He only hoped that words could breach it. That he could find the words, words strong enough to substitute for the magic in her blood. Words strong enough to frame a door and open it and allow him to step through. Through to that fire-haired temptress who owned his heart.
"Hair of fire and temper matching,
"Passion and clear eyes well wed.
"Witch blood drawing ever onward,
"Past obsidian armored head."
Shivers ran down his spine, as if he stared into that great yellow eye again. And he would, if he formed that door and passed through it. The other dragon waited, and hated, and felt no shackles around its legs.
The wind gusted sleet into his face, stinging cold. He looked up from the dirt and dangerous grass, to find clouds massing and dark on the horizon. Maine spring.
Rain drove through the sleet, and fat wet snowflakes, a sudden squall as mixed up as his brain. Or schizo weather, as Maureen would say. Ask the expert. Another reason to give up, turn tail and run back to the apartment.
He was an expert at running away. He even ran away from his own poems.
"From the terror deep and searing,
"Trembling, forcing strength to turn,
"Came again the desperate poet,
"Found his bow amidst the fern."
Did he have the guts even to work though that in words? He wiped the sweat off his palms, heartbeat racing. The crushed green bitterness of bracken filled his nose for an instant, and then cold rain washed him back into reality. Fools died in this kind of weather, thinking spring or summer came on the calendar.
No hat, no gloves, spring jacket. He'd better turn back. His fingertips tingled already, and icy trickles dripped down his nose and the back of his neck. Only a fool would keep on walking.
Only a fool or a desperate man. Desperation killed the dragon, not that fool poet -- desperation and the vision of Jo somewhere on the other side of all those teeth and claws.
And Jo waited somewhere on the other side of this spring storm, somewhere on the other side of Carlysle Woods. He had to go on. He hunched his shoulders and blinked rain out of his eyes and walked forward instead of back.
And Carlysle Woods rose in front of him, the muddy parking lot and overflowing trashcans and graffiti-carved trail signs dangling sideways off their posts, rattling in the wind. An old man, fat and bald and sallow, sat in a beat-up Chevy with the radio thumping away as loud as any teenager's boom box. Must be deaf.
Snowbanks trailed off into slush and glacial moraines of stained foam coffee cups and fast food wrappers. He skirted puddles that aspired to the status of ponds, sorting through three trailheads in his mind. Dog turds graced the yellow snow by all of them. This was Maureen's sacred grove?
The right-hand trail felt right. He climbed a rain-hardened snowbank and followed tracks between two birches and the car radio faded behind him, so fast the old man must have turned it down out of politeness. David held Maureen's map in his head, tracing the labyrinth of trails with a mental fingertip. Someone had laid out the system to give the illusion of a much larger park, with twists and turns that stretched one mile into five or six while still keeping distance between the loops. You'd think you were alone even if a hundred other people walked the path.
Trees arched overhead, breaking the wind, and the rain switched back to snowflakes as big as cotton balls. His ears and fingers warmed again, sheltered now. If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes.
Now the place looked like a cathedral in living stone, gray columns of tree trunks rising up to an interlacing roof of branches that filtered the falling snow into grace. His feet crunched on the packed melting drifts, and chickadees flitted and chattered from branch to branch in case he stirred up something interesting. Tension leaked out of his shoulders. Quiet and calm wrapped around him, and he understood what Maureen had found here. It seemed . . . uncanny . . . so close to downtown.
{Come.}
He froze in his tracks, fists clenched so hard he could feel his fingernails biting into his palms. He remembered that voice whispering in the back of his head. There'd been an oak . . . an oak and a fox, deep in the dreams when Jo had joined him in the forest's weave, an oak and a fox had fought on Maureen's side to free him from the binding.
{My roots drink the waters of many worlds.}
David shivered. Why'd he get involved with this family of psychos? Jo had told him some about her dad, some about her mom. A lot more about Maureen. The police sergeant had told him what had happened at the nursing home, added his conclusions on what led up to it. Cops had to learn a lot about damaged families and abused children, know how they hid and lied for safety's sake, lied even to those who might protect them. From that angle the pieces fitted better, assembling a jig-saw puzzle straight out of hell. Now that officer had seemed inclined to cut Maureen and Jo some slack. Sympathetic.
Jo had hidden it better than Maureen, built a picture of strength and freedom that she showed the world, but she was just as scarred as her sister.
Just as dangerous.
He stood in the snow, shaking. Jo had told the police that she killed her father. They didn't believe her. Wrote the confession off as psychiatric trauma. Didn't fit the facts they saw.
David believed.
He'd been afraid of Brian, when they first met. Brian was a Doberman, trained and lethal, a weapon sculpted out of flesh and guided by calculation. Totally controlled. But Maureen and Jo were something else entirely, avalanche slopes overloaded and ready to explode
