Wildwood Road (32 page)

A memory.

Michael took the gas can into the house and splashed curtains and mattresses and furniture, holding it upended until the last drop had fallen, and soaked into that house. When he came outside again, Tom Barnes had already gone, taking his mother's remains with him.

Jillian insisted that she be allowed to strike the match. Michael didn't argue.

The blaze lit the night, dispelling shadows. Some of those monsters, those hideous thieves, were still inside. He felt sure they would escape. But with the power that had gathered in that house for so long destroyed by cleansing fire, they would have to begin again. To find another place.

Another empty house to fill with stolen memories.

EPILOGUE

Springtime in Seville was all music and flowers and laughter. It was the kind of place anyone could fall in love with. The Old City was a labyrinth of cobblestoned streets, many barely wide enough for two cars to pass without scraping against one another. The architecture was breathtaking, so different from anything Michael and Jillian were used to. There were massive doors that seemed made for giants, with doors of a more ordinary size cut into them. Wrought-iron gates covered arched entrances that revealed interior courtyard gardens, where flowers blossomed in colors so bright they seemed impossible. Small religious icons were set into alcoves in the outer walls of buildings that might have been homes, hotels, or churches, though it was difficult to tell at times.

Michael led the way along a sidewalk that forced them into single file. He glanced back at Jillian; she offered him a bemused expression. A squat car that looked almost like a toy passed them, and they had to hug the wall to keep from being bumped by the side mirror. He heard Jillian laugh in amazement and a warm feeling flooded his chest. Michael stepped off the sidewalk and reached for her hand so they could walk together.

“You're going to get killed if you stay in the street.”

“I'm pretty quick. I can jump out of the way.”

“Ooh,” Jilly said, squeezing his hand. “He's a rebel.”

A loud whine erupted behind him and Michael started, heart galloping, adrenaline spiking through him as he leaped back to the sidewalk. He spun just in time to see a guy on a moped fly by at maniacal speed.
Probably a messenger,
he thought, seeing the packages strapped to the back.

“My hero,” Jilly said, and laughed.

Michael whacked her lightly on the arm.

“Ow!” She shot him a withering glance.

Michael didn't wither. “You be nice or I'm not taking you to that flamenco show tonight.”

The one thing she had made him promise when they had decided upon Seville as a destination was that he would take her to a flamenco show. The city had turned out to have an extraordinary charm all its own . . . or, rather, the Old City had. Seville proper was a sprawl of urban ugliness, depressing in its gray sameness and almost dystopic in its filth. But finding the Old City in the center was like peeling back the layers of a rotten onion and discovering a pearl.

“You promised,” Jillian said, as the road opened up into a small plaza where the street forked. The main road continued to the right, but on the left was a narrow pedestrian path lined with restaurants and shops and what might have been apartments. In the middle of the fork was a bar with outdoor patio seats where waiters brought tapas to the tables of the tourists who needed a rest and a bite to eat.

Michael grinned and spun her around in a mad dance. Jilly laughed a moment, then nearly tripped and pulled him into a tight embrace. Her heart beat wildly in her chest from the fright.

“I'll take you anywhere you want to go,” he whispered to her. Michael drew back just enough so that he could see her eyes. “Didn't I tell you that from the beginning?”

Jillian nodded. Michael pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face and bent to kiss her. They lingered there, breathing each other in. Several local boys drove by in a car and one of them hooted something out the window. Michael and Jillian only glanced over at the passing car and smiled. But then he squeezed her hand to draw her attention again.

“Whatever you want is fine with me.”

She tilted her head to one side, a little-girl gesture that was a recent trait. “I want you to have a good time, too.”

“I'm having a great time. The best. How could I not? God, the colors, the gardens . . . today was incredible.”

And it had been. They had walked the Barrio de Santa Cruz, and then visited the royal Alcázar, taking their time as they wandered its rooms and gardens. Michael had taken dozens of pictures in a span of hours, his artist's eye taking in the Moorish influences and storing it all for another time. He knew he would not come away from Spain unchanged, that his creative imagination would be stoked by this place. And the Alcázar was only one of the city's wonders. The great cathedral at the heart of the Old City was perhaps the most breathtaking man-made structure Michael had ever seen. Its Gothic sprawl covered an entire block with intricate design, every surface—within and without—ornate in its way. And the Giralda, the tower, was equally impressive. What Jillian had loved best about it was that there were no stairs. The builders had constructed it so that there were only ramps going up and up and up inside that square structure. Legend had it that the king had wanted to be able to ride his horse all the way to the top.

Michael believed it.

In the shadow of the cathedral, in the square below it, he had been tempted to dance with his wife under the warm sun of the Spanish spring. But he did not. This was not the past, but the future. They were crafting new memories here, something Jillian desperately needed and Michael craved.

They had considered Vienna for this trip, but did not linger on it very long. Neither of them seemed inclined to travel old ground. Jillian had lost a lot of memories—she did not like to discuss it, so Michael had no way to know just how much of her past had been stolen from her, save the few memories of hers that still lingered in his own mind—and this trip was a fresh start. Here she would begin to weave a tapestry of bright thoughts and colorful moments that would help to give texture to her life.

They had both been fortunate in that they had employers who were understanding. Teddy had covered Michael's ass on the new ad campaign, and things had come out better than ever. Things were not quite as smooth for Jillian. She had been rude and insulting to several of the partners at her firm. And yet once she had gone back in to speak with them, to apologize and let them know that she hadn't been herself, that she'd been having personal problems, they were more than willing to let her show them that she had resolved those issues.

Her political aspirations had not been so fortunate. After her behavior toward Bob Ryan and the reporter from the
Tribune,
Jillian didn't have a chance in hell of making it onto the city council. Remarkably, she seemed to care very little. When he asked her about it, Jilly just shrugged it off, mystified that it had ever been important to her in the first place.

Jillian had reconciled with Hannah, however. Her bond with her sister was more important to her now than it ever had been before. When she had heard the news that the lump in Hannah's breast had turned out to be benign, she had wept openly. Not only for her sister, but for herself. She couldn't imagine losing Hannah, her one real connection to the memories she had lost.

As for Tom Barnes, they had seen reports on the news about the man being questioned by police in connection with his mother's death. The authorities seemed to think she had convinced him to take her out of the hospital, but that her mental illness and violent episodes had caused her to attack him, and that Barnes had killed his mother in self-defense. The investigation was ongoing. Michael thought it a shame that this was how Susan would be remembered, and that Tom had to go through all of this.

But, thus far, six months after that terrible night, there had been no mention of Wildwood Road. Tom had left the Danskys out of it, and Michael was grateful.

Now they were starting over with this trip to Spain, exploring the Old City of Seville. Jillian spoke Italian and so understood much of what was said to them in Spanish, but she could not speak the language. Michael could not understand a word of what was being said to them, but remembered enough college Spanish to reply after Jillian translated. They were a perfect team.

As they made their way down that alley—part of a maze of such passages that somehow always brought them back to one of the larger streets, or to a monument they could identify in the guidebook—they glanced in shop windows and instinctively began to slow down. To take their time.
Enough sightseeing,
Michael thought. Now they would just meander. They knew each other well enough that they were attuned to such rhythms.

Jillian gave a sudden mischievous laugh and darted away from him, up the alley. There was a tall door that hung open; a sign propped in front announced a flamenco show that night at half past nine. It wasn't until Michael had nearly caught up with her that he heard the music coming from that open door, the strumming of a guitar, a musician warming up for the evening. Jilly spun around snapping her fingers as though she wore castanets.

Michael watched her in amazement.

She must have seen something on his face, for she faltered and a wave of melancholy swept across her features.

“What, Jilly? What's wrong?” he asked.

Jillian glanced around but no one was nearby. Her eyes narrowed and there was something lost and plaintive in them, something that reminded him of Scooter Barnes.

“I'm different,” she said, averting her eyes.

It was as though she had been reading his mind, but Michael knew that she had only been reading his face. And she felt it, deep down. It had come up before, but it still haunted her.

“A little,” Michael told her. “Not so much that most people would notice.”

“But you notice.”

“I'm your husband.”

He reached out for her and she took his hands.

Jillian gazed at him now, gnawing on her lower lip. “Different how?”

Michael smiled. “You're a little daffier. But that's not a bad thing, babe. It really isn't. You're . . . you seem happier.”

Most of the time.
That was the unspoken coda. And even during those times when she seemed happier than before, there was a kind of undercurrent in her voice, a gray cloud at the back of her eyes. Michael understood; he saw the same thing in his own eyes when he looked in the mirror. The two of them could still love, they could still laugh, but they had learned that the rules that had always defined the world were lies. And they were unsure how to go about learning the real ones . . . or even if they wanted to.

In light of things, Michael was prepared to be grateful for
Most of the time.
In a way, the hard knowledge they had found made him appreciate everything more. Ice cream tasted sweeter, jokes were funnier, Jilly's perfume was sexier.

But the fact that she was different, that she had changed in some small, fundamental way, troubled her, and Michael did not know how to fix that, to make that better.

“And you still love me?”

Michael pulled her nearer. “Still and always.”

“Even though I'm . . . even though I've changed?”

They had both lost bits of themselves the previous autumn, Jillian quite literally and Michael more figuratively. Preconceptions. Expectations. Assumptions. Michael had come to the conclusion that life wasn't about avoiding sorrow—that was patently impossible. Instead, it was about recognizing it, and finding joy in spite of it.

“We all change,” he shrugged, trying to find the words. “Life changes us. I have no idea how much we'll have changed by the time we're seventy. But I want to find out with you. The thing is, I don't think who we are, way down, ever changes. That's who I fell in love with, Jilly. And if you're different now, well, I get to fall in love all over again.”

For a long moment she stared at him, searching his face. Then she laughed, rolling her eyes heavenward. “Oh, that is so unbelievably lame!”

Michael couldn't help laughing along with her. “It's true.”

“It's still lame,” Jilly said, shaking her head and tugging him by the hand, pulling him deeper into the labyrinth of the Old City.

Michael followed willingly. Evening shadows began to stretch over the cobblestones now, even as he thought again about the things they had learned, and the shadows that knowledge had cast upon their lives. Moments later they emerged into a large square where the late-day sun still shone brightly.

That was the thing about shadows. Stepping out of them always made the light seem so much brighter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the award-winning,
Los Angeles
Times
bestselling author of such novels as
Of Saints and Shadows, The Ferryman, Strangewood, The Gathering Dark,
and the Body of Evidence series of teen thrillers. Working with actress/writer/director Amber Benson, he cocreated and cowrote
Ghosts of Albion
, an animated supernatural drama for BBC online.

Golden has also written or cowritten several books and comic books related to the TV series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and
Angel
, as well as the scripts for two
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
video games. His recent comic book work includes the creator-owned
The Sisterhood
and DC Comics'
Doctor Fate: The Curse.

As a pop-culture journalist, he was the editor of the Bram Stoker Award-winning book of criticism
CUT!: Horror Writers on Horror Film,
and coauthor of
The Stephen King Universe.

Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. He graduated from Tufts University. There are more than eight million copies of his books in print. Please visit him at
www.christophergolden.com
.

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

The Boys Are Back in Town

The Ferryman

Straight on 'Til Morning

Strangewood

The Shadow Saga:

Of Saints and Shadows

Angel Souls and Devil Hearts

Of Masques and Martyrs

The Gathering Dark