The End of Never (22 page)

“Get away from that,” Benjamin yelled at Jack. He leaned on the door frame with his hands stuffed into the front pockets of his blue jeans, his fingertips jingling the loose change.

Jack nudged the box across the floor, while Ricky swatted at the banana gum globs clinging to his nose. “So much for my tip!” he whispered to Jack as he knelt to retrieve the pizza box.

“Sorry, man,” Ricky apologized as he delivered the rumpled box to Benjamin.

“No worries.” Benjamin assured him. “I'm starved, dude. I don't care what that pizza looks like. I'll lick it off the box if I have to.”

Ricky held out his empty palm. “Twenty even,” he told Benjamin.

“Dude, I'm wiped,” Benjamin explained. “Callahan!” he yelled into the apartment behind him.

At Ricky's feet, Jack whimpered and licked his lips while Ricky popped another piece of gum. “Nice dog,” he said impatiently to Jack and checked his cell phone for the time.

Dashing to the door, Callahan shoved two twenty-dollar bills at Ricky and held his nose. He told Benjamin, “That trash will kill you, young man.”

Raising his eyebrows, Ricky counted to forty in his head. “I ain't got no change, man,” he yelled after Callahan, who retreated back inside the apartment, waving Ricky away.

“Keep it,” Benjamin said to Ricky. “Inside,” he told Jack, who gladly followed the pizza box back inside the apartment.

“Nice tux, dude,” Ricky said to Callahan, as he flattened the rumpled bills against his chest and stalked back down the hallway to the elevator.

Inside the Peyton apartment, Benjamin crashed on the leather sofa cushions in the living room with the pizza box spread open across his lap. “Come and get it,” he yelled, while he scraped off the melted cheese and pepperoni stuck to the lid of the box.

“Yuck,” Taylor said and stuck out her tongue.

“I know you want some, Taylor,” Benjamin shouted.

“Whatever,” she said.

Retreating to the guest room, Taylor eased herself to her knees and unzipped the suitcase Krystal had packed hastily for her. Holding her breath, she hoped for the best. “Wrinkled white shirts, a blazer, two plaid skirts,” she said. “At least I don't have to go school naked.”

Taylor tossed the school uniforms to the sofa bed that took up most of the room. She gritted her perfectly straight, bleached white teeth. “No mascara, no lip gloss,” she huffed and punched the bag. “One hideous pair of flat penny loafers and five pairs of granny panties. Thanks, Krystal,” she hissed sarcastically.

She rifled hopefully through an inside pocket. “Yes!” she squealed, having located a half-pack of cigarettes.

“Come eat,” Benjamin said, startling her when he appeared at the open door with a dripping slice of pizza in his hand.

“Give me a lighter,” Taylor demanded, clutching the cigarettes as she raised herself from the floor with her crutches.

“No,” Benjamin said and snatched the cigarettes from her.

“Get back here, jerk,” she yelled as he fled the room. Hobbling on her crutches, she followed him to the apartment balcony.

Throwing open the glass French doors, Benjamin stumbled into a black iron bistro set. “Ouch,” he growled. His knees had smashed into the round table and overturned an empty chair, which had landed with a clatter.

“Don't do it!” Taylor howled behind him, her crutches pounding feverishly into the wooden floor.

On the city street ten stories below, a dump truck of crushed asphalt spewed a plume of black diesel fumes. The driver was idling at a red light. “Fourth and goal, baby,” Benjamin sang as he pumped his right arm back behind his head, the cigarette pack cradled in his palm like a football.

“Yes!” he cried victoriously. He leaned over the railing to watch the cigarette pack sail into the back of the dump truck.

“I hate you,” Taylor fumed, shoving the overturned chair aside with her crutches to get up close and personal with Benjamin.

He merely shrugged his shoulders. “I don't hate you,” he said bashfully.

Suddenly the French doors shut with a deliberate slam. Through the clear glass, Callahan wagged his finger from side to side at them and whispered, “Hush.”

Benjamin straightened the toppled chair.

“Thanks a lot,” she said mockingly and collapsed into the seat.

“You're welcome,” Benjamin said, leaning his arched back against the railing.

“I can't believe the wicked witch of the South thinks she is going to get away with kicking me out of my own house.” Crossing her arms atop the table, she rested her head while Benjamin stepped toward the closed French doors and peeked anxiously through the clear glass. “Do you think Alex's mom will let you stay?”

“Of course she will,” Taylor sighed. “She likes me for some reason,” she explained. “I don't know about Alex, though. She can only take so much of me at one time.”

“It's like ninety-five degrees out here,” Benjamin complained, with his face pressed to the glass. “How can she be cold? She was complaining about being too hot before you showed up with—” he paused, studying Alexandra on the other side of the door. She was in a robe in front of the fireplace, trembling.

“Kraven,” the name trickled across Alexandra's lips.

A low flame flickered in the hearth, the glow casting long shadows across the darkened living room. Sitting next to her on a suede footstool, Callahan brushed the wet tangles dangling down Alexandra's back. He removed his tuxedo jacket and pushed his shirt sleeves past his elbows.

“You are a strange case,” he told her, his palm gauging the temperature on her furrowed forehead. “Hot, then cold; cold, then hot,” he said, stroking his fingers through the pale yellow light glowing around her face, a halo visible only to those people with hypersenses.

“What do you see?” Alexandra asked, staring into his eyes.

“Your sorrow,” he said, cupping his hands together in his lap. “The blood—Kraven's blood—it touched you?”

“Yes,” Alexandra admitted, shifting closer to the flames. “Only a couple of drops before he wiped it away, but it felt like . . . ” She paused and bit her lip.

“Like what?” Callahan pleaded.

“It seeped into my skin like it wanted to shoot straight through my veins and into my heart.”

“How did you feel?” Callahan asked, cradling her palms in his own.

Alexandra shrank into her robe, her eyes glowing orange in the flames. “Maddening,” she answered. “My hands burned like I had stuck them in there,” she said, breaking free of his grasp and holding her hands to the fire.

“He is gone?” Callahan asked, trusting he could not be far.

Alexandra shrugged her shoulders and flipped her head to the balcony doors. “He's out there somewhere,” she said softly. “Waiting, wanting something I don't know how to give him.”

Raising herself from the brick hearth, Alexandra wobbled on her knees.

“Child,” Callahan scolded. “Be careful.”

“I'm fine,” she said brusquely and shoved his hands from her shoulders.

“You cannot go anywhere like this,” Callahan insisted. “I'll track the beast alone and destroy him, as I should have done before now. You should not suffer for my mistakes.”

“Callahan,” she said, shaking her head. “This battle is not yours. I appreciate your help, but this is my life that's in danger.”

“Ours,” Callahan insisted, admiring the soft glow of life radiating from her head. He would have to trust her that she was ready to fight.

“He has a hostage?” Alexandra asked, gripping the mantel.

“Yes,” he replied.

Alexandra shuffled to the coffee table across the room.

“It's here somewhere,” she huffed and brushed aside stacks of glossy magazines until there was only one left. It was a gigantic
Vogue
issue that Taylor had insisted Alexandra borrow “for obvious fashion reasons.” Underneath this last weighty tome, Alexandra found the receiver to the cordless phone and dialed Granny June.

“She's not answering,” Alexandra said. She hit redial. She and Callahan cringed at the answer of a flat computer voice, which announced that service for the number was unavailable. Callahan reminded her that the storm probably knocked out service.

“Is that where that mongrel is going?” Alexandra asked, plopping down next to Jack on the leather sofa.

“Yes,” said Callahan, nodding his head. “I'm certain of it.”

“I'm going with you.”

A cackle echoed in her ears.

Her body tensing, Alexandra dropped the phone, the plastic case cracking as it slammed into the hardwood floor. “Did you hear that cackle?” she asked Callahan.

Apparently Jack did, because he hid his head under a fluffed pillow resting atop the sofa cushions.

“No,” Callahan said, straining his ears. He overheard Taylor bickering with Benjamin on the balcony about his running out to the nearest gas station to buy her a pack of cigarettes.

“Not Taylor,” Alexandra chuckled. She pointed east. “Her.”

Down in South Carolina, Jasmine rested on the rotten stump of a fallen magnolia tree deep in the forest surrounding Peyton Manor. She struck a match against the bark and raised the flame to her grinning face to light a stuffed tobacco pipe. Closing her eyes, she rocked back and forth, puffs of coal-black smoke wafting from her pursed, wrinkled lips.

In the haze around her head, she saw Cyrus, his gnarled hands and feet getting the truck closer to Peyton Manor.

“Dat me boy!” she sang into the air. “Dat girl cain't let ya go, Cyrus.”

Licking her lips, Jasmine moaned softly, her soul aching to harness the powers of good and evil that she knew Alexandra commanded within her soul.

“Dat girl don't know,” Jasmine cackled to herself. “Dat man wit dem wings,” she laughed. “Him da devil.”

21
Dancing in the Moonlight

Twilight cast a gloom upon the forest equal to the despair in Iselin's heart. Kneeling at the mouth of the cave, her bare legs scraped against the craggy gravel strewn across the damp clay earth. The tattered hem of her ivory dress billowed from around her waist onto the mud.

She hummed as she unraveled her braided hair. She let loose her waist-length auburn tresses. As she hummed, the walls of the cave echoed her song. Behind her in the forest, the shadows swallowed the dying light of day. The glow of the rising moon illuminated the towering treetops.

He had told her to hide and that he would follow. Her faith in the prince calmed the terror clawing at the cracks in her spirit. Brushing through her hair's tangles with her fingertips, she trembled as the sun set finally behind the trees. A cool breeze rustled the lace ruffles of her bodice. The wind, trapped inside the cave, swirled and wailed in her ears. To her, the din was like the howls of the unsettled dead.

Her father was dead; of that she felt certain. She rubbed a trail of tears from her flushed cheeks. She had told him that they should not go to their cottage in the blooming meadow outside the high stone walls of Castle Kilhaven, but he did so anyway.

“For his maps,” she whispered, her breath rising like smoke from her lips in the cool air of the early evening.

The sorcerer and his dragon looked for her there first, but she was concealed in the trees nearby. When they could not find her, the dragon spit a searing ball of fire from his belly. Flames licked at the thatch roof, and everything inside would soon be lost. Inside the cottage, her father's eyes burned with smoke. He would not leave without the map to the sea. Just as the cottage was engulfed and fell to the ground, her father stumbled from the door, choking. He handed his only child the drawing. He told her not to stray from the path of the river, and she would find her way.

“Go,” he cried as she held his wrists. “Run, child,” he scolded and broke from her grasp to return to the fiery ruins and retrieve anything he could of his life's work, the maps and legends of the lands of Kilhaven. “Don't look back.”

His daughter obeyed, and she ran, swift and scared, until she at last dared to turn her head at the edge of the forest. The cottage stood no more. Only a heavy plume of gray smoke rose from the smoldering ashes toward the cloudless sky. In her ears, the roar of the river drowned the anguished cry she allowed herself before breaking once more into a sprint.

Her mother had stayed behind the walls of the castle, where Kraven had insisted she would be safe. As Iselin sat in the cave and remembered the day, she begged the rising moon and twinkling stars that her mother would remain safe. She curled up against a boulder at the mouth of the cave. Hugging her shoulders to warm her trembling, bare arms, she heard the crackling of leaves on the forest floor. Choking back a scream, she held her breath.

Twigs snapped under the fall of horse hooves upon the earth. Steady and deliberate, the beast approached the mouth of the cave.

She threw her palms upon her lips to stifle a cry.

“Iselin?” a voice called in the pale moonlight.

A trick
, the girl told herself. Her legs shook with the urge to flee.

“Iselin?” the voice sang lowly. A rider on horseback emerged from behind a bank of entwined cypress trees.

“Prince?” she whispered, straining to see the rider's face.

A raven mane crowned his head. Even in the dull twilight, she recognized the translucence of his azure eyes. Beneath him, the midnight-black coat of his horse glistened under the stars.

Breathless, she waited silently for the pair to approach her. “Kraven,” she sighed when he dismounted.

If she had wanted to stand, the strength of her legs would have failed her. But Kraven scooped up her limp and shivering body to his chest before she could try. Burying his face in her auburn hair, he smelled honeysuckle, the sweet scent tickling his nose.

“Why?” the girl asked him, her innocent green eyes pleading with her prince.