Page 68

Rising groggily, pain sears through my eyes. Cold drills down to my bones. The darkness presses in, thick and sordid, and my body aches beneath the weight of a force unseen. Warning settles into my limbs. Alarms blare in my head.

My head tips back instinctively, eyes dragging up to the painted scene on the ceiling, its languid figures staring down through streaks of shadow. For a moment, I swear they move just barely as though shifting into new poses.

In the dark, the grandeur of the room stifles any awe and replaces it with terror. I hold my breath and listen. Nothing. No footfalls, nor whispers in the hall, or a nocturnal creature testing the thresholds of the house. Only absolute and unnatural silence.

Something isn’t right.

From the far corner, the clock ticks. Each tick is a pulse of dread threading through the stillness. I never noticed the clock working before. Better yet, the house isn’t groaning nor the floors creaking. It is pure stillness in Lazarus house right now.

I reach out blindly for warmth, searching the blankets, searching the hollow where Kieran’s body had been. My fingers meet only the chill of abandoned fabric. He’s gone. And the fire once alive, had collapsed into blackened stumps and scattered soot. The hearth looks like a grave. A shiver carves its way down my spine.

“Did he just leave me here?” My voice fractures, disappearing into the dark that now seeps fear down to my muscle. Angling my head toward the back of the settee, I peer into the greater sea of night behind it. The foyer lies beyond, dipped in shadow so thick it resembles fog rolling across the bay.

Every surface is veiled in darkness. Moonlight leaks through in thin slits painting the floor with pale lines that look more like prison bars than illumination.

Wasn’t one of the rules to never let the light die out at night? I stand on unsteady legs, clutching a blanket around my shoulders as though it could shield me from whatever prowls the edges of this place. The floor is icy despite the boots secured around my feet. And each step toward the main foyer feels like trespassing into forbidden territory.

When I glance around the opening of the Great Room, the night seems deeper than it should be. Only the faintest shards of moonlight remain to prove the world hasn’t evaporated entirely. Maybe I’d found myself back in the dark world, void of any memories of my past.

“Kieran?” The name escapes with a wisp of vapor, dissolving instantly in the air. I lift my hand in front of my face, fingers trembling, twisting them through the cold to feel just how sharp it had become.

Did we lose whatever meager power we already had? That would explain the extinguished lamps in the Great Room. Even the candles have surrendered. If the power is gone…that could explain the lack of heat, the lack of sound and the absence of Kieran’s body beside mine. Maybe he woke to the cold before I did and went to track down the source of the outage. Maybe he’s still in the house somewhere. My jaw clenches, anticipating an attack.

The house feels emptier than before. Something essential has slipped out and something else has slipped in. Like the first night when shadows skittered by as Kieran sealed thresholds, shutting whatever each room held. Those creatures lingered at night—this was the truth.

In the ballroom there is a candelabra situated right next to the door atop an old wobbly console. “Let there be light,” my voice is a whisper as light the candles, then turn to first find my dog and then man who’d left me here.

“Misty?” I keep my voice quiet, ambling through the lonely corridor that connects the foyer to the kitchen. I rattle the door handles on either side of me, all were locked. All with the same line of white substance beneath it. At the end of this corridor were the dining, kitchen and East Wing entrance. On the left: the cavernous dining room, just as shuttered for the night, and to the right, the East wing. Straight ahead is the kitchen, returning an eager stare of nothing.

I sweep my light across the dining room, then try to flick the light switch against the wall yet nothing illuminates. A figure flicks by in my periphery. Swift and tenebrous, too quick to register. I know better now than to assume it’s an animal. I sweep my light straight ahead towards the kitchen’s entrance, finding only tidy countertops and cabinets.

“Tania?” No answer. “Kieran?” I hope I’m wrong and it’s a member of the household lingering in the shadows. I turn sharply right, leading me down the dreaded hallway toward the East Wing. What if he wasn’t there and I was walking into danger? A part of me is curious to find whatever lies in the house’s secret history. To revisit the place, I’d only been a few days ago. What am I even looking for? What if the occupants of this house were the ones in need of help? I’m incapable of help right now, the only weapon is the heavy candelabra in my hand. With a brief sweep of candlelight, I find nothing amiss in the pool room and push forward.

I guess I’m more seduced by danger than preservation for life.

The East Wing, charred and dusty. The wing where maybe Kieran and his wife once lived. The wife he claimed to want to move past.

“This is not good.”

Wishing Misty was here, I push the heavy door open, barely allowing warm candlelight to flood the hallway. In the distance, a form writhes in slow, languid movements. I lift the light toward it. Now would be a great fucking time to have electricity, and a gun.

Don’t walk the labyrinth at night. The Sheriff’s warning echoes in my head.

“Hello?” My voice is hoarse. I slow, walking in sure easy steps toward the shape. In my past life, had I been a bad person? A woman who committed atrocities against other people? Had I been a criminal? Had I dabbled in anything dark? The inclination toward danger at my own detriment should be studied. I can already tell I had been an insufferable woman. Who in their right mind would walk toward a disfigured shadow without protection? Me.

Slurping sounds become clearer as I put one foot in front of the other. On this side of the house, there are portraits. Portraits that weren’t here the other day. Ones that held haughty expressions and followed you with their painted eyes. Had my focus been too fuddled by the excitement of an investigation to notice these? Of digesting so many changing variables at once?

My heart thumps against my chest. A numbing sensation creeps over my fingers. The thick bronze candelabra shakes in my grasp. At this point, I’m neither scared nor galvanized. Still curious. A hunched figure awaits me. What am I looking at?

The voice in my head screams, run.

It’s a person, female in appearance. She’d stopped moving and is now standing still. Her hair hangs in slick ropes, plastered to her body like she had risen from some abyssal depth. A white gown clings to her skin soaked through, every contour of her frame sharpened by dampness. Her movements are jagged, unnatural and disjointed, like each limb is being puppeted by a will that is not her own.

She looks exactly like the creature from yesterday.

A croak ruptures from her throat, followed by a wet, nauseating squelch that churns in the air. My gag reflex spikes. I nearly recoil. Nearly. Call it madness coupled with intrigue, I keep moving forward.

My body is not in flight, nor is it braced for attack. It is trapped in the strange no-man’s-land between sense and instinct. Am I incapable of fear? Is something wrong with me? Because if my steps carry me closer to this grotesque, sagging figure—this ruin of a woman—then the answer must be yes. With each slow step, a viscous substance sloughs off her skin, sliding onto the floor with a squelching sound. It reminds me of the coagulated liquid Arik siphoned from my veins, an image that sends a cold, parasitic echo through my memory.