Burning Times Chapter

Burning Times - Shadows Burning Times - Dreamscapes Return to Burning Times

Prologue

The pumpkin-colored cat normally spent quiet evenings sprawled across the forbidden kitchen table. But tonight he remained alert, a ball of fur, ears pointing toward . . . it.

It didn't belong here. It was old and incorporeal, nothing but flickers of memory and tastes of identity. And hatred. Its stale scent and slow, pulsing sound did not even register in the physical realm. And it was seeking outward, bits of it crossing the Veil. Rediscovering its existence.

The cat laid his ears back and rose defensively, a growl low in his throat. As tendrils of invisible darkness neared him, the growl escalated into a challenging wail.

It hesitated, retreated back into itself--but the cat knew neither he nor his mistress, busy in the back yard, had caused the retreat. The being was not strong enough to exist outside its own realm, outside its portal.

Yet.

Settling back into a watchful crouch, the cat hissed.

The entity wasn't after cats.

But it was after something.

"'Tis said the devil plagues us with witches."
The Journals of Josiah Blakelee

CHAPTER ONE:

Something felt very wrong--for no reason at all.

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway stretched over twenty lonely miles across black, choppy water. Overhead, the full moon lurked behind clouds . . . except full moon was last night. Alone in his '82 Volvo, Steve Peabody shook his head to kick-start his brain. "Blue moon," his wife Brie had said; the second full moon this month.

Thoughts of Brie fueled his irrational unease.

He noticed his knuckles, pale against the steering wheel in the orange glow of his dashboard lights, and forcibly relaxed his grip. Then he noticed his speed, and let up on the gas, too. The need to get home pressed in his chest, an unnamable weight that had settled there after he'd tried calling home from the Halloween party and the answering machine had clicked on. He'd left the number, asked Brie to call him back.

She hadn't.

Only this afternoon she'd repeated her insistence that she didn't "do" Halloween parties--a fact three years acquaintance had borne out. "Go on without me, Honey," she'd insisted. Since one of his newspaper's largest sponsors had invited him, he did.

The digital clock on his silent car stereo now read 12:08. The witching hour, some would say.

She'd probably gone to bed early.

The moan of the Volvo's wheels deepened as he left the bridge for solid land. The dark expanse over the lake shrank to a looming tunnel of tall pines lurking outside the beam of his headlights on either side of the ditch-lined road. Home. Get home. Something . . . .

"What?" he asked out loud, annoyed at this unrelenting, inexplicable tension. He considered paranoia a weakness. Who, what, where, when, why--those provided evidence, showed reality. "Intuition" wasn't worth the air it was plucked out of.

Red tail-lights, like glowing eyes, flickered in the midnight darkness; he had to stop-and-start through a minor traffic snarl in front of the local Haunted House attraction. Maybe he just didn't like parties, he mused, frustrated. Maybe he just wished he'd stayed home with his wife, passing out treats to neighborhood children. That might plausibly explain this burning need to get home.

How would he know if something were wrong?

When the road cleared, Steve had to struggle to keep from speeding through the small Louisiana town of Stagwater. Not soon enough, he pulled up in front of his and Brie's duplex. The two-story building huddled between tangled vacant lots on either side, with a huge oak and thick wood behind it. A faint glow eked through the drapes of both living-rooms. Brie's Blazer sat at the curb, between his next-door-neighbor/sister's old Pinto and one of her friend's cars.

So why didn't Brie answer the phone? Why didn't she call back?

Why don't you go in and find out? As he left his car and strode across the squishy lawn, his unease got worse: a heaviness in his chest, a dread. Fear solidified, hard, in his throat--maybe she couldn't call back?--and he leaned into the front door as he pushed it open, bracing himself against . . .

Something.

A cluster of candles drew a red glow from the Chippendale furniture that crouched on ball-and-claw feet; candles on the coffee table, candles mounting the narrow stairway, candles hovering in a hanging iron holder. Brie loved candles.

Beyond the den, the hallway to the dining room lay in darkness.

Steve drew breath to call her--to hell with logic, this was his wife he was worried about--but at that moment, from that darkness, she emerged.

He forgot to exhale.

She'd always been bewitching. Tonight the smoky blue eyes that first caught the light were almost feline. Her red hair fell in a fiery tangle about the folds of a black hood, nestled on her shoulders. Strangely, she wore a robe, like a monk, but Steve's gaze followed the open neckline down a completely un-monkish plunge that hinted at cleavage he knew and loved. The material--silk?--flowed around her and absorbed the subtle candlelight that flushed across her cheeks, but her wild hair caught and reflected the flames in russet sparks.

Brigit

Something shivery hovered in the room, past the rich scent of melting beeswax, past the ethereal harmony of a Celtic ballad about swan maidens on the stereo. Steve ignored it to gaze at his wife.

Those smoldering eyes crescented into a smile. "No trouble getting home?" Brie guessed. "I tried calling the party, but they said you'd already left." When she swept toward him, her absurd black hem hissed across the bare wooden floor.

"What are you wearing?" he demanded, more sharply than he'd meant, and shut the door. When he looked up, she'd stayed her approach and planted two sleeve-hidden hands on her hips. Uh oh.

She opened her mouth, considered her words. "Gee . . . what night is it, Hon?"

He felt a little silly, especially after the ridiculous sense of doom that had driven him here, and folded his arms. So it was Halloween.

Another smile tugged at Brie's full lips, and she dramatically lifted one arm and pointed toward the plant stand beside the door, like the Grim Reaper choosing a soul.

He noted the nearly empty bowl of candy bars. "You couldn't answer the phone because you were entertaining trick-or-treaters dressed as a . . . a . . . ." A monk, or Death? Did either wear raw silk? It could go either way.

She hesitated, her eyes searching him. "I only entertained trick-or-treaters 'till about nine; then Sylvie invited me next door. Cy and Mary were over."

Suspicion, and that same knot of unease, whispered unintelligible warnings; he fought to stick to facts. "I thought you didn't do Halloween parties."

"It wasn't a party." She shrugged and wrinkled her nose. "Would you rather I wore my corset and garter belt?" she teased, coming to him, sliding her arms around him in a belated, welcome-home hug.

A different shivery sensation sapped his skepticism. His hands drifted up; his fingers brushed the rough silk over her shoulders. Then he held her, too, clutched her tightly to him in a wordless dare to anybody, anything else. She leaned into his strength. He felt her softness mold against his stress-weary body, seductive through the loose folds of her costume.

"The corset and garter belt? That would be a treat," he murmured into her fiery hair. He could relax now. He was home, with his wife. But something still felt . . . dark. A new threat in the house, almost . . . . "Nothing's wrong, then?"

"Were you worried?" Brie nuzzled into his neck, her breath steamy under his jaw. He inhaled deeply, as if she were his drug. Smoke. "I should have left a message on the machine for you when I went next door."

When she trailed her nose off his jaw and up his cheek and tipped her beguiling face to him, those dusky eyes expectant, those full lips parting eagerly, he took her mouth with his. At the seductive taste of her, desire rushed through him, hot and inevitable. Burying a hand in her tangled curls, he grasped her hair almost too tightly while he kissed her, while he lost himself in her.

She sighed approval, melted into him and their hunger.

His inexplicable dread didn't go away; it just became suddenly expendable. For her. Hell, for her, at this moment, Steve would sell his soul.

Maybe he already had.

'Twas much like emerging from a heavy sleep, only so much as to recognize that sleep and resubmerge. Something called to lost memories, beckoned forgotten intents, and yet . . . .

For what should it risk the pain of awareness? Better to drown in the void of death, keep the pain at bay as by a philter . . .

A witch's philter?

Consciousness snapped at that image with a hunger that o'erwhelmed its confusion. A hunger for redemption. A hunger for revenge.

Disoriented, it struggled to remember.

Brie Peabody reared up in her empty bed with a sob. Half-real memories of a mutilated Egyptian king and a sacrificed forest lord--both wearing her husband's face--smothered her. A nightmare? Her panicked eyes began to focus: home, morning, the bed she and Steve shared right here in the twentieth-century. She was no widow, neither dusky-skinned queen nor woodland lady. She was no kidnapped daughter.

Red flannel sheets tangled about her legs as if she'd struggled with them; she tried to kick them off, and when they clung she grasped them and tore them away, threw them off her as she would like to throw off the lingering sense of tragedy. Muggy November air licked at her nakedness, barely cooling the sheen of sweat that coated her body. She pulled her knees up against her chest, buried her face in them until her heart slowed its cadence.

November air. Of course. Last night had been Halloween.

Now fully awake, she recognized images from her dream as the pagan legend of the sacrificed Holly King--she'd recounted the story to her friends last night. Beneath the sheltering oak tree, Cypress Bernard had related a similar Egyptian myth of Isis and her murdered Osirus.

Slowly Brie uncurled, adjusted herself to being safe at home. She'd personally restored the oversized mahogany bureau and wardrobe that crowded the paneled bedroom, heavy with age. She'd refinished the floors herself. Pre-dawn gray struggled in through heavy, red drapes that she'd sewn--night lingered longer and longer this time of year.

Her subconscious merely blurred the similar stories, that was all. Nothing to dust off her dream journal for--her panic at imagining Steve in dual roles as a doomed husband hardly required little introspection to decipher.

Registering the soothing background hiss of the shower, Brie shuddered off the last vestiges of the nightmare. Steve. She rolled out of bed, yanking on a short, scarlet robe as she crossed the wooden floor to the bathroom. This was one of the many benefits of being married: on-site comforting.

When she pushed the door open, tendrils of steam reached out to her like living things. For a moment she paused, one foot on steam-slick tile, caught in a flashback of dark, underworld shadows from the deepest recesses of her nightmare.

Kidnapped into darkness . . . .

Then the shower stopped, the curtain rattled back with a wet sweep and her husband stepped out of the claw-footed, antique bathtub, knotting an oversized towel around his slim waist.

A different, more appreciative paralysis stole over Brie. Her gaze lingered on the water droplets marbling Steve's flat stomach, his chest and shoulders--tanned from months of jogging shirtless--before climbing high enough to meet his sharp-eyed curiosity. Dripping hair, darker and straighter than its usual light-brown sweep, clung to his temples and cheekbones, partially hiding his raised eyebrows. Steve had the clean-cut face of a scholar, a poet, a . . . well, a newspaper editor.

An incredibly sexy newspaper editor. If Brie had met him in high-school he'd have been the class president/track star and she'd have merely been the artsy misfit, Crazy Gwen's daughter, adoring him from afar. Luckily she'd met him when she was in college, where nobody knew Crazy Gwen.

She tried to swallow back the sudden knot of anxiety that rose in her throat. She was still her mother's daughter . . . last night she had come disastrously close to revealing just how much.

"You okay?" Steve asked now, brown eyes concerned. The dampness of his hand caught on the silk of her robe as he paused to caress her back. She arched into his strength like a cat, some of her tension draining. "Nightmares?"

She knew better than to accuse him of being psychic, no matter her long-held suspicions. "How'd you guess?"

"It was an equal-opportunity nightmare," he admitted. After drawing his palm up over her shoulder, skimming her cheek with the back of his fingers as he broke the seductive contact, he leaned past her to snag a hand towel. She watched his planed muscles flex as he scrubbed his hair dry. When he finished, he caught her gaze in the mirror--in the moment before he palmed the hair back, he looked far more wild than Steven Christopher Peabody was ever meant to look.

Holly and ivy woven into his hair, brown eyes reflecting the flame of a bonfire, cheekbones highlighted and jaw lost in wavering shadows . . . . She recoiled from images of her own nightmare. "You too? What did you dream about?"

He bent to kiss her, a kiss that tasted of toothpaste and smelled of woodsy shampoo and resurrected a chaos of memories from last night. "Can't remember. Tell me about yours while I dress." Then he swept past her, with the barest graze of hard shoulder and nubbly towel, into the reddish half-light of the bedroom.

"Just . . . nightmares." She leaned against the doorjamb to watch him dress, apprehension about last night settling into her stomach like nausea. Not that she hadn't enjoyed their lovemaking! In fact, there had been an intensity to Steve's passion, an exciting, primal edge of desperation.

He knew. Somehow, he knew she wasn't what she seemed.

No, how could he know? She made herself stand up straight, casual. She should be used to keeping secrets; it was part of her heritage.

But she'd never meant to keep them from him.

Steve shed the towel and too-quickly covered his cute butt with a pair of teal briefs she'd gotten him on his last birthday. Then he disguised the rest of his athletic body with the usual business shirt--slouchy and silk, casually classy like himself--slim green tie, and khaki trousers, occasionally glancing at her. She knew him well enough to see the contemplation behind his attention. He knew she wasn't--

No! His own nightmare had probably upset him, that was all. Steve didn't like to admit being upset by anything.

She asked, "Do you think you could take a long lunch and help me pick up the tallboy I bought at the estate sale?"

He glanced up from his socks. "Sorry. Town council's having a meeting on the new stoplight--the one past the railroad tracks. Some genius spent beaucoup bucks on a light with a special left-turn arrow, and heads are gonna roll. Could be the biggest scandal Stagwater sees all year."

His enthusiasm surprised her; Steve loved his job, but he normally kept it in perspective. "Over a traffic light?"

"Mmhm." He slid on shoes and went to the mahogany bureau to comb his hair. "It's a real mess, because there's only the two lanes. Picture this: someone behind a go-straighter wants to make a left turn, watches his arrow come and go. When the light changes and the guy in front goes straight, the left-turner's stuck waiting out the oncoming traffic, blocking any go-straighters behind him. Blood pressures soar. Violence erupts." He dropped the comb back onto the bureau and turned to wink at her, his neat workday self once more.

"Can you get out of it?"

"Nope. Can't use the shoulder because of the ditch. And the right-turners."

"I mean, can't Kent do it?" Kent, the Sentinel's ad salesman, was also the paper's only other full-time reporter. But . . . maybe Steve didn't want to get out of it? Water residue on the tile floor cooled beneath her bare feet; standing on one foot and then the other, to shake the moisture off, she stepped into the bedroom.

"Sorry." Steve rolled his shoulders. "Since Kent and Louise cut their honeymoon short to make deadline last Thursday, I gave them today off. And my free-lancers have day jobs. If someone else can help you load the stuff, I'll unload it after work." Passing her, he paused in his cuff-buttoning to level a finger. "If someone can help you load--don't do anything crazy."

The twinkle in his dark eyes eased her anxiety--when she moved to bat the finger away he caught her hand, and a playful arm-wrestle ended with her tucked securely against the silk and hard muscle of his chest, her head beneath his freshly-shaved chin, in a hug. When he planted a good-bye kiss on her hair and murmured "I love you," she melted into his strength.

"I love you too," she returned, then added as ever, "always have. Always will."

Too soon he backed away. She felt suddenly cold.

"I met you doing something crazy," she thought to remind him even as he made for the door.

Steve paused in the doorway, considering. "No, Red, you did something crazy when you met me." Then he grinned, his special grin for her. He didn't suspect her secrets. Yet. "Quit while you're ahead." He ducked out of sight.

She listened to his receding footsteps drum the stairs, then the bang of the front door. A moment later, she heard the purr of the Volvo's engine. She'd read too much into his fascination with traffic lights. He wasn't trying to cover up distress. Steve was very thorough, that was all. Dedicated.

Her mother's warning came back at her, a taunting "I-told-you-so": Be careful what you wish for, Brigit. You just might get it.

When Brie and Steve met, Brie knew the gods smiled on her. Here stood all the normalcy, stability, dependability she'd ever dreamed of, in a surprisingly attractive package. It was almost three years ago that she'd been working a Dallas soup-kitchen on Christmas day, her own rebellion against years of never celebrating the holidays on the 25th. He'd arrived to do a story on the charity and stayed to dish stuffing beside her. In conversation--a patter of small-talk to disguise how momentous their meeting felt--she learned that car problems had kept him from his family's traditional Christmas in Chicago, so she'd offered to drive him. Not knowing how little sentimental value Christmas held for her, nor how well she could protect herself, Steve had called her crazy. But he accepted the offered road-trip and, arriving in Illinois mere hours into December 26th, she'd discovered the most wonderfully normal family in the world.

The Peabodys had made her feel not only welcome, but as if she belonged. They put her in Steve's old room--he'd good naturedly volunteered to take the couch downstairs--and she could still remember how it felt to lie in his bed, staring at his track trophies, his old typewriter, the pictures still arranged on his bureau. Steve as a gap-toothed little leaguer; with his sister at camp; at his high-school prom--that picture had a small wedding photo of his prom date, maybe three years older, with another man, tucked affectionately into the corner of the frame. She'd lain awake for hours, savoring the love and stability that permeated this place--and thinking about the man downstairs.

The next year's Christmas had been even more wonderful, sharing the room--and the bed--with her husband.

Be careful what you wish for. Brie knew her fairy tales. Every boon has a catch; every blessing a curse. The irony of getting Steve was that she didn't deserve either his love or his trust. She'd thought to leave her secrets behind, when they married, but she didn't.

She'd lied to them both.

Brie ducked into the clammy bathroom and started the shower with a violent twist of faucets, shedding her robe, hoping to lose her guilt under the age-old cure of running water. She closed her eyes against the hot water; if a few uncharacteristic tears squeezed out, even she needn't know.

She wasn't truly the woman Steve had fallen in love with. She wasn't the person he'd married. Worse, circumstances forbade her even the decency of telling him why.

Steam whispered at her bare skin, awakening vestiges of her nightmare. Kidnapped into darkness . . . . No, she knew that autumnal legend too; her friend and circlemate, Mary, had told it during last night's Samhain ritual. The Lord of the Underworld kidnaps the Greek goddess Demeter's daughter, and the Earth Mother's mourning sends the world into a season of cold, and darkness, and death.

That one, at least, Brie couldn't cast with herself or Steve. She'd been in no way abducted into marriage, and Steve was no Lord of Darkness--despite her mother's dislike of him.

"Everyone is a balance of good and evil," Gwen Conway had warned. "Your Eagle Scout makes me wonder just how deeply he's buried his dark side . . . and what it's been doing while he wasn't looking."

But Mom had never liked Steve, because Mom was prejudiced.

Steve wasn't a witch.

With a moan, Brie turned her face up into the spray and twisted the hot-water faucet....

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