The Splendour Falls (52 page)

The decision hurt as if I'd shattered my leg all over again, only it was my whole being, the person I was, breaking apart. I turned to Shawn, pulling myself up, poised like the ballerina I would never be again. ‘There is no win-win situation here. And I believe you know that.'

From the corner of my eye, I saw Rhys shift, a nearly imperceptible breath of released tension. But Shawn still gripped my hand, and his fingers tightened as he realized he'd lost his thrall over me. ‘That's what you think—'

‘Here's what I
know
, Shawn. If the archaeological park is washed under by this flood, the state might sell it to Maddox Point pretty cheap. That's one win for you.

‘And I'm the last Davis. I inherit all of this, eventually. If the bulldozer matchmaking going on
here worked, a Maddox would finally have ownership of Bluestone Hill.' That was my theory, anyway. I didn't know if Alabama was a common-law state, but it was a pretty good guess that a wife's property became joint on her marriage. Talk about a long-term plan on the part of the Maddox men.

‘It must be really inconvenient for you that I sort of hate your guts right now.'

My mouth was running now without any sense of self-preservation. I knew Shawn was more calculating than he appeared. But part of me still believed he was just trying to play the odds in his favour and that he would give in easily when I stood up to him.

That was a miscalculation. He proved his viciousness in the grip on my hand. It tightened until I felt the bones grind together, and I gave a surprised gasp of pain.

Rhys jumped forward, but not before Shawn yanked me out of the green circle and up against him, twisting my arm around behind my back until I cried out and went up on my tiptoes, trying to relieve the pressure on the joint.

‘Stop there, English, or we'll see if you can fix her broken arm.'

I made another sound, this one not of pain but of fear, because when Shawn spun me round, I faced the river. ‘Rhys, look. The lawn. The water.'

He glanced behind him and his shoulders stiffened as he saw what I meant. The water was creeping up towards the summerhouse. And bringing its unearthly entourage with it.

‘I think he's bringing them,' I said with horrified awe. I knew Shawn had an uncanny ability to charm and sway people. The spectres would be even easier because they had no will of their own. ‘He's controlling them. Oh my God. You
did
make the Colonel's ghost throw Clara down the stairs.'

‘Shut up!' Shawn wrenched my arm up higher, twisting a cry of pain from me.

And then, suddenly,
he
was screaming. Shawn let go of my wrist and I slipped out of his hold, stunned to see a six-pound ball of muddy fluff attached to his leg. Gigi was awake. She'd gotten up under his jeans and clamped onto his Achilles tendon. And she was
not
letting go.

Rhys didn't waste the opportunity. He jumped Shawn and they went down with a hard crash into the gravel. Gigi let go, and I scooped her up in my good arm and scrambled out of the way. Rhys's fists were flying and I had to wonder where a professor's son had learned to fight like that.

Unfortunately, it looked like Shawn Maddox knew what he was doing, too, as my shoulder could attest. I didn't even see how he did it – magic? Oh my God, anything was possible – but he threw Rhys into a hedge, then went after him.

My mind was spinning through the past few minutes, checking lost bits of conversation. The council was in the summerhouse, which was going to be underwater in a few minutes. Not to mention overrun by the ghost army. Why weren't they running and screaming in fear? Where they in a similar thrall?

In a decisive burst of insight, I knew what to do. While the boys tore through my garden and the drowned legion advanced, I ran for the standing stone.

The rock seemed to hold onto the moisture in the air, staying dark and wet the whole day. It should have been cold to the touch, but it felt warm and alive. The stone wasn't magic, but it was the focal point of something huge and mystical, and I opened myself up to that idea and flung myself off the cliff of reason and logic, into the swirling ocean of I-might-be-crazy-butI-don't-care.

And I didn't fall.

A tide of energy rose and caught me. It seemed to carry me to a dizzying height, until I was looking down at the land from far above, a satellite image of this earth. My earth. I could see lines of energy running through it like a net of light, dim and broken in places, shining too bright and hot in others, like a fuse about to go out.

Too high. Too far.

The dancer who flings herself around the stage ends up injured or unemployed. She always
places
herself. That's what gives her balance. That's what gives her control.

I came back down, in my body but still with the extra layer of awareness. I could see the lines of power that connected Shawn to the ghosts. With a wave of my hand, I cut the cords that bound them, surprised at how easy it was. Of course, that was setting things to rights. What I did next was more difficult. I pointed at the grass at Shawn's feet and tripped him as he ran at Rhys again.

He hit the ground and Rhys grabbed his arm, taking a page from Shawn's own book, and twisted it up behind his back. Shawn thrashed and cursed, but couldn't move.

Leaving the stone, I felt the connection stretching along with me, unthinned by distance. I crouched in front of Shawn, grabbed a handful of purple flowers from the herbs beneath him, and dropped them over him, picturing a blanket of sleep. He stopped thrashing.

Rhys looked at me, breathing hard, bleeding from his nose and his lip. ‘You are taking to this rather quickly.'

‘I'm a natural,' I said, oddly calm. I didn't think it was shock. I felt too
right.

Trusting my spell to hold, Rhys stood and offered his hand to help me up. I stood without it. ‘How could you believe that I would go along with him?' I accused.

He looked at me levelly. ‘Weren't you thinking of it?'

‘That's—' Completely true. ‘Completely beside the point.'

Screams from the summerhouse interrupted what was probably a dead-end argument. When Shawn had gone unconscious, it must have released whatever hold he had on the council. They seemed to be only now noticing what was going on, and I was amazed at his ability. It must have taken a lot of power to keep nearly a dozen people as complacent as he'd kept the town about the TTC's activities.

‘Come on,' said Rhys, and we ran for the spiral
staircase at the corner of the balcony, Gigi still in the crook of my arm. I climbed quickly, and Rhys and I assessed the situation from the better vantage point.

The water was already up around the bottom of the summerhouse, and there were still ghosts, milling about as if they had nowhere to go now that they had lost their direction.

Kimberly and the others leaned out the door, but understandably didn't want to come further as the water swirled and eddied around the steps. That, and the ghosts.

Rhys wiped the blood from under his nose and rubbed his hand on his jeans. ‘This is going to be a big job. Are you up for it?'

‘Are you?' I asked, since all I'd seen him do tonight was use his fists.

He turned to me, his face beat up, his clothes filthy, his expression wary. ‘We'll have to really trust each other.'

‘I can probably fake it for long enough.' It wasn't really the time for jokes. But it also wasn't the time for a long discussion on how trust involved telling your ally – that was accurate, if incomplete – everything pertinent before the bad guy forces you to. It wasn't his error in judgement that made me wonder if I could trust him again, but that he hadn't
told
me about it.

‘No, Sylvie,' Rhys said, urgent, but careful to catch and hold my gaze. ‘I trust you, now more than ever. You have to trust me like you'd trust your old partner not to drop you on your head.'

I studied him for as long as I dared, with the crisis
all around us. Then I admitted, ‘I trust you, Rhys. My heart is smarter than my brain, and I should listen to it.'

He smiled, just a quick acknowledgement, and I faced the river, offering him my hand. Rhys took it, my left in his left, and stood behind me. Then he surprised me by putting an arm around my waist, like we were starting a pas de deux. My senses expanded again, my awareness of the world, but this time Rhys's hold kept me grounded, linking realities, focusing my perceptions like a lens.

I saw the web lines of power, the hot nodes and the sickly dim ones, but now I was able to relate them to where we were. There was a line connecting the ruins of Old Cahawba, the Hill, the church and the town, and all along the line the energy was off. Out of proportion. It skewed the beauty of this unseen, extra?sensory landscape.

With water imagery on my mind, I pictured myself opening dams where the line connected to others, equalizing the pressure. Evening the flow of the earth's energy.

‘Can we hold back the water so they can get out of the summerhouse?' Rhys's voice was low in my ear.

I blinked, and saw that the ghosts had gone. Nothing but shades, they'd disappeared as shadows did when you flicked on the light.

‘OK,' I said. With our linked hands I made a motion, like pushing back a curtain. The wave swept back – I couldn't help a gasp of amazement – and the Teen Town Council made a run for it. They helped
one another up the wet and slippery slope, towards the house and high ground.

Defying physics was more difficult than righting the natural order of supernatural energy. My knees began to shake, and Rhys's arm tightened around my waist, flooding me with strength. Even he was breathing hard, though, when the last boy was out of the gazebo and running for the house.

We let go together, and the water swept forward, taking the summerhouse with it. But everyone inside was safe. And the ghosts were – mostly – laid to rest.

The very last thing was done quickly. But a deal was a deal, and you don't get something for nothing. As Gigi looked up at me, monitoring everything with a serene doggy calm, I took a sad but resolute breath, laced my fingers with Rhys's and balanced the last equation.

I knew my leg would continue to heal without help. What I didn't realize was how much the garden's energy was keeping me propped up. The night's worth of stress and running and fighting surged through me, and with a cry of pain and surprise, I went crashing down, neither leg supporting me any more.

It was a good thing Rhys was there to catch me.

T
here were some seriously frantic parents by the time things were all over. The sheriff showed up, kids were ferried home, there were a lot of tears on all sides. Now that decades of accumulated imbalance had been reset, Shawn didn't have the same power to draw on. If I needed proof of that, I found it in Shawn's face as the sheriff read him the riot act for endangering all the teens with his prank.

None of the kids could recall how they got there. And most of them were also fuzzy on the details of what
they did during their normal meetings. Kimberly did remember that Clara was in the hospital, and told me to tell Addie to call her.

Rhys's dad arrived just as the last car pulled away. The waters were receding almost as quickly as they'd risen, and the state police had opened up the roads that were out of danger. Professor Griffith made tea – naturally – and we ate by candlelight – cold cereal with tepid soy milk – while I gave him the official version of the evening's events: Rhys had been busy at the archaeological park, I'd been reading in my room, and we had no idea that Shawn Maddox had organized a gettogether of thrill-seeking teens in the summerhouse. That is, until they barely escaped serious injury as the floodwaters knocked down the building.

‘I never had a good feeling about that Maddox boy,' said the professor. ‘Despite his last name.'

‘What about his last name?' I asked, recalling the conversation vaguely.

‘Maddox. It's an anglicization of Madoc. Quite the coincidence, isn't it?'

‘Yes. But you said it was unrelated.' I wondered if other people would be realizing things about the Maddoxes that they hadn't before, now that Shawn's charm had run out. He would still have his natural good looks, though, so perhaps not.

Rhys held his watch to the light of one of the candles. ‘Isn't it getting late, Dad? I'll bet you're knackered.'

Professor Griffith checked his own watch. ‘Heavens. It feels much later than it is. I'll bet you youngsters are done in as well.'

‘A bit,' I admitted in a colossal understatement. I could barely move, and my leg hurt like someone had been hammering on it. ‘I really want a bath, though. Is the water heater gas, do you know?'

‘You could try it and see.' The professor rose from the table with a stretch. ‘There will be some cleanup to do in the morning, so let's get an early start. We don't want Paula to come home to any more of a disaster than she has to.'

I smiled slightly, imagining that Paula would have a lot to say about the mess. Her ordered life had been anything but since I'd gotten here.