Eve's Rib, page 24
Mark beckoned her to him. “C’mon Eve,” he said. “You know you want this as much as I do.”
Mark was insane, and his plan was full of holes. The biggest one being that Eve would step off the edge of the quarry herself if he pushed the car over with her family inside. But she couldn’t risk upsetting him by pointing that out. The situation stood on a knife’s edge, as precarious as the rocky lip of the quarry. She needed to use what little magic she possessed to keep it in balance. Focusing all her energy, she affected a glamour like the one she’d used at Richard’s office. Except instead of projecting youth, she cast an appearance of adoration and love. The illusion hid from Mark her shaking hands and the sour grimace on her face as she swallowed down bile.
“Darling,” she said, sitting down beside him on the trunk of the car. Knowing Abbey was so close almost broke her resolve. She could hear her daughter’s breathing as she listened for what was to happen next. Eve rested her head on Mark’s shoulder. He put his hand on her knee and Eve had to focus even harder on her illusion to disguise the cringe.
“You don’t need to do all this,” she said, tracing a finger playfully along his chest. “We can just leave them here and run away together. I understand now that I don’t need either of them. You were right. Let’s just go.”
“Oh, Eve,” he said. “You always did live in a dream world.” He brought the hand without the gun up to her face, pushing back strands of her hair to gaze at the lie of her face.
“No, really,” she said, fixing him with her eyes. She was using everything she could muster to draw him into the mirage of her deception. “I know how much you love me now. After doing all this.”
“You should have known before,” he said haughtily, but her spell was working. He lowered the gun to his lap, let it rest there.
“I know it now,” she said, smiling.
“You’re so beautiful,” he said, caressing her cheek. Eve closed her eyes and concentrated on the glamour, taking full advantage of the added boost of a man who only saw what he wanted to see.
“I love you, Mark,” she said between clenched teeth, and the glamour wavered a little. “Let me show you how much.” Her heart was breaking to think Abbey was hearing this humiliating seduction from the trunk, believing it real.
She kissed Mark lightly on the neck, flicking her tongue behind his ear in the way she knew he liked. He groaned and leaned back, the gun still held in his lap.
“Please, let me show you,” she repeated. She unbuttoned his shirt to kiss the wisps of red hair curled on his chest and began working her way down. Mark tilted his head back and looked up at the moonlit sky. He couldn’t see her eyes as they glowed yellow, channelling the animals she’d inhabited on those stormy nights running through the forest with Janet. Eve knew the simple beauty of instinct within an animal. She also knew their savagery. When her kisses reached his lap, she bit down hard on the hand holding the gun. As she did, she felt her teeth catch bone and the reward of blood in her mouth.
“You fucking bitch!” Mark roared, bolting upright in a bid to free himself. She kept her jaw locked fast, shredding the delicate web of skin at the base of his thumb. Mark wrestled with her, but she was like a vicious dog clamped down on a fleshy chew toy. With his free hand he went to choke her. Together they moved toward the sharp drop-off of the quarry. Her healing rib shifted and popped, shooting her through with exquisite pain. But she didn’t let go. Eve was ready to go over the edge with him. Ready to sacrifice herself to end it all. But instead of feeling her body pulled over the cliff, she felt her teeth clamp down one final time to meet each other. Mark released his grip from her throat, screaming as Eve fell to the ground. The gun dropped out of what was left of his hand. Eve spit out his thumb onto the grass.
Crawling away from the cliff of the quarry, she struggled to pull in oxygen that he’d robbed her of. If she could only get to the cellphone she’d left in their car, she could call for help. But Eve feared help wouldn’t arrive in time, before Mark made good on his threat to push his own car into the quarry with Abbey and Richard inside. She remained crumpled halfway between the two vehicles, gasping for air. She was torn between the promise of the phone and the fear of leaving Abbey and Richard undefended, and her hesitation created a window of opportunity for Mark. He shouted and swore as he wrapped his jacket around his bleeding hand and clubbed her with a brutal blow to the back of the head. She sank to the grass where he kicked at her, favouring her injured side. When he finally stepped away, he howled, and his body and face began to waver and change, as if he were affecting his own glamour.
“You’re going to pay for this, bitch. I’m going to make you watch your daughter beg for her life. I’m going to kill that fucking husband of yours right in front of
your face.”
Eve groaned, clutching her rib as she tried to protect herself from another crippling blow. With her eyes squeezed shut, she didn’t see that Mark had moved away to stand in the full clearing where he was becoming something else. Or perhaps becoming what he’d been all along.
At first, she didn’t register the cool blue light that steadily grew beside her either. It started off like a tickling breeze that teased at her skin but soon expanded until it had matter and form. She was fully enveloped in its brilliant blue glow before she felt the small steady hand reach out to lie on top of her trembling one. She opened her eyes.
Michael.
He knelt in the grass beside her, her little boy, bathed in blue light. His aura spread and surrounded them both, charged with an electricity that crackled in the night air. She reached out with both arms and pulled him to her, breathing in the scent of his hair — a mixture of baby shampoo with that indescribable essence only a mother can detect. She wrapped his small body in her own and inhaled his sweet perfume, perfectly intoxicated.
“Michael,” she said, drawing him closer. “Michael, where have you been?”
He didn’t answer her, only nuzzled deeper into her neck. She rubbed his back in circles like she’d done when he was a baby. She didn’t need anything more than this, she thought. Nothing more than to hold her boy to her and forget everything else in the world. He could take her with him, to wherever he’d been, and she would go willingly.
A crash sounded above them, and Michael squirmed and pulled away from his mother. Her arms reached out, aching for him. But he stood up and held out his tiny hand to her again. She wondered at the sight of him, her boy full and whole. His tousled dark hair reminded her so much of Richard’s when they’d first met and fallen in love. The serious look on his face was so like Abbey’s when she studied at the kitchen table. In her son, surrounded by the blue light, Eve saw not only what she had lost but what she had allowed herself to forget she still had.
Eve took hold of Michael’s hand. Her body seized from the jolt as her lost powers raced up her arm like liquid fuel. In her chest, they exploded and flared to fill the rest of her, veins and arteries set ablaze. Her silhouette burned a scorching red in the icy blue light. She struggled to open her mouth, to discharge some of her powers even as they threatened to cook her flesh from within. But a cunning magic kept her lips sewn together, unable to release the fire.
Eve worked to stand, never letting go of Michael’s hand, even as the searing heat and pain coursed through her body from his touch. She bent on one knee in the moonlight’s shadow and looked up at the man she’d known as Mark. What he’d become now towered over both of them, reaching the height of the tallest trees that banked the quarry. His clothes were torn strips of cloth that seethed and pulsed with a festering filth. Crows shrieked as they flew in and out of the tattered folds. His face was that of a snake’s, a fierce black cobra. But when he opened his mouth to laugh, Eve saw the double-rowed teeth of a shark. A bolt of lightning shot down from the sky sending a hundred-year-old pine to the ground in a fiery crash. It narrowly missed the car that held her husband and her daughter inside.
Eve pulled herself up in the protective blue light of her son and stood tall against the monster of her own making. And in doing so, she readied herself to fight the Ragman for all she still had.
Thirty-Five
Mommy, Daddy! I can smell fire! Why aren’t you getting me out of the trunk? Why aren’t you saving me? Oh god, I can hear the flames. They’re crackling. I can feel the heat.
(Banging)
I’m not going to burn to death in here, I’m not! I’m hitting the little lever with my foot, Daddy. I’m hitting it so hard. I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! (Cries out)
(Sound of trunk opening)
Momma?
Thirty-Six
Richard came awake in the driver’s seat in the midst of chaos. Flames danced wildly in the clearing behind him. The sky had erupted into a storm with winds strong enough to rip branches from the lofty pines. Eve was in the midst of it all, awash in blue light. A little boy stood beside her. It took only a moment for Richard to realize the little boy was his son. His real son, not the charlatan’s version conjured up using raps under the table and a faked falsetto voice spoken through a medium. Michael held his mother’s hand as he stood strong and silent in the eye of the storm. A towering monster covered in rags thundered blows down on the two of them. Their blue aura shuddered and threw off sparks with each strike. He couldn’t be seeing this. He wasn’t seeing this. Richard turned away. But he could still catch reflections of the impossible scene in the rear-view mirror before the trunk popped open and obscured his view.
Abbey!
Richard battled with the door of the car before he found and released the lock. He stepped out onto the grass, shielding his face from the smoke as he raced to the back of the car. Lightning filled the sky. A fallen tree was ablaze only a few feet away. Abbey was curled up inside the open trunk, clutching at her ankle. As he picked her up in his arms, she cried out, then buried her face into his chest. The heat of the burning tree blasted the back of his legs, penetrating his clothing, singeing his calves. He turned toward the clearing, willing what he’d seen to be gone. But Michael still stood with his mother as the hideous giant with a serpent’s face fought the blue light that surrounded them. Eve’s body was taut, her head thrown back as if to howl. Red flames licked the back of her neck as she struggled to remain on her feet.
He wanted to run away with his daughter in his arms, as far as he could get from the scene in the clearing. To run away from his wife and his son and their struggle, his sanity still intact. But Richard had wasted enough time running away from what he couldn’t understand.
He staggered toward Eve and Michael with Abbey in his arms. The ground shook beneath him with each of the monster’s blows. As he stepped into the protective circle of blue light, he felt a blast of cool energy along with the searing sensation of raw heat that emanated from his wife. He lowered his daughter from his arms and placed her at her mother’s feet. Thus, his family lay arranged before him in a completed tableau. Abbey on one side of Eve. Michael on the other. Richard stood behind his wife and closed his eyes before he wrapped her in his arms, clutching both his children fiercely to them. The bonfire of Eve’s body burned him when she leaned back into his strength. As he fought to hold them all together, he heard a roar rising from deep within her chest, building with such force that he felt her rib snap. He looked up. From his wife’s open mouth rose an astral arc of fire. It pierced the blue light and the sky above to set the rags of the monster aflame. Richard watched as it screamed, an unholy caterwauling that echoed off the steep walls of the quarry before the giant fell to the ground and disappeared into swirling black smoke. When the moonlight shone through and the thick sooty cloud dispersed, there was nothing left of the snake man dressed in rags. Only the prone body of his wife’s lover remained, unmoving under a blanket of ash.
Richard continued to hold onto his family as the blue light began to fade. He could feel Michael slipping away from them, off to wherever he had come from and where Richard knew now he must remain. As his son left, Richard drew Eve and Abbey all the closer to him, though his arms ached in the act of letting go.
A man’s love for his family holds its own powerful magic. Even the love of an imperfect man.
And Richard’s love had held just enough to tip the balance.
Epilogue
Eve slapped the doctor’s hands away when he pressed too hard on her rib.
“I’m all right,” she insisted.
She sat in a plastic chair in the hospital emergency’s inner waiting room. Richard was beside her. He took her hand as he waved the doctor away.
“She’ll be all right,” he said.
“I still want her to go for an X-ray,” the doctor said. “Wait here.” He stood up from where he’d been examining Eve and walked over to the nurse’s station to scribble out a hasty requisition. He’d already checked out Richard’s head wound and pronounced him concussed. Something you couldn’t do a lot for, just like a broken rib.
“What happened back there, Eve?” Richard asked her.
She didn’t answer, only squeezed his hand firmly in her own.
Eve couldn’t make Richard forget what he’d seen. Janet’s binding spell stopped her from erasing his memories. There would be no going back. The veil had been pulled aside. Her husband knew who and what she was now. When she had more time, she’d explain this part of herself that she’d kept from him. Although not all of it. She wouldn’t reveal how Abbey had been conceived. There were some confidences a woman kept to herself, as did her husband. If all marriages were open books, not many would survive the reading. But as long as there was enough good material there, it didn’t really matter.
Abbey came down the hallway on crutches, escorted by an orderly. Her foot sported a new walking cast. She’d broken her ankle kicking at the lever to release herself from Mark’s trunk. She sat down beside her parents and rested her head on Eve’s shoulder. Her icy-blond hair shone almost blue in the harsh fluorescent light.
“They told me I could go up to see Selena today, Mom.”
“I’m so glad, honey.”
In her mind’s eye, Eve could see Mark strapped to a bed in a far wing of the hospital. He was covered in black soot but only injured with superficial burns. He ranted and raved to the two detectives who stood solemn at his bedside, blaming his crimes on the voices in his head, the prescription drug habit he’d developed, and the devil. In that order. The usual suspects. They’d found Julia’s purse stuffed under the carpet of his trunk next to the spare tire. The female detective was reading him his rights, despite fears that he was too far gone to comprehend them.
When Janet came crashing through the double doors chased by the triage nurse, Eve’s mother followed behind her leaning on a brightly bedazzled cane.
“They’re family,” Eve told the nurse. That and the power of suggestion she planted was enough to send the nurse back to her desk.
“How do you like my new stick?” Eve’s mother held the cane up, proudly displaying the faux jewels and glitter.
“I made it for her,” Janet said.
“It’s beautiful.” Eve lifted her hand toward the cane and a swirl of glitter danced around it like spinning stars.
“I left them both voice mails when we got to the hospital,” Richard explained.
Janet leaned in to whisper in Eve’s ear. “I heard you calling.”
Richard didn’t understand that Janet had been summoned long before his voice mail. The two women shared a frequency, transmitted more strongly than a signal from the loftiest of towers. He went to help Eve’s mother into a chair. But with the help of her cane, she managed to get down on one knee to kneel in front of her daughter.
“Sweetheart,” she said, holding both of Eve’s hands in her own. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” Eve planted a kiss on her lightly lined forehead.
“Check out my cast, Grandma,” Abbey broke in. She bent down to help her grandmother up. Eve’s mother took a seat and listened as her granddaughter relayed the details of her harrowing escape. How brave she’d been. How Richard had saved her. It didn’t bother Eve, this retelling of the story without her role in it. She’d worked hard to delete certain memories from Abbey’s consciousness, especially the one where she’d watched Eve burn with fire. But she wasn’t sure if she’d managed to get them all. Her daughter was capable of throwing up walls that even Eve’s reinstated powers couldn’t penetrate.
Richard convinced his daughter and his mother-in-law to investigate the hospital vending machines with him. It had been hours since any of them had eaten, and the hospital cafeteria wouldn’t be open for another hour. Eve watched as her husband held the double doors open for her daughter and mother. She remembered the strength of his arms wrapped around her, lifting her spirit up so she could find her power again. They had a long road ahead of them through the betrayal and the hurt, but they could still make their way back to each other. Eve had enough of her own strength for that now.
“I took the red-eye out of JFK,” Janet said when the others had disappeared down the hall. “But by the time I touched down, I could tell it was over. I knew you still had your powers.”
“Michael might have had a part in that.”
“Michael is a part of you, Eve. That’s what he’s always been.”
Eve thought about that and smiled. Then gave her friend a playful jab. “I can’t believe you brought my mom.”
