He stepped away from her, keeping his hands on her shoulders. Rain glistened on his lean face and in his mud-streaked hair. “I found out about you through my dreams. I found out that the demon was your father. But most important of all, I saw what you became because he touched you here tonight, in this place, in this park. I came to Hopewell to stop that from happening.”
“What did I become?” she asked, her voice shaking.
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. It can’t happen now. The window of opportunity is past. The demon is gone. The events can’t re-create themselves. You won’t become what I saw in my dream. You will become what you make of yourself, but it won’t be a bad thing. Not after what you did tonight. Not after you’ve heard what I have to say.”.
His smile was tight and bitter. “Some of what I do as a Knight of the Word is difficult for me to live with. I can’t always change the future with words and knowledge. The demons I hunt are elusive and clever, and I don’t always find them. Sometimes they accomplish what they intend, and I am left to deal with the results. Because I know from my dreams what those results signify, I must change them any way I can.”
His brow furrowed with hidden pain. “It was necessary for you to face your father and reject him. I came to Hopewell to see if you could do that. I would have destroyed him beforehand if I could, but I knew from the beginning that my chances were poor. I knew it would probably be left up to you. I gave you what help I could, but in my heart, Nest, in my soul, I knew it would come down to you.”
He stood tall in front of her, suddenly unapproachable, become as impenetrable as the darkness that shrouded them both.
“Do you understand?” he asked softly. “If you had failed in what was required of you, if the demon had touched you and you had become what he intended, if you had been unable to withstand him and your magic had darkened to his use …”
He took his hands from her shoulders, his voice trailing off. Their eyes locked. “My purpose in coming here, Nest, was to stop you from becoming the creature I saw in my dreams.” He paused, letting the full import of his words sink in. “I would have done whatever was needed to accomplish that.”
Recognition of his meaning ran through her like shards of ice, and she stared at him in horror and disbelief. Whatever was needed. She tried to say something in response, to let him know what she was feeling, but she could not find the words. The chasm he had opened between them was so vast that she could not find a way to bridge it.
“Good-bye, Nest,” he said finally, stepping back from her, his mouth crooked in a tight, sad smile. “I wish I could have been your father.”
He stood there a moment longer, a lean, hunched figure in the rain-drenched night. Her savior. Her executioner. She felt her heart break with the realization.
Then he turned away, his black staff gleaming, and disappeared into the night.
TUESDAY, JULY 5
CHAPTER 32
By morning, news services from as far away as Chicago were reporting the story. Variations in word usage and presentation aside, it read pretty much the same everywhere. A disgruntled union worker at MidCon Steel in Hopewell, Illinois, had attempted to sabotage a fireworks display sponsored by the company. Derry Howe, age thirty-eight, of Hope-well, was killed when the bomb he was attempting to plant within the staging area exploded prematurely. Also injured were Robert Freemark, aged sixty-five, of Hopewell, a retired member of the same union; two members of the staging crew; and several spectators. In a related incident, a second man, Junior Elway, aged thirty-seven, of Hopewell, was killed attempting to plant a bomb in the fourteen-inch mill at MidCon during a break in his work shift. It was thought that the dead men, longtime friends and union activists, were acting in concert, and that the bombs were intended to halt efforts by MidCon to reopen the company in defiance of a strike order and to initiate a new round of settlement talks. Police were continuing with their investigation.