Sunshine and the Shadowmaster (2 page)

Mark slowly shifted his glance from the wall to his aunt. “He's home now? In Monterey?”

“Yes. Obviously, when he heard you were missing, he went right back there.”

For that remark, Heather received a sullen look, one that clearly said,
Yeah, right. Go ahead and defend him.
But then Mark did hold out his hand. The phone cord was long enough to stretch to the table, so Heather passed over the receiver.

Mark cradled the phone between his chin and his shoulder and folded his arms over his chest once more. “Yeah.”

Heather suppressed a sad smile. Mark sounded just like his father—only a couple of octaves higher.

“I'm fine,” Mark mumbled. A moment later he insisted crossly, “I
said
I'm okay.” Then he admitted, “I hitched.”

After that, Lucas did all the talking. Mark listened to the voice on the other end of the line, his young face growing more unhappy by the second. Once or twice, Mark tried to speak, but his father ran right over him. Finally the boy muttered, “All right, I will,” and held out the phone to Heather.

Heather took it. “Yes?” The single word was caution personified. Lucas really did make her nervous.

“Put him to bed,” Lucas commanded. “I'll be there in the morning to take him home.” Then the line went dead.

Heather held the phone away from her ear and grimaced at it, thinking that Lucas Drury was running true to form. He never wasted time on being polite when he could bark an order at a person and then hang up on them. She turned and hooked the receiver back in its cradle on the wall. When she faced Mark again he was watching her.

“He's coming to get me,” he said.

“I know.” Heather cast about for something encouraging to say to him. All that came to mind were platitudes. She went ahead and said one. “Things will look better in the morning.”

Mark wasn't buying any platitudes. “No, they won't. Things will never look better. Not until he listens to me. And he won't do that. He won't listen to anybody. He's too busy. He's got too much to do.”

Looking at Mark's glum face then, Heather felt about two inches tall. She knew that she'd let him down. Out of all the places or people he might have run to, he'd chosen her. The message was clear. He'd hoped she might help him. But she hadn't helped him. When it came to the moment of truth, Lucas had run over her as easily as he'd dominated Mark.

“Oh, Mark...” she began, and then didn't know how to continue.

The boy shook his head. “Look, Aunt Heather. It's not your fault. I know that. And I'm tired now, okay? I think I should get ready for bed.”

* * *

Heather put Mark in the small downstairs bedroom off the dining room. It was the same room he'd slept in when he stayed with her over Christmas vacation the previous winter. She gave the boy one of Jason Lee's old T-shirts to sleep in and offered a shower, to which the fastidious Mark readily agreed.

After Mark was through in the bathroom and had been in the bedroom for several minutes, Heather went in to say good-night. She found him already in bed, his dusty jeans and wrinkled shirt laid neatly across a straight-backed chair in the corner, his sneakers lined up nearby, dirt-stained white socks stuck inside them.

“You left the light on,” she said. “You can't sleep with the light on.”

“I knew you'd be in. You always came in to say goodnight when I stayed here before.”

Heather approached the bed and perched on the edge of it. “I'll take your clothes now and put them in the washer before I go to bed.”

He objected almost before she'd finished speaking. “No, never mind about doing that.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” He looked up at the ceiling and then at her once more. “My dad said he'd be here real early. And he'll want to get going. He won't want to wait for my clothes to get dry.”

Heather considered Mark's reasoning, then conceded, “You may be right, but it only takes a half an hour to run the wash cycle. I'll just wait up and switch them to the dryer before I go to bed.”

“Please don't do that, Aunt Heather. Just get some sleep, okay? I made enough trouble for you already tonight.”

“It's no trouble, Mark.”

“It's late. And I know you have to work tomorrow. It won't hurt me to wear dirty clothes. So just go to bed, okay?”

Heather was touched. He really was a very sensitive boy. And he was right. It was late and she was due in at work at six-thirty the next morning.

She agreed, “Fair enough. I'll leave your dirty clothes right where they are.”

He smiled at her then, a wise, sad smile. She smiled back, thinking that his hair looked very black against the pillow. It was still wet from his shower. She wanted to reach out and smooth it a little, in a gesture that would have been a reassurance both to herself and to him. But she didn't do it. Though he seemed resigned to his fate of being collected and returned to Monterey by his father, she sensed he would turn his head away at her touch.

Since she felt he didn't want her to touch him, she tried to reassure him with words. “Your father
does
love you.”

“I know.” It was a reluctant admission.

“He's just...um...” Heather had no idea how to continue. She'd been raised in a family of complex and difficult men. But Lucas Drury was beyond even her experience. When he was seven years old, he'd stabbed his own father with a carving knife. And as a young man, he'd barely escaped doing hard time for assault and battery. Now, he was an international celebrity who wrote the kind of books that keep people from sleeping at night. The newspapers and entertainment magazines called him the Shadowmaster, a name that referred both to the spookiness of his stories and the fact that each one had the word “shadow” in the title.

Heather had read all of those stories. She'd read the first one out of family loyalty, because Jason Lee's brother had written it. But after that, she read them because, even though they often had her sleeping with the light on, they were absolutely impossible to put down.

However, having read all of his books didn't make her an authority on Lucas Drury himself. No, she hadn't the faintest idea what made the man tick. So how in the world was she going to explain him to his ten-year-old son?

Mark came to her rescue with a groan. “Oh, Aunt Heather. You don't have to say anything. Like I said before, it's not your fault, anyway. I know that.”

Heather smiled. She'd come in here to comfort Mark, and ended up with
him
reassuring
her.

Mark added, “It's just something I gotta work out myself, I guess.”

“And I know you will—you and your father together.”

He made a face at that. Lucas was still very much the bad guy in Mark's mind.

Heather dared to point out gently, “Maybe your father is a little hard to talk to, but what
you
did today—running away—was wrong and dangerous.”

Mark pressed his lips together. “I told you. I can handle myself.”

“That's not the point. And I'm not finished.”

“Okay, what?”

“What you did was wrong and dangerous.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“However...”

“What?”

“
You
are a great kid. An incredible kid. A smart, funny, wonderful, terrific kid.”

His tan skin pinkened a little. She knew she had pleased him. “Sure,” he said, skeptical.

“That's how I know your dad's an all-right guy.”

“How?”

“He's raising you, isn't he? And you're turning out just wonderfully.

“Oh, right. Gag. Puke.”

“You're much too modest.”

“You're blinded by my brains and good looks.”

Heather laughed at that, and her glance fell on the night table by the bed. Mark had emptied his pockets there: a few crumpled bills, some change, a Milky Way wrapper, and a Swiss army knife.

At the sight of the knife, Heather stopped laughing. The knife had been Jason Lee's and he had prized it.

She thought of her dead husband, holding the knife, remarking that the “damn thing's got more attachments than a hound dog has ticks.” There were two metal files and a little pair of scissors, a corkscrew, a toothpick and tweezers—not to mention four different knife blades. On one end, at the place where the tweezers were stored, the surface had been chipped. Jason Lee used to rub his thumb on that chipped place, “For good luck,” he said. Then his light eyes would go misty and he'd tell her how someday he'd pass on that fine knife to their first son.

But, of course, now there would be no son. So Heather had given the knife to Mark.

Mark saw where she was looking. “I always take it. Wherever I go.”

“Jason Lee would be glad.” Heather's throat felt tight. It had gotten so she could think of Jason Lee most times now without that heavy surge of loss all through her body. But wrapping her mouth around his name could still be a challenge. Often when she did that, her throat would close up for a minute and the metallic taste of grief would slide along her tongue.

“If you want to kiss me good-night, I guess you can,” Mark said, and she knew he sensed her sadness and sought to ease it by allowing her to touch him now.

Heather put on a bright face. “Gee, thanks.” She bent and brushed her lips against his forehead. His skin was smooth and smelled of soap and a little leftover road dust. She stood. “Get some sleep now.”

“Okay.”

She went to the door and switched off the light.

“Aunt Heather?” Mark said from the shadows across the room.

“Hmm?”

“If I lived here with you, I never would have run away.”

His words made a lightness inside her. How lovely if that could really happen. The house was much too big for her now. And sometimes her loneliness was like a vast, empty space inside her. Having Mark in the house would fill up that emptiness.

But of course, such a thing was impossible. Mark would never live with her. And Heather knew she had to say so.

“Your place is with your father, Mark.”

He said nothing to that. Only turned his face to the wall.

Heather sighed and tiptoed out, closing the door quietly behind her.

* * *

The doorbell rang at five-thirty the next morning. Heather was still in bed, but awake. She was due at Lily's Café in an hour. However, she had no intention of leaving the house until Lucas had come to collect Mark. So she was lying there staring at the clock, trying to decide whether to call her boss, Lily Tibbits, at home, or wait until Lily got to work herself to give her the news that her head waitress was going to be late.

But now the problem was solved. Mark's father was here and Heather wouldn't be missing any work after all.

The doorbell rang again. Lucas Drury was an impatient man. Heather jumped from the bed and shoved her feet into her slippers. Then she yanked on her robe and ran to let him in.

When she pulled back the front door, dawn was just breaking on the horizon. Her brother-in-law stood on her porch, hands in his pockets, feet braced slightly apart.

Heather blinked at the odd, momentary trick of the light, which made him seem slightly unreal, as if his body itself had been cut out of pure darkness. It appeared as if he had no face. Still, Heather had no trouble recognizing him. She knew him by his stance, by his height and leanness—and by the commanding set of his shoulders.

“I got here as quickly as I could.”

That voice of his, at once sophisticated and rough-edged, sent a little shiver skittering along the surface of Heather's skin. The dawn light behind him grew a tiny bit brighter, enough that it seemed to wrap around him a little. Now she could begin to make out the shape of his mouth, his nose, the darker shadows where his eyes were.

Lucas turned his head to the side. She saw his strong profile. Then he faced her again. His features retreated into darkness.

“Well, may I come in?” The words were low, and almost teasing.

Heather thought of one of his books, for some crazy reason.
Shadowfall,
it was called. In it there was a lonely vampire who lived in darkness, preying only on the hopelessly ill and the evil. And then one night, while stalking a murderer, he saved a woman of innocence and light. He found out where she lived by looking into her mind. He took her home. And after that, he tried to stay away from her, to protect her from himself.

But her attraction was too strong. At last, he came to the window of her room in the deepest part of the night. And he asked her, “May I come in...?”

“Heather?” Lucas said.

She blinked. “Oh. Yes. Come on in.”

Heather pulled back the door and moved out of his way. He stepped over the threshold, filling the room with his intensity and a faint, tempting scent, like sandalwood and something else—something indefinable, both spicy and exotic.

The shades were still drawn and the room seemed very dark. So Heather went over and turned on the floor lamp beside the couch. The quick wash of light banished the shadows to the corners of the room.

“There,” Heather said, rather unnecessarily, smiling nervously and squinting a little as her eyes adjusted to the brightness.

Her brother-in-law remained standing near the door. Now, with the light, he was clear to her.

He was all in black—soft pleated black slacks, a black sport shirt, black belt and black shoes. The lean, hard muscles of his arms looked very stark, somehow, against all that dark fabric.

“You were still sleeping,” he said. He was looking at her tangled hair and the robe that she'd pulled so hastily over her summer pajamas.

“No. No, I was awake. I was just lying there.”

“I thought you had to be at work early. Is that right?”

“Yes.” It was so strange. He seemed rather shy. She'd never in her life thought of Lucas Drury as shy. “At six-thirty. I work at six-thirty.”