to marry her. She’d always been highly irregular in her seasons, and she felt that she knew the very night it had happened. She’d dreamed of a baby that night. But she couldn’t really remember.
Was it dreaming inside her? She pictured the tiny circuitry of its developing brain. No longer embryo by now, but an entire fetus. She closed her eyes, listening, feeling. All right. And then her own strong telepathic sense began to frighten her.
Had she the power within her to hurt this child? The thought was so terrifying that she couldn’t bear it. And when she thought of Lasher again, he too seemed a menace to this frail and busy little being, because he was a threat to her, and she was her baby’s entire world.
How could she protect it from her own dark powers, and from the dark history that sought to ensnare it? Little Chris. You will not grow up with curses and spirits, and things that go bump in the night. She cleared her mind of dark and turbulent thoughts; she envisioned the sea outside, crashing endlessly on the beach, no one wave like another, yet all part of the same great monotonous force, full of sweet and lulling noise and incalculable variation.
Destroy Lasher. Seduce him, yes, as he is trying to seduce you. Discover what he is and destroy him! And you’re the only one who can do it. Tell Michael or Aaron and he will retreat. You’ve got to deceive with a purpose and do it.
Four A.M. She must have slept. The irresistible hunk was lying there against her, his big heavy arm cradling her, his hand hugging her breasts. And a dream was just winking out, all full of misery and those Dutchmen in their big black hats, and a mob outside screaming for the blood of Jan van Abel.
“I describe what I see!” he had said. “I am no heretic! How are we to learn if we do not throw out the dogmas of Aristotle and Galen?”
Right you are. But it was gone now, along with that body on the table with all the tiny organs inside like flowers.
Ah, she hated that dream!
She rose and walked across the thick carpet, and out on the wooden deck. Oh, was ever a sky more vast and clear, and full of tiny twinkling stars. Pure white the foam of the black waves. As white as the sand which glowed in the moonlight.
But far down on the beach stood a lone figure, a lean tall man, looking towards her. Damn you. She saw the figure slowly thin and then vanish.
Bowing her head, she stood trembling with her hands on the wooden rail.
You’ll come when I call you.
I love you, Rowan.
With horror she realized the voice came from no direction. It was a whisper inside of her, all around her, intimate and audible only to her.
I wait only for you, Rowan.
Leave me, then. Don’t speak another word or show yourself again, or I’ll never call for you.
Angry, bitter, she turned and went back into the darkened bedroom, the warm carpet soft under her feet, and climbed into the low bed beside Michael. She clung to him in the darkness, her fingers tight around his arm. Desperately she wanted to wake him, to tell him what had happened.
But this she had to do alone. She knew it. She’d always known.
And an awful fatality gripped her.
Just give me these last days before the battle, she prayed. Ellie, Deirdre, help me.
She was sick every morning for a week. Then the nausea left her, and the days after were glorious, as if mornings had been rediscovered, and being clearheaded was a gift from the gods.
He didn’t speak to her again. He didn’t show himself. When she thought of him, she imagined her anger like a withering heat, striking the mysterious and unclassifiable cells of his form, and drying them up like so many minuscule husks. But most of all when she thought of him she was fearful.
Meantime life went on because she kept the secret locked inside her.
By phone she made an appointment with an obstetrician back in New Orleans, who arranged to have the early blood work done right here in Destin, with the results to be sent on. Everything was normal as she expected.
But who could expect them to understand that with her diagnostic sense she would have known if the little tucker was in trouble?
The warm days were few and far between, but she and Michael had