Bloodstone Read Online Free Page B

for him, in the end.
    He returned to his empty room near the flats and that night the dreams came back with a vengeance.
    He was standing on a hill, the stars peppering the sky above his head. There were great empty stretches of black on either side, making him feel as if he were standing on the deck of a boat in an endless sea. The hillside was cool beneath his bare feet and a light breeze ruffled his hair. He could smell pine needles, and the sharp, bitter smell of smoke.
    Behind and below him the stretch of blackness was brokenby a scattering of lights. He looked down at the roughness beneath his feet, and realized he was standing at the edge of a huge flat slab of rock jutting out into space. Below the lip of the rock the treetops swayed in the breeze.
    The smell of smoke assaulted him. The heat of it against his face. And the sound of something scraping across the rock behind him.
    He did not want to see what it was. Oh no, he did not.
    William .
    He turned; his mother stood there, but not the mother he remembered from his childhood. Cancer had ruined her. Her hair hung in mossy clumps against her face. Her skin was black and running with open sores. Her cold, dead eyes were covered with a yellow film. They were not his mother’s eyes. The person he had called mother was long gone.
    Her cracked lips opened to speak again. He screamed without sound; and behind her rose the legions of the dead, hundreds of them, ripping themselves out of the ground and pulling themselves up the hill onto the rock. Among them he saw the woman and two children he had killed, their mangled bodies and broken limbs reaching up as if in prayer. He backed away until he could feel the drop beneath his feet, and the heat of the fire burning his neck.
    And the voice, always there, always the same. Break the circle, William. You must come
home.
       
    After Burger King they got back in the car and continued east, but the mood between them had changed. He could sense it in the way she sat in the seat, the way she watched the scenery through the window, the way her breathing had eased. It had been the first time she was out of the car with him, in sight of other people, and she hadn’t run screaming for help. She knew he had a gun in the car, but he hadn’t brought it into the restaurant with him and he was pretty sure she knew that too.
    You must come home . The words tortured him, runningthrough his mind at the strangest moments, like a record that kept skipping. What did it mean?
    He glanced at Angel in the passenger seat. “You want to know why we’re here,” he said softly. “I’ll tell you what I know, if you’ll listen.”
    “What good will that do? Are you going to let me go? I don’t think so.”
    He shrugged. “I can’t promise you anything. All I can do is tell you my story.” He glanced at her again. “I thought maybe…you’d understand.”
    “Understand what? That you’re nuts?”
    “That I don’t have a choice.”
    He told her about the dreams. His life after the accident, in San Francisco, the odd sense of urgency he felt that drove him on, the whispers, and finally, the dead. And the face he began to see everywhere, starting the day after his Salt Lake City nightmare. That next morning he had driven southeast for hours, the drive passing in a frenzied blur. He could still see that little pattern of lights below him in the night from his dream, and those lights began to take shape for him, the brightest ones becoming the line of brow and nose, two of them eyes, and others tracing the cheekbones and jaw. That night he stopped in a small town outside Santa Fe and fell asleep in his car, and this time he saw the face in sharp and complete detail. A beautiful woman. Throughout the day, he kept seeing it in the strangest places; in the bathroom mirror, in the pattern of clouds overhead, among the ripples of the motel pool as he walked by. He had to find this woman, and bring her with him. That was what he had been asked