Rooted to the spot, as the rain fell on her, she waited for the feeling to pass. But it only intensified.
“Jac?” Malachai’s voice was low and caring. “Are you all right?”
She couldn’t find her voice, but she nodded.
“Jac? Are you really all right?”
“No, not really.” Her voice sounded shaky in her own ears.
“What is it?”
She didn’t know what to say. All her efforts at being present had failed at once. How to explain how alone she suddenly felt? As if her mother, who had been dead for seventeen years, had just died. As if she had this moment learned of her father’s Alzheimer’s. Of her grandparents’ passing. As if today, not eight weeks ago, she’d said good-bye to Griffin North in Paris.
All the grief was pressing down, forcing her to feel the magnitude of all the deaths, all the defeats, and of the fresh loss of the lover she’d so desperately wanted to hold on to. Jac felt as if she’d walked into a giant silken web woven of sadness and was now trapped in its threads.
“What’s happening to me, Malachai?” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with any myth I’ve ever heard of.”
“Scientists have gotten extreme electromagnetic readings here that they believe have an effect on the emotional center in the brain. I prefer what those who are more evolved suggest: we’re in a sacred vortex. The earth’s energy is being channeled and collected here for a purpose we’ve long since lost the ability to recognize. You are being affected by that energy.”
Jac wanted to escape. Cross the gully of gravel and step back over to the mossy bank where Malachai was, clearly, safely out of the range of the electromagnetic field. But she couldn’t and stood rooted to the spot as if she were, like the magnificent trees surrounding her, part of this landscape now.
“Do you feel it too?” she asked Malachai.
He shook his head. A look of frustration mixed with misery crossed his face. She’d seen the same expression when she’d asked him if he had past-life memories and he’d admitted that he never had. No matter what he tried, from meditation to hypnosis to experimenting with drugs, the man who spent his life studying regressions had never been able to access one of his own precognitive memories.
Suddenly a clap of thunder cracked. A downpour followed immediately. It happened so quickly, neither Jac nor Malachai was able to run for cover. Almost instantly, they were soaked.
This wasn’t a kind rain but an angry outburst. A fury unleashed. In less than a minute the moat around the rock filled and Jac was encircled. Logically she knew the gully couldn’t be deep at all and that she could jump across it without any problem. Even step in it if she had to. But the pervasive sadness restrained her. Pinned her to the stone and prevented her from moving.
One after another, three flashes of lightning lit up the dark sky. Each was followed by a burst of thunder. Each outburst louder than the last. This was the sound ancients ascribed to Tarnis, the Celtic god of thunder.
Malachai was shouting too, but she couldn’t make out his words over the storm’s fury. From his gestures, she knew he was telling her to move, to come to him.
She wanted to, desperately, but she just couldn’t.
The next round of thunder was deafening. And then a wild bolt of lightning illuminated the scene in its electric radiance. For a moment Malachai seemed to glow. A tree limb fell nearby. Jac smelled the bitter, burned wood.
Malachai was gesticulating wildly and yelling. She made out the words-take cover-but she still couldn’t move. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to. All the tears she had held back for so long were somehow being released by the sky. She needed to honor them. To let them pour down and wash her clean so she could finally be present.
“Jac!” Malachai yelled just as thunder and lightning hit almost simultaneously.
Time slowed. The rock’s scent, even stronger in the rain, overpowered her. Jac felt suspended between now and the next instant. Sensed it might never come. Thought everything might end in the brilliant burst of illumination. She was aware of exactly what was happening and was surprised at just how acute her senses were. Astonished by the number of separate thoughts she could cram into so few seconds.
Research she’d once done on Zeus flashed in her mind like lightning. She remembered excruciating details. At any given moment 1,800 thunderstorms are playing havoc somewhere on the planet. Lightning strikes 80 to 100 times a second; 40 million strikes a year.
The amount of electricity discharged, like so many other things in nature, was a mystery still to scientists. But not to shamans. Not to mystics and wizards. Not in myths. In those last crazy seconds, Jac was aware that a woman standing in a clearing in a storm was an ideal target for the massive electrical discharges filling the sky, searching for places to touch down. A woman standing out in a clearing was the perfect vessel for the lightning’s ire. For its one fiery kiss.
Three
Jac was unsure of where she was, only sure that she was in pain. A cramp tightened her stomach. Then was gone. And with its exit she fully awoke and realized she was in Malachai’s guest room.
As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw him, sitting about ten feet away from her. Sprawled in a large armchair by the bed, he was asleep, his book splayed across his chest where it must have fallen.
She remembered Malachai saying he was going to stay with her and make sure she fell asleep. But why? What was wrong? She tried to remember what came before he’d said that.
They’d been walking through the woods, she’d seen the giant stone-
Another cramp gripped her. Uncomfortable, she shifted, tried to find a better position and felt the warm stickiness between her legs.
Carefully, she stood. Grabbing her dopp kit from the dresser, she hurried to the bathroom.
Jac had never been regular. Stress and air travel affected her menses. Since she’d recently flown quite a bit, she hadn’t paid much attention to missing her period in June. Or in July. Besides, she hadn’t felt different. And people said you did. That you knew. But she hadn’t known.
That’s why, a few days ago, she’d finally bought the test. At home, she unwrapped it and then sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the plastic stick as if it were a priceless object discovered on one of her expeditions in Greece or Turkey or Japan.
She’d just looked at it and wondered what she’d do if indeed she was pregnant. Jac didn’t have a husband or a boyfriend. All she’d had was a moment out of time-a passion resurrected for a few brief nights in Paris in late May-with a man she’d been in love with it seemed, for better or worse, for most of her life. But Griffin was married. Had a family. Was entrenched in problems with his wife and trying to salvage their relationship. Jac couldn’t interfere. If she was pregnant, how would she handle it?
Jac wasn’t like most of her friends. She never imagined herself with children. Never allowed herself to yearn for a baby. She was just too worried she’d be the same kind of mother hers had been to her and Robbie. A childhood fraught with that much trauma causes damage, and Jac couldn’t conceive of damaging another human soul. Would never want to inflict anything like what she’d been through on someone else.
But could she give a child up if she was pregnant? Especially Griffin’s child? Hadn’t she given up much too much already?
So she hadn’t taken the test. Jac had put the plastic stick in her medicine cabinet and decided to deal with it after her weekend with Malachai. Now that wouldn’t be necessary. Now she knew. She just didn’t know how she was going to cope with what she knew.
As she cleaned herself she tried to reconstruct what had happened to her in the woods that had made this happen.
The lightning hadn’t struck her, but it had hit right next to her. For a moment, the flash had blinded her. The resounding crack had deafened her. The earth had trembled. The shock came up through the soil. The power and intensity of it rattled her bones and hurt her teeth. The acrid scent of burning leaves filled her nostrils. She’d jumped back and smacked into the rock’s hard, unyielding surface. Around her leaves fell and branches broke and all the while the rain, the interminable rain, never lessened, never yielded.