But Jade wanted her to run away. He wanted her to give up, to leave the house and not return. Surely that meant that she posed some threat to him? That she did stand a chance of defeating him? Knowingly or not, she must have the knowledge and the power to destroy him, or he would not expend so much energy in frightening her away. If she were truly powerless, Jade would not have to try to convince her of that.
Sarah stared up at the house, imagining it in flames. Her hands tightened on the diary she still held, and she knew she could not walk away forever. She could not let Jade win. She would not. She was leaving now, but she would return when she had a plan. Just then, that time seemed distant and unimaginable.
But it was only a few minutes later, as she was driving across town on 38th Street, that the idea came to her, and Sarah realized what it was that the diary had told her; what she knew about Jade and the way in which he might be destroyed.
Chapter Twelve
Pete and Beverly looked up from their dinner in surprise as Sarah burst in. The apartment was dimly lit, with candles on the glass-topped table, so as she crossed the room Sarah turned on a lamp, then flung herself into the large chair that faced the dining area.
“I thought you were going to eat out,” Beverly said. She moved in her chair as if uncertain whether to rise.
Sarah waved a hand at her. “Dinner? Sure, I had a hamburger. Don’t worry about it.” She grinned broadly, feeling she was about to burst with her discovery. “You’re not going to believe what I just found out. It’s fantastic—”
“Sarah,” Pete said. “Do you think it could wait until after dinner? We’ve just started eating and Beverly went to some trouble with this meal.”
Sarah looked at him, unperturbed by his coolness. Wait until he heard. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “You guys go ahead and eat, and I’ll do all the talking. You can listen while you chew, can’t you?”
Beverly moved her mouth the way she did when she was nervous, and darted a glance at her husband, then looked at Sarah. “We didn’t expect you until much later,” she said. “You said you’d be out late.”
“God, isn’t it late?” Sarah said. “I’ve lost all track of time. I suppose it is still early, but after what I went through—Jade just tried another of his games on me. Ambulatory corpses. Really horror-movie stuff. Straight out of my own, sick, predictable imagination, and of course I fell for it.” She laughed and got to her feet. She was feeling good, the fear far away and unreal in these familiar surroundings, among friends. “Could I have some of that wine?” She saw Pete and Beverly exchange a look before she went into the kitchen for a glass.
Pete filled her glass in silence, and Sarah looked at the dishes spread out on the table: chicken kiev, wild rice, rolls, artichokes with drawn butter. Beverly was wearing a long, slinky, blue velvet dress Sarah had seen her wear only a few times before. Raising the full glass of wine to her lips, Sarah suddenly understood. Pete and Beverly wanted a quiet, romantic evening alone together. Judy Collins on the stereo. Candles on the table. She took a too-large gulp of wine, wondering if she were blushing, and backed away from the table.
“So what’s this exciting discovery?” Pete asked.
She could excuse herself, go spend a few hours at the library, and talk to them in the morning. She knew she should—they had put up with her moods and intrusions for so long that she owed them at least one evening to themselves.
But she didn’t want to wait; she couldn’t. She wanted to bounce her ideas off them, wanted to have her cleverness applauded. She needed to talk about it, to discover if there were flaws she hadn’t thought of. It was important, damn it. Certainly more important in the long run than the spoiling of one romantic evening. Surely they would see it that way once they knew.
More restrained now, Sarah settled back in the big chair, placing the diary on her knees. She tapped it. “This is the diary of Nancy Owens, who was the original owner and inhabiter of the house on West Thirty-fifth Street. Her daughter-in-law, my landlady, let me have it, and I read it today. And now I know that the trouble in that house didn’t start with Valerie’s witchcraft—in fact, I wonder now if that witchcraft was Valerie’s idea in the first place. I think she was used. This woman, Nancy Owens, had the house built in the nineteen-twenties. Her husband had left her, and she was miserable about it. She met some people who were into magic—some kind of disciples of Aleister Crowley, I think—and they let her believe that if she helped them in their rituals that they would teach her how to win her husband back. One of these people was a woman called Yolanda Ferris, and the other was a man, a powerful magician who called himself Jade.”
She paused for effect, watching Pete expectantly. He went on eating methodically, dipping artichoke leaves in butter and biting the ends off. Sarah grimaced. Perhaps she should have let them finish their dinner in peace. But she had started and could not stop now, merely because Pete was refusing to respond. Beverly met her eyes and nodded encouragingly.
“Nancy Owens became more and more involved with Jade, and more convinced of his tremendous powers. He was supposed to be more powerful than Crowley, and less cautious. He was ready to crush anyone who got in his way—he was the only being in the world who mattered to himself. His plan, which he kept from Nancy until the last minute, was to survive death. To inhabit more than one body and, that way, to become immortal. Through a sexual and magical ritual he meant to destroy her soul. Or to absorb it. Anyway, he meant to become her while still remaining himself. One mind in two bodies. He’d had some practice with splitting off a part of himself to take over the bodies of various animals, but this was to be his first trial with another human being. Either he overestimated his own power, or he underestimated hers. It didn’t work.
“She managed to fend him off with her mind, the way you and I did, Pete. And then she killed him—killed his body, anyway. She stabbed him to death. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.
“Jade survived his own death.”
Again Sarah paused, and again she was disappointed. Pete simply ate, as if there were nothing more important on his mind, and she could see by the stiff way he held himself that he was still angry with her for altering the mood of the evening. Beverly had been listening with her usual sympathy, but Sarah could tell by her anxious glances at her husband that she longed to placate him.
“Was that a pause for our gasps of amazement?” Pete asked sourly, not looking at Sarah.
“I thought you would be interested in this,” Sarah said. “I thought it concerned you, too.”
Pete swallowed some wine and then looked around at her. “Sarah, of course I’m interested in your concerns. But this hardly seems the time—I don’t see the overwhelming importance of this diary. So the woman who used to live in your house was involved in magic rituals, like Valerie. So what?”
“It’s about Jade,” Sarah said, annoyed by his obtuseness. “That’s what I’ve been telling you! It explains everything.”
“Does it?” He raised his eyebrows. “Really?” He pushed his chair away from the table and moved around to face her. “What do you think it explains?”
“Jade. It explains who he is, what he is. He’s not a demon. He’s not the devil. He’s a spirit, the leftover force of a very powerful man who lived in the 1920s.” Her voice softened then, pleading. “Pete, this book explains what we experienced.”