Stone Kissed (16 page)

Cecily had tried to find an orderly to sip off who didn’t smoke, but hospital staff were the worst. She was no longer able to hide her distaste from her latest so-called boyfriend. “Put that damned thing out,” she said to Jeff…Jake? It didn’t matter.

In the three-and-a-half weeks since she drained Carl, she’d become so hungry she could barely focus, which made no sense. She’d survived most of her adult life on three or four full feeds a year. But now, the odd sip from her informant barely controlled the tremor that had become her constant companion. Still, she tried to hold out, to space her feeds. Even she, as smart as she was, wouldn’t be able to hide a dozen bodies a year.

Jimbo stubbed the cigarette into the trunk of the tree that blocked the back corner of the hospital parking lot from prying eyes. It was three in the morning and the end of his shift, which might explain his pallor. But it didn’t explain the loose skin on his cheeks and neck, or the way his once-thick brown hair was falling out in clumps. Joe-Bob was fading fast, and it was her fault.

“Sure. I’m going to quit now, anyway.” Instead of reaching for her as he usually did, he folded his arms against the pale blue fabric of his scrubs.

“How’s Forrest?”

“Better and better. His daughter cheers him up.”

“What’s he saying?”

“He’s sick of the Jell-O. Worried that they’ll have to give him a glass eye.”

“Why?”

“He’s got facial surgery tomorrow. Listen, I got some news. I’m going on medical leave.” He flapped his hands loosely at his own body. “They think this problem I’m having is a bone disorder, but it’s not leukemia.”

Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap. He’d been seeing a doctor.

She was starving, but she didn’t want to drain him, even if it was the only way to guarantee his loyalty and silence. She was pretty sure his dad owned the biker bar out on Route 52, and he almost certainly had brothers and sisters. People in this town bred like cats. Even after their deaths Cecily couldn’t escape from their ghosts, from the threads and fragments of their lives that tied them to others and tangled her in knots.

“I’m sorry, honey. I just…this is my last night on the job, and this thing may take awhile to kick. But I’ll kick it.” He grabbed her hand in both of his, nodding earnestly. She didn’t understand at first, just stared at him as his eyes bored into hers. “Maybe, in a few weeks, when I’m better, I can call you?”

She raised her free hand to her mouth and choked into it, coughing to hide her shock. He was dumping her! Jethro was trying to let her down easy. First that prick Wolverton had detached himself from her, and now, when she was so hungry she couldn’t think straight, this shriveled prune was brushing her off.

She had no one else to watch Forrest for her, and she couldn’t keep sucking on orderlies. It was beneath her dignity. The simplest solution—the one she’d been avoiding out of sentiment, out of caution, out of concern for her little cousin—was to end Forrest, once and for all. The disappearances of two healthy men in less than a month would be noticed. Forrest, on the other hand, was almost dead anyway. The timing was perfect. Divine, even.

She needed to wipe Jay-Jay’s memories of their time together, and then she needed to figure out how to take advantage of this unexpected gift. So she raised a shaking hand to his cheek. “Do I get a kiss goodbye?”

***

Beatrice beamed at Delia as she walked through the door at Blossom’s Folly. Not for the first time in the last few weeks did Delia wish she had a key to the back door—or better yet, the ability to resist the pull of the light from his window.

On the four or five days each week Grant was in town they’d fallen into a routine. He came to Steward House and worked alongside the craftsmen, and often beside her. They talked about the reconstruction and the installation of banisters and beams. She kept her eyes on the walls and floor with admirable self-control.

But as they day grew hotter, so did Delia. He’d brush by her in a hallway and she’d turn toward the rare breeze. He’d look down from the stairwell, his T-shirt wet with sweat, and her eyes would trace the lines of his chest muscles, the sinews of his arms, the tendon in his wrist as his hand flexed on the handle of the hammer.

At the end of each day she raced to her apartment to stand in blessed isolation under her own cold shower, steadfastly ignoring the sounds of Brogan shouting at the TV talk show guests, of Athena bickering with Romana, and of the shepherdesses trying—and failing—to get themselves drunk on the cheap wine Delia never had time to drink any more.

When her fingers went pruney and the unquenchable heat within her settled to a quiet ember, Delia stepped out of the shower, pulled on her least-faded jeans and one of her pretty blouses—the ones she order during her rare sessions with her laptop—and went to visit her father.

The two of them were perfecting the art of meaningless chatter. They discussed how “P.T.” stood for “pain and torture,” or how some starlet had more leg than talent.

This night, just like every night when Grant was in town, Delia sat, chatting and sketching, until she could sit no longer, until the rising tide of anticipation caused her fingers to tremble on the pencil and her voice to quake. She took her leave and went to him.

He opened the door, closing his laptop or putting aside his cell phone. He cooked. She ate. He asked her questions. And because she had too little sleep and too great desire to see the quick flash of his smile, she told him about the shepherdesses’ fascination with QVC, about how Annabel and Isobel had insisted she teach them chess. “How are my statues?” he always asked. She’d told him how Sophie sang the low notes and how Bert’s countertenor could break glass.

But Grant never laughed. Not once. Perhaps if he’d mocked her or questioned her veracity she might have remained strong enough not to fall into him when he pulled her hands, not to twine her legs about him when his palms engulfed about her waist, not to squirm and writhe and scream his name until she lost her voice when he made love to her. If he had been cold or unkind or disparaging, she could have resisted loving him. Instead, he smiled his sun-god smile and said her name as if it were the song of the heavens. She was absolutely lost.

In the wee hours, however, while his arm and thigh wrapped over her, pressing her down into the sheets that smelled of the two of them, the statues woke. Every damned night they sang louder, moved more. As Delia’s feelings for Grant took up an inextricable hold in her heart, the sculptures within her radius of power became more alive. While they were pleased to keep her happy, Delia was, in fact, just another mortal, flitting through their existence. They were not under her control.

Except, they were. Delia could end all of it. She could leave Grant’s bed, leave Steward House and separate herself from the stones. As her love for him withered, the statues would return to what they had been before—chatty, vague, self-centered, still. Maybe, eventually, even hollow.

She could pass for normal again. She could carve herself another quiet life, free of exultation and free of risk. All she had to do was slip away.

She peeled his arm back slowly, expecting to feel the not-quite-limp lack of resistance as Grant, once again, faked sleep. But this time he held firm, his entire body rigid in an instant against her back. Her spine arched into him and her ass rubbed against his belly even as her stomach clenched in alarm.

“Stay tonight.”

“Why?” She clenched her teeth together. She was a hopeless fool.

“You need your sleep. It’s a big day tomorrow.”

He was right. He was being rational, considerate even.

She tapped her fist against his forearm. “Let me go.”

And, damn it, he did.

She never told him why she left. Her thousand-and-one tales entertained him because he believed they were fiction. He didn’t want to hear that she left him to drive through Stewardsville with her lights out, collecting Bert from the window at the Apple Tree or shooing Frank back to the hospital because the moon waxed. Delia didn’t know how much longer she could survive the sheer exhaustion of loving Grant and hiding her true heart. But she wouldn’t risk losing their time together by giving him what he didn’t want—either her love, or the truth.

***

Cecily curled up fetal in the dirt and rolled slowly from side to side. She hadn’t killed Jerry, but she had come damned close. He’d passed out in her arms and she ripped her mouth free of his stinky, anemic little drizzle of energy. She slapped him awake and he’d managed to walk back to his car and drive out of the hospital parking lot. He wouldn’t remember they’d ever met, even though both of them had passed each other in the hallways of school as kids. If God were truly kind, he wouldn’t survive his drive up the ridge.

But she’d barely made it to the Steward Estate herself, because the taste of him had done nothing to ease the roaring between her ears or the twisted ache at the base of her spine. She’d burrowed into her hollow, the new one she’d dug to replace the one Grant’s landscapers had filled in.

Her dirt. Her land. But the comfort it brought her was all in her head.

This one was farther back from the house but still in sight of the brick abomination that glowed in the pre-dawn light. In only a few weeks they had finished the flooring, replaced the lath-and-plaster walls with the more modern, less-flammable drywall, plastered and waxed, papered and painted and rebirthed the stack of granite bricks.

Her rocking slowed. It was nice lying here, staring into the fading moon and the swaying black branches as they warmed to green. If she let her mind wander long enough and continued to ignore the hunger, would she dissipate into the soil? Eventually, surely, she would wash down between the grains and clumps of earth into quiet oblivion.

The brakes of the town garbage truck squealed in the distance. The pre-dawn birdsong rose in a riot of noise that woke her out of her starved reverie.

She needed to feed. She wasn’t thinking well. She’d become pessimistic, with these stupid fantasies of oblivion—and that just wasn’t who Cecily Johnson was. She was young and strong and free. She had a good life—parents who loved her and lived far, far away. She had a real estate business with great growth potential. No friends to speak of, but from what she could see, friends were simply people with a license to whine to you. She had some money and an excellent plan to get her hands on her land.

As Cecily sat up, her fingernail snagged on a clump of dirt and peeled back, causing a surprisingly sharp pain. She sucked on it a moment, pressed the nail against her front upper tooth. The tooth gave way slightly and she closed her eyes. No wonder she couldn’t think. She might have trouble covering two kills in one month, but she’d figure something out. She always had before. It was high time to stop dicking around in the dirt.

***

Grant waited for Delia outside her apartment. She locked the door, glanced over to her Civic and then came to his car. Hugging her battered brown handbag into her stomach, she slid into his passenger seat, saying nothing. He was relieved. He’d broken his rule last night and asked her to stay. For his moment of weakness he’d gotten what he deserved.

“I’m staying with you.” He pulled out of the complex drive.

“Why?”

He ignored the question because he didn’t have a reasonable answer. He had no role to play in Forrest’s surgery today and nothing useful to do at the hospital. He had work to do—clients whose life stories he should be listening to over lunch or between acts at the opera. Instead, he’d spent most days with Delia as Steward House came back to life. And she’d spent part of her nights with him.

She was industrious but tranquil, quieter even than he. In the companionable silences across sawhorses or under the sheets at Blossom’s Folly, Grant found himself telling her his stories instead, speaking aloud memories he’d never voiced before. He’d actually confessed his desire to hunt again to Delia. She listened calmly, without judgment.

He knew how to shake her tranquility, to make her face flush and her eyes flash. She always looked away when he asked her to tell him stories from the statues. But she thawed every time, as if she needed someone to hear her fantasies of Renaissance whores and jazz musicians, of parlor maids and the potato famine. Their days flowed by on her river of words, and Steward House was almost finished.

“You don’t have to stay,” he told her. “He won’t even know you’re there.”

“I know, but it’s his face. They’re peeling back the skin to the hairline and trying to open up the eye.”

“Phillips is an excellent plastic surgeon—”

“I know. Lars checked her out.”

He glanced over to gauge her mood, and her smile flickered and faded.

“Eyes on the road, buster.”

She was so pretty, with her large dark green eyes, creamy-pale, freckled skin and her soft dark curls. How had Delia survived in business in the city? She’d avoided the cutthroats like her father and him by keeping her eyes down and staying camouflaged against the wall. Most people didn’t even see her. He’d probably looked past her dozens of times and never known it.

But Delia had looked her fill at the collectors and dealers, the artists and dilettantes, his competitors, and him. He wondered what she’d seen.

“Where is that drawing, by the way?”

It took her a moment. She flushed soft pink. “Back at the apartment.”

“What are you planning to do with it?”

She looked at him blankly, then her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together. “I’m giving it to the
Gazette
. The editor wants a comic strip.”

“You’re brutal.”

Her answering smile was pure and clean, containing no calculation, no request or cost.

The ever-present humming in his veins, the rhythmic, tidal beat of the blood in his ears rose to a roar. She opened the door and stepped into the parking lot. She was backlit by the morning sun as she hefted her bag onto her shoulder. She walked toward Frank, but she stopped after a few steps and turned back. “Grant?” she asked. “Are you coming?”

His blood was pounding and his throat was thick. He could only nod.