The Chase Page 0,16

that TV. Jenny, what is it? You're so pale."

"Nothing." She didn't want to talk about it with her mother. She couldn't stand any more questions -or any more weird stuff-or any more anything.

"I'm really tired," she said and headed for the back of the house before her mother could stop her.

In the privacy of her own room, she flopped on the bed. It was a pleasant room, and normally its familiarity would have comforted her. Michael always said it looked like a garden because of the Ralph Lauren comforter in rose and poppy and gold and dusty blue, and the baskets on the dresser twined with silk flowers. On the windowsill were pots of petunias and alyssum.

Just now it made Jenny feel-alien. As if she didn't belong to its familiarity any longer.

She lay listening to the house. She heard the distant sounds of the family room TV cut short, and presently heard splashing noises in the bathroom. Joey going to bed. Voices in the hall, and a door shutting. Her parents going to bed. After that, everything was quiet.

Jenny lay there a long time. She couldn't relax for sleep; she had to do something to express the strangeness she felt inside. She wanted-she wanted -

She wanted to do something ritual and-well, purifying. By herself.

Then she had it. She went to the door and cautiously turned the knob. She stepped into the darkened hallway, listening. Silence. Everyone was asleep; the house had that hushed middle-of-the-night feeling.

Quietly Jenny opened the linen closet and fished out a towel. Still careful not to make the slightest sound, she unlocked the family room sliding glass door and eased it open.

A three-quarter moon was rising over the foothills. Jenny glanced toward her parents' room, but their Venetian blinds were dark, and a row of tall oleander bushes blocked their view of the pool. No one would see her.

She made her way stealthily to a block-wall alcove, where she turned a switch. The pool light went on.

Magic. It transformed a dark ominous void into a fluorescent blue-green jewel.

Jenny sighed.

Keeping well behind the screening row of bushes, she stripped her clothes off. Then she knelt by the lip of the pool, sat on it, easing her legs into the water. She could feel the porous concrete deck on the backs of her thighs and the cool water on her calves. She looked at her feet, pale green and magnified in the glowing water. With a careful twist and a slide, she dropped in.

A slight shock of coolness. Jenny boosted off the side of the pool with her feet and floated on her back, spreading her arms. The smell of chlorine filled her nostrils.

The moon was pure silver in the sky and very far away. Right now Jenny felt as distant from ordinary emotions.

So what do you do, she thought, floating, when you've sold your soul to the devil?

That was about the size of it. She had let Julian put his ring on her finger. A gold ring with an inscription on the inside: All I refuse and thee I chuse.

Magical words, inscribed on the inside of the ring so they would rest against her skin and bind her to the promise.

When they'd gotten back from the Shadow World, Jenny had put the ring in the white box, the one with the paper house, the one P.C. and Slug had stolen. Now she wished she had it back. She should have had it melted down or hammered flat.

The water slipped pleasantly between her fingertips. It cradled her whole body, touching all her skin. It was a very-sensual-feeling, to be embraced like this, to stroke out in any direction and feel the coolness flow past you.

Jenny-felt things-more these days.

She'd discovered it that first week after getting back. She'd realized, to her bewilderment and somewhat to her horror, that she found things more beautiful than before. The night air was more fragrant than it used to be, her cat's fur was smoother. She noticed little things-tiny, delicate details she had never seen before.

Something about her time with Julian had-opened her to things. To their sensuality, their immediacy. Maybe that was what people were noticing when they said she had changed.

Or maybe she'd always been different. Because she'd been chosen. Julian had chosen her, had fallen in love with her, had begun to watch her, when she was five years old.

Because when she was five she had opened a secret closet in her grandfather's basement, a closet carved with the symbol