When Lightning Strikes Read online

It hadn't been until it was gone, until he crawled night after night into his cold, empty bed, that he'd realized what it meant to sleep with another person. Just

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  sleep. It represented to Killian everything that he'd had with Emily, every sweet, pure emotion he'd felt and lost and expected never to recover. Didn't even want to recover.

  Beside him, the woman whimpered quietly.

  He tried to ignore the sound, soft and somehow filled with sorrow. It was just a sleep noise, an involuntary release of breath.

  He squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the weak glow of the moonlight through his window, plunging himself into the solitude of complete darkness. But he couldn't ignore her, couldn't pretend he was in bed alone. Couldn't even pretend, not here alone in the darkness, that it was only memories of Emily that roused him right now.

  It was Lainie herself. Something about her ... intrigued him.

  The sound of her breathing mesmerized him, curled around him like gossamer strands. He could feel the warmth of her body alongside his, smell the sunshine and dust scent of her hair and the leftover hint of perfume that clung to her clothing. And for the first time in forever, he remembered what it had felt like to want a woman.

  Shadows. Darkness, shifting in on itself, moving. The magpie chatter of young men's laughter.

  "Here, chicky, chicky, chicky. Don't make us come after you." More laughter, piercing through the night.

  Lainie thrashed from side to side, trying to get away from the voices and the darkness that swirled around her, weighting her arms and legs and dragging her downward, downward. She couldn't move, couldn't free herself. Her body wouldn't respond to her brain. Terror

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  washed through her in an icy wave. Her teeth started to chatter.

  Another sound penetrated the inky veil. The scratchy snap of a rope being drawn taut, the whispery rustle of hemp on hemp.

  A scream built inside her, filled her lungs with pounding, pulsing life. She opened her mouth to scream. Thick, fetid air rushed in. Only it wasn't air, it was viscous and slimy and mudlike. The slime curled around her throat, coated her tongue. She coughed and gagged and tried to spit. The sharp, metallic taste of bile backed up in her throat. Nothing made it past her mouth except a feeble, terrified whimper.

  "Don't . . . please ..."

  Hands pulled at her clothing, clamped over her mouth. She tasted the salty moisture of sweat, smelled its humid odor.

  They laughed again; the high, cackling sound exploded in the darkness, gaining strength until the air vibrated with it.

  Tears stung her eyes, burned deeply, and slid down the sides of her face. Sobbing, she flailed to be free.

  "Alaina."

  The voice echoed in the dark horror around her, roused her. The sound of it was a lifeline. She bolted upright and reached out, her fingers and hands searching blindly for something solid.

  "Lainie, wake up."

  I'm dreaming. The words rushed through her like a balm, soothing her instantly. She blinked, still tasting the acrid taste of terror on her tongue.

  The nightmare receded slowly, as it always did, moved back into the distance of memory. It was one she hadn't had in years, but she should have expected it tonight. After what she dreamed had happened with the

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  men at the hideout . .. She shivered. Of course, the old nightmare would come back.

  Thank God, it was all over now.

  She sniffled and reached blindly toward her bedside table for a Kleenex.

  "Are you all right?"

  The voice hit her like a slap. She stiffened, tried to see through the impenetrable darkness, searching for the Day-Glo stars on her ceiling. "No way," she muttered. "No goddamn way."

  "No way what?"

  Lainie felt as if she were doing a freefall. Any moment the earth would rush up and smack her in the face. She knew what she had to ask, the name she had to utter, but at the thought of it, her stomach tightened. "Killian?"

  The bed squeaked. A match flared in the darkness, then moved as if by magic into a smoky lantern. Light blossomed in the glass globe and radiated outward, illuminating the man sprawled in the bed beside her. He was sitting up, his massive chest wreathed in shadow. A gray blanket hugged low on his hips, just below a red cotton drawstring waistband. Thick coils of black hair formed a vee of darkness against the copper smoothness of his skin.

  She buried her face in her cold hands. "Oh, my God. Oh, my God ..."

  "Alaina, what is it?"

  She lifted her heavy head and looked at him. He sat there, half-naked, looking so goddamn normal that she wanted to cry.

  "How can you still be here?" She meant to scream the question at him, but the words came out softly, mangled and somehow broken. For the first time in years, she felt utterly defeated.

  III

  "I live here."

  "It's real," she said softly, feeling the hot moisture of tears. "This is all real. You're real."

  "You really thought it was a dream?"

  She laughed. It was a sharp-edged sound, steeped in bitterness. "I didn't think it could be anything else."

  "Are you crazy?"

  Hysterical laughter welled up in her, squeezed her chest, and exploded in a high-pitched cackle. She threw her head back, giving vent to the laughter until, suddenly, she was crying. The salty taste of the tears burrowed into her mouth, flooded her tongue. As quickly as it came, the hysteria vanished, leaving in its place a yawning sense of despair. She hung her head, stared through her tears at the hands clasped in her lap. "Am I crazy?" she said.

  The moment she whispered the words, she wished she hadn't. They called forth a battalion of dark memories, moments in her life when she had been crazy, days and nights she'd spent huddled in a cold room with metal bars on the windows, telling strangers the story of her life. She shook her head, trying to banish the images, to quell the rising tide of nausea that wrenched her insides. "Yeah, I've always been crazy. But this ..." She looked up at him suddenly, and in the shadowy darkness of the cabin, their eyes met. She looked at him, knowing her gaze revealed her pain and confusion, and unable to hide it. Later, she knew, she would feel a drenching regret for having looked at him so openly, for having set her vulnerability on the blanket between them, but now ... now she had no choice. She needed him to believe her, to believe in her. She needed someone to tell her this wasn't happening.

  "This is ... different," she whispered brokenly. "I'm not this crazy."

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  "You still think I'm a dream." He said it matter-of-factly, but she could see in his eyes that he thought she was loony-tunes. That look, that instant, almost broke her heart. She felt a saturating sense of isolation.

  "Tell me something about yourself," she pleaded. "Something I don't know." Anything to prove I didn't create you.

  He sighed. "Lady, you don't know shit about me."

  She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to smile. It was a dismal, trembling failure. "I knew you'd say that."

  He reached for her, grabbed her wrist. "Who are you?"

  She tried to wrench free, but his grip wouldn't let her. She felt his fingers, burning into her skin, bruising her. "It is a dream," she whispered, trying to believe her own words.

  He jerked her chin up, forcing her to look into his eyes. "I can give you a nightmare, if that's what you want."

  Lainie wrenched backward so forcefully, she fell off the bed. She hit the cold floor with a thud and crawled quickly to her feet. She stood there, breathing hard, staring at him. She was letting fear eat at her, swallow her strength, and right now she needed her strength, every ounce of it. She drew in a big, shuddering breath and straightened. At her sides, her hands curled into fists. "I won't believe this. You're not real. You can't he "

  L/C. ...

  "I'm real."

  The words, spoken quietly and with a confidence she'd kill for, infuriated her. "I'm the author, goddamn it, I invented you."

  "Lainie�"

  "D
on't talk to me," she screamed, wincing at the

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  high-pitched desperation in her voice. "You don't know me. ... I know you."

  She backed away from him, trying to control her breathing.

  Calm down, Lainie. Don't go off the deep end. She couldn't afford to get hysterical right now. She needed to be calm, to go somewhere by herself and figure out what in the hell was happening to her. There had to be a reasonable explanation.

  She ran for the door and yanked it open. Before he could follow, she shot outside, letting the door bang shut behind her.

  This wasn't real, she told herself over and over again, clinging to the words like a mantra as her bare feet pattered on the icy dirt.

  It couldn't be real.

  Lainie raced blindly down the narrow trail that bisected the outlaw ranch.

  At the end of the encampment, she veered down toward the stream and raced along a grooved cattle trail that edged the water. To the left, a hillside beckoned, offering a quiet place.

  She splashed through the stream and clambered up the slick bank on the other side. Rocks slid down the slope and hit the grassy canyon floor just below.

  Her breathing came in great, wheezing gasps that seemed to fill her lungs with fire, but still she kept scrambling upward, ignoring the cuts and scrapes that stung her fingertips and the searing heat of dirt in her eyes.

  On the crest of the hill, she collapsed, shaking and cold, to the ground. It took her about five minutes to regain her breath. For a few heartbreakingly perfect moments,

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  she closed her eyes and almost forgot where she was. Where she thought she was.

  Then a bird cried, and it all came back with a vengeance, staggering in its intensity. She lifted her head, blinked dully at the sleeping hideout. The cabins� about ten of them�were spaced along the dirt road, stumplike blocks of black against the steel gray stone walls. Another ten or twelve tents, their canvas roofs a paler shade of gray, were interspersed among the cabins, making them look sturdy and permanent by comparison.

  In the distance, a wolf howled. The lonely, vibrating sound rode on the chilly predawn air like the last lingering notes of a sad song before it disappeared.

  Lainie brought her knees up and hugged herself. She felt inexpressibly cold, as if she might never really be warm again.

  "It can't be real." She said the words softly, wishing she could put a spine into her voice.

  She took a deep breath and forced herself to calm down. There was no point in going off the deep end. She just had to be rational. That was not something she was usually good at�remaining calm and logical. She was more used to swinging her fist first and asking questions later. But this time it was important. She had to look at her situation squarely, without fear or panic, and try to understand. Okay, it can't be real. Why?

  "It can't be real," she said slowly, "because it's fiction." Yes. That was it. The facts comforted her, gave her an anchor in the shifting bleakness of her world. Fortune Flats, and "The Ridge" hideout, and Killian were all figments of her own imagination. None of it could possibly really exist.

  She wasn't crazy. After all, if it was just Arizona in 1896, she might have to face the possibility of time

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  travel. But time travel couldn't be possible to a fictional place. It couldn't.

  She sighed, relieved. "So where the hell am I?" She glanced around, taking in the towering stone walls that came full circle around a large oval plain. A single crack marred the smoothness of the sandstone cliffs, and that was the entrance to the tunnel. It was a perfect hideout. Two men could hike out to the ridge above the entrance and keep a posse of one hundred men at bay. If a rider couldn't get into the tunnel, he couldn't get to the hideout.

  It was exactly as she'd envisioned it. As she'd created it. It wasn't that this hideout couldn't exist; it was simply that it didn't. She'd done a ton of research on the old West, and there were three primary outlaw hideouts. Brown's Hole, Robber's Roost, and Hole in the Wall. This one, The Ridge, was a combination of all of them. And Lainie had created it.

  So that left the question: Where was she, really, since she couldn't in fact be here?

  Drugs. She was on life support back home, hooked up to a morphine IV that was a bit too strong.

  The minute she thought it, she discarded the idea. She'd taken morphine�more than once. It made her feel . . . tingly, sluggish, lighter than air. Not delusional.

  Dead. She was dead somewhere, lying in a coffin in an empty church, awaiting rebirth.

  She shivered at the thought and hugged herself more tightly. That was too grisly to contemplate.

  "Okay, so I'm sleeping at home. It's an ordinary dream."

  The words were wimpy-sounding, wistful. She knew the moment they left her lips that she couldn't believe in them anymore. Too many things didn't fit.

  Like the proportion. It was a simple thing; nothing

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  much, really. But how often did you have dreams in which the proportion was perfect? In which doorways never bled to the side and turned into fishhooks, and clouds never merged into an immense ice cream cone?

  Everything here was perfect, fixed, immobile. The wolf's cry had sounded real, the wind touched her face in soft, realistic feather-strokes. Nothing at any point in this dream had been bizarre, impossible, fantastic. The horses never changed into goats or flew over cliffs.

  And pain. How often did you dream you were in pain?

  She eased her sweater down her shoulder to reveal the angry red of her sunburn.

  Who in the hell dreamt they got sunburned?

  Shot, maybe. Stabbed, strangled, run over, certainly. But sunburned?

  Gingerly she touched the burnt skin, felt the familiar sting of it through her shoulder. She winced and drew her hand back. It felt real. So did the rock-bites on her bare feet and the scrapes on her hands. And the blisters on her backside were too ugly to consider.

  She sighed and closed her eyes, not wanting to think about it anymore and yet unable to think of anything else.

  Warmth caressed her face.

  She opened her eyes and watched, spellbound, as dawn crept over the rim of the canyon, tossing a gauzy, purplish pink net across the smooth rock walls. Light slid down the steep, naked cliffs, turned the stone to burnished gold. The cottonwood trees along the stream seemed to turn toward the light with a glossy green shiver.

  And in that instant, as she smelled the dirt and dryness in the air and felt the familiar touch of the sun on her face, she knew. She just knew. It was no dream.

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  Somehow, it was real.

  Her mind fumbled for something�some philosophy or point of reference to cling to�anything that would make this moment possible. Time travel, magic, and death all came to her as possible explanations, but she discarded them promptly. She'd dug through a fair amount of metaphysical research for a ghost book she'd once done. None of it had touched her, or made much sense. In the end, she'd decided most of it was a bunch of bunk. But even so, nothing she'd ever heard or read about made travel to a fictional world possible.

  Despair pulled her into a dark pit from which she couldn't seem to emerge. She felt tired suddenly, inexpressibly tired. For the first time in years, she wanted to crawl in a hole somewhere, in the dark, and simply cease to exist. Maybe then she could finally wake up and all of this would have been a nightmare. She and Kelly would�

  She gasped and threw her head up, looking around again. Her heart started pounding in her chest, so loud and thudding, she couldn't hear anything else. Panic sluiced through her body, left her shaking and icy cold.

  Kelly.

  Soon Kelly would come home, laughing, excited, filled with stories of camp. She'd knock on the door, or pick up the telephone ... something, anything to get hold of her mother. But there'd be no answer, no door flung open in greeting, no answering shriek of welcome, no "I missed you." The house would be cold and empty.

  Lainie had seen that empt
y house before, had come home to it when she was eleven years old. At the memory, she felt sick.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, battling the wave of horrifying images and memories that crept at the edges of her

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  mind, taunting her, reminding her. She remembered it all: the glare of fluorescent lighting, the clicking hum of a rattling old radiator in a state-run building, the smell of a hundred new beds with sheets that never belonged to her first. We don't know where your parents are, honey. You 'II have to come with us. .. . The Georges are such nice people. .. . The Yannicks are such nice people. ... The Hoi-dens will take you for a while, but no more acting up... . The Grays will take you, but . . . The Rivers . . . The Smiths ... The Kents . . .

  Oh, yeah. Lainie knew what happened to children who came home to empty houses.

  But it wouldn't happen to Kelly.

  Lainie wouldn't let it.

  She scrambled to her feet, ready to run, to scream, something. But what? For a breathless moment, she couldn't move, couldn't think about anything except her baby. Her precious, beautiful little girl.

  A scream built in her throat. Reflexively she clamped a hand over her mouth to still it.

  "Oh, God." The terrified, formless prayer slipped through her fingers.

  Fortune Flats. The words came to her like a gift from God, giving her something to cling to, something to hang on to.

  However she'd gotten here, it had been through Fortune Flats. That had to be the doorway. If there was a way home, it was through Fortune Flats.

  She had to go back.

  Chapter Ten

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  Lainie could barely breathe by the time she reached Killian's cabin. The stitch in her side was a great, stabbing pain that intensified with each inhalation. She skidded to a stop and grabbed for the latchstring.

  But before she even touched it, doubt crashed in on her.

  He won't help you. No one will help you.

  A tiny, yelping sound of panic escaped her.

  She took a deep breath and held it until she felt dizzy, then slowly she exhaled. "Calm down, Lainie," she said firmly. "Calm down."

  Unexpectedly she remembered the ledge. Killian had been different then, not the hard-bitten outlaw with a gun, nor the ruthless villain she'd created. He'd talked her through her fear, and in his eyes she'd seen an understanding that surprised her. Maybe if she could find that in him again, draw it out of him, he'd help her.

  It wasn't much hope, but it was something, and she'd worked with less.