She drew a hard breath.
'Softly, Mary. Gently! It is all right. You were remembering some unpleasant things.'
'I was . . . I was right there . . .'
'No, you were not there tonight. I had started to drive in the direction of the cabin, the place where the explosion happened. But it proved unnecessary to take you there. Everything worked, you were able to tell me all en route. So we are now heading back toward Phoenix—that pleasant glow in the sky ahead is from the city's lights. We shall be there in a couple of hours.'
A couple of hours. She yearned for the lovely city. She felt weak inside, as though recovering from an illness. Loneliness and night and disorientation overcame her. She had never felt so far from home in all her life. She had never understood before how runaways must really feel.
Weakness turned her back toward childhood. She was a bad girl, and she wept now, for all the sins of her past life. For infatuation and sex in Idaho. For broken promises. For living with Robby, endangering his immortal soul. Was it really his idea or hers that they should not get married?
Thorn glanced at her again. 'Ah. You are experiencing a common reaction to the experience you have just been through. It will pass. Presently you will feel much better.'
'What experience have I been through? What have you done to me?' The words came out in a snuffle.
'What have I done? Very little. Ah, here we are. I must obtain some petrol.'
In half a minute the deep invisibility of the night gave forth a small, almost abandoned looking gas station into the headlights. Thorn could hardly have seen the place before the headlights picked it out; he must, thought Mary, vaguely be familiar with this road. Anyway, the place was certainly closed, utterly dark and still.
Thorn pulled in, though, and up to the gas pumps, and turned off his engine as confidently as if he had seen some of those television-commercial attendants cartwheeling out to give him service. When the headlights went out, Mary saw that a thick crescent of desert moon had risen, to make the setting a ghostly stage.
'I shall be only a moment,' Thorn said from just outside the vehicle, and slammed the door carelessly behind him.
Mary was not going to offer any comments on the practicality of trying to get gas here tonight; not now, and not to Thorn. With great relief, though, she found some of her mental strength returning. All right, she had done some things in her life that were wrong, but nothing all that terrible. Even when she closed her eyes again, Thorn's face seemed to hang before them. It wasn't his fault that she felt lousy. He understood. And he didn't want her to cry, to suffer.
For some reason, what Thorn wanted had suddenly become important to her. Even more important than— than—was it really love that she knew with Robby, after all?
She opened her eyes again, just in time to see her companion vanish beside the silent station. Yes, vanish was the right word, though the building was near, and the moonlight fairly bright, it seemed that he had just disappeared.
Mary waited quietly, wondering if the owner perhaps lives somewhere in back, and had heard the car door slam—
And Thorn was back again, even as he had gone, standing now beside the gas pumps with keys jingling in his hand. He was rattling them impatiently against a pump, with a muttering of what sounded like Latin oaths.
Mary said, through her partially rolled-down window: 'You hypnotized me, didn't you? We were at the house . . .'
'Your property that we went to retrieve is all in the rear seat. This damnable device will not . . . ah.'
Very faintly, there came the sound of small motors, electricity.
Mary turned to look into the rear seat of the Blazer even as the dim figure outside began to pump gas into its tank. There were here familiar string-tied boxes, one of them unopened since Chicago. There was the small, battered spare suitcase that she had all but forgotten. Things she evidently didn't really need. All her essential stuff was now at Robby's house.
'Thank you,' she called out softly, turning back to the window.
'It is I who should thank you. You have been of considerable help.'
'How?'
He didn't answer. The desert here was high enough so that the night had grown quite cool. Mary breathed deeply of its coolness, meanwhile listening to a distant owl. Her thoughts were ready to go with the bird, fly through the night. Sadness was rapidly being replaced by a fierce though quiet elation.
When Thorn had finished filling the tank, he came like a conscientious attendant to treat the windshield with a squeegee no one had bothered to lock away. That task complete, he vanished again in the direction of the building. This time Mary made a more intense effort to watch closely. But this time too Thorn simply disappeared.
Then abruptly he was standing at the driver's door again, opening it to get in. I don't believe this, Mary thought, feeling delighted, as by some stage magician's cleverness.
'You had to go back in to return the keys,' she remarked cheerfully.
'And to leave payment.' His voice seemed to chide her gently for having omitted anything so important. 'Not, of course, at the outrageous rates listed on these signs.'
'Oh, of course not.' Was this really her, so eager to be agreeable?
He was now seated beside her, with the door closed. Looking at her. But for the moment he made no move to start the engine.
Something in the way he looked at her made Mary sigh faintly and lean back in her seat. 'You were right,' she said. 'It was hard to go through that, but now somehow I feel sure those dreams aren't going to bother me any more.'
'I trust that they will not.'
The moonlight was silver and strange. Mary had the feeling that she had never really looked at moonlight closely before.
Again she was the one to break the silence. 'I have the feeling,'' she announced, 'that when you kiss me I'm going to enjoy it very much.'
One of his eyebrows went up. 'Then I must seem churlish indeed to delay. But I would like to find a better place than this.'
Thorn turned the key in the ignition. He was immune to personal fear, but not to horror. And he supped full on horror in the next moment, when he heard the strange reaction, and sensed the hellish fire of the bomb blast, blowing backward and upward at him from the engine.
Our wedding night, or wedding morning rather, was spent at Careggi, the beautiful Medici villa which lay only a few miles outside the walls of Florence. Lorenzo praised that country retreat to me extravagantly as we rode out through the silently opened city gates before dawn, and told me that much of his childhood had been spent there. I was on my own stallion, Helen at my side on a docile young white palfrey that Lorenzo had begged her to accept as his own wedding gift.
We reached Careggi just as the sun brightened the Tuscan countryside. Piero, gout and all, was waiting for us on the grounds, seated on the rim of one of the great stone fountains near the main house. The head of the Medici family rose to offer us greetings and congratulations, then led us to what would now be called a debriefing session, in the guise of a wedding breakfast at which the men and women of course sat down separately. The questioning was very polite and very smooth, and accompanied with intervals of real celebration; but in the course of an hour my hosts had managed to extract from me more information than I had been aware of carrying regarding the Boccalini and their affairs. When I was finally milked dry and yawning, Piero made flowery apologies for the delay, presented me with a jeweled collar and a warhorse as my own wedding gifts, and released me to join my bride. The sun was fully up by now, the day already growing warm.
