
remembered she’d begun a new job. “Don’t you want to know about the
job first? Whether I had a good day or not?”

“
Who cares about you? I
want to know about Ravensong.”

Elena laughed again.
Ravensong
...she’d only
glanced at him, so absorbed with her new duties had she been.
Handsome? “Of course he’s handsome,” she said.

“
No, is he
gorgeous?”

Elena tried to remember what he’d
looked like. He’d been shorter than she expected, but most rock
stars were. Gorgeous? She couldn’t say, she hadn’t looked at him
that closely, but she did remember his eyes. Black, like
velvet.

“
I don’t know. I just met
him for a moment. He has a nice voice and pretty eyes.”