The Lebrus Stone (16 page)

"Are you talking about anyone in particular, Milton? You seem to think you know exactly how I feel."

I didn't mean to sound so defensive. He kept pruning, avoiding the fact that I was waiting for him to reply.

"Well?"

"I think you know the answer to that, Crystal. It's not every day you meet your equivalent or surrender to your match."

"I don't understand."

His eyes flickered to mine. "I think you do."

Before I could correct his misconception, we were interrupted by Isobel, at her most lanky, and in a pinstripe pencil skirt and a tight fitted blouse the shade of mustard that was definitely not her color. It tinged her matte white complexion a jaundice yellow.

I had always admired her dress sense; recently she didn't seem so…with it.

She cupped her hand over her eyes as she spoke, moving closer until she stood just inches away.

"Here you are! I've been looking all over for you," she said to me.

"I thought I would help Milton with some gardening." Not that I had lifted a finger the whole time. Still, it was the only answer I could give her.

"Yes, she's been a great help," Milton said, perhaps being sarcastic. "She's been keeping me company. I don't usually have such an honor." He patted my shoulder.

Isobel's face soured to a look of embarrassment. "That's just delightful, Milton. I am sure you are making the most of her stay."

Milton cocked his head to the side and looked at Isobel with a squint. Nothing was said, but something passed between them with a speechless accusation, particularly from Isobel.

Tying a compost bag twice, Milton stood to face Isobel who was standing rigid with her hands on her hips, looking forcibly strong considering she was half his size. I stayed put. I wasn't ready to leave just yet. It seemed like they were about to have a silent showdown.

"I've done my work here. I'll be on my way." Milton nodded at Isobel; even tipped the end of his cap.

"Thank you for your time, Milton. From now on I shall call you before you're scheduled time. I feel we can no longer overlook your lack of punctuality."

Milton's jaw dropped, but he didn't fully react. Understandably he didn't want an argument. But I felt angered at the mistreatment. I thought Milton was considered family.

Had I changed that?

Milton came and went when he pleased. I didn't know he had an allotted time to work every day, and by the looks of it, neither did he.

"Right, okay," he replied calmly.

This finally made Isobel smile; another triumph no doubt.

When he left, I couldn't bring myself to look at her. I didn't like the way she'd spoken to him. It was unnecessary.

What had Milton done to be treated with such lack of respect?

I had never seen Isobel talk to him in that way, and I couldn't help wonder if I had something to do with it; if my growing affection for Milton was being mistaken for something else, if it was a dislike for another reason.

Maybe Isobel was afraid he was going to tell me something she wanted to keep under wraps. Maybe she was hiding more than she cared to reveal to anyone.

Whatever her reasons, they were wrong, which was why I wasn't going to attend the fundraiser. To deliberately teach her a lesson.

It was a good enough excuse.

~ * ~

"You cannot attend?"  Isobel's voice was steady but shocked, maybe even appalled when I said I wasn't attending the fundraiser.

She was sitting in her oversized chair in the study, reading the mail from this morning. Her half-moon glasses, which she wore only when reading, were on the end of her nose. I had taken a seat opposite her as I bit into a ripe peach.

"No. I'm sorry, Isobel. I'm feeling a little run down. I think I might be coming down with something."

I had planned to outright tell her I didn't want to attend, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I was choosing to pull a sicky. Pathetic. I couldn't stand up to the woman.

The mail lay crumpled in her hands as she thought about what I'd said. She eyed me with disbelief. "You look fine to me; radiant in fact."

I tried not to be flattered by the remark. Instead, I coughed and spluttered into my hand. "It's probably a mild twenty-four hour thing. If I don't rest, it could take longer to get rid of."

"In May? It's unheard of."

I didn't expect this to be easy, but heck, could she really not take no for an answer. She continued to observe me, stiff as an arrow.

I held my stomach and coughed, wincing with phantom pain.

"My, that does sound terrible, Crystal."

She came to stand beside me, brushing my hair back into a loose knot. "Let me take look at you." She turned my head by the chin and searched my face, looking for clues to diagnose my symptoms. The touch of her cool hand on my head brought actual relief from the unease I felt in the house.

"Much closer, you do look withdrawn. Have you been sleeping?" She still held my chin with the tip of her fingers. It wasn't nice to know she suggested I needed my beauty sleep.

"Some nights it's broken."

"By what?"

"Nightmares mainly. Sometimes it seems like people are talking outside my room." I wasn't sure why I was admitting it. Maybe I hoped she would believe me and understand I needed the rest. Maybe I hoped she would send me home.

"Nightmares about what exactly?" Her hand slid away to her side as she walked back to her chair. Leaning forward, she took my hand.

"I don't remember all that much about them when I wake up," I lied "I just know they're frightening, which makes it harder for me to fall back to sleep"

"I see," she whispered.

"Premonitions!" someone bellowed from the doorway.

I recognized the interrupting, catty tone. Marsi crossed the room and stood by the fireplace. Her long, purple gypsy dress fell just above her painted red toenails. They overlapped within her black leather sandals. She also wore a purple t-shirt.

She was practically dressed like me, and that filled me with a rage I couldn't just bite on. How dare she try to copy what I wore, especially on the same day.

She cackled with laughter, running her hands through her hair as if they could tame the big, wild curls springing out of her small head.

"What?" Isobel asked.

Marsi was the only person who could take Isobel out of her natural elegance.

"Prem-o-nitions," Marsi repeated like we were hard of hearing. "Nightmares and dreams alike are seventy per cent from insight. We connect with ourselves mostly when we are in a relaxed state of sleep. As with meditation, we close away from our minds."

She picked up the framed photograph of Isobel and Theodore on their wedding day and nodded to herself.

Isobel rose to snag it from her hands and placed it carefully back on the mantelpiece. "I did not ask for your verdict or your pointless research into benign facts, Marselle," she quipped. "I simply wished to know what it was you wanted."

"Tut tut…how impolite of you to assume, Issy. I was merely stating factual information. As for your problem, Crystal." She had stated my name like it was the term used for a puss oozing abscess. "It's simply a power of mind. Only you can pull the plug and drain your sorrows."

I threw my peach in the waste bin and wiped my hands with a napkin.

"You only have to try," she added slyly.

"When I need your help, I'll ask for it," I retorted, getting up to stand behind my chair. I gripped the back. Suddenly I wanted to slap her condescending smile to a faraway kingdom like Mazoo; a place that didn't exist.

"I don't wish to help, only complete the cycle of your destiny," she went on, boringly.

"You're right," I said.

She frowned

"Someone does need help. You!"

I didn't wait for a jibe or comeback. She'd had her say and I mine.

And what did she know?

She wasn't God, a prophet or anything of such holiness. She only contorted things. Marsi was no real Wiccan or spiritual retriever, she was too malicious for anything spiritually enhanced. She was just someone lonely, a buyer of time with nothing better to do than to mock and interfere and drink herself to hell.

I kept to my room until the house became empty of people and their constant questions. It was hours before they left late afternoon to join the rest of the community in restructuring the chapel.

A fundraising attempt obliterated by its chances of survival by minus one.

They were going to need a lot more money to rebuild it, and that would have taken a dozen more fundraising. Not that I was being a party pooper. I just knew a wreck when I saw it.

I managed to read a book I had  forgotten to finish and caught up on the goings-on back home. Jared had little to say on the work front, although he assured me things were running smoothly. He had even employed Nancy to help out temporarily while I was away.

That meant T.J. had his airhead of an ex-girlfriend around almost twenty four hours a day. It had to be a serious glutton for punishment.

It had to be a way to get me permanently removed. They did seem to be carrying on fine without me. T.J. was even too busy to talk; unloading new seasonal stock was a better option than to take my call. If he was sulking, two could play that game. I was a master at sulking. I did it here enough to become a pro champion at it.

But to be honest, I wanted my old life back, and somehow I knew it wasn't going to be that easy. It also wasn't completely going to make such a difference. Not when I was still nowhere near to a solution to my ongoing problems or the story behind my ancestors.

After shooting out of bed and changing into a pair of thicker jeans, I made my way downstairs and into the hallway, pausing a moment to be sure I was alone for once.

It was safe to say I was.

There wasn't a sound, not even a tinker of a voice, quarreling or a fuss over a spilt drink. It was almost too quiet, spacous with empty corners, filled and destroyed with only the tick tock of the most annoying clock in the universe.

It chimed three o'clock, startling me out of my once calm composure. I swore under my breath, and passed through the hall and into the drawing room.

It was still my favorite room. It almost felt wrong to sit among the beauty of it.

It seemed for public display only, for tour guided groups visiting a museum of artifacts. I guessed it would be if it was to ever get lost or taken from the Lockes. It could become a showroom. A glimpse into one's past. Kept as a souvenir and sold like a bag of candy to the greedy investors.

On the table was a collection of magazines titled things like "Telepathy." There were also news clippings on UFO sightings and hauntings around Florida. A bookmarked diary made of a two toned fabric lay open. It must have been Marsi's. There was a weird looking eye that blinked whenever you moved the diary from side to side.

I opened it and found a verse:

Soon bear fruit, the throws of one's despair

Seek fair child, the wounds of your kind

Between you and I. There are no secrets told.

Between you and those. There can be no unfolding.

Marselle Mornay

I turned another page. She had drawn a spider's web.

Every other page had more drawings, each more disturbing than the other.

They were of mangled bodies, bleeding heads and even naked lovers biting each other's torn flesh; red stained the pages with black, smudged ink.

I kept flicking through the pages, watching them move like a sequence of events that resolved to the final message.

"CRYSTAL IS HER NAME."

I dropped the book, hands trembling.

I couldn't get the pictures out of my mind, the way they represented a lustful aggression to kill and be killed, to destroy one another with a compassionate will.

"Seen enough?"

I jumped. Cray was leaning against the door, his hands in his pockets.

He was wearing black combats and a white vest. Yet he still appeared smartly dressed. He wasn't wearing his shades, though, and the bruise was fading. He wasn't hiding it anymore.

I wished he was. It reminded me of what I did. It reminded me that I still needed to apologize, but didn't know how to begin. I knew he wouldn't have gone to the fundraiser. I didn't ask where he had been for so long. It had nothing to do with me.

A slight smile curled one corner of his lips. I bit mine hard with a blush.

How had he entered without me knowing? I couldn't even bring myself to ask the question.

"Shame," he spoke softly, raising my temperature higher, until I burned like firewood. Was he being nice to me?

Why?

Maybe Isobel had asked him to.

I didn't want to stick around to find out how well he did with it. I bolted for the doorway, wanting to keep him at a safer distance and myself away from such a compelling face.

It was obsessive, compulsive and a disorder I had no control of. Not when he was this close.

He barricaded me in with his arm. It was toned and its usual tanned self, prickling with heat from the visible moisture. There was a scent of masculinity and superiority in the air. I tried to not enjoy it

"I was hoping we could talk," he said.

He was? My shock mustn't have been masked so well. He actually smiled, wide and generous. I would never have been able to describe it, or explain the effect it had on me. But I could try to push it away. I had to.

"What about?" I said, managing to astound myself by speaking clearly and with a confidence that wasn't truly mine.

He bit his bottom lip, as if contemplating something pleasurably sinful. His devious expression only made my heart palpitate; the adrenaline rush of being so close to him kicked in full speed, and his scent aroused a need for me to touch his flushed red lips that were slightly swollen from all the biting.

My sigh sounded more like a whimper. I wanted to run away. I just couldn't move. A part of me wanted to stay and gain more of…him. And it was wrong, wrong of me to want it. Yet I didn't care. Not when he was around.

And there was nothing harsh about the way his soft brown eyes looked at me. They were only ponderous.

This new side of him was much more dangerous than the other. The person who smiled at me could cause you to fall in love with him a thousand times over. No matter the outcome. No matter the consequence.

He leaned closer, till our lips were only centimeters apart.

If he was going to miraculously kiss me, I wasn't ready. I never would be. But I wanted it so badly, it physically hurt to remain so still.

I closed my eyes, waiting for the moment to finally arrive, to take me further away from myself and deeper into an emotional trail of surrender. I knew I would allow it to fill me, to lower me whole beneath the sands of time. If only this once so that it could give me some type of internal peace.

But lips didn't touch mine. No breath lingered or opened up a wave of discovery to my hardly kissed mouth. I had waited a long time. Not just for him, but all that was wasted with keeping people away.

"Why are you suddenly talking to me?" I asked him, agitated as I opened my eyes to look at his shirt button and distract myself from how he was making me feel all warm and fuzzy.

"Are we talking?" he said, unaffected. This agitated all the more.

"More than usual."

His eyes remained on mine, still a neutral brown.

There was nothing but silence and the ticking grandfather clock in the hallway.

"Tell me what you want," I said. "I'm too tired to play mind games."

"This is no game." His tone was cool and collected, practically careless.

"Really? Tell that to my poor head."

He leaned back on the door frame. I was glad he was giving me some space. I could have left but stupidly chose to stay and hear what else he had to say.

"I think your head's suffered way in advance," he said.

"What do you mean?" I lashed back, regretting it.

He shrugged. "Just what I said."

"That I'm a head case?"

"That's one way to describe you."

That was it. I wasn't sticking around to be insulted again. Not even if he was joking. I turned to leave, but he barricaded me again.

"L-let me go," I stammered. "Stop it."

"Stop what?" His eyes grew dark, his voice hoarse.

"This: teasing me." I blinked too much. "I don't like it. It's immature."

I tried to push by him, but he grabbed my wrist.

I winced. He let go and stepped back. His face contorted, his lips pursed and his eyes drew together. A menacing white shot out from his pupils.

"Your eyes," I said, it was barely a whisper. "Why do they keep changing like that?" I automatically stepped toward him to marvel at them.

Were they a new kind of contacts?

His expression turned from fierce to almost afraid. "My eyes are fine. It's your eyes that are wrong."

"Wrong?" I sounded more insulted than I should have.

He cleared his throat. "…I mean…different."

"Different how?"

He stepped forward, hesitantly, and examined my eyes with equal amount of depth before answering. I wished I hadn't asked.

"They can be the deepest violet. The next." His words faltered. "Ice blue, yet too sharp, too transparent…" He bit his lip. "Sky blue would be too contained to be the exact the color. It would be somewhere between…" Again he faltered, blinking almost nervously.

I wasn't the only one imagining things then? But why? It was mind boggling. Or maybe he was lying. Again, I was afraid I was losing my grip on reality. I was afraid Cray was pretending to see the same, just to offend me in return, to find out how messed up I was. For now I kept up with the pretense.

"Between?" My voice was sure of itself.

I didn't care about the color of my eyes to him after that comment, only with the fact that he had noticed them.

He stepped back from me like a charge of something electric had bounced between us. He scratched his head and looked around the drawing room. "Forget what I said."

He dashed away.

"Wait," I shouted, but it was too late. He moved too fast.

~ * ~

The nightmares had gone. It was hard to believe, but true. My dreams were now flourished with wonderful silk garmented angels that flew like wingless birds, swarming me with a delicate press of long linked fingers. I didn't understand these either, but I was grateful they weren't menacing and gory for a change.

I joined Zella for breakfast, and talked briefly between every mouthful of cereal. She was meeting friends for a game of lacrosse late evening and had plenty to keep her busy throughout the day.

I didn't ask why it seemed as though she was distancing herself. Then again, she had seen me attack her brother, and probably knew about my collapse in the study. She had good reason to want to stay away from me.

Thankfully, Gal and Marsi were rarely around to show me how much they detested my very existence. I didn't ask Marsi why she had mentioned me in her book and why she drew such pictures. I knew she wouldn't have given me a straight answer if her life depended on it. She would have just mocked me, questioned my mental state, and most likely lied. I also had a feeling she had wanted me to find her book and feel reprimanded.

As for Cray. I hadn't seen him since his disappearance, and no one mentioned where or why he was absent. They never did. It didn't take much to figure out the why part of his absence. It was because of me. As usual, I had frightened him away, made him uncomfortable to be around me for longer than a few minutes.

The longest we had been around each other was roughly twenty minutes, and that was during mealtimes. It couldn't even be classed as a social moment of verbal exchange.

Still, dinner was for viewing purposes mainly. It was the only thing other than the food that I liked about dinners. It was a chance to admire him, up close. It was so true, there was no point in denying it.

Isobel was nowhere in sight either considering she went to great lengths to socialize with me in Utah. Marsi later left, maybe to a secluded cave in Transylvania. I'd been calling Jared, but he wasn't answering. I left a dozen messages, which he never returned. By now, it was beginning to feel like he was deliberately avoiding me, or that he was too busy to at least say it.

Jess hadn't tried to visit, which was a shame. I was beginning to open myself up to the possibilities of a profound world where what she implied could be the truth. Nothing could be impossible really. Although I kept away from delving deeper again for the moment. I decided I wasn't ready. The moment with Cray had me back to wallowing. What I'd seen in Marsi's notebook had me further spooked. I couldn't let myself spiral into having panic attacks. I had to get back some courage and face things head on.

To get me in that state of mind, I helped Syd buy some groceries from the supermarket. I even placed a fresh bunch of lilies in the vases for the kitchen and dining room table, then began helping to prepare lunch.