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“They’re taking her into the OR,” a voice said, and Hale stopped staring into the middle distance to look up and see that the same nurse was talking to him. “There’s a waiting room through here.”
He followed after her, feeling helpless and lost. As soon as he was seated in the smaller room with the blue and gray molded plastic chairs, he pulled out his cell again. He stared at it a moment before punching in Savannah’s cell number.
CHAPTER 15
She knew she was dreaming, but she couldn’t wake up. Kristina was there, dressed in white, beckoning her silently toward a building covered by dense shrubbery. Savannah tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t form the words. They were stuck in her throat, and every effort to speak failed her. “I’m not going,” she tried to tell the wraithlike Kristina. “I’m not going!”
But it was useless and the screen of bushes seemed to fall away and there was the lodge, Siren Song, only bigger and darker. And there was a light in the third-floor window that shouldn’t have been there, Savvy was pretty sure. The gates were open, and she followed Kristina, only it wasn’t Kristina anymore. It was someone else. Someone older and old-fashioned, with a cameo brooch at her neck depicting an even older woman, a relative, she knew. Mary? No, someone older. Sarah? That was a name from the book. One of the women from the past who had powers . . . no, a gift. That was what they all had, all the women, but it was the men . . . the boys . . . whose gifts were more intense, more deadly.
In front of her eyes floated Xs and Ys, and she heard Catherine’s voice saying, “It goes deeper and darker with them. Can you feel it? Can you feel it?”
And Savvy was suddenly drenched with a desire so hot and angry that she felt her body shudder and explode into a climax that had her arching upward. A man was crooning to her, telling her she was his, and she saw that it was Hale St. Cloud.
I’m dreaming. Stop, she told herself. Stop! Wake up!
Kristina’s eyes were staring into Savvy’s accusingly. “I wasn’t with Hale. I wasn’t!” she wanted to scream, but Kristina couldn’t seem to hear her.
And then Joyce Powell-Pritchett was there, peering at Savannah through her narrow-lensed glasses, saying in her schoolteacher’s voice, “It’s all in the history. If you would just look deeper, you would see.”
“Who’s the older lady?” Savvy struggled to ask, and she must have been heard, because Catherine turned slowly to see where she was looking and said in her crisp tones, “That’s no lady. Look. Look.”
Before Savvy’s eyes the woman with the cameo turned into a man wearing a fedora dipped over one eye and a brown suit. He lifted the brim of his hat with one finger, and his eyes burned like hot coals.
Savannah screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and she sat bolt upright in bed.
She was awake, quivering all over, still propped up on the motel room bed. She could feel th
e faint remnants of her climax and was slightly embarrassed. What the hell?
And then Baby St. Cloud rolled over once, and Savvy clutched the covers, seized by a stronger Braxton Hicks as her cell phone shattered the stillness and caused her to gasp, her heart lurching.
“God,” she muttered, annoyed at herself, feeling cold sweat on her skin. She searched around for her phone and found it tangled in the covers of the bed. “Hello?” she answered. “Hello?”
“Savvy? It’s Hale.”
Her sex dream about him momentarily came back, and she pushed it aside with revulsion. She realized she was breathing hard and swallowed once, trying to shake the remnants of the dream. “Hey, there,” she said. Then, “Have you talked to Kristina?”
“That’s why I’m calling you. There’s been an accident.”
Savvy sat up straighter, the hairs on the back of her neck lifting. “What kind of accident?”
“At one of our construction sites. She was hit with a beam, it looks like it fell on her, and she’s at the hospital, in surgery.”
Savannah was on her feet. “What?” When he hesitated, Savannah felt like screaming. “Damn it, Hale. What?”
“They’re saying subdural hematoma.” Another profound hesitation. “She’s bleeding into her brain.”
“Oh, God . . . How? How did this happen?” Her eyes were searching for her shoes, sturdy black slip-ons, but she needed something else. She’d packed her sneakers. Boots with traction would have been better, but sneakers would work. She had her ski jacket. She hadn’t unpacked.
“I don’t know.”
He sounded tired, but Savannah felt wide awake now with every nerve fiber singing. She took two steps to the window and pulled back the curtain. Snow was falling fast and hard. The rail outside her window had an inch on it already.
“I’m coming back,” she said.
“No,” he said. “The pass is going to be a mess.”
“I have four-wheel drive. I have chains in the back. I’m coming back, Hale.”
