anything. She would do what had to be done, alone or with her sisters. But she wouldn't allow anyone into their circle. Or into her heart.
In the deepest part of night, while the island slept, she stood on her cliffs. The cold rain poured and the black sea lashed at the jagged rocks as if it would, in one night, wear them to nubs. All around her the irritable wind swirled, snapping at her cloak until it billowed up like wings. There was no light, no relief from the black except the single circling blade from the white tower behind her. It cut over her, the cliffs, the sea. Then left her alone in the dark again. Fly, the canny voice whispered. Fly out and let go, and it will all be over. Why do you fight the inevitable? Why would you live with the loneliness?
How many times, she wondered, had she heard that voice? How many times had she come here, testing herself against it? Even when her heart had been shattered, she'd come. And had won. She would never give in.
"You won't beat me." She felt the cold as the dirty fog slithered over ground and rock. Felt it like icy fingers wrapping around her ankles, where it could tug, and tempt. "I'll never give up." She raised her arms, spread them wide.
And the wild, whirling wind she called tore the fog to tatters.
"What's mine I serve and protect and keep." She lifted her face to the rain, let it wash over her like tears. "Whether I wake or whether I sleep, to what I am I will be true in what I say, in what I do."
Magic poured into her and pulsed like a heart.
"This vow I make, and will not break: I will meet my destiny. As I will, so mote it be."
With her eyes closed, she fisted her hands as if she could beat against the night. As if she could use them to rip through the veil that blinded her from what would come for her.
"Why don't I know ? Why can't I feel? Why can't I do anything but feel?"
Something shivered on the air, like warm hands brushing her cheeks. It wasn't comfort she wanted, or the urges to be patient. So, she turned from them, from the cliffs, and the sea. Her cloak whipped behind her as she ran toward the lights of home.
While Mia wrapped herself in isolation, cocooned in the house on the cliff, Lulu was propped in bed with her third glass of wine, her latest true crime book, Diary of an American Cannibal , and a bag of cheese-and-garlic potato chips. Across the room, the bedroom TV blasted out gunfire as Mel Gibson and Danny Glover kicked ass in Lethal Weapon.
It was, for Lulu, her Saturday-night ritual.
Her nightclothes consisted of ratty shorts, a T-shirt that announced it was better to be rich than stupid, and a book light fastened to a ball cap.
She munched, sipped, divided her attention between the book and the video, and considered herself in her own personal heaven.
Rain drummed outside the windows of her colorful little saltbox, and the breeze rattled the love beads that dangled in lieu of curtains. Content, marginally tipsy, she sprawled under the spread she'd quilted from squares of madras, paisley, and tie-dyed scraps.
You could take the child out of the sixties, but you couldn't take the sixties out of this child, she often thought.
The words on the page began to blur, so she adjusted her glasses, boosted herself up in bed a little more. She just wanted to finish one more chapter and find out if the young prostitute was going to be stupid enough to get her throat slit and her internal organs gutted. Lulu was banking on it.
But her head dipped. She jerked it back up. Blinked. She could have sworn she heard someone whisper her name.
Hearing things, she thought in disgust. Getting old was God's big rip-off. She polished off the glass of wine, glanced toward the TV.
And there was Mel, his pretty face filling the screen, his eyes brilliantly blue as they grinned at her. "Hey, Lu. How's it going?"
She rubbed her eyes, blinked rapidly. But the image was still there. "What the hell?"
"That's what I say! What the hell!" The image drew back, far enough for her to see the gun. Its barrel looked to be the size of a cannon. "Nobody wants to live forever, right?"
The explosion boomed out of the set, flashed