“I’m not free.”
“You’ll be free if you trust me.”
He sounded so sure. Josiah wondered how he could be so sure. For one piercing moment, he envied Miles. Much as he’d adored Isabella, he’d never been so certain of her, even when she’d pledged her life to him.
After a fraught instant of silence, Miles chanced a step in Calista’s direction.
He was too eager. She jerked back. For one horrifying moment, she teetered on the top of the stair. She cried out and grabbed the banister, but it was a near thing.
Josiah released the breath he hadn’t realized he held. Dear God, tonight mustn’t end in tragedy, as his own wedding seventy years ago had ended in tragedy. Yet he could do nothing to prevent calamity. He was cursed to be merely an observer. Frustration was a rusty taste in his mouth. Glancing at Isabella’s stricken expression, he could see that she too chafed under her inability to intervene.
“Trust yourself. Trust me. Trust our love.” Miles’s voice cracked with emotion. “For God’s sake, Calista, don’t throw away what we have because you’re frightened.”
“Trust myself—”
The girl hovered on the step. Josiah poised in sick dread for her to lean a few inches backward and topple to her death. The red lights performed a stately minuet around her, as though celebrating a victory alread
y won.
“Yes, trust yourself.” Miles’s voice lowered to vibrating intensity and his gaze burned into Calista’s as if sheer force of will could convince her to return to him. “I love you. If you destroy yourself, you destroy me too.”
For a moment, Josiah thought she hadn’t heard him. He braced for her to fall. Hope and wretchedness warred in her eyes before at last, she ventured one shaky step toward Miles.
Again she wavered in trembling indecision. The red lights blazed in a frenzy around her.
Whatever held her was strong, it was malevolent, and it wanted her dead.
For an endless moment, red fire meshed the girl, threatened to immolate her. Calista moved no closer to Miles and with her surrender to its promptings, the red light grew so bright that it hurt Josiah’s eyes.
“For God’s sake, Calista, run!” Josiah shouted at her, but she didn’t hear. The glaze in her eyes hinted she couldn’t even see Miles anymore.
“They can’t hear you,” Isabella said, her voice shaking with grief and horror.
“Don’t leave me,” Miles whispered, reaching out without touching Calista. Surely it was too late. The red lights’ power seemed too strong for frail flesh and blood to vanquish.
Still Calista didn’t move. The girl’s eyes were stark with longing and doubt and fear. Her gaze didn’t waver from where Miles stood, but heaven knew what she saw.
Josiah’s belly knotted with anguish. And how must Isabella feel, witnessing events that so closely mirrored her own death? And yet again on a wedding day.
Don’t let this lovely girl die.
Calista didn’t move or speak. For a long moment, Josiah thought that the evil had won. Bleak hopelessness chilled him. Love was strong. But not as strong as the powers of darkness. Hadn’t he already learned that from his own fate?
Then he watched Calista suck in a deep breath. Purpose, courage, life flooded her features. Slowly she straightened and raised her chin with fresh defiance.
“I trust you, Miles.” Her voice emerged with steady confidence. “I trust you and I love you and I want to be your wife.”
The red lights ruptured into a blinding cascade of flame, silhouetting her in scarlet, but this time Calista proved herself immune to their lures. She smiled at Miles with the radiance Josiah had noticed the first time he saw her. She wasn’t beautiful, but when she smiled, she seemed beautiful.
With a stumble, she burst free of the seething cloud of red. Miles groaned and dragged her into his arms, muttering an incoherent litany of love and relief. Calista sagged against him in exhaustion and started to cry.
Around her, the red lights circled in confusion, then one by one, winked out to nothing. The air suddenly seemed cleaner, cooler, untinged by the low buzz of malevolence.
Josiah glanced up to see Isabella approaching him, a smile transfiguring her face, too. At last she looked like the woman he’d kissed so passionately on their wedding day. At last he read neither suspicion nor hatred in her eyes as she looked at him.
She reached for his hand. It was the first time she’d touched him since he’d woken to this new century.
“Isabella—” he stammered. Turbulent hoped crammed his throat, making a wreck of eloquence.