In truth, he didn't want to know.
They didn't speak much during the rest of the meal, and once it was over, they returned to Taryn's house.
As they entered the living room, something odd started to happen. Hawk's skin turned grayish. He looked as if he were completely ill. "What is happening?" he asked.
"I don't know." Taryn helped him toward her couch. He was writhing as if he were in pain. She put her hand on his brow to feel a severe fever. "Baby, are you okay?"
Holding his stomach as if something were rupturing, he grimaced and cursed. Suddenly her hand passed right through him. "Hawk?" He looked at her with panic in his eyes. It was as if he were fading out of existence.
"Hawk?"
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The next thing she knew, he was gone. There wasn't even a scrap of fabric left behind.
"No!" Taryn screamed as she found herself completely alone in her living room. "You said we had seven days."
Come back to me.
The words whispered through her head as if Sparhawk had said them.
"How?" she asked out loud.
There was no answer. None. He was gone now. Taryn sat there in stunned disbelief as pain washed over her. How could he be gone like this?
Sparhawk jolted awake to find himself back in his own bed. It was early light by the looks of it. Rolling over on the large hand-carved mahogany bed, he found himself face-to-face with Alinor, who stared at him as if she wanted to run him through with his sword.
"Good," she said, narrowing her gaze on him. "You're back, milord."
"There is nothing good about this," he grumbled, getting up. He had to find the witch and return to Taryn. He hadn't had enough time with her.
Alinor blocked his way to the door. "Where is it you go?"
"'Tis none of your business. Now stand aside."
She lifted her chin defiantly as she held her arms out. "Nay! I most certainly will not. Nor will you leave this castle again. You are my hero, Sparhawk. Mine. You don't belong in that other story with that other woman. Taryn. What sort of name is that anyway? 'Tis a man's name and yet you would sooner be with her than me? I will not allow such."
Sparhawk went cold at her words. "How do you know about Taryn?"
She stamped her foot at him. "Because you cheated!" She threw a book at him.
"Ow!" Sparhawk said as he picked it up. It was the original book of his story, only now it had Alinor'
s name listed as the author. "What did you do?"
"Me?" She snorted at him. "You're the one who changed it first. I was minding my own business, doing what I was supposed to be doing when you decided to go off and change our lives. Well, I'm not having it. I was supposed to be the damsel you grew to love and you are supposed to be my champion, so now I have created a new master book."
He couldn't breathe as her words sank in. If she had created her own version of their lives, there was nothing he could do to alter it. God help him if she really were the author. "Where is the master book?"
She gave him an arrogant, taunting smile. "Someplace you can't find it. But don't worry, I'm writing the story now and we're going to be just fine, you and I. We're going to have lots of children and castles all over Christendom. We'll be the envy of everyone."
It was a nightmare even to contemplate. "I do not love you, Alinor. I love Taryn."
She shrieked at him. "You are going to love me, Sparhawk! You're my hero! I know you're resisting it right now because that's what heroes do. But you will settle into this role just as soon as I finish shopping for my wedding clothes. You just wait here and be thoughtful for a bit while I attend my role like a good character."
Sparhawk gaped as she spun about and left the room. Taking three steps, he opened the heavy wooden door. "I will not stay here, Alinor!" he shouted out the door after her. She paused halfway down to the hall to look back at him with smug satisfaction beaming on her beautiful face. "Oh, yes, you will. I wrote the old witch out of the book entirely, so even if you go into the woods, all you'll find now is a creek that goes nowhere."
Sparhawk slammed the door, then opened it again immediately. He wasn't about to take her word for what was happening. He wasn't going to blithely submit to this storyline. He was Sparhawk the Brave. The king's champion. No one was going to take charge of his life without a fight. Sprinting through the castle, he ran out to the stable to find his horse waiting for him. He saddled his stallion, then headed back toward the witch's hut.
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trees surrounding it. No sign of the hut or witch existed anywhere.
"Damn you, Alinor!" he shouted at the sky above. "I love Taryn."
But there was no one to hear him. Taryn was gone and now it was his fate to marry Alinor again. Heartsick and weary, he wheeled his horse about and headed back to the castle. Tears gathered in his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. There had to be some way out of this. Some way to reach Taryn again. He couldn't give up, not on his lady. By the time he reached the castle's gate, he'd decided on a new course of action. He had to find Alinor's master copy of the book. If he did, then there was a chance he could change it as Alinor had done, so that he could return to Taryn and her story.
If not, then he was doomed to stay here forever.
Taryn sat on her bed with voices speaking in her head. She swore she could hear Sparhawk's deep baritone and another woman she'd never met before. The voice was high pitched and whiny. Shrill. It went through her head like shattering glass.
Alinor?
It was eerie what was going on in her head. She could see Sparhawk searching the castle in her mind like a movie. She could feel his despair and his pain as he ached for her and sought his book. Every thought, every emotion he felt, was in her, too. It was as if she was experiencing it with him.
"I'm completely losing my mind."
"No, dear, you're not."
Taryn turned sharply at the old voice behind her. It was Esther. "What are you doing in my house?"
Esther sighed as she came farther into the room to sit beside her. "I'm breaking all kinds of rules . . . again. I'm not supposed to be here, but then I wasn't supposed to be there in the store either, when your car broke down, but I had no choice. I still don't. I have to make this right before it's too late."
"Make what right?"
Esther smiled at her. "Your happy ending."
Taryn rubbed her head as a severe pain started in her right temple. This was it. She had lost her mind. There was nothing more to be done about it. Maybe she should call the psycho ward now.
"You're not crazy," Esther said quietly. "Please don't even think it. We lose enough of you to that as it is."
"Enough of you who?"
"Writers," Esther said simply. "For some reason, a lot of you reject what you hear and see in your heads. If you go too long ignoring it, it builds up and then you do all sorts of weird things. Mumble to yourself. Nightmares. Daydreams. Total anarchy and chaos. Before you know it, the writer is either sitting in a corner feverishly humming to his-or herself or on Prozac." She hesitated. "You're not on Prozac, are you?"
No, but she was beginning to think she ought to be.
Taryn frowned at her and completely disregarded everything she was saying. "How did you get into my house anyway?"
"The front door. You left it unlocked."
No, she hadn't. However, she wasn't about to argue. "How did you know where I lived?"
"I know where all good writers live."
The ache increased. "I'm not a writer," Taryn insisted. "I've never been one."
Esther patted her hand in an extremely patronizing manner. "That's what Hemingway said, too, when I sent him A Farewell to Arms, and then look at what he went on to do."
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Okay, they were both nuts. But insanity aside, there was only one matter that was weighing heavily on her. "Can you get me back to Sparhawk?"
Esther sighed heavily. "No."
Tears welled in Taryn's eyes as she heard the last word she needed to. She didn't even want to think about not seeing him again.
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Esther leaned forward and spoke in a low tone. "But you can."
Taryn swallowed as hope began to swell inside her. "What do you mean I can? If I could, don't you think I'd be there?"
"Hon, you already are. Why do you think you can hear him in your head right now?"
"Because I've gone insane."
Esther laughed and shook her head. "No, sweetie. You hear him because you're a writer."
Here we go again.
"I don't have time--"
"Remember a few weeks ago, when you had that strange dream about a man lost in the woods?"
Esther asked, interrupting her denial.
Taryn snapped her mouth shut. That dream had haunted her for days as she tried to figure out what it meant. She hadn't told a soul about it. Not even Janice.
"How do you know about that?" she asked the old woman.
Esther shrugged as if it were nothing unusual. "I'm the one who sent that dream to you. I'm the repository for romance novels."
"The what?"
"Repository," Esther said in a patient voice. "There are several dozen of us, and we are the keepers of books written and those yet to be written."
Taryn was about to reach for the phone to call the cops when her room suddenly changed from her bedroom to what appeared to be a giant library.
Her heart hammering, she looked about at the glistening shelves that were covered with thousands and thousands of leather-bound books as far as her eyes could see. It was the most incredible thing she'd ever heard of. "I have totally snapped a wheel."
"No, dear. I knew you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it yourself." Esther, who was now dressed in a glowing red robe, walked down a row of shelves, dragging her finger lovingly along the edge of the carved wood. It was obvious the old woman cherished every volume in the room.
"Where is this place?" Taryn asked.
"Let's just say it's 'other.' There's no place like it on earth . . . exactly."
Esther walked over to the shelf on her right and swept her hand across the spines that held no author name whatsoever. "These are all the books that have yet to be written. Each one is a very special creation, and I am one of the overseers who is charged with making sure that the people who live inside the books get to the writer who can birth them properly." She pinned Taryn with a dark stare. "You were destined to be a writer, Taryn, but you have gone astray. Do you remember when you were a girl and you wrote all the time about all the people who talked to you whenever you closed your eyes?"
"Yeah," she said defensively, "and my mother told me to get my head out of the clouds and focus on what was important."
Esther sighed. "I hate it when that happens. We lose so many wonderful stories that way. 'Be practical. Stop listening to the characters who only want to live.' It's why we have people like Sparhawk, and it's why we end up losing them, too. Such a tragedy, really."
Taryn frowned at her words. "What do you mean, losing them, too?"
Esther indicated a steel vaulted door that was on the wall behind Taryn. "That is the Valley of Lost Souls. It's where we send the books whose characters have revolted."
"Revolted?"
She nodded. "You see the characters for the books that haven't yet been written are in a holding pattern while they wait for their stories to be finished. We, the repositories, send out an idea, usually the first chapter or a snippet from later in the book, to the writer. It plays over and over again in the writer's head until the writer is forced to sit down to write it. If the writer fails to follow the idea and commit it to paper, then the characters can get caught in a loop where they relive the same scenes over and over again, sometimes with only minor changes until they essentially go mad from the monotony. Then they can get a little cranky and revolt against the writer and us."
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pull the characters out of that writer's mind, then send them on to another writer where the process repeats until someone finally pens the story of their lives."
Taryn stared at all the volumes of "unwritten" books. "I don't understand. Where do all these ideas come from?"
Esther shrugged as she glanced over the infinity of books. "They are gifts from the universe to mankind. Honestly, we don't know where they come from. They just appear on the shelves, and we are charged with bringing them to life. It's kind of like a child being born. Where does his or her soul come from? Some call it God, others fate, whatever you believe or want to call it, it sends the books to us. Our personal theory is that a baby's soul and a character's soul are born from the same place. Some are destined to be living, breathing people in the flesh, and the others are living, breathing people on paper."
Esther picked up a book off the shelf closest to her and handed it to Taryn. Just like the copy of Knightly Dreams Esther had given her in the store, there was no author listed. The cover showed a dark-haired Regency rake holding on to a scantily clad blond woman. "This book has been sent out over and over again these last few years. The first writer decided she didn't want to do romances and went on to write mysteries instead. The next one was all excited to write it until she got married. Another one got all the way to the middle of the book before she got rejected one time too many and decided she couldn't take the rejections anymore. She quit and burned what she'd written. The last writer we sent it to finished the first three chapters, but has since become distracted by a rumor that no one wants to read historical romances anymore. So she has set the book aside to write something she thinks is more marketable."
Esther sighed as if her heart were broken. "All we have now are the first three chapters and they repeat over and over again. The characters are in London, in the Regency period, where they attend the same party and speak the same lines ad nauseam. Miles is a rake, but he, like Sparhawk, is tired of listening to Henrietta rant about her season and her boorish uncle out to steal her inheritance. If the writer doesn't return soon, then I shall have to send this off to another to write before we lose the characters completely."
"Lose them how?"
Esther took the book back and held it lovingly in her arms. "They essentially start writing the story themselves and refuse to take orders from a writer. If we have a strong enough writer who loves them, then she can save them. If there is no writer, then they can no longer be corralled and the story falls apart. You have medieval knights abducting Regency governesses, dogs sleeping with chickens. Chaos. Total chaos. The story is then lost for all time, and we are forced to place the book in that room." She indicated the vault again. "It's truly tragic. The greatest book of all time is in there now because the author who was destined to write it thought he was losing his mind when he started hearing the characters talking to him. He's now on Prozac, living in an isolated cabin in Montana."
Taryn was still confused by all of this. "Are you telling me that Sparhawk isn't real?"
"Oh, no," she said sincerely. "They're all real. All of them. Just like you or I, only they live in their own world that is apart from ours. I allowed Sparhawk to cross over from his world into yours in a more tangible form so that he could win you. I knew that if you didn't fall absolutely head over heels in love with him, you wouldn't save him, and if he had to go back on the shelf one more time, he would rebel and take over his book so that no one would ever be able to finish it. Now it appears that Alinor has rebelled instead of him and threatens the whole thing."
&nbs
p; Esther handed her a copy of Knightly Dreams. Sparhawk was again on the cover, just as he'd been originally. Only now the author's name read Alinor de Blakely. Taryn ran her hand over the embossed letters. "How can she do this?"
"Alinor has found the original copy and has taken it over. She wanted Sparhawk back and so she has written his return." Esther opened the book to show her the parts that now held her name on the pages. Taryn's heart stilled as she saw her life laid out in ink. It was horrifying. "This can't be."
"Yes, hon, it can and it is." Esther turned to the last page of the book, where it showed Alinor marrying Sparhawk.
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"Don't despair," Esther said quickly. "Notice there is room on the page and if you turn to the last page of the book, it's completely blank."
"Most books are like that."
"Yes, but not all. Those with no blank pages are the ones that are completely finished. There is nothing more to be done with them. But books like this one, where they have blank pages, can still be added to."
A glimmer of hope went through Taryn. "What exactly are you saying?"
Esther handed her a pen that appeared out of thin air. "I'm saying that you can alter Alinor's book and make it your own. We are all the authors of our own lives, Taryn. We make the rules of our world, and we are the ones who decide which road to take. It's all up to you and you alone. This story ends the way you want it to. But only if you have the courage and the imagination to see it through."
It sounded too good to be true. Too easy. "But it won't be a published book."
Esther held her hand out to indicate all the books around them. "Only a small percentage of all books written ever get published, dearest. Many more stay in the hearts, minds, and closets of their authors forever after they are committed to paper. They are there solely for the author's pleasure and benefit alone. But more importantly, they are there for the characters because until they are on paper, the characters aren't truly alive. Every author owes it to her people to birth them as best as he or she can."