When Shadows Fall (30 page)

TUESDAY

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.”

—Walt Whitman

“Freedom is at hand, sayeth the Mother. Accept this dying breath as your final benediction and know, at last, you are free.”

—Curtis Lott

Chapter
62

Georgetown University School of
Medicine
Washington, D.C.

THE FIRST MEETING
of Sam’s Forensic Gross Anatomy class was over. Unlike other med school anatomy classes, this program was in place to study those who’d died violent deaths. It was specifically designed for doctors who wanted to be forensic pathologists. Who wanted to use science to right wrongs.

The room smelled faintly of formaldehyde and the meat of open bodies, the sweat of anxiety and denatured alcohol. She dismissed the students with a smile. They’d done so well. Not a fainter in the group. She remembered her first gross anatomy class, her knees knocking in fear, the surreal experience of the bodies lying inert on the tables, the unshakable feeling they might all rise from their metal graves and march out of the room to a deeper unknown.

The students left, chattering in excitement, and she packed her own things, happy to know she’d done a good job.

The craziness of the weekend would never truly fade away, but she was determined to let it go. She’d done the best she could, and that was all anyone could ever ask of her.

She ran back to her office to drop off her things, and was surprised to find her T.A., Stephanie, today with deep red streaks in her black hair in honor of the first day of bloodletting, in deep conversation with John Baldwin.

Sam gave Baldwin a quick hug, watched Stephanie wilt. Then the girl smiled at her boss and walked out, leaving them alone.

“I thought you went back to Nashville.”

“I’ve got a flight in a couple of hours. I wanted to say goodbye properly. Can I buy you a quick lunch?”

“Sure.”

They walked to the Tombs, a Georgetown favorite, which was already thrumming with life at noon, the students who didn’t have afternoon classes tilting their pint glasses in happy abandon. Sam ordered a Lagavulin and fried calamari. Baldwin got Guinness and a bowl of chili.

“So. Have you decided you miss this life enough to join us?” he asked.

The server returned with their drinks. Sam swirled the amber Scotch around the glass. “I don’t miss it,” she said.

“You’re lying, and we both know it. You should have seen yourself out there in the woods. The whole place was burning down and you’re scheming, then saving lives at the drop of a hat. The most experienced medics would have had a hard time with Fletcher’s injury. You did it without a thought.”

“I was thinking, Baldwin, trust me.”
More than you want to know.

“I know you think you want to teach, be quiet, stay out of the fray, but it’s in your blood, Sam. Just like it’s in mine, in Xander’s and Fletcher’s. In all of us. We’ll make it work for you, however you need.”

“You aren’t going to give this up, are you?”

He grinned at her. “Nope.”

She watched his deep green eyes, and nodded. Raised her Scotch, tapped his pint glass. Gave him a smile. “All right. I’m in.”

* * *

Xander and Thor were waiting for her at home, sitting out by the pool. Xander couldn’t get in the water all the way to swim, but could dangle his legs on the edge. It would be a few weeks until he could get back into his normal groove, and she knew it was already driving him mad.

Thor barked once in hello. The cut on his nose was healing well. The vet had done a wonderful job.

She kicked off her shoes and sat next to Xander. “Baldwin took me to lunch.”

“Did you give him an answer?”

She ran her hand in the water, watching the ripples. Like her life, everything she did rippled out and affected the people around her. “I said yes.”

He hugged her with his good arm. “I figured so.”

“Are you sure you’re cool with this? It’s going to mean changes.”

“Hon, your drive, your passion, your commitment to helping others is one of the reasons I fell in love with you. Hell, you got me down off my mountain and inserted back into the real world. I wanted my life to start again because of you. I want you all for myself, but I know that’s not going to happen. You’re going to be great.”

“I’ll continue teaching. That would be my primary job. D.C. would be home base. Baldwin said I could pick the cases, and I’d only be called in for special situations.”

“This is good. You can still teach, still drive me mad, still do whatever you want.”

He ruffled her hair off the back of her neck. Air flowed over her shoulder blades, cooling her. She was ready for summer to end. For the next phase of her life to begin. She kissed his cheek. “Thank you for understanding.”

“I do. More than you know. Now. While we’re discussing big, life-changing events, I have something else I’d like to run by you.”

She ran her finger along the edge of the ring he’d given her, and smiled at him. “Do you, now?”

Epilogue

I SUPPOSE YOU
realize the truth by now. I was the one who killed Doug.

I know you hate me. I hate myself. I never should have listened to him. Never agreed to his stupid plan, the one he cooked up with that crazy old lawyer.

You’re asking yourself how I could do that to the man who saved my life. Who brought me out of the darkest recess of the world into the light. You want to know how I could kill a man I claim to love. And why I would cry for him when I was finished choking the life out of him.

I had no choice. In the end, Doug betrayed me. He’d conceived a plan to end his own life, because of his guilt, or his sickness, or whatever it was. In so doing, he brought every nasty, seedy, horrible moment of mine to light. I had put the past behind me. I had no desire to relive it. Yet now I have. Every wound reopened, every decision rethought.

Now I know he was lying when he told me he had been to the doctor and was riddled with cancer. That he had only weeks to live, and those numbered days would be incredibly painful. He told me that he would die by his own hand were it not the gravest sin, and if I could take that sin from him, he would be forever grateful.

When I refused, he reminded me of the horrible favor he’d done for me all those years ago, the night I’d been ripped apart from childbirth, tossed bleeding and exhausted into the darkness, left with a bottle of water and an empty womb, my blood leaking onto the dirt floor. He’d found me there, and spirited me away. Treated the infection that almost killed me, nursed me back to health, gave me a chance at a better life.

He reminded me he
chose
to do that, to break with Eden, and his life. That he’d compromised everything he believed in, spent all those years hiding me, keeping me safe from Adrian and Curtis. That he’d educated me and loved me like a father, a brother, a lover, and if I loved him at all I would do this for him.

When I still refused, he flew into a fury and attacked me. He said words I still do not comprehend about the night I was given to the Reasoning, the Reasoning that started the life in my womb. That the man Adrian was not the one who’d been there in my blindfolded darkness, but it was Doug, my surrogate father, my best friend and teacher, who’d held me down and raped me for hours. He was full of rage, his eyes wild and fiery, and he put his hand around my neck and forced me to listen to his confession, and in those brief moments of cataclysmic shock, I realized what he said was true.

He knew exactly what touching me in violence would do. The bastard did it on purpose so I’d follow his instructions. Between his threatening touch and his awful, painful truth, I had no choice but to fight him off.

Before I knew what had truly happened, he was dead on the floor, my hands locked in a death grip around his neck. When I came back from the dark place, realized what I’d done, I sobbed, tried to bring him back to life. When it didn’t work, and I began to comprehend the enormity of my situation, what I’d done, I cleaned him, wiped the blood from his face with the dishtowel I’d somehow wrapped around his neck and followed through with the rest of his ridiculous plan to bring these hateful shadows into the light.

I will always be haunted by the knowledge that at the end, when I began to put pressure on his throat, he did not resist me. He wanted his death to be at my hands.

And now I have what some people like to call closure, what he’d always wanted for me. All I ever wanted was to be with my daughter, but I’d never admitted that to him, or even myself. I spent years pretending to be something I was not. Doug kept me at home, dressed me as a boy, educated me himself. When I went out in the world, I kept to myself, made no friends and continued the charade, because I loved him for saving me.

Always on my mind, though, was the child I will never see again.

They are good people, her adoptive parents. Kind. They love her. Though they still don’t seem to realize that locked doors are no match for a true mother’s love.

I am happy she loves them, and they her. She probably won’t remember me when she’s grown, or if she does, she’ll have a foggy recollection of a strange woman who held her close and whispered
I love you
a thousand times over the course of a starlit night.

Rachel’s bedroom is pink and full of soft things. She sleeps like a lightning bolt, arms and legs spread away from her body at odd angles, the sleep of a child well loved, and safe. I spent the dark hours of that night tracing her limbs under the sheet, looking at the tiny similarities between us—she has my nails, long-bedded and elegant, and my nose and eyelashes and freckles. She has parts of him, too, the broad forehead and cornflower-blue eyes, and while I should hate him for what he did, I smile to see them.

I have forgiven him. I know now why he did what he did, and how his actions, though horrible, saved me from a far worse fate. I am grateful his blood flows through her veins and not the filthy, tainted blood of the killer who should have been her father.

That night, watching my daughter sleep, her rosebud mouth puckered as if she just learned to stop sucking her thumb but it hadn’t forgotten the motion, I knew exactly what must be done. She is so beautiful. So perfect. So clean. I cannot allow anyone else to be sullied.

I am not clean. I am not good. I am a depraved, broken human being who has no right to live. I want things to be all right, to go back to the way they’re supposed to be. If only I had lived in a world where my parents loved me, walked me to the bus stop and met me there when school let out. Parents who made more of an effort to find me when I went missing, and were happy when I was rescued, all these years later.

If wishes were horses, right? Or something like that.

Here is the truth, if you are brave enough to hear it.

There is darkness in the world, a heavy hatred of all that is good and right. You might call it evil, or immorality, or simple a callous disregard for humanity. Some people choose this path through the shadows, their breath hot and frantic on the wind. Their poison spreads, infecting others who also embark on the dark journey.

Curtis is one of these people. Mother to us all, she was bereft of any maternal qualities. She allowed unspeakable things to happen to me. She used me as her personal broodmare. She forced drugs into me and made me listen to her endless ramblings about the mystic cosmos and our place in it. She marked my soul, and my skin, made me her drudge, tortured and humiliated me, then built me up, fed me golden stories and washed my hair and feet like I was a supplicant.

She is a demon, come to earth to punish the wicked.

And because of her, I am so very wicked.

Yet Curtis taught me perseverance, and strength. How to survive, to stay sane in the face of darkness. That the absence of light did not make the person, that only the long wait for a shadow to find you, to cross from the afterlife and attach itself with painful stitches to your soul, makes you whole again. This is the greatest lesson a mother can give to her children. How not to be completely broken by a situation.

Curtis taught me to accept myself, all my faults. To greet my darkness like an old friend rather than an enemy. She saw something in me I’d never known existed in my soul—power. The power to right wrongs, to change things.

My power scared her, made her trap me like an animal, keep me in a cage. She kept me in the darkness until it fed on my blood and gave me back the strength I’d lost.

Adrian was weak compared to me. All he could do was give in to his urges.

Curtis, in all her bizarre, unfathomable glory, taught me how to channel mine. She made me in her own image, yet she was so very wrong.

I am the light, and she is the darkness.

I am the good, and she is the evil.

By blood born, and by blood taken, we move through this life in a fog, briefly touching those around us, imparting wisdom or love, pain or sorrow, or even a mother’s gentle kiss.

We are born alone, and we die alone.

* * *

I stand in the darkness of Curtis’s chamber and watch her sleep. When I move toward her with the blade raised, my breath catches in my throat. I know that I am doing the only thing that is good and right in this world.

Vengeance is mine.

The blade falls.

* * * * *

Keep reading for an excerpt from EDGE OF BLACK by J.T. Ellison.

Acknowledgments

WHEN SHADOWS FALL
wouldn’t be in your hands today without the support of the following people:

Scott Miller—who is more than a wonder agent. He is a friend, a confidant and a trusted member of the familia. Thanks for always happily handling the drama lama from Nashville.

Stephanie Hoover—who is more than the assistant to agent extraordinaire, and a joy to work with.

Nicole Brebner—who saw what the story could be and helped me find the way home.

Laura Benedict—who is my sanity, my daily dose of reality and a brilliant first reader, and always knows exactly how to fix that f-ing plot hole.

Sherrie Saint—who did a ton of research legwork for this book and believed in it from the very first Starbucks pitch.

Paige Crutcher—who teaches me yoga, and so much more, especially for pointing me in the direction of The Farm.

Catherine Coulter—who helped me cook up the cult idea.

Karen Evans—who helps us both when we get off track.

Jennifer Brooks—who reads, edits, cheers and otherwise makes these books what they are.

Del Tinsley—who is my other mother.

Jeff Abbott—who continually steers me toward the correct path.

Erica Spindler—who taught me the real meaning of gratitude attitude.

Alex Kava—who gives such sage advice.

Deb Carlin—who is always such a joy.

Sandra Thomas—who is the harbinger of the scalpel, and helps Sam come alive in the autopsy suite.

Andy Levy—who read a terrible first draft and told me he loved it, despite its flaws.

Joan Huston—who is my grammar goddess extraordinaire (how’s THAT for a promotion?).

Nicole Brebner—who saw what the story could be and helped me find the way home.

Miranda Indrigo—who cheered me on from near and far.

Susan Swinwood—who helped shepherd this baby into being.

All the amazing folks at Mira Books—who support the dickens out of me.

Rachel Stevens—who agreed to be murdered (sorry you’re not dead, but only dented about the middle bits).

Anna Benjamin—who touches my heart daily.

Blake Leyers—who helps me be all kinds of girly.

Deanna Raybourn—who is my favorite cheerleader and eighty-year-old Englishwoman (cream tea, dear?).

Chuck Beard—who owns East Side Story, an incredible bookseller as well as a dear friend.

My Nashville Literary Libations Peeps—who manage to meet up every fourth Thursday whether I can make it or not (Ha!).

All the awesome booksellers and librarians who get my work into the hands of my readers.

My readers—who listen to me wail on Facebook, share their love (and hate) of the books and always keep me honest.

And finally,

My mom—who really did ask every day if the words were any good, and probably drove me to peaks of insanity making sure they were all wonderful. Thanks for making sure they all count.

My dad—who is a first reader, an extraordinary man and an unflagging cheerleader for all my words, even the ones that suck.

Randy—who deserves more than thanks, more than words on the page, who cooked and cleaned and read this book three times and managed my world while I tried to make a very close deadline. You have the keeping of more than the words, darling—you have my heart.