Touching his children’s hands, David Collins flew down the path of their powers to his past’s heart.
He saw Hallie Stokes’s heart-shaped face, lipstick too red for her mouth, fair hair flowing loose under a black hood, cloak billowing around her. She might have been Angelique or Barnabas, yet she was all-too human, shivering in her high-necked white shirt beneath a black blazer and pants.
Not so Amy Jennings. Stalking in black lace under a matching robe, ignoring the cold, her auburn hair was tossed by the wind from her shoulders. Her golden eyes gleamed with a predatory light, the sign of her werewolf heritage from Quentin, for her gypsy ancestors’s attempts to steal it from her gender.
No. Amy was a she-wolf. She would not be turned from her prey.
David tensed as his girlfriends turned to face each other. Taking each other’s measure.
Perhaps it should haven’t been a surprise when Amy seized Hallie’s face, ravaging her lips in a hungry kiss. When Hallie relaxed, allowing herself to melt into Amy’s arms.
Laughter bubbled up in David; regret, envy, but above all relief. Amy and Hallie were all right. His girlfriends hadn’t waited for him. They’d found each other. He couldn’t blame them, either of them. Perhaps they were safer this way, safe from David and the phoenix waiting to be born inside him. The phoenix who would have wanted any children they bore him.
He glanced at the children he’d dared to take in, children not of his blood. His grip tightened on their hands.
Danny Torrance and Charlie McGee looked back at him, anxiety shining in their eyes and upon their foreheads. Unsure of how to react to what they’d seen, to his own reaction.
“It’s all right,” David said, quieting the laughter so it wouldn’t scare them. “I just wanted to make sure Hallie Stokes and Amy Jennings were safe.”
*Safe from me.* The silent sentence might have been silence for most people, but not his children.
*And you?* Danny’s bright blue eyes had a greenish edge to them, a reddish gold curl clung to his forehead, damp with sweat. *Are you safe?*
Charlie didn’t say anything, not even to his mind, but David could feel the heat stirring within her, making her fair hair writhe around her face.
She knew he wasn’t safe. She’d felt the power stirring within David Collins, the hot, hungry entity waiting to burn within him, waiting to claim him. It was too much like what lurked inside her, what was part of her, yet wasn’t.
As always any threat to what was precious made that power rise within her, angry and ready to lash out, yet eager.
Danny felt the power within both of them, tensing, his own a whipcrack of psychic energy he wondered if he had to use to make the fire back off.
“Yes,” David said, projecting his will into the word, while pulling Danny and Charlie close.
Yes, it would be all right. David Collins would be stronger than both Jack Torrance and Andy McGee, the fathers who’d died and disappointed his children. Trying to save them, but abandoning him. He would be stronger than his own father as well, even if he often wondered if he was.
Maybe Roger Collins simply saw too much and tried to deny it, because he had no idea how to fight it.
David would be stronger, strong enough to protect everyone, including himself. “We’ll make sure we’re safe. All of us.”
It was a promise to all of them. He’d keep it. He had to.
Too many promises had been broken.