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My brother, Emmanuel, is almost as tall as me. I’ve got an inch on him. Most of the men of my family are tall and strongly built. According to Grandmother, it’s our inheritance, and, with pride upon her face, she reminds us as often as she can of it.
Weaving around the manicured garden with Benedict at my side, I glance at the pool house with its glass walls. Water shimmers in the lamplight. I move quickly out of sight of the house and into the woods, trees growing denser as I run deeper under their cover.
The Delacroix mansion is surrounded by more than fifteen acres of land, most of it unused and untouched by man. There is a cleared path to my destination, but I bypass it, choosing to run through the trees. I’d prefer to have gone into the dark wing of the house to my piano than run, but I need to burn off this energy.
The dark wing is technically the east wing, but Mom started calling it the dark wing back when it was just Abacus, Emmanuel, and me to scare us from going into the maze of rooms that had yet to be renovated. It was too dangerous. She was right. It still is because we never did get around to renovating, even after Abacus and I came of age. By then it was too late. Grandmother had the wing sealed off.
I wonder if she knows I have been visiting it again since Abacus’s death. If I had to guess, I’d say yes. Her hearing is almost inhuman, even at her age. She can hear a mouse in the cellar. She claims it’s her gift from above, just as ours is our height and strength.
My teeth clench together at the thought of it all.
Just one week after our parents disappeared—yacht and all—on what was meant to be a relaxing week in a calm sea, Grandmother had arrived at our house. We were only children then, Rébecca, my sister, barely a year old, my brother, Emmanuel a year younger than my twin, Abacus and I who had been eleven at the time. She was a formidable woman. My brothers and I made fun of her strange ways at first. It was one of the few things that made us laugh, even if there wasn’t anything funny about it. We missed our parents, and Grandmother has always been a cold substitute. She heard our mocking laughter, but she was patient.
Over time, over years and years of hearing something, you almost start to believe it, no matter how preposterous, how unbelievable. You start to believe the texts she carried with her from her home in the suburbs of Paris telling the history of our family.
Rébecca has no memory of our parents. In their place, she had Grandmother and her strange stories. I’d worried about Rébecca then and I still do now, but it turned out Abacus had been the one to watch.
At the memory of him, my chest tightens. We were as tight as twins could be. But during the last year of his life, everything had changed. Every single thing.
Fuck.
Now I wish I’d brought my phone. At least I could blare music to drown out my thoughts—not that I could bear it with this fucking migraine.
This is why I prefer going into the dark wing on nights like this. The piano is there. There, I can hammer at the keys and drown out every other sound. Grandmother had it put away when she moved in, calling it an unnecessary distraction. When I play there, no one hears it; it’s too far from the west wing of the house.
Well, no one but my grandmother, but I’m too old to be chastised by her. Besides, as the rules go within The Society we are a part of, I am the head of this household, not her. No matter how much she’d like it to be otherwise.
As if taking pity on me, birds begin waking as the sky ahead glows a deep crimson with the first light of day. I stop, barely out of breath, to take in the beauty of it, but it triggers a memory of the dream I am running from: the sun breaking the horizon as Elizabeth Wildblood is carted out to Proctor’s Ledge. To the hanging tree.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
I charge on faster than ever, twenty more minutes of single-minded focus as I run the length of the property and circle back, only hearing the chirping of birds and the crunching of branches underfoot. Twenty more minutes pass before I just make out the red glow of the Tabernacle lamp in the distance. It burns in the small chapel on the property and is visible through one of the narrow windows.
It’s only then that I slow my pace, as the forest grows thinner and I get my first glimpse of the angel Shemhazai standing tall and proud.
