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“I told them I wasn’t...” she slurred. “I couldn’t...not yet...” She was hopped up on so much morphine, it was hard to understand half of what she was saying, and the bits I caught didn’t make sense. “Don’t trust him. Don’t trust his eyes.”
“Whose eyes, Mom?”
Her own gray eyes were staring off into another plane. She went quiet for a while, as her breathing slowed. But in the seconds before she took her final breath, she looked directly at me and rasped, “I’ll see you soon.”
I’m not sure whether she was talking to me, or if she even knew I was there. But her words gave me goosebumps like cold rain sliding down my back.
My throat tightens at the memory. I start pulling things out of my suitcase and piling them haphazardly onto the bed.
“It was really bad toward the end,” is all I can bring myself to say to Chastity.
She nods, like she suspected as much. “Well, however badly your momma suffered, it wasn’t enough to make up for what she did to this family. She got what she deserved.”
My mouth falls open. Did she really just say that to me?
I stand rooted, mouth gaping, as she paints the smile back onto her face as easily as smoothing on lipstick.
“Come on down when you’re ready for lunch,” she says.
Chapter Three
William
The girl is still staring at the open door long after Chastity has turned on her designer heels and strode into the hall.
“Bitch,” she whispers, as her tears start to fall.
I move around her, studying her from different angles. She’s got Radcliff blood in her for sure. I can sense it. But it wasn’t until I heard Isabella’s name that I took a long, hard look at her.
Could this really be Isabella’s daughter? If she is, why can’t I sense her power?
I’m standing four feet away from the girl, yet she cannot see me. I was out among the vines when she and Edward pulled up to the house, and at the top of the front steps during her icy introduction to the family.
I follow her into the attached bath where she pulls a wad of toilet paper off the roll and blows her nose, then sits on the closed seat with her head in her hands.
Soft cries deepen into stilted, gut-wrenching sobs.
Watching her fall apart stirs a need inside me that I haven’t felt in years: the desire to provide comfort. It’s a strange and unfounded feeling, this urge to pull her close. To stroke her face and assure her it’ll all be okay.
Must be the hunger talking...
“Mom,” she croaks. “I don’t think I can do this. I tried to be strong, but I feel so brittle... It was easier to be brave for you because I didn’t want you to worry. I know this used to be your home, but I don’t feel welcome here. I miss you... Please, give me a sign that you can hear me.”
Isabella must’ve been pregnant when Edward sent her away. I was here the night John and Isabella were unceremoniously evicted from the estate, though I use the termhereloosely.
Simply put, I am a prisoner on this property. I possess a physical body that hasn’t left its cage in almost twenty years.
The only escape I’m afforded is my ability to project myself into the twilight realm—an affectionate name for the dreamlike, superimposed version of the world that serves as a permanent resting place for the dead.
Being perpetually on the verge of starvation has severely limited my psychic abilities. As it stands, I can only venture a few yards beyond the vineyard, and only as a silent observer.
When I’m in my astral form, I cannot interact with the living. The only beings I can converse with, besides my captors, are the spirits who reside here.
Sadly, with only a few exceptions, the ghosts that haunt this estate make for poor company. Perhaps that’s an unkind claim to make about my own descendants. But thus is the nature of the twilight realm; it seduces you, lulling you into a stupor, in an effort to soften death’s final blow.
Sensing a presence in the other room, I leave the girl to her sorrow and return to find my favorite spirit, Katherine, folding her granddaughter’s belongings on the bed.
“Trying to spook her already?” I ask.
