G.o.d, had she really dreamt that?
She was losing it, she knew that. Completely enmeshed in the life of a man who didn"t exist. Living his stories by day, dreaming of him by night. My G.o.d, she was an acclaimed screenwriter. And yet she didn"t care. She cared about nothing except him, a man who did not-who could not-exist!
Something compelled her to check the French doors that led out onto her balcony before she did anything else. They were locked. From the inside. Of course they were. What had she expected? Sighing, she turned and walked into the bathroom.
She stopped in the doorway, staring in at a tub still full of water. "That"s so odd." More than odd, a voice in her mind warned. It was completely unlike her to leave water in the tub. She was meticulous about this house, had been ever since she had first come to know its one-time owner. To her, this place was Dante"s headstone. His memorial. His marker. She honored it.
Another sign of her looming nervous breakdown, she supposed. And what on earth had possessed her to sleep all day long? h.e.l.l, she shouldn"t complain. As good as she felt, she would be able to make up for lost time long into the night.
Heading back into her bedroom, she decided to get out of the house for a little while. Outside, in the brisk spring air, maybe go for a walk down the beach and into the Norman Rockwell town a mile away. It would do her good. Besides, she couldn"t remember the last time she had felt capable of walking on the beach.
She showered quickly, threw on a pair of jeans and a cozy sweater, dressed her feet in a pair of white ankle socks and lightweight tennis shoes. She only towel dried her hair, then left it loose. And she grabbed a handbag she rarely used, and a jacket, just in case.
Then she trotted down the wide staircase with a sense of antic.i.p.ation she couldn"t explain and didn"t want to. At the bottom, she caught herself, slowed her pace, mentally reminding herself that she would be breathless and panting if she didn"t She wasn"t, though. Her heart wasn"t even pounding hard.
Maybe she was getting better. Maybe the sea air or those herbal supplements she"d been taking were finally kicking in. Maybe...
She walked briskly through the house, out the back door and down across the sloping green lawn toward the cliffs. For a moment she simply stood there, staring out at the horizon. The sun was setting on the other side of the world. If she were on the West Coast, she could watch it go down over the ocean. A huge blazing ball of fire, quenching itself slowly in the cool embrace of the sea. She hadn"t watched the sun set over the Pacific in years. But she could watch it rise over the Atlantic. And tonight she could watch the darkness gradually stealing over the water, changing its color, as the sun set far, far behind her.
She thought about the words that could capture such a sight and describe it. The way the water kept changing, racing, it seemed to stay a shade darker than the sky. The sky went from robin"s egg to lilac, navy to midnight blue. The sea from turquoise to purple to ebony.
The wind picked up as the sun sank lower. Salty and ever cooler, it pushed Morgan teasingly, daring her to push back. She stood there for a long time as the first few stars winked to life in the darkening sky. Sighing in appreciation, she inhaled the night air. It tasted good. She wasn"t ready to go in just yet. Turning, she headed down the path along the edge of the cliffs to where it rolled downward to the sh.o.r.e at a gentler angle. When she reached the level of the sh.o.r.e, she followed the stony, sandy sh.o.r.eline southward toward town.
Easton was small. Picturesque, but not enough so that it had become a tourist trap-not yet, at least. The sidewalks tended to roll up early. Morgan veered away from the beach onto the town"s main road, just north of the downtown area. She took the sidewalk and walked along, looking in the shop windows, most of which were already closed.
A crowd drew her attention, and she glanced ahead, saw the line forming outside the movie theater, its small, lighted marquee above their heads. The theater was small, two screens, a couple of hundred seats. No surround-sound or giant screen. It was closed until showtime, and the doors opened a half hour before each show and not a minute sooner.
Glancing up at the scrolling marquee, Morgan couldn"t help but smile. Her latest film was showing, and underneath the t.i.tle the colored lights spelled out a message that scrolled past repeatedly. "Easton"s own Morgan De Silva has earned a Best Screenplay nomination! See the film tonight!"
She blinked happily. Gee, it seemed she was something of a celebrity around town. Odd that no one had been out to the house to bother her. Of course, she kept a very low profile, rarely ventured out, had an unlisted phone number and a whole lot of electronic security. Maybe people just respected each other"s privacy out here?
There had to be more to it than that. Part of her knew what, but most of her refused to acknowledge what that part of her knew. It was silly to believe that people avoided going anywhere near her house because it still emanated the predatory energy of the man who had once inhabited it.
She still carried her jacket. Now she put it on, tugging up its lightweight hood and tucking her long hair inside it. She dug into her purse for the case that held her designer sungla.s.ses and slipped them on, as well. Then she moved ahead and took her spot at the end of the line.
She felt a shiver go up her spine, as if a cold breath had just whispered across her nape, and she turned fast. But no one stood behind her. There was someone standing on the sidewalk, though, several yards away, in the direction from which she had come. A man. He stood in the shadows, all the way at the end of the block, on the corner. And the moment she looked his way, he slipped around the corner and out of sight.
His stance... his silhouette, nothing but a dark shape in the night. And yet she thought... No. She was letting her imagination run away with her again.
"Miss?"
She turned, realized it was her turn to step up to the ticket window. "Sorry. One please, for Twilight Hunger." She slid a ten across the counter, waited for the change, which was a crisp clean five with her ticket on top. She"d been out so few times since coming here mat the low ticket prices still surprised her. She tucked the five in her jeans pocket and held on to the ticket as she moved inside.
She got a seat in the back and sat quietly while the previews began to roll.
Morgan had thought she was the last one in, but the doors opened a few minutes into the previews, and someone else entered. Again that chill danced over her spine, and Morgan turned to look his way.
He was already making his way to the opposite side of the theater, but, like her, he took a seat in the back row. He wore a long coat with its collar turned up around his face, and he, too, had dark gla.s.ses.
It was foolish to think of Dante when she saw the stranger. It was just some other lonely soul who preferred to keep his ident.i.ty to himself. Dante didn"t exist. The Dante of those journals, the one who haunted her mind, had never existed. Only a slightly deranged man with a wild imagination and an excellent way with words. The Dante whose life was about to unfold on the screen at the far end of the room was a fictional character. A figment of his creator"s imagination, enhanced, perhaps, by Morgan"s own. But he wasn"t real. And she had to get that through her head. He was not real.
Just because she"d been having vivid, visceral dreams about him...
And just because she had hallucinated those marks on her neck that night...
They were there! her mind insisted. I checked in the bedroom mirror, and they were there.
But gone without a trace in the morning, she reminded herself. And as vivid as her dreams had been lately, how could she be so sure that seeing those marks hadn"t been just another part of one of them? "Dante isn"t real," she whispered to herself. "And he most certainly isn"t sitting in this dark theater, watching me watch this film."
Why, then, did she feel herself sinking more deeply into her seat as his story began to play out for the audience-and as the words across the screen told them all that she, Morgan De Silva, had created it?
Chapter 12.
*Lou got a call before Max could show him what she had on the CD, and then he managed to avoid her for a couple of days-h.e.l.l, she wasn"t even sure why, unless he was doing some research on his own.
Finally she caught him by waiting for him at his apartment after his shift. And then she sat him down and made him look at his computer while she manned the mouse and showed him the vampire files of the organization known as DPI.
When they finished, Lou looked as if Max had popped him between the eyes with a two-by-four. He sat there blinking at the computer screen long after she had closed the file and removed the CD from the drive.
"Do you think if you stare at Bill Gates" brainchild long enough you"ll find your way back to that logical world where everything makes sense?"
He glanced at her vaguely.
"Believe me, it doesn"t work. I spent a couple of hours staring at the Windows logo myself after I saw what was on that CD. It didn"t help a bit."
"It"s nuts. It"s a prank."
"The man I saw outside the fire that night was no prank, Lou. He was real. And he dropped the CD and the ID badge. That place, that so-called research center-it was for research, all right On vampires."
He shook his head.
"I never told you what happened the next morning. The morning after the fire."
"Something happened the next morning?"
"I had an envelope delivered to my front door."
His brows rose now as he studied her. "What was in it?"
"Photos. My friends, Jason Beck, asleep in his bed, and Stormy in her own shower. And there was one of my mother, in the parking garage at work. It had been taken that morning."
"Any note?"
She shook her head. "No, he called instead."
"He called you?"
Maxine nodded. Lou was getting riled now. She had known he would. He was the most laid-back guy on the planet until someone he cared about was threatened or harmed. Then he got d.a.m.ned dangerous. And he did care about her, even if he was too dense to realize it.
"The same guy you saw that night?"
"I think so, yeah. I mean, it had to be him."
"What did he say to you, Maxie? Did he know you took those things?"
She shook her head slowly. "Nope. But he knew I"d seen him there. He made it clear that he could get to my friends and my mother at will, told me to forget I"d ever been there, that if I so much as mentioned seeing him or being in that place the night of the fire, he would find out and make me regret it."
"He said he"d hurt your mother."
She nodded. "And I believed him. I still do. And I kept the tape of that call, Lou. You can hear it for yourself." She was nothing if not prepared. She took the tape out of the envelope, popped it into Lou"s machine and let it play.
Lou muttered a string of cuss words under his breath. When the tape finished, he said, "I need a beer."
"I could use one myself." She left him sitting where he was-on the edge of his camelback couch, elbows braced on his knees-walked into the kitchen and opened his fridge. As she had expected, it was well stocked. All the beer, coldcuts and cheese a man could eat. A few bottles of ketchup, mustard, salsa, hot sauce and horseradish. Horseradish? She took out two long necks, twisted off the caps and carried them back into the living room of the three-room apartment. She handed him a bottle, then flopped onto the couch beside him and took a long drink from her own.
Lou was looking at her oddly as she swallowed.
"What?"
He shrugged. "Never saw you drink before."
"I"ve been legal for years, Lou."
"Sure. I just never think of you that way."
"I hadn"t noticed," she said, loading on as much sarcasm as the words could carry.
He was quiet for a long moment, sipping his beer, studying her sipping hers. Made her feel d.a.m.ned self-conscious. Finally he set the bottle on the coffee table, no doubt adding a fresh new water ring to the collection that had acc.u.mulated there. "You must have been scared half to death, Max."
She shrugged, took another gulp. "It shook me up some, yeah."
"You should have told me about this."
"And what could you have done, Lou? File a report? This guy worked for some offshoot of the CIA, Lou. The C-f.u.c.king-IA."
He sighed. "Even if that"s true-"
"It"s true. And if I"d told you about it, he would have known. If you had filed a report, he would have known, and maybe you"d have been getting threats, too-or worse."
He sat back a little. "You were protecting me." He said it deadpan.
"Not just you. Myself, my mother, Stormy and Jason."
"And me."
She shrugged, looked away, because it was true. "Maybe I just don"t trust cops."
"I know you don"t trust cops. But you trust me."
She smiled just a little. "Yeah, and you trust me, too, don"t you?"
He pursed his lips. "You"re sharp. You don"t lie, and you"re d.a.m.n tough to lie to. What"s not to trust?"
"You trust me," she insisted. "So trust me on this. There"s not a pa.s.sably sane person in the entire civilized world who believes vampires exist. But if they don"t, then why does the government have volumes of research on them? Why does it know them by name and have life histories on so many of them? This is real, Lou. They exist."
He shook his head. "I can"t wrap my brain around that one, Maxie."
"You will. h.e.l.l, it"s taken me the better part of five years. Unfortunately, you don"t have that kind of time."
He glanced at her, and she knew he was wishing she wouldn"t finish the thought, but she had to.
"Lydia Jordan"s friend was killed by one of them, Lou. There"s no getting around that."
He shook his head slowly. "She was more than a friend. And you can"t tell Lydia about any of this, regardless."
"Why not? What"s the point in keeping this secret?"
"I don"t know what the point is, but there has to be one, or the government wouldn"t have gone to so much trouble to do it!"
She widened her eyes and bobbed her head at him.
"h.e.l.l, Max... just let me think, okay?"
"Fine." She polished off her beer, leaned back on the couch and absently reached for the newspaper strewn on the coffee table, picking it up, leafing through the sections. She picked out the magazine section, which she always read first. She flipped it open, paused and shook her head. "Speak of the devil."
"What?"
Sending Lou a lopsided smile, she held up the page so he could see the article"s t.i.tle. "Vampire Thriller Garners Coveted Nomination."
He rolled his eyes, shook his head. "Figures."
She licked her lips as she began to skim the article about the film and the reclusive screenwriter, until she got to the short synopsis of the story, and there she paused. "Uh... Lou?"
"I"m still thinkin"."
"Yeah, well, think about this. Wasn"t one of the names on that CD-ROM "Dante"?"
He glanced at her sharply. "I think so. Why?"
She licked her lips. "Maybe we"d better take another look at the file on that one. And, uh-then we ought to think about going out. Maybe even catching a movie."
In the theater, the story, a prequel to the earlier two films, unfolded on the silver screen. A young man, a Gypsy, lay on the ground. The makeshift bandage was torn and b.l.o.o.d.y. But there was no longer any pain, and his strength was returning. More than returning, it surged in him, singing in his veins like a thousand violins. He tore the bandage off, balled it up and threw it to the ground beside the rest of what had been his shirt. He stared at his Aunt Sarafina. Her black eyes gleamed in the night, though there was no light for them to reflect. And he saw more now than he had seen before, as if he were seeing her through new eyes now. How he"d ever missed something so obvious before, he couldn"t imagine.