Carolina Moon

long cry of desperation, and calls out for her friend.
    Tory! Tory, help me!
    And the woman trapped inside the dead child weeps.
    When Tory came back to herself she was lying on the flagstones of her patio, wearing only a nightshirt already soaked through from the thin spring rain. Her face was wet, and she tasted the salt of her own tears.
    Screams echoed in her head, but she didn’t know if they were her own or those of the child she couldn’t forget.
    Shivering, she rolled onto her back so the rain could cool her cheeks and wash the tears away. The episodes—spells, her mother always called them—often left her weak and queasy. There had been a time she’d been able to fight them off before they swamped her. It had either been that or the shocking sting of her father’s belt.
    I’ll whip the devil out of you, girl.
    To Hannibal Bodeen, the devil was everywhere; in every fear and temptation lurked the hand of Satan. And he’d done his best to drive that wickedness out of his only child.
    At the moment, with the sickness circling in her belly, Tory wished he’d managed it.
    It amazed her that for a space of years she’d actually embraced what was in her, had explored it, used it, even celebrated it. A legacy, her grandmother had told her. The sight. The shining. A gift of the blood through the blood.
    But there was Hope. More and more there was Hope, and those flashes of her childhood friend’s memories hurt her heart. And frightened her.
    Nothing she’d experienced, either blocking or embracing this gift, had taken her like this. Taken her away, taken her over. It made her helpless, when she’d promised herself she would never be helpless again.
    Yet here she was, sprawled on her own patio in the rain without any memory of how she got outside. She’d been in the kitchen brewing tea, standing at the counter, the lights and the music on, reading a letter from her grandmother.
    That was the trigger, Tory realized, as she slowly got to her feet. Her grandmother was her link to her childhood. To Hope.
    Into Hope, she thought, as she closed the patio door. Into the pain and fear and horror of that terrible night. And still she didn’t know the who or the why.
    Still shivering, Tory went into the bath, stripped and, turning the shower hot, stepped under the spray.
    “I can’t help you,” she murmured, closing her eyes. “I couldn’t help you then, I can’t help you now.”
    Her best friend, her sister of the heart, had died that night in the swamp while she’d been locked in her room, sobbing over the latest beating.
    And she had known. She had seen. She had been helpless.
    Guilt, as fresh as it had been eighteen years before, swarmed through her. “I can’t help you,” she said again. “But I’m coming back.”
    We were eight years old that summer. That long-ago summer when it seemed those thick, hot days would last forever. It was a summer of innocence and foolishness and friendship, the kind that combines to form a pretty glass globe around your world. One night changed all of that. Nothing’s been the same for me since. How could it be?
    Most of my life I’ve avoided speaking of it. That didn’t stop the memories, or the images. But for a time I tried to bury it, as Hope was buried. To face it now, to record this out loud, if only for myself, is a relief. Like pulling a splinter out of the heart. The ache will linger a while.
    She was my best friend. Our bond had the deep and immediate intensity only children are capable of forging. I suppose we were an odd pair, bright and privileged Hope Lavelle and dark, shy Tory Bodeen. My daddy leased a small patch of land, a little corner of the grand plantation hers owned. Sometimes when her mama gave a big society dinner or one of her lavish parties, mine would help out with the cleaning and serving.
    But those gaps of social standing and class never touched the friendship. Indeed, they never occurred to us.
    She lived in a grand house, one her reputedly eccentric ancestor had built to resemble a castle rather than the Georgian style so popular during its era. It was stone, with towers and turrets and what you would call battlements, I suppose. But there was nothing of the princess about Hope.
    She lived for adventures. And when I was with her, so did I. With her, I escaped from the miseries and turmoils of my own house, my own life, and became her partner. We were spies, detectives, knights on quests, pirates, or space marauders. We were brave