Her chest was suddenly so tight that she could hardly breathe.
Maybe he’ll make it back,
she told herself. After all, he did before.
What she needed to do was stay calm. Turn the process over to whatever part of Divine Providence handled such matters. Trust in the ultimate rightness of all things.
She sat perfectly still, taking deep, hopefully calming breaths, searching for her inner Zen.
Then she thought
, To hell with that.
Her legs still felt unsteady as she pushed to her feet. Snatching up her purse from the floor where it had fallen when Michael had grabbed her—she didn’t even remember dropping it—Charlie fished inside it for her phone and called Tam.
“Cherie, I was just getting ready to call you” was how Tam greeted her. “I have more: in the dark water, there is a gray house. The danger is inside the gray house.”
It sounded screwy. Lots of times, Charlie recalled, Tam’s visions sounded screwy, until they worked out exactly the way Tam said they would. But at the moment, she didn’t care.
“Tam,” she said, and it was a struggle to keep her voice from cracking. “You remember that ghost you told me how to keep here? A few minutes ago, he”— kissed me senseless—“materialized. All the way. As real and solid as if he was alive. Then he groaned, and looked like he was in terrible pain, and disappeared. It was—fast.”
“Spirits shouldn’t be materializing,” Tam said sharply. “It goes against the way things are supposed to be.”
“Well, he did. And now he’s gone. I think he’s been sucked into Spookville—well, that’s what he calls it. A place that’s all cold, purple twilight.”
“The Dark Place.” Tam’s tone was stark with horror. “The spirit you wanted to keep earthbound is from there?”
“Yes.”
“He should not have materialized. He broke the bond.” Tam paused. “Which is probably just as well.”
“I need to help him get back.”
“No and no and no. If I had known before—”
“Tam. Please.”
“But, cherie, if he is of the Dark Place, then you need to leave him be
. He—is—not—good
.” Tam said that last forcefully.
“Tam, for God’s sake, if there’s anything I can do to help him get back here, tell me what it is.”
“Really, cherie?” Tam sounded as disapproving as ever Tam sounded, which Charlie realized ordinarily would have made her think twice about what she was asking. That saying about only counting the sunny hours? That was Tam. She always chose to embrace the light.
“Yes. Really.” Charlie heard the desperation in her own voice, and briefly closed her eyes.
“Please.”
“Hmm.” Tam sighed. “All right, well, let me see. You closed the passage to keep the spirit earthbound, if I recall.” Charlie made an affirmative noise. “There is no sure method to bring spirits back from the Beyond, much less from the Dark Place, I must tell you. My best suggestion to you would be that you open the passage again. You have a candle?”
“Yes.”
“Light it to open the passage, then call the spirit’s name. The spirit may hear, and find the passage, and return.”
Charlie heard the second possibility in the other woman’s voice loud and clear: or he may not.
She tried to control her too-rapid breathing. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“That’s all I know, cherie,” Tam said.
“Thanks.” As Charlie was disconnecting, she heard Tam call to her, “Take the utmost care.”
Charlie never traveled without her Miracle-Go kit, to which she had added a small, heavy glass for the closing of spectral passages since she had realized such a thing might become necessary. Now she grabbed a lighter and one of the squat round jasmine candles from the kit. Then she pulled out a second and a third candle. It hit her that turning on the water might help, too, so she took the candles into the bathroom, set them on the counter, and lit them. As the scent of jasmine started to fill the air, she closed the door to keep the aroma in and turned the cold water tap in the sink on full blast.
Then she turned off the bathroom light and looked into the flickering flames and called, “Michael.”
Again and again and again.
He didn’t come.
The terror she felt for him frightened her.
Minutes ticked past, blurred into hours.
Finally Charlie was sitting on the bathroom floor, still in her dress, with her knees drawn up almost to her chin and her back against the cold hard side of the tub. She was growing hoarse. Her eyelids were heavy as lead.
She gave up on calling his name only because she fell asleep.
At first she thought the creeping tendrils of fog that snaked toward her were smoke from the candles. Then she noticed that they were purple, and thick. As they reached her they started slowly swirling around her like multiple lariats. Even as she blinked at them, they rose, enveloping her in a way that the puny smoke from her candles never could. Instead of jasmine, they smelled of—rotting things, and damp. Eyes widening, Charlie clambered to her feet. Everywhere she looked—and she got the impression that she was confronting vast distances in all directions—the landscape was overlaid with billowing clouds of purple mist.
She shivered, suddenly cold. Her arms and shoulders and legs were bare, and her feet were, too. It took her a second to realize that she was still wearing her red dress, minus the shoes. It seemed to be twilight—there was no sun, but it wasn’t quite dark, either. The ground beneath her feet—she couldn’t really see it because of the fog—seemed to be composed mostly of solid sheets of rock, with a few patches of what looked like slimy moss.
Where am I?
But even as the question popped into her mind, she knew.
Spookville.
Michael.
Oh, my God, how did I get here?”
An instant later the more pertinent question brought a thrill of fear with it:
How do I get back?
In the distance, a bloodcurdling scream tore through the mist. Charlie jumped and looked fearfully all around as a sense of utter dread filled her. Closer at hand, she heard a kind of shuffling, lumbering sound as if something huge was moving toward her at a fast pace. That rhythmic wheezing gasp was its breathing, she realized with horror a split second after she became aware of it.
She caught a glimpse of a huge dark
thing
shrouded by the mist as it rushed past her.
Now the screams were so close that they sent icy ripples of fright coursing through the center of her being. It sounded like a creature was being torn to shreds not more than a stone’s throw away, and Charlie thought that the nightmarish shrieks came from something the thing had caught. She barely managed to swallow her own answering scream.
Then she saw another horror in the mist: what looked like two unblinking yellow eyes luminescent enough to glow through the swirling fog, turning in her direction.
She knew, instinctively, that she was in terrible danger.
Swallowing another scream, she ran.
Not far to her left, there was a scrabble of feet, a barely seen leap through the mist as if something pounced, another deathly scream.
Fear washed over her in waves.
Michael.
She dared not cry his name out loud, not with whatever these things were so near. He was there somewhere, she was sure. Instinct—a sixth sense—an insistent psychic pull—told her so. It sent her fleeing in a certain direction, but whether it was right or not she had no way of knowing. If she was wrong—the thought made her shake. Creatures bounded past her. Horrific screams pierced the air. Feet bruising on the rocky ground, she fled past stands of what seemed to be shaggy, misshapen trees, past boulders bigger than she was, past a fissure in the ground spewing a sulfurous gray steam.
An orange glow, blurred by the mist but still a beacon in the gloom, drew her. As she neared it, gasping for what little air there was, feeling as though her heart would burst from her chest, she saw that she was running headlong toward the dark edge of a cliff and slowed abruptly. The orange glow came from a fire far below, she discovered as she drew cautiously closer, a roaring, raging conflagration from which screaming people fled while flames consumed them.
Charlie recoiled in fear.
At the edge of the cliff overlooking the horror, a man crouched, his back against a boulder the size of a bus.
His face was turned away from her as he looked down into the abyss, but there was no mistaking those broad shoulders or that tawny hair. Limned in orange, his big body was no more than a dark shape against the glow, but she would know him anywhere.
“Michael!”
This time, as she flew toward him, she did cry his name aloud.
He looked sharply around, surged to his feet, leaped toward her.
“Charlie!”
She threw herself against him, and he caught her. His face was all sharp planes and angles, and his eyes were as black and fathomless as hell’s deepest pit. For a moment the intensity of emotion she felt at having found him swamped everything else. He hugged her tight, and she wrapped her arms around him and clung to him like he was the only hope of salvation she had left.
“Jesus Christ.” The stark fear in his voice penetrated a split second before she heard the growl. It was a low, guttural, threatening sound that had to have come from something huge, and it was close behind her. She looked up at Michael: what she saw in his face made her blood run cold. Whatever could make him look like that, she didn’t want to see.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Michael whirled with her so that his back was turned to whatever it was. Curling himself protectively around her, he pressed her head to his chest. Tensing, clinging close, silently reciting every prayer she had ever learned in her life, Charlie cowered in his arms.
“Think of somewhere safe, quick,” he told her urgently.
Even as Charlie did, the growl turned into a roar. She felt a rush of air as the creature leaped at them and they passed it while it was in mid-jump.
The mist swirled. She had the sensation of being hurtled forward, and closed her eyes against a rushing wind. She could feel Michael warm and solid against her, and she held on to him for dear life. The very air seemed to writhe, and suck at her skin. Then the cold was gone, along with the smell, and with those things went the clingy dampness of the fog. Entwined together, the two of them tumbled in what felt like a free fall through the infinite blackness of time and space. Clinging to Michael like he was the only solid thing left in the universe, Charlie felt as if she were being crushed; as if she couldn’t breathe. Then, suddenly, everything around them was still. There seemed to be solid ground beneath her bare feet. Carpet, from the texture of it.
Charlie opened her eyes. They were in her hotel room, in the narrow hall between the bathroom and closet, near the spot where he had disappeared. The room was awash in moonlight that spilled inside because the curtains over the big window across the room were open to the night.
Safe. Thank God.
“You okay?” Michael’s voice grated. She looked up at him. Her arms were locked around his waist. His were wrapped tight around her shoulders. His face was harsh. His eyes were still black, blacker even than the night outside the window, but some of the horrible soulless glitter left them as he looked down at her.
Charlie took a deep breath, glad to be able to fill her lungs. “Yes.” Then as he closed his eyes she took another breath and added, “What about you?”
He didn’t answer, and she frowned. He was his usual handsome self, but—not. He seemed bigger than usual, and badder. Savagery radiated from him like rays from the sun. Ruthlessness was there in the set of his jaw, brutality in the curve of his mouth. There was a hardness around his cheekbones and closed eyes.
This is what a man capable of killing looks like,
was the thought that came to her unbidden, and her mind flicked uneasily back to what Tam had said about the Dark Place, to the question of how innocent or guilty of the heinous crimes that had been attributed to him she really believed him to be. She became fully aware of how solid and real he felt in her arms, and faced all the ramifications of what that meant. There was no cosmic shield between them to protect her, no lack of substance on his part to keep her safe.
They were on the same side of the barrier now, and for better or worse she was locked in his arms.
Charlie faced the terrible truth: there was no place else on earth she would rather be.
“Michael.” Her hands unclasped from around his waist to gently stroke his back. Whatever the Dark Place had brought out in him, she chose to attribute to the place, not him. She hoped her touch would remind him that they were away from that horrible place, and safe. Beneath the softness of his shirt, his back felt warm and firm. Her hands slid beneath it: his skin was hot, and faintly damp. She could feel his back heaving beneath her hands. She asked him again: “Are you okay?”
His eyes opened. She was relieved to see that more of the black had retreated now. But there was a hard, predatory glitter in them still that alarmed her as they raked her face.