“Please, my love … ”
It was almost believable; the words catching in her throat, the soft sob.
” … don’t go. I won’t be able to live without you.”
They were still a few strides from the front door. Then, once they were out, they had to get along the pathway and onto the street. Somehow she doubted Katya’s power extended far beyond the limits of the house. The Canyon might have been hers once upon a time, but she’d lost control of it in the decades since her heyday. Now it belonged to the ghosts and the animals, and the bestial offspring of both.
Still coaxing Todd after her, Tammy made her way across the hallway to the front door.
Behind them, Katya kept up her tearful appeals: declarations of love, interspersed with sobs. Then more appeals for him to turn around and look at her.
“You don’t want to go,” she called to Todd, “you know you don’t. Especially with her. Lord, Todd, look at her. You really want that?”
Finally, Tammy snapped. “How the hell do you know what he wants, bitch?” she said, turning to look round at the woman on their heels.
“Because we’re soul-mates,” Katya said.
Her eyes were swollen and red, Tammy noted with some satisfaction, and there were tears pouring down her face. Her mascara was running down her pale cheeks in two black rivulets. “He knows it’s true,” Katya went on. “We’ve suffered the same way. Haven’t we, Todd? Remember how you said it was like I was reading your mind? And I said it was because we were the same, deep down? Remember that?”
“Ignore her,” Tammy said. They were no more than three strides from the front door.
But Katya — realizing she was close to losing — had one last trick up her sleeve. One final power-play. “If you step out of this house,” she said to Todd, “then it’s over between us. Do you understand me? If you stay — oh, if you stay, my darling — then I’m yours. I’m yours body and soul — I mean it: body and soul. But if you go it’ll be as though you never existed.”
Finally, something she said carried enough weight to stop Todd in his tracks.
“Ignore her,” Tammy said. “Please.”
“You know I can do that,” Katya went on.
Todd turned, and looked back at her, which was exactly what Tammy was praying he wouldn’t do. Katya was standing in the darkness close to the top of the stairs but the shadows did not conceal the fierce brilliance of her stare. Her eyes seemed to flicker in the murk, as though there were flames behind them.
Now she had succeeded in making him look at her again, she softened her tone. She certainly had quite a repertoire, Tammy thought. First demands, then pleas and siren-songs; then tears and threats. Now what?
“I know what you’re thinking … ” she said.
Ah, mind reading.
” … you’re thinking that you’ve got a life out there. And it’s calling you back”
Tammy was puzzled. This sounded like a self-defeating argument. “You’re thinking you want to be back in the spotlight, where you belong … ”
While Katya talked, Tammy made a momentous decision. She let go of Todd’s hand. She’d done all that she could. If after all this Todd decided that he wanted to turn back and give himself to the wretched woman, then there was nothing more Tammy could do about it. He was a lost cause.
She crossed swiftly to the front door, and opened it. The first tug was a little difficult. Then the door swung open easily, majestically. There were no ghosts on the threshold, only the refreshing night air, sweetened by the scent of night-blooming jasmine.
Behind her, in the house, Katya was finishing her argument. “The fact is,” she said, “there’s nothing out there for you now. Do you understand me, Todd? There’s nothing.”
Tammy stepped out onto the front steps. She looked back at Todd, in time to catch a look of pitiful confusion on his face. He literally didn’t know which way to turn.
“Don’t look at me,” Tammy said to him. “It’s your choice.”