String of Tears, page 13
She whispered, “Oh my God.”
He nodded. “I don’t know who sent that to you, but that package packs a punch.”
She shuddered. “That’s what happened with the pearls, as soon as I started working on them. It wasn’t immediate, only after I did my usual thing, and then it, … it started to get weird. I could see all these women. So beautiful and in terrible pain.”
“The same women you just saw now?” She nodded. He hesitated. “Did you get any names?”
“Names? What names?”
“Names of the women, so I could try to track them down.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “These women aren’t on this earthly plane anymore.”
He nodded. “I got that,” he agreed, his tone grim. “However I would still like to know who they were and what happened to them. It would be good to maybe get closure for their families.”
Jewel took a deep breath. “First names. I can do first names.”
“How about last names?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. She stared down at the box, like it was a viper about to strike her again. “I don’t know what this is, what kind of power is in that, or how to dilute it.”
“I hate to say it, but diluting it means not getting answers.”
“You want to know what happened to those women?” she asked him.
He nodded slowly. “If you think you can.”
She shuddered. “Maybe the second time it won’t be so bad?” she asked hopefully.
“I’ll be here,” he stated.
“What does that mean?” She widened her eyes and looked at him. “What can you do?”
He smiled. “Hold my hand.”
When she reached up and grabbed his hand, immediately the waves of panic and terror eased back. She stared down at his hand and back up at him. “I don’t know what you just did, but I think I want that all the time.”
He chuckled. “Use me as a ground,” he urged.
“Is that what you’re doing? Like helping to ground my energy?”
“Let’s worry about explanations later. I’m afraid that whatever this energy is will dissipate.”
Obediently she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and, with his hand in hers, she opened up the parcel and grabbed the jeweler’s box, now holding the bracelet. Immediately the same storm swept through her, tossing her into a torrential hurricane of emotions. Almost instantly she understood how that connected to him, but, just as the understanding swept through her, so did more women, more faces.
She started calling out names, “Elizabeth, Rhea, Haley, Anna.”
“Last names,” he urged.
“Targus, Malone, Robinson, Billings.”
The words, the names, they just rolled off her lips, almost like an incantation. When her voice finally fell silent, the storm eased, as if it had finally passed.
She opened her eyes and stared at Hurricane. “Is it over?” she whispered.
He looked down at her hands, now tightly gripped in his, and he whispered, “For the moment.”
She closed her eyes, shuddering. “And those women in the necklace? I’m not sure I had names for them.”
Hurricane nodded. “If they come later, tell me then.”
Jewel shook her head. “It’s never over for those women, is it?”
He hesitated and then replied, “I’m afraid not.”
She opened her eyes, glaring at him. “What is happening?”
“Somebody has somehow captured these women’s souls and enslaved them into this bracelet, the same with the necklace,” he whispered. “My best guess is that, when you poured love into it, you came up against the evil that was behind it, and all these women, with your energy at their backs, are now screaming to get out.”
Jewel stared at him in horror. “Are their voices knocking me out?”
He nodded slowly. “As far as I can tell, their energies inside are causing all this.”
Jewel swallowed. “How do we let them out? We need to set them free,” she stated, her voice gaining in urgency. “How do we help them?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he admitted, as he stared down at the bracelet in fascination. “Didn’t you say something to Stefan about a bracelet?”
“Yes. I thought a bracelet was connected to the necklace, as if he would put more souls inside it. I can vaguely recall it.”
“Right, so you already knew that the souls were there.”
“I knew, yes, and then I forgot.” Frustrated, she shook her head. “How does somebody forget something like that?”
“Self-preservation, if nothing else,” he murmured. “You have to remember this was all relatively new, and you were and still are unprepared for this in many ways.”
She shuddered. “I work with the light,” she stated. “This is not something I’ve ever come across.”
“No, and sometimes the absolute goodness of who you are and what you’re doing can attract the exact opposite of what you want.”
She stared at him, struggling to comprehend. “You mean, I … I brought this necklace to me?”
He nodded slowly. “It’s possible, yes.”
“Possible, but you’re not sure.”
At that, his lips twitched. “In this business, I can’t be sure of anything, until we get to the raw end of whatever is going on.”
“But what … what other end is there?” she asked in astonishment, staring at him. “What other end could there be?”
He hesitated and looked at the bracelet, back at her, before replying, “I guess the question really is, who sent it to you, why did they send it to you, and is one of these pearls empty?”
“If it’s empty, that’s good, isn’t it?” she asked in bewilderment.
He looked at her and slowly shook his head. “No, it’s not good at all.”
“Why not?” she asked. “I mean, it would mean one less soul to save.”
“Jewel, think about it. It’s also one more soul he can capture.” He looked at her directly, squeezed her fingers, and added, “And I think you’re it.”
*
Hurricane knew that he’d shocked Jewel, and that was good. He wanted to shock her. He wanted her to wake up to be as aware as she could be as to whatever was going on. That she’d been targeted, he had no doubt. Why she was targeted was a whole different story. Stefan’s voice in the back of Hurricane’s head gave him a clue to the answer.
Because she can, Stefan said.
He looked at the woman sitting here, hugging a cup of coffee and staring at the bracelet, like it would bite her.
What do you mean?
She can access the energy. She is one of them. Therefore, she’s very important to whoever owns these artifacts.
How would he capture her like this? he asked, bewildered. I mean, she’s sitting on the couch.
She is at the moment, yes, Stefan confirmed in his head. But that doesn’t mean that something else isn’t there.
As he watched Jewel, she touched her hand to her throat. He remembered her saying in the hospital that the necklace belonged on her neck.
He sat down beside her, and, with Stefan still half in his head, he asked Jewel, “Did you ever wear the necklace?”
She looked up at him. “I put it on once. Something was off about the hasp, so, after adjusting it, I put the necklace on to make sure it would lay properly. Why?”
In the background, he heard Stefan’s shocked gasp.
Hurricane ignored Stefan and concentrated on Jewel. “Because I think doing that is what triggered this thing.”
She stared at the bracelet, instinctively leaning farther back away from it.
He nodded. “I’ve written down those names you called out, and we’ll see if we can track down any of these women.”
She stared up at him, then at the bracelet. “You and I both know that they’re not alive. I just don’t know if they’re in that bracelet, which is way too hard to believe, or if something else has happened to them.”
He nodded. “So let me just see what we can find out about them. I need to get answers on who these women are and what happened to them.” He pulled out his phone and called Stefan, instead of trying to get all the names through his head. “Can you contact the detective or maybe Grant?”
“I’ll contact Grant,” Stefan replied. “You look after her. The artifact is hungry now. I don’t know if it’s looking for completion or just feels that fresh energy, but it’s hungry, so you have to watch her.”
“What do I do with the bracelet?”
“Have you got a strongbox?”
“Not here, not with me,” he replied, as he turned and looked around. Seeing the battered-up wall, he added, “She does have a safe. I might put it in there with the necklace.”
“No,” Stefan snapped, his voice sharp. “Do not put them together.”
At that, he hesitated. “Are you thinking their energy will just build on each other?”
Stefan replied, “They will undoubtedly feed off each other. Do not put them together, no matter what.”
“Good God,” Hurricane said. “Fine, I’ll find a solution.”
“If not, we can send you something.”
“You’ll have to do that anyway, but, in the meantime, I need a solution for right this moment. Because even now, sitting far from her, it still feels like it’s reaching for her.”
“It is,” Stefan confirmed. “Bind it, bind it as hard and as fast as you can. I know that won’t work long-term, but it’s an answer for the moment. I’m sending you a strongbox.”
“You’ll have to send a couple,” Hurricane noted, “because if I can’t have the two of them in the same place, we’ll need to bind both of them separately.”
And, with that, Stefan hung up.
Jewel was looking at him, as if he had lost his mind, … or she had. “Bind, strongbox, attracted to each other, growing, feeding, reaching.” She stared at him. “You do know that anybody else will think I’m strange if not a complete lunatic, right?”
“I know,” he murmured. “And if it … if we didn’t have some very private corporations behind us as benefactors, you would never have come across anything like this. And honestly I’m not sure it’s a good thing that you have, but the fact of the matter is, it’s responding to you, and you are responding to it.”
“It, as in the bracelet?” she asked, staring at it.
He nodded. “That’s very true. For now, I have to find a way to secure it.”
“By the looks of it, it can’t go in the safe beside the necklace,” she stated, with a startled cry.
“No, it can’t.”
“Because they will feed off each other,” she repeated, as if it made perfect sense, and then she gave a wild cry. “Dear God, what is happening?”
He reached out, pulled her into his arms, and just held her. “Listen. I know it’s bizarre. I know it’s all very beyond the norm. I get that. But right now, I need to find a way to close this thing up, so it can’t continuously call to you.”
“Is that what it’s doing?” she asked, staring at it in horror. She bolted off the couch and ran to the far side of the room, her hands and back against the wall, as she stared at it. “How on earth did any of this even come to be possible?” she murmured.
She watched, as Hurricane picked up the box and packaged it back up in the second box. “Now what? When just in the packaging, it seems so innocuous.”
“Until it fed on your energy and realized that you’d already touched the necklace, I suspect,” he murmured. “They are bonded, the two pieces. And that brings its own set of dangers.”
“And it almost, almost sounds normal,” she noted in a low tone. “Then I think about the whole thing in context and understand just how absolutely insane all of this is.”
He smiled at her. “It is, no question. Now, why don’t you go do something completely normal, completely mundane, and I will wrap this up in energy, and that way we can try and contain it.”
“You don’t want me to watch?”
“It’s easier on me if I do this alone,” he replied. “You could get burned.”
At that, her eyes widened. “Oh, great, now you’ll do something that’ll burn somebody? What the holy hell is this?” She shuddered and walked away, her movements stiff, but they were as normal as she could make them, and he knew that.
“Tell me when you’re done,” she said. “I’ll just sit over in the corner here and stare at the fridge.”
“Why don’t you put on a pot of water for pasta?” he suggested.
She shot him a look and then nodded. “Fine, right. You did say mundane.” And, with that, she turned her back on him.
“And, Jewel, don’t turn around, no matter what you hear.”
She froze and then slowly nodded. “Then you’d better do it fast. I’m not the shrinking violet type, and I don’t normally listen when somebody tells me to do things like that.”
“No, but, at this point in time, I’m trying to keep you safe. And, in order to keep you safe, I must stop this thing from coming after you.”
He stood, waiting until her back was turned, and then, with the bracelet contained within the two nested boxes, he headed toward the safe, knowing that, as soon as he got closer, it would, … he would feel the vibration. He waited until he was just far enough away to try and keep their energy happy, yet not close enough that they could do anything about it, and he started wrapping it up in energy.
However, as soon as he wrapped it, it would unwrap itself. He would wrap it again, and it would unwrap itself.
Frustrated, he heard Maddy in the background, saying, Remember. It’s only energy. It has wants, wishes, and desires too.
And, with that, he knew how true her words were, and he infused it with love, with energy that could complement love, instead of trying to constrain it. As soon as he changed that tactic, it accepted the energy, and slowly he found he could wrap it.
With that done, he walked into the kitchen, stashed it in a cupboard, and announced, “Okay, it’s contained for the moment.”
She looked up at him and nodded jerkily. “The pasta water is on. What did you want for a sauce?”
“I’ll do it,” he offered, stepping in front of her. “You want to make a salad, while I take care of this?” And, with that, he proceeded to make a rosé sauce to go with dinner. He kept an eye on her, and, as a little more time passed, she calmed. As more time passed, she had calmed even more.
Finally she slowly relaxed, her shoulders easing, noting, “The entire atmosphere is different.”
He nodded. “It happens that way sometimes.”
She let out her breath. “So, what do you do in real life?”
“This,” he stated. “Honestly, this is what I do.”
“Do people pay you to do this?”
“We do have corporate donors, and we get sponsors to help,” he admitted, “but I have money of my own.”
She stared at him, and he gave her a knowing look.
“Anybody who has this energy ability has access to money. Why would we not? If money is only energy, we can get what we need at any point in time. It’s just one of those universal laws.”
Her eyes widened, and she stared at him.
He shrugged. “Once you understand the universal laws, they’re really quite forgiving.”
“If you say so,” she replied in a strangled voice. “Man, I really need to learn how to use that one.”
He burst out laughing. “That one I should be able to teach you,” he murmured. “If you can hear, see, and feel the energy in that box, all you need to learn are the laws, and you’ll be fine.”
“Says you,” she quipped. She shook her head, turned back to the food, and asked, “Is it time to eat?”
He looked over at the sauce in the pan bubbling gently in front of him and nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Good,” she replied. “I’m starving.”
Chapter 12
The next morning dawned bright and clear. Jewel lay in bed, feeling a set of tumblers going through her head, almost like clickety-click-click. She slowly sat upright, knowing that it was important, but she didn’t know why. She dressed quickly, walked down to the safe, and opened up the tumblers.
She reached inside, only to have Hurricane grab her hand and whisper against her ear, “Stop.”
She froze and looked up at him. “I wanted to check that they’re still there.”
He gently pulled her hand back, locked up the safe, and put the plasterboard back into position. Then he nudged her down the stairs. “It’s the pearls, the energy, calling to you.”
Downstairs, she stared up at the safe and looked back at him. “Something was calling me, but, like really important, tumblers went off in my head,” she murmured.
He stared at her and then nodded. “I’ll still put that down to energy.”
“Maybe,” she murmured. “I woke up feeling so good, so normal, and then all of this played through my head, and it felt so right.”
He smiled at her, leaned down, then pulled her into his arms and gave her a hug. She cuddled in close, only to realize that his chest was bare, and he was a furnace of warm, comforting heat. She wrapped her arms around him and just held him. They stood like that for a long moment, him gently massaging her back, his chin resting on her head.
“Will it ever be normal again?”
“It will,” he stated, his chin moving back and forth on the top of her head. “It will all go back to normal, whatever that means.”
She gave a strangled laugh. “That’s the thing isn’t it? Whatever normal means.”
He smiled. “Let me go grab some clothes. I had to bolt to stop you.” Turning away from her, he walked to his duffel bag in the corner, his huge muscled body rippling in the early morning light. He quickly pulled on his jeans and then turned back to her, T-shirt in hand. “Coffee?”
Almost dumbstruck by this male specimen of perfection in front of her, she felt an urgent need to create itching at her fingertips. She nodded, but, instead of going to the kitchen, she headed to her workbench and her sketchbook, her mind busy with a design. She quickly picked up a piece of charcoal, and her fingers moved furiously across the page, as she opened up that well in her mind and let her fingers dance across the designs pouring from her soul.
