Out of Body by Stella Cameron

wouldn’t be hard once she opened the front door. Not that any of that mattered, since Sykes was with her.
    “We didn’t meet under good circumstances,” Gray said. “I wish we had.”
    “Why?”
    “Damn!” He looked skyward. “Sorry. But can’t you say anything but ‘why’? It’s annoying.”
    “I can say other things,” she told him.
    He put his hands lightly on her shoulders. “Can I come by and take you for dinner tomorrow? Around seven?”
    “Sykes?”
    Sykes didn’t answer and she looked around, but couldn’t find him. “Damn,” she said sharply.
    Gray rubbed his palms up and down her arms and laughed. “You, too, huh? At a loss for useful words? Just say yes.”
    “I’d rather think about it.”
    “Yes, of course you would. You do that and call me.”
    “Okay,” she said, anxious to get away.
    Sykes had left her in her hour—her moment of need.
    “Good night, Gray.”
    “Night,” he said. “How will you phone me?”
    She frowned.
    “You don’t know my number. It doesn’t really matter. I’ll call you.”
    Marley turned to unlock the shop door. She felt shivery and not only because she was responding to a very sexual thrill. Real fear climbed her spine. He could follow her into the shop and there would be nothing she could do about it if Sykes had really chosen to take himself off.
    “Good night, Marley,” Gray said. “Tomorrow?”
    She turned back for a moment. “Maybe.”
    He nodded and faced the street to step off the sidewalk. His hands were deep in his pockets. Every move he made flowed. He had a powerful grace, like a big cat.
    The instant before she looked away, Gray glanced at her over his shoulder.
    That look wasn’t soft or humorous anymore. Just for a flicker of time he stared, and Marley went into the shop and slammed the door. She shot home the locks.
    It was the light, it had to be. But then, it had been the light the first time she saw hardness in those eyes that looked black, not whiskey-colored anymore. The light had turned his face into a facsimile of a black-and-white photograph. What the living face amazingly concealed, a negative image revealed: a thin, white scar passed through Gray’s mouth, sliced upward beside his nose and across his cheek.

10
    M arley didn’t want to wake up.
    Between night and dawn, sleep and the drifting time, Marley’s old companions waited: the Ushers.
    They had come for her. They wanted her to travel again.
    Should she resist—or give in and go where they took her?
    They were there again, beckoning.
    In her dream-state, Marley felt herself drawn back to something that had happened to her more than two weeks earlier. She saw her feet aimlessly wandering along a sidewalk as they had that day. The colored layers of her skirt floated, pointed hems curling about her ankles and flashes of gold—from the sandals she wore—gleaming through gauze .
    A woman called out, “Marley Millet?”
    Marley didn’t recognized the voice, but it was kind.
    “Marley Millet, you came! I’ve been expecting you. This way, my friend, follow me.” A welcome in every word. “I’ve waited for you and now you’re here. You’re going to help me do something that must be done. Come and see what I have for you.”
    “Yes,” the Ushers whispered to Marley when she hesitated, whispered in sounds like soft smiles. “Come on, Marley.”
    An alley and an archway opened before her and once through the arch, she entered a small shop. She twirled around and felt her skirts fly wide, then wind tight. Glasscases filled with toys. Dolls. All around her beautiful, wide-eyed dolls, their ringlets shining, dressed in silks and satins.
    Teddy bears and stuffed horses, foxes, lambs, piglets, kittens and puppies, an elephant, an ostrich, a giraffe, a parrot—they lined two rows of shelves, one above the other, all around the shop.
    Marley turned and turned.
    A baby buggy of palest cane stood there, and there a cart with woolen chickens inside, and there three