Chapter Twenty-One
Trey arrived that evening with more photos, and stories.
“It was fine when I got over there, even when she says, really casual, ‘I think I’m in labor.’”
He sat with Sonya and Cleo, looking out at the sea and waiting for Owen.
“I’m ‘Okay, I’ll call Seth,’ then she tells me he’s out on a boat excursion, and she thinks it’s too early anyway. I want to call Mom, because Mom, but Anna’s just ‘Wait awhile.’ I’m going to do that. I’m not just going to leave. Then one hits her, and she’s puffing, and gone pale.”
“And you panicked,” Sonya finished.
“Not yet. It’s more ‘We’ll handle this, but I’m calling Seth, and the midwife,’ and yeah, she thinks that’s probably a good idea since it’s not the false stuff, or indigestion like she thought—and that turns out to be a couple hours before I got there.
I get word to Seth, get her bag, get her in the car. All good. We got this.”
He shook his head, heaved out a breath. “We get to the birthing center, and everything’s happening all at once. Seth’s a couple hours out, and my mom’s doing a photo shoot and can’t get back to the village for an hour.”
“So it’s just you.” Cleo laughed. “Then you panicked.”
“I wouldn’t say panicked. Next door to panic. I have to call Seth’s parents, my dad, you—because I’m going to be really seriously late. And they leave me alone in the room with her. Like just her and me. I kinda needed some backup.”
He took a sip of wine. “Anyway, once Owen got there, and my dad, then finally Mom, all good. Then Seth. Anyway, it was an experience.”
“And all’s well,” Sonya said.
“All’s incredible. But it didn’t hurt my feelings when they kicked me out, and I’m not ashamed. Jesus, I mean Jesus, it’s a lot. After, you’d think it was nothing. She’s holding the baby, and we’re taking pictures and videos, and Anna’s laughing. Like it was nothing. It wasn’t nothing.”
He drank again. “Swear to God, it makes you wonder how the human race survives.”
“Because … Who runs the world, Clover?”
The phone shouted it out: Who run the world? Girls.
“After this? No argument from me. I need to start sending my mother flowers every week. Maybe daily.”
“We’ve got a welcome gift for the new family,” Sonya told him. “You could take it to her tomorrow.”
“You could take it. I mean, they sent her home today.” He could only shake his head. “Like it was nothing.”
“We’re giving them a few days. Because it wasn’t nothing.”
“It sure as hell wasn’t.”
Mookie and Yoda sent up the alert, and seconds later, Owen’s truck pulled up.
“And how did he handle it?” Cleo wondered.
“I gotta say, he was a rock.”
“Good to know.” Cleo rose, sauntered over to greet him and Jones.
“I haven’t even asked how everything’s been here.”
“It was fine. Cleo and I lit bunches of candles, had a girls’ night. Later? Well, there was later, and I’ll tell you. Cleo wants to use the grill, because September means not much more time for that. I’ll tell you while that’s happening.”
And once they’d moved to the deck, once the grill smoked, she told Trey and Owen about seeing Agatha.
Then about the portraits.
“Cold-ass bitch” was Owen’s opinion.
“She wanted to tear at you, and that was a surefire way to do it. She’s not going to win this.”
Grateful, she looked at Trey. “I don’t think she could’ve done anything that would have made me more determined to take her down. But it’s more. I’ve said before I don’t think she can really hurt me. I’m more sure of it. More sure that she can’t or she loses her hold here.”
“Because you’re not a bride.”
She nodded at Trey. “Because I’m not a bride, and that’s where she boxed herself in. And the portraits matter. Someway, somehow, and we’ll figure it out.
“It did tear at me,” Sonya admitted. “And going through that so soon after seeing Agatha, and feeling for her, for everything she lost. But that was temporary. She made a mistake using my feelings for those women, my connection to them. I won’t let her hold them hostage forever, and I sure as hell won’t let her take another. ”
“She’s misjudged you, cutie.”
Smiling, Sonya lifted her glass to Trey. “That’s fucking-A right.”
Owen had never known anyone who slept like Cleo. When the woman was ready to sleep, she was gone in seconds. And once gone, slept soundlessly and still. So soundlessly and still, it bordered on spooky.
Yet, he knew, she’d wake in that same finger snap if Sonya walked down the hallway. Oddly enough, so would he.
But Sonya didn’t walk, and Cleo didn’t wake.
He didn’t know what woke him, not at first. Still shy of three when he checked, so not the chiming clock, not the music, not the weeping or the murmurs.
He lay for a moment, listening to the dark, the sea, the sighs of an old house in the night. He started to roll over, just grab onto the sleep again.
He swore he heard his name. Not a whisper, not a murmur of a call, but some low, smoky sort of sound inside his head.
But not.
He listened, and it came again.
Owen. Owen Poole. Owen. Owen Poole.
He wondered if what he felt was like Sonya with the mirror. But he wouldn’t have called it a pull. It was more of an … invitation.
Intrigued, he got out of bed, yanked on his jeans. Jones lifted his head, waited. He started to go to the window, to look out. But no, that was wrong, so he turned and walked to the sitting room, and the dog, as always, rose to go with him.
He went out into the hall, and the intrigue became a kind of dreaming. But he wasn’t dreaming. He knew himself awake, aware.
And yet, instead of turning to go down the hall, alert Trey, he turned the other way.
And walked to the stairs, then up into a kind of thin fog that spread through the third floor.
It smelled like secrets. Dark, female secrets. Irresistible. With every breath it aroused, sparked something in the blood so it ran hot under his skin.
His pulse began to pound.
Beside him, Jones growled, but he didn’t heed the warning. He didn’t notice or care.
The fog thickened over the doorway of Cleo’s studio, like a wall blocking the room, the windows. And like a wall it seemed to close behind him, so he heard nothing but the voice calling his name.
In that moment, he wanted nothing more in the world but to answer.
The door to the Gold Room swung open, and light, smoky like the voice, poured out so the fog glittered with it.
Jones growled again, followed it with a series of throaty barks, wet, warning snarls. Owen barely heard it.
Fire smoldered in his blood, in his belly, in his loins. No power on earth could stop him from reaching that open door.
Where she stood, lit by a thousand candles, her hair streaming, her dress molding her body like skin.
When she smiled, the wanting was pain, and the pain welcome.
“Owen Poole. I welcome you.”
He stepped inside.
Jones leaped, but the door slammed, and the dog rammed against it.
Candlelight swayed in shadows. In the air wafted a perfume so seductive, Owen could barely take a breath, and when he did, the taste of it filled him with a kind of crazed hunger.
“I’ve waited for you. Waited for you to take my body, to ravish it, to sate yourself with it.” Watching him, she ran her hands from her breasts to her hips. “You want this body. You crave it.”
Desire all but strangled him.
“I know what you are.” The words tore at his throat. He swore he tasted blood. “What you’ve done. What you want.”
“It’s you I want, Owen Poole.” Her voice was a cold hand on a hot wound.
“This manor, they wrenched it from you. Yours by right of blood.
She is no true Poole. This manor is mine, by right of the blood I took, the blood I gave.
We will share it for eternity, you and I.
You and I alone. You will have me to do all the things you wish, for all time.
We are and will be master and mistress of the manor.
“Say it.”
Her eyes burned into his.
“Say you want me. Say you want only to give me what I need and take all you need.”
“I want you.” More than he wanted his next breath. Rock hard, sweat slicking his skin, he reached out.
The shock stunned his hand, raced through his whole body, and left him gasping.
She laughed, and in his swimming vision was the most beautiful creature ever born.
“Oh, but not so easy, my love. Such glory as I will give has a price. You’ve only to pay it, and I will give you an eternity of pleasures beyond any you’ve known. Do as I bid you, Owen Poole, pay this price, and I give you forever.”
“What do you want? What’s the price?”
“I must have blood. There must be blood to pay. Take what I give you. Take it, give me blood. Kill them. Kill them all, and everything you desire is yours.”
“Kill them,” he said, looking down at the knife in his hand. “Kill them all.”
“And be quick about it. Kill them. The cousin, her lover, then the friend. Let their blood flow over your hands, warm and thick. Taste it, one by one, you must taste their blood, so sweet, so fresh. And when what must be done is done, take their bodies out of my manor. These I will burn to ash. Then, only then, will you have me.”
Something changed as she leaned toward him, but he didn’t know what. Then her lips brushed over his.
“A taste,” she murmured. “One taste only. Do what needs doing, then come back for all. Forever.”
He turned toward the door.
“Owen? Kill the animals as well. Clear my manor of all of them.”
He walked out. Jones scrabbled at his legs, and the blood on his muzzle where he’d rammed against the door smeared on Owen’s jeans.
He walked on through the mists, the knife gripped in his hand.
Kill them, she’d said. Kill them all.
He walked down to the second floor. The need, so great, all but swallowed him whole. The taste of her lingered on his lips, the scent of her covered him, and her voice pounded in his ears.
His vision narrowed on the doors at the end of the hall. The turret room. The master.
It will be ours, Dobbs murmured in his head. It will all be ours.
As he reached the doors, music blasted, and the dogs sent up a howling.
He pushed inside.