cheeks; his hair tumbled over his shoulders in dark, lustrous curls; and the wisps of hair on his cheeks made him look like a youth, not a man capable of inhuman cruelties.
My head ached from the narcotic I’d breathed all night. If I felt this bad, I figured Adair had to be nearly comatose. I picked up his hand and let it fall, dead weight. He didn’t so much as grunt or shift under the covers.
Then a perverse thought came to me. I recalled the tiny silver vial that held the elixir of life, the drop of demonic magic that had changed me forever.
With the potion, I’d have the ability to bind Jonathan to me, as I was bound to Adair. The thought flashed through my mind, but my stomach went weak. I could never use it-I could never transform someone into what I was now.
I wanted revenge for what he’d done to me in the basement. I resented being sent on this errand, being forced to condemn my beloved to an eternity with this monster. More than anything I wanted to get back at Adair.
I prefer to think that I was possessed by a power far stronger than my reason, for I inched cautiously out of bed, dropping my bare feet silently to the floor. As I slipped on one of Adair’s banyans, I surveyed the room: where would he hide the vial? I’d seen it only that day, never before or since.
I went to the dressing room. Was it on the tray that held the sewing needles, or in the jewelry case, tucked among the rings and stickpins? Perhaps in the toe of a seldom worn slipper? I was on my knees, feeling my way through a row of his shoes, before I realized Adair would never store such a valuable object where his valet might find it and pocket it. He would either keep it on him at all times-and I’d seen him stark naked on many occasions, with no sign of the vial-or he would secret it away where no one would think to look for it. Where no one would dare look for it.
Candle in hand, I scurried out of the room and took the servants’ stairs to the cellar, through the dank subterranean halls that smelled of old standing water, trailing a hand along the thick stone walls. Slowing as I approached the room where no one went and that everyone feared, I pushed back the scarred door and stepped onto the pounded dirt floor where I had recently lain, bleeding.
Holding my breath, I tiptoed to the lone trunk on the other side of the room and lifted the lid. Inside was the hated thing, the nightmarish harness, straps stiff with my sweat, still formed in the shape of my body. I almost dropped the lid at the sight of it, but held my fright in check when I noticed a small bundle in a corner of the trunk. I reached in and lifted out a man’s handkerchief, folded into a tiny pillow.
I peeled back a corner of the handkerchief to see… the vial. In the light of the candle, the silver vial glimmered like an ornament on a Christmas tree, sparkling with the same kind of faintly tarnished luster. The light seemed to pulse ominously, a warning of some kind. But I’d come this far and was not about to turn back now. The vial was mine. I balled my fist around it, pressed it to my heart, and stole out of the dungeon.
THIRTY-ONE
Outside the window of the motel room, the sky has gone blue-black, the color of ink from a ballpoint pen. They’d left the blind up as they tumbled into bed together, and now that the rush to discover each other’s bodies is over, Lanny and Luke lie side by side, gazing out the window at the northern stars. He runs his fingers down her bare arm, marveling at the luminosity of her skin, how perfect it is, cream with a spattering of faint gold freckles. Her body is a series of smooth, low-rising curves. He wants to skim his hands over her again and again, as if by doing this he can carry off a part of her for himself. He wonders if the magic in her has made her more beautiful, enhanced her natural appearance.
He can’t believe his good fortune in having gone to bed with her. He feels faintly like a dirty old man, as he hasn’t held a woman this firm since long before he was married. Not since he was in his twenties, but he doesn’t remember the sex being as good, perhaps because he and his partners were too self-conscious. He can imagine what his ex-wife or friends would say if they saw Lanny; they would think he was in the clutches of an epic midlife crisis, helping a barely legal woman evade the police in exchange for sex.
She looks him over with a smile on her beautiful face, and he wonders what she can possibly find pleasing about him. He’s always thought of himself as an ordinary man: average height, more thin than fat but hardly in any shape worthy of admiration; shaggy, wavy hair on the border between sandy brown and blond. His patients have implied that he’s hippieish, like some of the backpackers who descend on St. Andrew in the summer, but Luke thinks they’ve gotten this impression because he tends toward disarray when there’s no one around to tidy him up. What could a woman like her see in a man like him? he wonders.
Before he can ask, however, there’s a distraction at the window, a rippling of shadows outside the glass that indicates movement on the walkway. Luke just has time to sit up before banging erupts on the other side of the door and a deep male voice barks, “Open up! This is the police.”
Luke holds his breath, unable to think, to react, to
Two police officers fill the open doorway, shining a flashlight into Luke’s face. “We got a call about a man having sex with a minor… can you turn on a light, sir?” one of the officers asks, sounding exasperated, as though there is nothing he’d like better than to drive Luke into the wall, a police baton jammed against his throat. Both officers stare at Luke’s bare chest and the blanket cinched around his hips. Luke snaps on the closest switch, lighting up the room.
“Where’s the girl who registered for the room?”
“What girl?” Luke manages to say, though his throat is dry as desert sand. “There must be a mistake. This is my room.”
“So
Luke nods.
“I don’t think so. The desk clerk said there’s only one room rented out on this side of the building. To a girl. She told the clerk the room was for her and her father.” The police officers crowd the door. “A housekeeper said she heard what sounded like people having sex in here, and since the clerk knew the room was occupied by a father and daughter…”
Panic washes over Luke as he tries to recover from his lie. “Oh, yeah, that’s what I mean. The girl, we’re together, that’s why I said this is my room… but she’s not my daughter. I don’t know why she would have told anyone that.”
“Right.” They look unconvinced. “Do you mind if we come in and look around? We’d like to talk to the girl-is she here?”
Luke freezes, listening-he doesn’t hear anything, which makes him think she’s slipped out. In the police officers’ eyes, Luke sees barely controlled indignation; they would probably like nothing better than to knock him to the ground and kick the shit out of him for all the abused daughters they have seen in their careers. Luke is just about to stammer an excuse when he notices that the policemen are looking at something behind him. He turns, twisting the cheap peach blanket around his legs.
Lanny stands with the sheet still wrapped around her naked body, drinking from a battered red plastic glass, a look of surprise and feigned embarrassment in her eyes. “Oh! I thought I heard someone at the door. Good evening, Officers. Is something wrong?”
