The Black Dagger Brotherhood_ An Insider's Guide - J. R. Ward [89]
Phury:
(stops in the doorway, frowning) Actually . . . let’s go to the guest room next door.
Clearly he’s noticed the scent too, and I’m happy to help him avoid what is no doubt a trigger for him. We step out into the balconied hall and go into the room Cormia stayed in when she was at the mansion. It’s grand and lovely, just like his, just like all of theirs. Darius had spectacular taste, I think to myself as I look at the lush silk drapery and the museum-quality Chippendale dressers and the glowing landscapes. The bed isn’t so much a place to sleep, but a sanctuary to be absorbed in—with its canopied top and acres of red satin bedding, it is exactly what was in my mind when we were downstairs by the fire.
Phury:
(taking off his suit jacket) Sit here. (points to floor)
J.R.:
(planting it, cross-legged) What are we—
Phury:
(mirroring me on the floor and putting palms out) Give me your hands and close your eyes.
J.R.:
(doing what he asks) Where are—
The sensation that comes next is something like submerging your body in a warm bath—except then I realize that in fact I’ve become liquid; I am the water and I’m flowing somewhere. I panic and start to—
Phury:
(voice coming from far distance) Don’t open your eyes. Not yet.
A century later I feel like I’m condensing again, becoming whole . . . and there’s a new smell, something like flowers and sunshine. My closed lids diffuse a sudden light source, and my weight is absorbed by a soft pad as opposed to the short-napped Oriental I’d first seated myself on.
Phury:
(taking his hands away) Okay, you can open now.
I do . . . and am overwhelmed. I blink not from disorientation, but from too much orientation.
When I was little I spent my summers on a lake in the Adirondacks. My mother and I would move up there at the end of June and stay straight through until Labor Day—and my father would come on the weekends and for a block of two weeks at the end of July and the beginning of August. Those summers were the happiest times in my life, although part of that, I’m realizing as I get older, is the glow of nostalgia and the simplicity of youth. Still, for whatever cause, colors were brighter back then and watermelon on a hot day was wetter and sweeter and sleep was deeper and easier to come and no one ever died and nothing ever changed.
I have been far away from that special place for many years now—distanced in a way that a trip up the Northway can no longer cure. Except . . . I am there now. I am sitting in a meadow of long grass and clover and there are monarch butterflies drunkenly skipping from milkweed to milkweed. A red-winged blackbird is letting out its call as it heads for a row of shagbark hickory trees. And up ahead . . . there is a red barn with a flagpole and a massive stand of purple lilacs in front of it. A dark green Volvo from the eighties is parked to one side, and woven wicker lawn furniture marks the pale stone terrace. The window boxes are the ones my mother planted every year with white petunias (to match the white trim on the barn), and the porch pots have red geraniums and blue lobelia in them.
I can see the lake on the other side of the house. It’s deep blue and sparkling in the sunshine. Farther out in its midst is Odell Island, the place where I’d take my boat and my friends and my dog for picnics and swimming. If I turn my head, I see the mountain that rises up from the meadow, the one on which my family going back for generations is buried. And if I look behind me, I see across the meadow my great-uncle’s white house and then my best friends’ house and then my cousin’s Victorian manse.
J.R.:
How did you know about this?
Phury:
I didn’t. It’s just what’s in your mind.
J.R.:
(looking back to the barn) God, it feels like my mother’s in there getting dinner ready, and my dad’ll be here soon. I mean, it really . . . is