The Demon Lover Read online

  I left her introducing herself to Frank Delmarco (“A big strong man like you wouldn’t mind carrying up a few teeny-weeny boxes for me, would you?”) and made my escape. I was now really and truly exhausted. I was so tired that when I let myself into my house I couldn’t face one more flight of stairs. I collapsed on the couch in the library, not even bothering to draw the blinds against the late afternoon sun, and fell into a deep sleep.

  I must have slept for several hours because when I woke up the room was nearly dark. The last of the sun bathed the couch in liquid amber and shadows stretched long across the library floor, almost, but not quite, reaching me.

  Come here, a voice from inside the shadows said.

  I’m still asleep, I told myself. I’m still dreaming.

  Come here!

  The voice was harsher now. Gone was the gentle oceanic murmur of last night. But there was also something desperate in it. He couldn’t reach me in the light. He hadn’t grown that strong.

  I will once I feed on you again, the voice whispered.

  I shivered, not from fear—but from desire at the memory of those shadow lips suckling me last night. I could feel myself going wet already just at the thought of him—

  But it wasn’t a him; it was a thing waiting to feed on me and even if it was only a dream-thing I had to assert myself. Didn’t I?

  I reached behind me for the lamp, remembering only as I touched it that I hadn’t plugged it in yet. The shadows stretched closer. The voice commanded me again. Come here! He was getting angry. I swung my legs around and planted my feet in the swath of sunlight. The wood felt warm. Solid. Was I really dreaming?

  Yes, only dreaming, the voice said, coaxing now. But such a lovely dream. Come to me!

  The dreams were lovely … well, last night’s dream had been. But still some shred of consciousness told me that there was a limit. That if I let this thing into the daylight I might never wake up from those dreams.

  I stood up and followed the path of sunlight across the floor to the wall switch. I flicked it on.

  When I turned back I half expected him to still be there—my moonlight lover—glowering at me with disapproval for my disobedience. I could feel his anger prickling the hairs at the back of my neck. I spun around but the room, awash with electric light, was empty.

  SEVEN

  I slept with my light on that night. In the morning I called Brock Olsen to fix the window in my bedroom and he was at my door fifteen minutes later. He was short and broad and bearded. His face would have been handsome, but he must have had a bad case of acne when he was young that had left his skin rough and pitted. When I showed him the broken window he rocked back on his heels and stroked his beard as if he were contemplating the Mona Lisa.

  “It happened two nights ago when there was all that wind,” I said. “This wind chime blew against it and broke it.” I retrieved the metal ornament from the desk drawer where I’d stowed it away, as if it proved my story. Brock gave me a long considering look, as if I was a shelf hung crooked.

  “Is that how you cut your hand?” he asked, looking down at my hand.

  The scratch had almost healed so I’d taken the bandage off, but it had started to itch. I nodded and he took my hand in his own broad and calloused one. He studied the cut for so long I began to feel uncomfortable, but then he ran the tips of his fingers over the scratch, which should have made me feel even more uncomfortable. It had the opposite effect. As he stroked my hand a wave of comfort and well-being spread throughout my body. I thought of stories I’d read about faith healers, people whose touch could cure suffering. Brock Olsen’s hands looked as if they’d suffered a lot themselves; they were nicked and scarred and riddled with burn marks that stood out white against his dark skin. He was missing the top of his left ring finger. Maybe having been through so much pain himself gave him the power to ease the pain in others. When he released my hand the itching was gone.

  “Best be more careful next time,” he said, fixing me with his warm brown eyes. He waited until I promised I would and then went to get his tools from his truck.

  I spent the morning sorting through Dahlia LaMotte’s papers while Brock Olsen worked in the house, replaning all my doors and windows. I found the background noise of his hammering and sanding oddly companionable. I made a pot of coffee for us and heated up a plate of cinnamon rolls Diana Hart had left on my doorstep with a note saying they were leftovers from last night’s guests. The smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled cozily with the piney scent of sawdust. It felt good to have someone else in the house. Maybe Frank Delmarco was right. This was too big a house for one person—although maybe not one person with this many books.

  I decided that there were too many boxes of papers to keep in my little turret office, so I hauled them into one of the empty bedrooms. Brock helped me when he saw what I was doing. I unpacked them all and started stacking them in piles on the floor, sorting by category and using the iron mice doorstops as paperweights.

  There were notebooks—ledgers from her father’s shipping business bound in marbled paper and ruled with narrow horizontal lines and red vertical columns—in which Dahlia had apparently written her rough drafts; piles of typescript; and letters. I arranged the letters chronologically, making piles for each decade of her life, and the writing notebooks and typescripts by book.

  At some point in the afternoon Brock brought me a plate with cheese, bread, and apple slices and a fresh cup of coffee.

  “Oh, Brock!” I cried. “I should have gotten you lunch.”

  “I could see you were wrapped up in what you were doing,” he said, blood rising behind his ravaged skin. “Are these Dolly’s things?” he asked.

  “Dolly?”

  “That’s what we called her here in Fairwick. To the world she was Dahlia LaMotte.”

  “There are people who remember her?” I asked, amazed that the town’s memory went back that far.

  He smiled. “It’s a small town and the local families have been here a long time. My people have been here for over a hundred years.”

  “Really? Did they come from somewhere in Scandinavia?”

  “Sort of,” he replied. “We made some other stops along the way. Dolly’s people, they came later, and overland.”

  “Overland?” I repeated, wondering what on earth he meant. Fairwick was a landlocked village in the Catskill Mountains. How else could anyone approach it? “You mean by train or carriage?”

  A vivid red streak rose up on the right side of Brock’s face, highlighting a welt on his cheekbone. It looked like he’d been bitten by an insect there.

  “Ya, they came by carriage, how else? I only meant some didn’t have fine carriages or train fare. My people came on foot, through the woods, through hardship and danger.” He rubbed at the welt on his face with the back of his scarred hand. He looked angry, but not at me, or even at the town. He looked angry at himself for not being able to express himself better. I wondered if the marks on his face were the vestiges of some childhood illness—chicken pox? measles?—that had scarred his brain as well as his skin.

  “Your ancestors must have struggled hard to find a safe place to live and raise their children,” I said gently. “That’s something to be proud of.”

  He nodded, the red streak subsiding. He pointed at the stacks of notebooks. “Dolly understood that. She helped us … my great-uncles, I mean, start the gardening shop when there weren’t no call for blacksmiths no more, and always had them come do what work needed doing in the house. She liked hearing the old stories.”

  “Really?” I said, looking down at the ledgers. Had she used the stories she’d heard in her books? “That’s interesting. Perhaps you can help me by identifying where some of her stories came from.”

  He smiled. It transformed his face from ugly to handsome. “Ya, I’ll be happy to. I am here to help you.”

  I spent the rest of the afternoon making an inventory of Dahlia LaMotte’s notebooks and let
ters. The letters I found, to my disappointment, were all of a business nature, either to her publisher in New York or her lawyer in Boston. No clandestine love affairs or dark family secrets were likely to be lurking there, but the letters to her publisher could establish a timeline of her writing process. A glimpse of one showed that she reported progress on her novels dutifully. I finished the handwritten draft of Dark Destiny today and will begin typing it tomorrow, one letter read.

  It was curious that she didn’t employ a typist. Was she such a hermit that she couldn’t stand the human interaction? But then, Brock had said that she enjoyed talking to the locals and hearing their stories. If I could find accounts of those conversations it would be fascinating to compare the references to boggarts and fairies, witches and demons that Dahlia sprinkled throughout her books to local folklore.

  Only when I had a complete list of all the notebooks—numbered with dates and the titles of which novels she had been working on in each—and a list of typescripts, did I allow myself a peek at one of the notebooks. I chose The Dark Stranger, my favorite of her books and her best known novel. I read the familiar first lines with a frisson of excitement.

  The moment I set foot across the threshold of Lion’s Keep I knew my fate was sealed. I had been here before, in desperate dreams and fevered fancies, and always I knew it to be the place where he would finally ensnare me—the man of my dreams—the incubus of my nightmares. The dark stranger, my demon lover …

  I stopped reading. I didn’t recall the word incubus from the first paragraph of The Dark Stranger, or the phrase demon lover. Although Dahlia LaMotte flirted with the supernatural with her use of dreams, portents, creaking stairs, veiled figures, and telepathic voices, she never made overt use of it. At the end of each book the events were tidily explained. Her anti-heroes had all the elements of the rakish Byronic heroes of Gothic Romance, but they were flesh and blood, not incubi, demons, or vampires. Perhaps she was just playing with the imagery, but that imagery hadn’t made it into her final drafts. When, I wondered, had it been edited out?

  I turned to the first page of the typescript of The Dark Stranger. On brittle, yellowed paper I read over the first paragraph. It was the same as in the notebook until the last line.

  … the man of my dreams, the figure in my nightmares.

  Interesting.

  Between handwritten draft and typescript Dahlia LaMotte had struck the words incubus and demon lover. How many other changes had she made? I flipped through one of the notebooks in which she’d written The Dark Stranger and happened upon a scene I remembered well. Violet Grey, timid governess, hears a cry in the night and rushes out onto the landing …

  … so urgently that I didn’t stop to cover myself in my dressing gown. When I reached the landing I saw, to my horror, William Dougall standing there chiding the laundry maid for squealing at a mouse. I couldn’t bear for haughty William Dougall to think I was spying on him or to look upon me in my transparent nightgown. To my left was the door to the linen closet, which had been left partly ajar by the careless maid. It was the work of an instant to slip inside and wedge myself between the full shelf of folded linens and the door. I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief and settled myself against the still warm and fragrant cloth. Thankfully the room was not completely dark. A beam of moonlight came through a window at the back of the closet and flowed through the crack in the door, allowing me to watch for Dougall to leave the landing. He was still scolding her.

  “You should not be out and about at night. There are things here far worse than a mouse that will make you scream until you have no voice. Go back to your room. Lock your door and close your windows. Draw your drapes to shut out the moonlight. The moonlight plays tricks with one’s mind.”

  Dougall glanced down at the spill of moonlight from the closet. For a moment his eyes seemed to meet mine and I felt a tremor move through me that reached into the pit of my stomach and made my legs go so weak I sank further into the warm sheets. Did he see me?

  But then he turned abruptly and stalked away, leaving a very frightened-looking maid who soon scurried back to her room.

  As I should have done now. Only my legs were still weak. What had William Dougall meant by the moonlight playing tricks? The moonlight had certainly played tricks on me since I’d come to Lion’s Keep. At the memory of those strange dreams my heart raced. Did Dougall know about my moonlight lover who had insinuated himself into my bed … and between my legs? At the thought I felt heat spark between my legs. I pressed my thighs together as if I could quench that flame, but instead the heat quickened. I squirmed against the sheets … and felt them squirm against me!

  I was not alone in the linen closet.

  Someone—or something—had stolen in behind me … or had been hiding there when I came in.

  Slowly I took a step toward the door …

  But strong arms wrapped around me and pulled me back.

  I started to call out and a hand clamped down over my mouth.

  Another hand dropped to my neck, caressed my throat, fondled my breast, lowered to my belly … then slipped in between my legs. I struggled but my movements only succeeded in exciting him. I felt something stiff pressing against my back, pressing in between the cleft of my buttocks. The hand lifted my gown and spread my legs just as the hard probing shaft found its way between my legs and thrust into me.

  I bit the hand over my mouth and he … it … returned the bite on my shoulder. He plunged deeper into me, withdrew, plunged again and again, stoking a flame that finally burst inside me. The moonlight seemed to splinter around me, dissolving into a shower of stars …

  “Miss?”

  I jumped at the sound of the voice, guiltily slamming shut the notebook on Violet Grey’s orgasm.

  I looked up, hoping my cheeks weren’t as red as they felt. Brock was standing in the hallway, his coat on and his toolbox in his right hand. “They’ll be here when you get back,” he said.

  “Who? Who’s coming back?” I asked.

  “The books, I meant,” he said, giving me an odd look. “They’ll be here when you get back from the faculty reception.”

  I looked down at my watch. It was a quarter to five; the reception started at six. I’d spent all afternoon in this room sorting through Dahlia’s papers, losing track of time, getting lost in an erotic haze.

  Dahlia LaMotte had written erotica! And then she had edited it out between manuscript and typescript. What a discovery! What an amazing book it would make! I wanted to go through every single notebook right now, but Brock was right. I had to go to the faculty reception.

  “Thanks for reminding me.” I started to get up and found my legs were cramped from sitting in the same position for so long. Brock held out his hand to help me up. As soon as his broad, rough hand enfolded mine I felt an overwhelming sense of well-being. I looked down at the piles of paper, each watched over by its own cast iron mouse sentinel, and felt a swelling sense of excitement … followed by an almost equally potent sense of dread. Dahlia LaMotte had written of a lover made out of moonlight who ravished her heroines just as the creature in my dreams had ravished me. Either she had dreamed the same dreams as I had … or they weren’t dreams at all.

  EIGHT

  I walked briskly across the campus, trying to dispel the ridiculous notion that my dreams were something more than the work of an overheated imagination—mine or Dahlia’s. There was a simple explanation. I’d grown up listening to fairy tales and had invented my own fairytale prince out of them. And I’d been reading Dahlia LaMotte’s books for years. Even in the edited and published versions there was a latent eroticism and plenty of references to moonlight and shadows. Moving to Dahlia’s house had simply brought that latent sexuality to life—and into my dreams. That Dahlia had written more graphically in her original manuscripts was an exciting scholarly discovery, I told myself as I entered Briggs Hall, but that was all. It didn’t mean my dreams were anything but dreams.

 
Like Fraser, Briggs was in the Tudor style, only considerably grander. Entering the main parlor I felt as if I might be entering William Dougall’s ancestral castle. One whole wall was covered with heavy tapestry drapes. The beamed ceiling must have been at least twelve feet high. Looking up I saw that each beam was decorated in gilt lettering and Celtic designs, which were echoed in painted inserts in the dark oak paneling. Above the stone fireplace at the end of the room hung a huge painting of monumental figures in flowing medieval robes. The room was so impressive that I stood in the doorway for several minutes admiring it—and catching my breath from my hurried walk across campus—before I became aware that I was being watched. Elizabeth Book, in a brocade dress and pearls that somehow managed to make her look fashionably chic and Old World elegant at the same time, was pointing me out to a striking, tall woman dressed all in green. The dean caught my eye and waved for me to come forward. I obeyed, feeling as if I’d been summoned by a queen.

  As regal as Elizabeth Book was, though, the woman who stood beside her dwarfed her. She must have been at least six feet tall, in a green jersey calf-length dress that clung to her willowy frame. Her loose, waist-length hair was platinum blond. From across the room I had thought she was young, but as I got closer I saw that her face was creased by fine lines and that her hair was actually silver. Her green eyes were clear and sharp as emeralds and watched me with unnerving focus. I felt as if my progress across the long room were being tracked by a mountain lion.

  “Ah, there you are, Callie,” Elizabeth Book said, holding out both her hands to me. “You look lovely!”

  “Thank you.” I had worn my favorite cocktail dress—a vintage peacock blue Dolce & Gabbana that clung just enough to my curves, made my hair glow copper, and brought out the green in my eyes. In the shadow of the regal woman in green, though, I felt suddenly like a scullery maid.