The Ruby Tear Read Online Free PDF

family had died young and violently, a few even by their own hands. But that must have more to do with their reckless pursuit of wealth than with some crazed, supernatural enemy stalking them down the centuries!
    If you were going to seek your fortune shipping slaves from Africa, you might expect someday to be killed in a revolt on board. A man who went West burning with gold fever might be killed over a rich claim. And one who ran down rumors of a lost emerald mine in South America could run into gangsters down there and not be seen again, which was what was thought to have happened to Nick’s father.
    At first Nick had ignored the package in the safe, which Uncle Rob swore held convincing evidence. Nick let it sit there and fester, whatever it was. Let it rot in the dark, deprived of the nourishing fears of the latest head of the Griffin family. Nick wasn’t going to play into the hands of any so-called “curse.”
    He’d been away traveling so much since, he’d all but forgotten the thing existed. Nobody used the clunky old safe anymore.
    But then he’d wandered into the battlefields of central Europe, and the dark history of that bleak but beautiful part of the world had stirred his creativity, and out of that came “Blood Kin.” When it was accepted in Chicago for their spring festival, he’d gone out to celebrate with the woman he loved, and driven them both straight into the impossible.
    No one believed him. Why in hell would they?
    But he knew what he’d seen that day: a woman in dark, floating garments sitting bareback on a massive milk white horse built like a medieval war mount. Horse and rider had simply appeared in the middle of the junction with the paved road, halted there, waiting, dead ahead. The woman’s head had turned, as if with mild curiosity, toward the onrushing car.
    “First the Woman on the White Horse comes,” Uncle Rob had whispered, “and shows herself to the victim. A little while later, in some terrible, violent way, he dies.”
    Nick had almost died right there at the junction, first from a surge of fear so huge it had felt like the bursting of his heart, and then from the impact of the crash.
    He hated to think that in his arrogance, his foolishness, his partisan distrust of Uncle Rob, he had nearly gotten Jess killed. He’d loved that woman, from the moment she came staggering, swearing and laughing, onto the stage that day in summer years before (having tripped becomingly over a lighting cable). And he’d come close to destroying her.
    In the hospital he’d dragged himself from his room to hers, watching over her in a relentless turmoil of pain, fear, and remorse. She’d just lain in drugged sleep, her head and hands swathed in bandages and her broken arm covered in a cast from shoulder to wrist. He sat there for hours on end, beyond tears, deprived by the bandages of even a decent look at her. That hurt, because he knew by then that this would be the last intimate time he would spend with Jess Croft.
    His dreams were haunted by the vision of her crushed eye socket, which had hit the corner post of the windshield, before the doctors reconstructed it. He remembered watching, feeling sick, as a nurse unwrapped the raw mangle that had been Jess’s left hand. He’d fled the room that day, hobbling down the hall as fast as he could despite the agony of his leg.
    It had been a mercy (and an unbearable deprivation) to finally be allowed to go home, away from her. And it had been absolutely necessary.
    First came the lady on the white horse, and then came—what, exactly? What was he to expect, and what could he do about it?
    The first thing he’d done on returning home was to make his painful way down into the cellar and open the wall safe. He found a document in spidery writing on parchment, so old that it was surely a museum piece, and the typed, modern version that his grandfather had provided. Behind these was another bundle of papers, bound in a black silk ribbon,