“It’s not cynicism. It’s healthy skepticism.”
“Whatever.” She slid the book away, so there was nothing between them, and she leaned toward him, leaned very near. “If what you’re thinking is true, there’s something I don’t understand.”
“What’s that?”
“Why me and Marlee and Dexter? Why not just wait until Ray Jay gets out of jail and do something to him then?”
It was a good question, one for which Cork didn’t have an answer, and he told her so. She looked scared, and he reached across the table, took her hands in his, and said, “It’s going to be all right, Stella. I promise I’ll make sure that you’re safe until this is all finished.”
She gazed at his hands folded over hers, and when she looked up at him next, she’d changed, changed so subtly and in so many ways that Cork couldn’t have put a finger on any one specifically, but he felt the difference as surely as he might have sensed a shift in the air that told him new weather was about to appear on the horizon.
“Do you trust intuitions?” she asked.
“I don’t discount them,” he answered.
“Good, because I have a feeling about something.”
His mouth had gone a little dry. “What?”
“That you didn’t come here just to protect Marlee and me.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.” She looked deeply into his eyes, and her voice became velvet. “My intuition tells me that you came here looking for something.”
“And what would that be?”
“Are you lonely sometimes, Cork?”
“Sometimes. Isn’t everybody?” It was a coy response, because he knew what she meant, knew exactly. And so he said, “You think I’m looking for company on a cold, lonely night? You think that’s really why I came?”
“I hope that’s part of it.”
She was right. If he tried to tell himself that he hadn’t been thinking about Stella since that lost moment the night before, he’d be a liar. The truth was that he did feel alone and empty these days, and it seemed to him forever since anyone had made him feel wanted.
Stella stood and came around the table and took his hands and drew him up from his chair. The look in her eyes, animal and knowing, made him ache in the deepest part of himself. “Come to my bedroom, Cork. You won’t feel lonely there, I promise.”
He glanced toward the living room sofa. “What about Marlee?”
“Those painkillers put her out for hours.”
The television was still on, showing a commercial that involved a woman working in her garden. The camera suddenly focused on her hands, and Cork had a fleeting image of Rainy Bisonette. Not all of Rainy, only her hands, callused and filled with the flowers and plants she used in making her medicines and teas.
“Don’t worry about Rainy,” Stella said, as if she’d read his thought.
He turned his face back to her. She put her palm, impossibly soft, against his cheek, and from the delicate skin of her wrist came the same scent he’d smelled the night before in that moment he’d been certain would never come again, the scent of some exotic flower he could almost name.
“This isn’t about anything except tonight, I promise,” she whispered.
She kissed him, and afterward, for a long time that night, in the delicious dark of her bedroom, he was lost.
CHAPTER 26
Stephen lay in bed, listening to the sounds the old house made as it settled around him into night. Nothing in the world was static. No matter how firm or rock-solid a thing seemed, it was always in motion, always changing, because that was the nature of creation. Nothing came from nothing. Everything came from something that had been before. At the heart of an acorn were the atoms of the tree from which it had dropped, and those same atoms had been in the soil of the earth before the oak had drawn them into itself, and before that they’d been in the water that had fallen from the sky, and long, long before that, they’d been a part of the beginning of the universe. The acorn, the oak tree, the sky, the earth, the stars, the universe, all woven into the same vast fabric of creation, all connected, all part of the Great Mystery.
He knew this. So why did he feel so separate that night, so alien, so alone? He thought he understood the reason. He was still angry with Skye Edwards for intruding on Anne’s life, for tempting his sister from her destined path, one Anne hadn’t simply chosen but had been born to. Hadn’t she? Been born to it in the way his father had been born ogichidaa, destined to stand between his people and evil, and Jenny nakomis, full of a nurturing spirit, and he himself mide, meant to be a healer? Wasn’t the way they fit into the design of creation already decided before they were born, long before they were even conceived?
He’d been staring up at the ceiling, at the pattern of shadows cast there by the streetlamp outside shining through his window, a spiderweb formed by the bare branches of the elm in the front yard. Now he closed his eyes. Maybe, he thought, no path was meant to be a simple one. Maybe that was part of the journey. Maybe you were meant to stumble, even to stray. Maybe there was something to be learned in being lost. If so, he hoped he was learning, because he sure felt lost.
Sleep came to him finally, as it always did, and as sometimes happened, a vision came with it. Not a pleasant one.
Stephen flew. He often flew in his dreams, usually with a measure of control. Those were wonderful dreams. This was different. He’d been picked up like fluff from a cottonwood and carried into the night sky, borne on the wind. Usually he gave himself over to flight in a dream, but this time he fought it, because he had a sense that where he was going was a fearful place. He struggled, battled against the current pushing him. Useless. And then he found himself caught in the branches of a tree, and he knew the tree. It was the elm in the front yard. And now the wind was trying to pull him away, but he held tightly to a limb. The wind grew stronger, and his fingers began to lose their grip. And that’s when he saw the figure under the elm, dark in the night, watching the house on Gooseberry Lane. He was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread, a fear that made him go weak, and just before he let go of the limb, he saw the figure turn its face upward, and the eyes in that face were like coals of a fire, and Stephen felt their glare burn two painful holes in the skin of his chest. He lost his grip on the tree limb, lost his hold on the dream, and he came out of it with a cry and dripping with sweat.
“Stephen?” It was Jenny, calling from his doorway. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t answer immediately but spent a moment grounding himself in the reality of his bedroom.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “Bad dream is all.”
Jenny came and sat beside him. “A vision?” She was well acquainted with Stephen’s gift, and she asked this seriously.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Not a good one sounds like.”
He slid himself up and put his back against the wall at the head of his bed. “A scary one.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“I want to think about it first.”
Jenny wore a yellow sleep shirt. In the last year, she’d let her hair grow long, and it lay almost white over her shoulders, even in the dark of Stephen’s bedroom. As often happened when he was with Jenny these days, he was reminded of their mother.
She said, “When you were a kid, you used to have horrible nightmares. You believed in monsters. I remember Dad used to come in here, and you’d both go hunting for them. Under the bed, in the closet.”
“Never found any,” he said. “Not then.”
“I hope you don’t ever.”
“You sound like Mom.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“All right. See you in the morning.”
She walked out, and he was alone again.