Seduction: A Novel of Suspense (4 page)

Jac wondered if there was more to Malachai’s comment. The tone he’d used in describing Davenport was strangely sympathetic for someone who might have been a killer.

The trees had thinned. Walking through areas of grass and thick
shrubbery, they passed an earth mound with a small stone hut built into the risers—only its entrance exposed. It was another typically Celtic structure from the same period. She itched to stop and examine it and asked Malachai if they could.

“On the way back,” he said.

“This place is a treasure trove. How come I’ve never read about it? How have you kept it a secret for so long?”

“With great effort. Especially because Trevor Talmadge’s death was quite newsworthy. There’s nothing like a few skeletons dangling off the family tree to keep historians nosing around. We’ve had to work diligently to keep this sanctuary private.”

“Not to mention the noise you make investigating reincarnation. Being in the news for cutting-edge scientific inquiry into past-life regression therapy techniques isn’t the best way to keep a low profile,” Jac joked.

“Hardly.” Malachai laughed. “But we’ve managed nonetheless. There was a bit of attention about thirty years ago when a local Native American tribe attempted to claim the land. But since there was no evidence the ruins were built by their forefathers, their fatuous claims were quickly dismissed.”

“No. Even if Indians found this place and used it, they didn’t build it,” Jac said.

Malachai gave her an approving glance. They’d reached an incline and he led the way, climbing a staircase of rough-hewn rocks. Despite his hip’s giving him a hard time, he didn’t falter.

Above them the storm clouds intensified. The sky darkened. Jac looked up just as the first few droplets fell.

“You don’t melt, do you?” Malachai asked, smiling.

She always had thought his smile was odd. His mouth moved the right way, but the sentiment somehow eluded his eyes.

“Not that I know.” She smiled back.

“Then there’s no reason to be afraid of a little rain, right?”

No, Jac wasn’t afraid of rain. Or of storms. And Malachai knew it. Just as he knew she panicked at edges. The rare phobia had first cropped up when she was a child. She and Robbie had been playing
hide-and-seek and she’d gone out on the roof looking for him. The many chimneys and eaves were excellent hiding places. As she crawled around, looking for him, she heard voices. Walked to the edge. Looked down. Her parents were below, standing in the street, arguing. Their altercation was especially nasty and loud. She was so absorbed in their insults and threats she didn’t hear Robbie coming up behind her. He said her name, startling her. She turned too fast. Her left foot slid over the edge. She was falling. Robbie grabbed her, held on, and pulled her up across the tiles. Scratching her as he dragged her, but saving her from what would have surely been broken bones or worse.

In her therapy with Malachai, they’d explored the metaphor of her almost falling off that roof and into the violent argument. When talking about it hadn’t cured her, Malachai had worked on the phobia in a series of hypnosis sessions. When that didn’t work either, he’d suggested her fear was a holdover from a past-life tragedy.

As she did with every attempt he’d made since those early days at Blixer Rath, to connect her present issues to a past life, she’d rejected the idea.

“If it gets too nasty we can always take refuge in the stone shelters up ahead,” Malachai reassured her. “I wanted to show them to you anyway. During the summer solstice the sun enters a pinhole in the east wall, sending a light beam onto the floor and illuminating a series of stones incised with runes. No one has yet been able to translate the symbols.”

“Can I take a fast peek?”

He nodded. Jac walked closer and began to inspect the hut. Dropping to her knees she ran her finger over the carved runes.

“I recognize some of these designs,” she said.

“You do?”

“Look at this one.” She pointed. “To me he looks like Dagda, the chief father god in Celtic mythology. He had a harp made out of oak that he played to keep the seasons in order. Don’t you think this could be a carving of that harp?”

Malachai stared. “You know, you might be right. We can come
back this way again. We should go now. I want to show you the rest before the rain comes,” he said.

“I can’t believe the huts aren’t the main attraction,” she said.

He chuckled.

As they continued on, she asked who’d dated the sites. She wasn’t impressed that whoever he’d brought in hadn’t recognized the harp symbol.

“It’s been a delicate dance—wanting information but fearful someone would become too excited by what we’ve found and reveal our secrets and location. Generous grants to the archaeologist’s and historian’s personal research funds have proved a satisfactory bribe in every case. There’s not a trace of what we’ve found in a single book or anywhere on the internet. But at the same time there have been experts I haven’t been able to bring in.”

Up ahead was an allée of gracious giant oaks. Just past it, in the center of a clearing, Jac glimpsed a monolithic rock. Even in the darkened afternoon it shone silver. What was making it glow like that? Mica chips?

When they were within fifteen yards, Malachai held her back.

“Wait. Before you get any closer, tell me, how do you feel?”

“Great. Why?”

“I want you to focus for a moment. Become aware of your psychological and physiological state.”

“But why?”

He shook his head. “All in time. Just do it, please?”

She nodded. Closed her eyes. Got her emotional and physical bearings. Then she nodded at him. “Okay.”

Still holding her arm, he led her forward. “Several of the experts I’ve brought here concur these structures were built at least four thousand years ago. One highly respected member of the esoteric movement actually thinks the area was once an intergalactic portal. That people took off and landed here.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you? Reincarnation is one thing, but extraterrestrial activity?”

“Extraterrestrial activity . . . a Celtic monument . . . whatever it
might be, given your search for a new myth to base a season on, I thought this might tempt you.”

Malachai was referring to
Mythfinders,
Jac’s television show and also the title of the book she wrote on the same subject. “That’s amazingly generous,” she said. “Especially because I thought you wanted to keep this place secret.”

“I do, but surely you can film here without giving the location away to the public.”

Jac was thrilled by what he was saying. If there were enough ruins here, this forest might be the end of the long tunnel she’d been traveling since the early summer, looking for her next mythic mystery to feature on her show. Before she could start suggesting myths that might have some connection to a place like this, he started talking about the gigantic menhir just yards way.

Jac had never seen one this large outside Western Europe.

“I believe this stone”—Malachai gestured—“this monument, is the heart of the entire ancient complex. We can examine it more closely if you like.”

There was something curious in his voice. Had they been anywhere else, had she not been so intrigued by the ruin, she might have questioned him about what he wasn’t saying. But what she was looking at was too enticing.

In a clearing was a giant boulder. Standing over eleven feet tall, the rock was at least sixteen feet around. She took a few steps closer. Weathered by the centuries, its surface was smooth and incised with runes. Craning her neck, she thought she recognized Dagda’s harp again. And perhaps his bottomless cauldron of bounty.

On the ground, a two-foot-wide moat of pebbles encircled the plinth, cutting it off from the grassy mound.

It started to drizzle steadily. Jac looked away from the rock, at Malachai. “Can we wait a few minutes before we head back? Can I just go up to it, touch it?”

He nodded.

Jac crossed the gravel stream, walked up to the monument and reached out.

Its surface was warmer than the air. She sniffed and searched the encyclopedia of scents in her memory. This was how she had always imagined the moon to smell. Gunpowder, earth and salt mixed with a harsh but beautiful metallic note.

She turned to ask Malachai, who’d stayed on the other side of the moat, what else his experts had said about the stone, when she was overcome by a profound and sudden wave of sadness. More than anything, Jac wanted to weep.

Rooted to the spot, as the rain fell on her, she waited for the feeling to pass. But it only intensified.

“Jac?” Malachai’s voice was low and caring. “Are you all right?”

She couldn’t find her voice, but she nodded.

“Jac? Are you really all right?”

“No, not really.” Her voice sounded shaky in her own ears.

“What is it?”

She didn’t know what to say. All her efforts at being present had failed at once. How to explain how alone she suddenly felt? As if her mother, who had been dead for seventeen years, had just died. As if she had this moment learned of her father’s Alzheimer’s. Of her grandparents’ passing. As if today, not eight weeks ago, she’d said good-bye to Griffin North in Paris.

All the grief was pressing down, forcing her to feel the magnitude of all the deaths, all the defeats, and of the fresh loss of the lover she’d so desperately wanted to hold on to. Jac felt as if she’d walked into a giant silken web woven of sadness and was now trapped in its threads.

“What’s happening to me, Malachai?” she whispered. “This has nothing to do with any myth I’ve ever heard of.”

“Scientists have gotten extreme electromagnetic readings here that they believe have an effect on the emotional center in the brain. I prefer what those who are more evolved suggest: we’re in a sacred vortex. The earth’s energy is being channeled and collected here for a purpose we’ve long since lost the ability to recognize. You are being affected by that energy.”

Jac wanted to escape. Cross the gully of gravel and step back over to the mossy bank where Malachai was, clearly, safely out of the range
of the electromagnetic field. But she couldn’t and stood rooted to the spot as if she were, like the magnificent trees surrounding her, part of this landscape now.

“Do you feel it too?” she asked Malachai.

He shook his head. A look of frustration mixed with misery crossed his face. She’d seen the same expression when she’d asked him if he had past-life memories and he’d admitted that he never had. No matter what he tried, from meditation to hypnosis to experimenting with drugs, the man who spent his life studying regressions had never been able to access one of his own precognitive memories.

Suddenly a clap of thunder cracked. A downpour followed immediately. It happened so quickly, neither Jac nor Malachai was able to run for cover. Almost instantly, they were soaked.

This wasn’t a kind rain but an angry outburst. A fury unleashed. In less than a minute the moat around the rock filled and Jac was encircled. Logically she knew the gully couldn’t be deep at all and that she could jump across it without any problem. Even step in it if she had to. But the pervasive sadness restrained her. Pinned her to the stone and prevented her from moving.

One after another, three flashes of lightning lit up the dark sky. Each was followed by a burst of thunder. Each outburst louder than the last. This was the sound ancients ascribed to Tarnis, the Celtic god of thunder.

Malachai was shouting too, but she couldn’t make out his words over the storm’s fury. From his gestures, she knew he was telling her to move, to come to him.

She wanted to, desperately, but she just couldn’t.

The next round of thunder was deafening. And then a wild bolt of lightning illuminated the scene in its electric radiance. For a moment Malachai seemed to glow. A tree limb fell nearby. Jac smelled the bitter, burned wood.

Malachai was gesticulating wildly and yelling. She made out the words—
take cover—
but she still couldn’t move. Wasn’t even sure she wanted to. All the tears she had held back for so long were somehow
being released by the sky. She needed to honor them. To let them pour down and wash her clean so she could finally be present.

“Jac!” Malachai yelled just as thunder and lightning hit almost simultaneously.

Time slowed. The rock’s scent, even stronger in the rain, overpowered her. Jac felt suspended between now and the next instant. Sensed it might never come. Thought everything might end in the brilliant burst of illumination. She was aware of exactly what was happening and was surprised at just how acute her senses were. Astonished by the number of separate thoughts she could cram into so few seconds.

Research she’d once done on Zeus flashed in her mind like lightning. She remembered excruciating details. At any given moment 1,800 thunderstorms are playing havoc somewhere on the planet. Lightning strikes 80 to 100 times a second; 40 million strikes a year.

The amount of electricity discharged, like so many other things in nature, was a mystery still to scientists. But not to shamans. Not to mystics and wizards. Not in myths. In those last crazy seconds, Jac was aware that a woman standing in a clearing in a storm was an ideal target for the massive electrical discharges filling the sky, searching for places to touch down. A woman standing out in a clearing was the perfect vessel for the lightning’s ire. For its one fiery kiss.

Jac was unsure of where she was, only sure that she was in pain. A cramp tightened her stomach. Then was gone. And with its exit she fully awoke and realized she was in Malachai’s guest room.

As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw him, sitting about ten feet away from her. Sprawled in a large armchair by the bed, he was asleep, his book splayed across his chest where it must have fallen.

She remembered Malachai saying he was going to stay with her and make sure she fell asleep. But why? What was wrong? She tried to remember what came before he’d said that.

They’d been walking through the woods, she’d seen the giant stone—

Another cramp gripped her. Uncomfortable, she shifted, tried to find a better position and felt the warm stickiness between her legs.