The Taking (34 page)

“Just say something, please. I’m begging you, Regan.”

Eyes filling with tears, she said, “How could you do this to me? How could you?”

Her voice was so filled with agony and hurt that Felix felt like he’d been slapped, and he wished he could take back his plea for her to speak.

That expression, those words of anguish, felt like they could kill the man that couldn’t be killed.

So Felix walked out of the house he should never have entered and away from the woman he should never have dared to love.

Regan stared into space from her chair on Chris and Nelson’s patio. Nelson was an amateur gardener and he had the courtyard in full bloom, lush reds and oranges popping all around Regan, but she didn’t notice.

Her coffee was cold, but she didn’t care.

She needed a shower, but she didn’t have the energy to take one.

Chris lit a cigarette in the chair across from her, and while she normally wrinkled her nose at the pungent tendrils of smoke crossing in front of her, she didn’t even blink.

“Regan.” Chris leaned forward in his chair. “This is getting fucking ridiculous. You’re like the dawn of the dirty-hair dead. You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, but you need to talk to me. This silence is freaking me out and it’s not healthy for you.”

She stared at him, impassive, trying to work up the energy to respond. Everything was so much effort, so much work. She knew she was in some kind of sleep-deprived depression because it just wasn’t normal to feel like it was almost too much work to breathe. Getting dressed ruined her for the day, and chewing her food seemed more trouble than it was worth.

“I can’t talk about it.” Regan was afraid that once she started to talk, she would start to think, and once she started to think, she would start to feel.

And that was not something she wanted to do.

It had been three weeks since she had seen her distorted face on that video, since Felix had made up the most outrageous story she’d ever heard in her life, and she had learned that loving him had been yet another mistake. That like Beau, she had never really known Felix Leblanc.

She didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to think about the fact that his ring had the same inscription her wedding ring had, or that he knew things, things about Camille that he shouldn’t since he had never read her journal.

Her lawyer had confirmed that Beau had in fact owned her house and that he had upward of twenty million in liquid assets in addition to almost fifty million in properties. Regan had ignored Richard’s voice mail and subsequent calls.

It didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered.

After her debacle of a house party, she had taken a suitcase full of clothes, Camille’s journal, and had left her house and its many questions behind. She had been staying with Chris and Nelson, working and doing nothing else, including sleeping. That eluded her completely. This week she’d finally given in to the fact that she was not functioning and had taken two weeks off from work. She wasn’t sure what would be better in two weeks, but she couldn’t do her job the way she was.

“You’re not even going to tell me what went down with Felix?”

“No.” How did you explain to your best friend that your judgment was so poor you let a man move in with you who was either delusional or a liar? Or that a small, strange part of you actually believed him? That you thought maybe, just maybe, he could be telling the truth, no matter how bizarre it was.

“And you won’t talk about the video.” It was a statement, not a question, because Chris knew her answer to that.

“Nope.”

“Will you eat something? I swear to God you’ve lost ten pounds and a cup size.”

“Isn’t thin in?” she asked, feeling a sudden urge to take a hit off of Chris’s cigarette. But she already had enough problems, she didn’t need to create a nicotine addiction at the same time.

“Thin is always in. But unhealthy isn’t. Your hair is dull, your clothes are hanging on you, and the skin under your eyes looks like you’ve been beaten black-and-blue and you’re recovering. You look bruised and miserable.”

At least he was being delicate about it. “I am bruised and miserable!” Regan said in a louder voice than she would have thought she’d have the energy to use. “I feel like I have been beaten black-and-blue. Crazy things happened in my house. The dreams, the sleepwalking, the dangling off the balcony, the face oozing out of my face... something got inside me, damn it, and it’s crazy and I don’t know what to do!”

“Well, you can keep ignoring it, because that’s clearly working for you,” Chris said sarcastically, before taking another drag on his cigarette. “Or you can deal with it. Kick this bitch out of your house.”

“And how exactly am I supposed to do that?” she asked in frustration. “I would love to have my life back to normal. I would love to be able to live in the house I paid a boatload of money for.”

“Felix would know.”

“Fuck Felix.”

Chris’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay, then. Apparently whatever happened in that thirty minutes you were alone with him was not good.”

“No, it was not good.” It was crazy. Crazy. All of it just ... crazy.

“So how about another voodoo practitioner? Or a priest? Or maybe you can just talk to Camille, and tell her it’s all good. That it’s time for her to pass on to the other side or whatever they say in that movie
Poltergeist.
Tell her to go toward the light.”

Regan knew Chris was just trying to help, that he was worried about her. She was worried about herself, too. But his well-meaning suggestions were just irritating her.

“I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Then because she felt bad, she kissed Chris on the top of the head when she stood up. “Thank you, for everything.”

“Do you want company?” he asked, though he looked perfectly comfortable lazing back in his chair.

“No, I’m fine.” Regan walked through the well-decorated but cluttered house and out the front door. There was something claustrophobic to her about all the knickknacks and excess furniture Chris and Nelson collected, so different from her own style of decorating.

Or maybe it was her own thoughts that were claustrophic. Those weren’t so easily edited and streamlined as a living room.

She was cutting down the walkway to the sidewalk when she spotted Beau stepping out of a parked car on the street. Damn it. She started to veer in the opposite direction, knowing he had no reason to be in the neighborhood except to see her, and hoping he wouldn’t notice her making an escape.

“Regan.”

No such luck. Of course he would spot her.

She turned and gave him a tight smile. “Hi. What are you doing here?”

“I heard you were staying with Chris and I wanted to talk to you.”

Just what she didn’t need, more futile conversation with a man she was definitely growing to despise. “I don’t think we have anything to talk about.” She kept walking.

Beau fell in step beside her. “I thought maybe we could talk about Camille.”

Regan paused and looked at him, the hairs on the back of her neck rising. “What could you know about Camille?”

He smiled at her, and it was an expression she’d never seen on his face before. Sly, and almost menacing. She shivered, wrapping her arms around her.

“Oh, I knew Camille personally, Regan. Before Felix did. When I was known as Alcroft Tradd.”

Regan’s knees buckled and she fought the urge to gasp out loud, to cover her ears to shut out his words. Was everyone intent on making her doubt her sanity? How could Beau be confirming Felix’s ludicrous story? “What are you talking about?”

“You look a little shocked, and at the risk of sounding rude, not the best I’ve ever seen you. Your hair . . .” He made a moue of distaste. “Anyway, do you want to sit down in my car and talk about this?”

He was standing next to her, casual, smirking, hands in the pockets of his expensive khaki pants, his Italian shoes shined to a high gloss. The thought of being confined with him in his car made her nervous. Like somehow she would be more vulnerable than she was standing here in the sunshine a few steps from Chris’s house. Out in the open she felt like she could escape. Both him and his words.

An illusion of safety, but one she couldn’t sacrifice nonetheless.

“No, let’s just walk.” She needed to move so she didn’t drop to the ground.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“That you’ve been alive for over a hundred years? It is a little far-fetched, you have to admit.” Though what was so hard to wrap her head around was why Beau and Felix would feed her the same story. A mass delusion between two men who she had thought didn’t know each other seemed equally as bizarre.

Or maybe they did know each other and they were playing some kind of game with her.

Which really chilled her.

She was walking, forcing one foot in front of the other, her skirt wrapping around knees that still bore the marks of her nails breaking the skin the night she’d been watching the video. She had never been a fast healer. Ironic.

“I’m older than that,” Beau said, his voice arrogant and amused. “I’m actually almost as old as time, Regan. Almost as old as God.”

Regan stopped walking, glad she hadn’t gotten into his car. That was it, she was going back to Chris’s. She didn’t need to be mocked, and she didn’t need to listen to this lunacy. She turned, but Beau stopped her by grabbing her hand.

His fingers wrapped around hers and she tried to tug them away, heart racing, but his grip was too strong. The lush street before her with its pretty cottages receded, and in its place was a dirt path, dust rising up in front of her. Terrified, Regan stopped trying to extract herself from Beau’s grip and actually held his hand tighter, needing to know she was still standing, still there, still alive as the world literally shifted in front of her. Beau was solid next to her, and she leaned in closer to him, feeling that even the ground beneath her feet was suddenly unstable.

She blinked hard, frightened, but reality wasn’t restored. The dirt road solidified.

“What ... ?” Regan shrieked when a wooden cart went flying past them on the left, the man driving it wearing a toga, fully three-dimensional and close enough to touch. “Oh, my God.”

“It’s Rome,” Beau told her in a low voice. “See the Colosseum?”

It rose up in front of her between the clouds of dust, a great hulking structure, throngs of people around it, all dressed in ancient robes. Regan stared in astonishment, afraid to move, afraid to speak. It wasn’t a picture. It was real.

“We’re seeing it through my eyes, the way it felt for me to be standing there,” he murmured. “It was a fascinating culture and an exciting city, but I’m just being self-indulgent. I wanted to see it again. Let’s move on to late-nineteenth-century New Orleans, which is what really interests us at the moment.” Beau raised his hand, with hers still in its grip, and made a waving motion.

The scene in front of her crumpled, the buildings and people that looked so real just disintegrating in a cloud of dust. In its place, brick by brick, in a matter of seconds, the French Quarter rose up in front of her. The gaslights twinkled, the horse-drawn carriages clipped along, and the people strolled in the early evening dressed in nineteenth-century attire, the ladies colorful birds in their hats with feathers, their lush gowns richly detailed with black and ivory lace and trim.

It was so real she could smell the manure in the street, feel the humid heat of a summer evening, hear the murmur of conversation around her. Regan reached her hand out like she could touch a painting, like it would be a flat scene in front of her, but it was just air. The scene was real. Or so it seemed.

“Look, there’s Camille.”

Regan saw her, the blonde in an elegant hat, the same woman Regan had seen in her bathroom doorway, descending from her carriage in a white gown trimmed in black, her expression haughty and defiant as she let the footman help her down to the street. She looked in their direction, right at them, and sniffed in disapproval.

“She was to be mine,” Beau said in a low voice. “My wife. The one I wanted more than all the others that came before and all the women since. But she considered herself too good for me, too exciting, too daring for the likes of me. If only she had understood that nothing is more exciting than a demon. I could have given her whatever she wanted, real or imagined.”

Beau made a sound of anger and the scene in front of them disappeared like the one before, and they were back standing on Chris’s quiet residential block.

“How ... ?” Regan swallowed, afraid that she really was going to faint this time. It wasn’t possible, what she had just seen, what Beau was claiming to be real. But it was. It was the truth, she knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. What had just happened was not normal and Beau was something she didn’t understand. “What are you ... ?”