The Seventh Night Read Free Page A

mounts the body, the experience can be…powerful.”
    “Stop teasing her with that nonsense, Reid,” my father said in annoyance. “I’d like Christine to come to Columbé someday. Don’t scare her off before she ever gets there.”
    “Christine doesn’t appear to me to be the type who frightens easily. Am I right?”
    “I’m certainly not afraid of voodoo. Sounds to me like Columbé is still living in the Dark Ages,” I replied primly, sipping my club soda with an air of what I hoped was disdain.
    “In many ways we’re still very primitive,” Reid agreed darkly, gazing down at his ring once more as he stroked the metal with the tip of one finger….
    The memory drifted away as the customs official gave my suitcase another deliberate shove, ramming it against my hand.
    “Have a nice stay in Columbé,” he said, dismissingme. I took the cue without further prompting, struggling for several seconds before I could haul the heavy suitcase from the table. Neither the customs official nor anyone else bothered to help me, and I wondered if that incident might well be a preview of what was to come.
    Well, so what? I asked myself as I half carried, half dragged my luggage to the terminal exit. Since when had anyone ever helped me? My father had fallen in love with Claudine St. Pierre and left my mother and me without so much as a backward glance when I’d been hardly more than a baby.
    My mother had loved me in her own way, I suppose, but she’d loved drinking more. Two years after my father had left us, she’d died in terrible pain from a liver disease brought on by her alcoholism.
    Years and years of intense loneliness had followed. My father had already moved out of the country by that time, so my maternal grandmother took me in. The act was not so much one of kindness on her part, but rather some sort of revenge against my father.
    She was a woman already well past middle age, and she’d worn the trials and tribulations of her life like medals of honor. She’d never failed to remind me of how much she had sacrificed for my benefit, nor how my father’s selfishness had caused my poor mother’s death.
    She was a bitter, resentful woman who, in some miscreant way, had blamed me for everything wrong in her life. As punishment, I was never allowed to have friends in the house, never allowed to attend parties or proms. Instead, I was subjected to lecture after lecture on the evils of men and their unholy desires.
    She’d had no way of knowing it, of course, because I would never have admitted it to her, but those sermons had fueled an already active imagination. I used to lie in bed at night and fantasize about the glamorous life my father led on the Caribbean island where he’d gone to live. In my dreams, he would come for me, pushingmy grandmother’s protests aside, and take me back to Columbé with him.
    Much later, after his last visit during my freshman year in college, those fantasies had begun to alter. No longer was my father cast in the role of rescuer, but instead a tall, dark, handsome stranger—a man who looked strikingly like Reid St. Pierre—would sweep me off my feet and carry me off to his romantic island home….
    In reality, I never saw my father or Reid again. They’d both gone home after their week-long visit and forgotten all about me. And I’d tried to forget about them. I’d been married and widowed in less than a year. I’d faced tragedy and survived. In the end, I’d had to rescue myself. In time, I’d discovered I could slay my own dragons.
    So bring on your zombies, I thought defiantly as a sudden vision straight from
Night of the Living Dead
flashed through my mind. Horror movie ghouls could hardly frighten me. My grandmother made Boris Karloff look like the boy next door.
    In the next instant, however, an inkling of the terror I’d felt in my dreams washed over me, and I realized my bravado was entirely false. I could be as fearless as the next person—while it was still