Chills & Thrills Paranormal Boxed Set (27 page)

Zach's own muffled screams awoke him, and he jerked upright
to see the night ablaze with lightning. Thunder shook the sky. Every nook of
the alcove was flooded with light, allowing him to see with no mistake that
everyone but him was gone.

And in the distance a twister, black as death against the
hazy sky, spiraled inexorably toward land.

* * *

The tornado roared like a tiger. Wind whipped the waters,
pushing the boat back, and rain poured from the sky. Liz turned up the throttle
and kept shouting, although she knew her father couldn't hear her above the
storm. Even worse, she feared he wouldn't answer if he did hear. His moves had
been calculated with cool sanity. He'd led her to believe he'd stay with her,
when all along he'd planned to send her off alone.

For what purpose? Her conviction that he'd lost his mind
suddenly rang false. Zach, she thought in alarm. If his accusations were on
target, her father couldn't let him live. And if he had cold-bloodedly killed
her mother and Jed, he wouldn't hesitate to do it again.

No! She refused to think such thoughts. It was the opal. Her
father truly believed he had to get it back for her. She'd trust him, no matter
what. She'd trust. . . .

Another wave hit the boat. Liz revved up the engine, but
overestimated the tide's strength. The boat jumped ashore, and she had to grab
the side to keep from flying over the stern. When she righted herself, she saw
that the twister completely blocked the moon, hiding everything outside the
path of the floodlight.

Then a shadow fell, splitting the beam in two, defying
natural law. A head, huge, dark. Two large, powerful arms. Long legs that ate
up the light as the form swirled toward her. A pair of red eyes blazed down at
her as though she were a small insect, and a menacing drone accompanied its
movements.

Liz closed her eyes, squeaks of terror hiccuping from her
throat, but when she opened them, the figure was still there.

Turn back, Guardian.

She screamed, the sound merging with an abrupt clap of
thunder. Lightning streaked across the sky, allowing her to see her father
running toward the boat.

"Izzy." She strained to hear him above the drone.
"Leave. Leave now. You cannot win when you got no opal!"

The creature's noises rose to a high-pitched whine. It spun,
directing red eyes toward shore.
Leave us, puny defender.

But her father continued running, waving his hands,
shouting, and the whine rose to a shriek. The creature abandoned its human
form, spinning with dizzying speed directly toward her father.

Helpless little sounds spilled repeatedly from Liz's lips,
her eardrums recoiled from the punishing noise, her eyes took in her father's moving
mouth, saw his feet pounding the gray sand. Then the monster burst into
hundreds of dancing flames, cooling the warm night with a blast of frigid air,
and she saw it swallow her father's racing body, saw him fly into the air.

The last things she heard were scraps of words. "Power
above . . . divine ... I . . . to thee . . ." Then nothing. The sky was
vacant save for the sickly moon. No sound, not even the splash of the
once-turbulent water.

Liz opened her mouth and let out a scream so shrill it
nearly ripped her throat apart.

* * *

Zach's feet barely touched the ground. His speed was much
greater now that he wasn't trying to block out the earsplitting whine with his
hands, but its sudden cessation alarmed him. When he heard Liz scream, his
alarm exploded into full-scale panic and he pushed the last ounce of energy
from his whirling legs.

Fat drops of rain splattered the dry earth, and thunder
still rumbled far away, and through it shone a floodlight. The intensity
blinded him for a moment, and when he recovered, he saw Liz climbing from the
boat. She uttered pathetic mews and held herself so tightly he didn't know how
her blood could flow.

"Liz!"

She jumped like a frightened mouse, then turned her wide,
blank eyes on him. "My fath . . . Papa . . ."

Shock. He'd seen it before as a cop after reaching a scene
of terrible violence. Terror and grief combining until the victim was little
more than a shivering zombie.

He arrived at her side just as her legs gave out, and caught
her easily while she sank, trembling, to the sand. His eyes automatically
scoped out the barren land, the empty boat, as he crouched beside her.

"Where is he?" Zach wasn't certain Liz would even
understand his question.

"T-The tornado . . . Ankouer—" She shook her head
violently. "No, no, not Ank— The tornado picked him . . . picked him off
the ground . . . li-like a s-stick."

She curled her arms around his forearm, clutching so hard
her fingers bit his flesh, and her wide, tearless eyes stared as vacantly as
they had in the dream he'd just awakened from. He could only guess what she'd
seen. Her father caught in the storm, the twister spiraling down to pick him
up, then lifting off to carry him away. Horrifying. Horrifying. No wonder she
could barely speak.

"It's okay, Liz," he gently told her. "You
don't have to talk about it."

"It b-b-burst into f-flames, Zach, ice-c-cold
f-flames!"

Her description sent his mind traveling back in time, but he
quickly slammed that door. "It was a tornado, Liz," he barked.
"You're in shock, imagining things."

Zach's harsh words sliced through Liz's paralysis, and she
looked up at him, her vision coming into focus. Rain was falling on them both,
streaking down his worried face, and the floodlight showed stress lines between
his brows and around the hard line of his mouth. A muscle twitched in his jaw
and his blue eyes looked at her sternly, as if daring her to talk of these
things again. She sensed a hard wall around him now, that despite her fog she
knew hadn't been there a moment earlier.

She couldn't blame him.

The world she'd created for herself in Chicago excluded
everything that she'd been taught during her first fifteen years of
life—phantoms and ghosts, even God and higher powers— had just shattered. As
she met Zach's warning gaze, she felt her hold on sanity grow tenuous and
slippery. She didn't know where Zach had gone or how he'd managed to erect his
mental barrier, but she wanted to join him there.

Another explosion of lightning and thunder shook the sandy
beach, and she gazed directly ahead to the spot where her father had vanished,
and told herself if she had any hope for survival, she'd better find the same
protective place that Zach had entered. Madness would be so easy, too easy, and
it was an indulgence she couldn't afford.

"We have to hunt for him." She tried to rise to
her feet, but terror had cooked her legs to mush.

Zach leaned forward and slid his hands under her arms and
lifted her. She quivered from head to toe, and he had to support her so she
wouldn't fall again. Her breathing still came in tatters, interrupted now and
then by the same small mews she'd been uttering when he'd found her. Raindrops
trickled down her face. He gently brushed them away, but she hardly noticed.

Finally, her trembling subsided to infrequent shivers.
"Did you hear me, Zach?" she asked. "We have to hunt for
Papa."

"It's nearly pitch-black out here, Liz, and we're in
danger from the lightning. We need to find shelter." He stepped away just
slightly, testing the steadiness of her legs.

"Maybe the twister put him down somewhere."

"But we don't know where."

"I read about a cow once that was dropped gently on . .
." Her trailing voice hinted that she saw the futility of her suggestion.

"Yeah." If living things survived tornadoes often,
newspapers wouldn't report them. But Liz had borne enough pain. He didn't have
to agree with her that Frank had probably fallen with spine-fracturing force.

"In the morning. We'll search in the morning. When the
storm's over and we have light. Okay?"

Her head bobbed up and down, and when he pulled her into his
arm, bearing a great deal of her weight as they walked to camp, she said not
another word.

Once in the alcove, Zach wrapped her in a blanket, then
covered it with a tarp to protect her from the rain. She rocked back and forth
under that unsubstantial shelter, mewing again.

Using stones to secure the edges, he erected a flimsy
lean-to against the rock wall, then dragged a sleeping bag beneath it. When he
finished, he went to help Liz to her feet. Shock had stolen her strength again,
and she could barely stand, so he carried her to the shelter, then stripped off
her shoes and rewrapped her in the blanket. Then he returned to the shore to
secure the boat. If it was lost, they'd both be doomed.

Afterward, he climbed under the lean-to. Liz was still
awake, lying on her back, stiff and wide-eyed. He took her in his arms.
"Sleep,
cher
," he whispered. "Tomorrow we'll search for
your pa."

Her chin bumped his chest as she bobbed her head again, and
a few minutes later he felt her relax. She still hadn't cried, he noticed.
Raindrops on her cheeks, but not a tear, and he wondered if she ever did, and
also wondered about the cost of holding back a lifetime of sorrow. Soon even
that thought was forgotten. His own body relaxed as well, and he drifted asleep
to the lullaby of his childhood sweetheart's breath.

Liz pressed against the warmth. of Zach's body. Rain
drizzled on the roof of the lean-to. An occasional clap of thunder sounded
overhead. The frequent lightning flashes turned everything as bright as day,
and with each swath of light, snippets of her past played across the
liver-toned canvas above. Mama singing her a lullaby in French. Papa hanging
the truck tire to the giant cypress tree. Zach laughing as he put a worm on her
fishing hook.

Then darker memories.
Grandmere
chanting over the
body of a dying man. Mrs. Cormier looking left and right as she sneaked up the
porch steps to get a potion to keep her man from cheating. And she knew with
increasing dread that each recollected nugget was leading her to a night she'd
wiped from her mind twenty years before. Already the pieces were coming. Heat
lightning flashing through the sky. The air thick and sticky and hard to
breathe. Liz rolled on her side, pushing away the images, pleading for sleep to
take her back into its arms. Instead the images got crisper, more vivid,
sweeping her irresistibly into the past . . . to the night she'd jerked from
her sleep and shot upright in her narrow bed, calling her grandmother.

Lightning had swept like the path of a torch across the room
Izzy shared with her grandmother, and her sweat-damp nightgown clung to her
body. Though the shutters were open, no night breeze stirred the stuffy air
inside the screened-in second floor, and she found it hard to breathe.

She saw
Grandmere
sitting on her bed, clutching a
blanket to her chest, and wondered how she stood having it touch her skin on so
hot a night.

"
Grandmere
," she whispered. "
Grandmere.
"

The older woman didn't turn. Instead, she stared at an empty
space, saying with uncharacteristic venom, "You cannot take the opal, no.
I will die before you have it."

Then die you will, old one. The stone shall be mine.

The words in Izzy's mind sounded so like the warning she'd
gotten the day she'd hidden from the storm with Zach and Jed that she trembled.

"
Grandmere
," she called again in a shaky
voice. "Wake up. You're dreaming bad."

It was as though she hadn't spoken, wasn't there. Her
grandmother's eyes remained transfixed on the vacant spot. Fear, thick and
sticky as the hot air she breathed, permeated the room.

"Never! Never! Not if you summon demons from
hell."

What could
Grandmere
be staring at, talking to, that
unleashed such terror and caused such harsh words to come from her mouth? Again
the voice sounded in Izzy's head.

I
am hell. I am the unformed, the ravenous one
that cannot be denied. I am hungry, old one. Give me the opal!

"Never! Again I speak never!" Her grandmother
scrambled to her feet and stood on the bed, crying, "Power above, power
divine, I call to thee in my hour of need!" Swaying on the sagging
bedsprings, she lifted something above her head. Colors—gold and orange, blue
and red and green—swirled through the room, bringing it alive with brilliant
hues. The opal! Izzy realized. Why was it here in their bedroom instead of
locked up in the sideboard downstairs?

A hiss sprang up, not of the mind, but real. Very real. Too
real. Izzy shivered violently and grabbed for the muslin sheet at the foot of
the bed, pulling it tight, frightened into paralysis.

Still not knowing what her grandmother battled, Izzy held
her in a frozen stare. Her long, dark, gray-streaked hair fluttered behind her
head as if stirred by wind, and her eyes looked toward heaven as she recited
the prayer Izzy had heard so often she knew it by heart herself. With each
word, the hissing got louder, longer, more frequent.

"Glow, glow bright opal, free your fire,"
Grandmere
chanted.

*You cannot win, ancient guardian. You have no defender.
You're old and tired and weak. Release the stone. It is mine.*

Grandmere
trembled so badly the opal quivered in her
hands and she stumbled over her words. "Cleanse . . . cleanse my . . .
heart . . . of fear."

The sparkling globe in her hand flickered and dimmed with
each stuttered syllable, with each quake of her body. Izzy couldn't stand it
anymore. She adored
Grandmere
, had adored her all her life. She forced
another call past her numb vocal chords.
"Grandmere!"