Page 41 of Ravished By the Revenant

“Stay,” I tell Shmoo, and sprint.

Up the stairs, past the portrait, into the library, drawer, key, and back down again, taking the steps two at a time, my socks skidding on stone because I never actually put my boots on. Shmoo hasn’t moved. He watches me fumble the key into the lock with the patience of a creature who has watched empires fall.

The mechanism turns with a clunk.

“There better not be spiders,” I mutter into the darkness.

The cellar breathes out cool air that smells of earth and old wine. I grab a candle from the wall bracket by the door, light it with the matches in my jeans pocket—I always carry matches now, castle rule number one—and descend.

It’s actually kind of beautiful down here. Wine barrels the size of small cars line one wall, stacked in wooden cradles. Shelves of dusty bottles. Crocks and clay jars, hanging bundles of ancient herbs, a wheel of something that might have been cheese during the Renaissance. Standard cellar things, if your standards were set by the Habsburgs.

Shmoo threads between the barrels, tail high, glancing back every few feet to make sure the slow human is keeping up.

“Yeah, yeah. Suspiciously helpful cat leads woman into cursed basement. I’ve seen this movie. The woman dies first.”

He stops at the far wall. A small alcove is cut into the stone there, fitted with an iron grate that stands ajar, and inside, on a shelf by itself, sits a goblet.

The goblet.

Gold, jewel-crusted, exactly as gaudy as a medieval warlord’s tableware should be. A dark residue stains the bowl, dried to a crust that shimmers faintly blue in the candlelight.

My pulse picks up. This is it. The scene of the crime. The murder weapon, if you can murder someone into immortality.

“Just looking,” I whisper, to Shmoo, to Aldric, to the universe. “Not licking. Nobody’s licking anything.”

I set the candle on the shelf, wipe my palms on my jeans, and pick the goblet up by the stem with two fingers, careful, like it’s a hot pan. It’s heavier than it looks. Cold. I turn it slowly, tilting it toward the light, looking for engravings, markings, anything⁠—

The cellar disappears.

One second I’m holding a cup; the next I’m standing in the great hall, except the fire is roaring, and the banners are bright and new, and a woman in gray robes stands at the sideboard with her back to me. Old. White hair. She opens a small drawstring bag and pours a fine blue dust into a goblet of dark wine—this goblet, glittering and whole—and the dust dissolves like sugar, like it was never there.

I can’t move. I can’t speak. I’m not really here; I’m like a camera recording the past.

The crone turns her head to check the doorway, and the firelight catches her ear.

There’s a mole on it. Small and dark, right on the upper curve of the cartilage.

I have that mole. Same ear. Same spot. Marco used to touch it and call it my beauty mark, and I hated it, and I’m staring at it on the ear of the woman who cursed Aldric seven hundred years ago.

The hall dissolves.

Now it’s daylight, a meadow, elderberry in bloom—and the same woman walks a dirt path, except she’s young, smooth-faced, laughing, holding hands with two little girls who skip along on either side of her. Daughters. They have to be; they have her chin, her nose, her⁠—

Her hair. All three of them. White-blonde, so pale it’s silver in the sun, falling straight and unbound down their backs.

Just like mine.

Exactly like mine.

The young witch turns her face toward me—toward me, like she can see the camera, like she’s been waiting seven hundred years for someone to press play—and her eyes are blue with hints of violet, and her mouth begins to open⁠—

“Clara!”

Aldric’s voice cracks through the silence of the cellar like a whip.

My hands spasm. The goblet drops. I open my eyes as it rolls in a lazy curve across the flagstones. It comes to rest against a pair of tall black boots.

Aldric stands at the base of the cellar stairs, shirtless, chest blazing blue, his one dark eye fixed on the cup at his feet.