by Kelly Creagh
“You’re the one who is being stupid, Lucas. What if there really is a spirit stuck here?”
“That’s just it, Charlotte. We’re not talking about a spirit. She said he was tangible—a person. But you and I both know that’s not possible. The legend isn’t real. It can’t be. So the only other explanation is that it’s playing her. There is no Erik. Nothing else makes sense.”
Sneering, I tightened a fist.
“Okay, fine,” said the girl, Charlotte. “Say there is a dark entity here. That doesn’t necessarily make it demonic.”
“It melted metal,” replied the boy. “It almost killed her dad. Besides, this thing’s been coming to her in dreams. It told her not to have investigators to the house. She said Erik was why she wanted to come back here. Name one thing about any of that that doesn’t scream demonic activity.”
So, Stephanie had told him quite a bit. Had she truly said she cared for me, though? Whether she had or not, was not her return to Moldavia proof enough that she did care?
“I knew I should have asked her why she wasn’t saying anything,” said Charlotte. “It wasn’t because she didn’t want to. It was because you told her not to.”
“Because we would have all sat there wasting time, debating about what this thing really was when the answer was obvious.”
“You know,” said the girl, “you’re starting to sound just like Wes.”
“I do not sound like Wes.”
“You do. And while we’re on the subject, what is going on between you two?”
“Nothing,” snapped the boy.
“Clearly it’s not nothing. Lately, he’s been trying to get a reaction out of you any chance he gets. Why?”
“He likes Stephanie, okay?”
“He said that?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes. Actually. He did.”
She laughed. “And you believed him?”
“Hey,” said the boy suddenly, his voice at once clearer than before. “The basement door. Look. It’s open.”
The scuff of a shoe on the tile warned me of his approach. If he looked beyond the door, though, there could be little doubt now that he would see me.
“Lucas, stop. Stephanie said not to—”
Quickly, I yanked the door shut. The resulting bang resounded through the house, inciting a scream from the girl.
FORTY-SEVEN
Stephanie
“You stay there!” I shouted at Patrick as I darted past him, bolting into the back hall with Wes on my heels.
Patrick’s instinct had been to rush toward the source of the scream. But we’d all be screaming soon if he didn’t keep his watch over the doorway.
Rounding the corner into the kitchen, I skidded to a stop on the tiles, confronted with the sight of Lucas battling to open the basement door. Charlotte stood nearby, her back pressed to the kitchen counter, hands covering her mouth.
I tore past her and, without thinking, grabbed one of Lucas’s hands, prying it free of the locked handle and inserting myself between him and the door. Flustered, Lucas backed off.
“The door,” he explained. “It . . . it shut on its own. Just before it did, I . . . I thought I saw—”
“No one goes into the basement alone,” I said. “You promised.”
His shocked expression told me that, in that moment, he hadn’t been thinking about what he’d promised. He hadn’t been thinking at all.
“It’s locked now,” he said, gesturing to the door. “So none of us are going down there.”
Maybe, for right now, that was for the best.
“Guuuuys?” came Patrick’s voice from the hall.
“Everybody’s okay,” Wes called back. “Though I can’t really say it was a false alarm.”
“No,” called Patrick. “All of you. Get in here.”
Lucas was the first to move, though not without grabbing my hand along the way. With forceful steps, he led me back down the hall and into the foyer. Charlotte and Wes followed close behind.
“Whose room is that right there?” Patrick asked when we arrived, pointing at a second-floor door.
“Mine,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Your door just opened all by itself.”
“Did you get it on camera?” asked Lucas.
“Negative,” replied Patrick. “Camera was aimed toward the back hall. Couldn’t pivot it in time.”
“Grab a digital, Wes,” Lucas said. “You and I can go check it out. You three”—he gestured to me, Charlotte, and Patrick—“stay together.”
“Like hell,” Charlotte snapped, snatching a camcorder from the duffel bag before starting after him. “I’m coming with you.”
“It’s Stephanie’s room,” said Wes. “Shouldn’t she go with Lucas?”
Charlotte and Lucas looked at Wes, dumbfounded.
“Charlotte and I can finish this floor,” Wes continued. “We stick with the plan to get the house cleaned. Obviously, we’re having an effect.”
Wes and Lucas shared a glare. But then Lucas broke from the group and, still holding my hand, took me with him. As we climbed the stairs, I got the distinct impression that Wes had orchestrated things for his own purposes, the way he had at the dance. Lucas, on the hunt, remained none the wiser. But I was certain that, as soon as Lucas and I were out of earshot, Wes would tell the others what I had let slip to him.
Lucas dropped my hand, but only once we were both beyond the threshold of my door. Was he taking me more seriously now after what he’d seen? And about that . . .
“What was it?” I asked him as he made a beeline for my closet. “What did you see?”
“This door,” he said, opening the closet. “Do you remember if it was like this last night? Closed, I mean.”
“Actually . . . I opened it last night,” I said. “Looking for Charlie. I’m pretty sure I left it that way . . .”
He swung toward me. “You might not have?”
“It matters?”
“Probably not,” he admitted. “At any rate, I think something just came through here. C’mon.”
Lucas took up my hand again and tugged me out of my room and down the rear hallway, like he knew the lay of the land as well as I did. But then, my house was all over a documentary.
“Lucas, where are we going?”
“Up,” he said. “To the attic. Like Wes said, we stick to the plan.”
Trailing sage smoke in our wake, Lucas and I climbed up, around one tight bend and then the next, our feet creating a hollow racket on the stairs that everyone had to be hearing. Everyone and everything.
I’d never seen Lucas this hell-bent. Until now, I’d have wagered that aggravation wasn’t an emotion he possessed.
We cleared the final steps, emerging into the dusty and antique-filled attic. Above us, rain pounded the roof, the storm issuing a low groan of thunder.
Then Lucas did something that shocked me. He slung me gently out into the center clearing of the room, releasing me in the same motion. I stumbled backward a step into the weak patches of light straining to stream through the rear windows. He scowled at me, ready, it seemed, to start yelling.
He didn’t, though. Instead, his steps hit the floorboards hard and fast as, with determination, he closed the distance between us, dropping his sage bundle along the way so that his hands could reach for me.
His palms, warm, took my face.
And then . . . then he kissed me.
FORTY-EIGHT
Zedok
From my side, I had entered Stephanie’s by way of her closet. I’d made a show of pushing her bedroom door open before retreating once more to my Moldavia, taking care to shut the closet door behind me. From there, I went to my old room and exited by way of the closet into Charlie’s. Sequestered there, I eavesdropped on the stir I had purposefully initiated long enough to ascertain that Stephanie would be return
ing to her room with the boy.
My aim was to continue to cause confusion that would lead to separation.
From there, I would isolate Stephanie at first opportunity and seize my final chance to explain everything.
Through the slit of Charlie’s partially open door, I marked Stephanie’s movements as she, conjoined at the hand with that infernal boy, was forced to follow his every step. Just when I had been sure he would bring her my way, their approach presenting me with the not-altogether-unappealing prospect of my having to incapacitate him, he turned sharply with Stephanie, veering for the rear portion of the second floor.
His conduct toward her, all but forceful, drove me to the window of Charlie’s bedroom. Concern for Stephanie now tearing at me, I climbed out onto the external iron staircase that had been installed two decades prior.
Scowling behind Valor’s mask, I scaled the fire escape through the pelting rain to its apex.
To the attic window that, shielded from the torrent by its gable, showed me . . . everything.
FORTY-NINE
Stephanie
Lucas. He was kissing me. As in no-holds-barred, no reservations, no hesitation kissing.
And it was . . . amazing.
The rush of his scent, a mixture of sandalwood, peppermint, and sage smoke, sent my mind reeling and my body into autopilot.
I kissed him back, my hands lifting to press his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. Eyes falling shut, I relished the sensation of his seeking lips. Soft and strong as his touch, they sought mine out in slow but fervent strokes.
Then those big hands fell to my hips, where, pulling me into him, they radiated the heat of desire.
It was a heat I felt all too keenly myself—from my toes to the electrified tips of my fingers.
Dismissing the small voice in the back of my mind that kept posing too many questions—and more distantly asking about someone else—I looped my arms around Lucas’s neck.
In response, Lucas’s steel arms enclosed me, wrapping me in a devouring embrace that drew us flush. He deepened the kiss then, obliterating the reserves of my thoughts with a sinful sweep of his tongue.
My blood racing in my veins, roaring in my ears, I sought from that point to keep up with the kiss that began to run off with us both.
That’s when Lucas stepped into me, walking us backward all the way to the wall, where he pressed me into the plaster—and then himself into me.
With no brain cells left to tell them not to, my hands somehow found their way beneath his shirt, fingers trailing over all the muscles I had always known they would find.
His hand cupped my face again, his thumb brushing my cheek, delivering in this heated moment the sweetest of caresses before, abruptly, he broke the kiss.
I blinked up at him, dazed, my chest rising and falling quickly from the run up the steps. And from the kiss, unexpected as it had been.
Lucas stared down at me, his brow pinched, like he was trying to figure out if he really had just kissed me that way. Urgent. Impulsive. Incredible.
In a moment, he would start talking. Why, though, when all I wanted was for him to kiss me like that again? In that insistent, demanding, and sexy-as-hell way that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that, despite appearances, he wasn’t all good boy.
“Do you like Wes?” he blurted, breathless himself.
I froze. And squinted at him, nonplussed. “What?”
FIFTY
Zedok
She stood with her back to me, her arms lifting to wind around the young man’s shoulders—not out of fear, as had been the case when they had wound around mine, but out of longing. For him. This wretch who took with ease what I had known all along could never be mine.
In spite of that knowing, this moment brought with it, for me . . . pain.
Along with the final unfolding of all I had sought to avoid.
No. Not so soon. Not yet. Not now.
The agony—the same from two nights ago—it came despite my plea, returning full force to ransack me from the inside out, exploding into being from the very core of my person.
I groped at my chest, wadding into my fist the waistcoat and shirt that concealed my ravaged form. But, as before, that did nothing to assuage the reckoning that occurred inside me—the likes of which I had never known. Not even when Rastin had applied his powers to my desolate soul.
That kiss.
The vilest of poisons could not have slain a man any better than that kiss killed me. And, like the twisting pain, their embrace wore on and on.
Weakened by the mounting intensity of both, I had no choice but to lean into the window that trapped within its frame this hated picture. One that, though I could not bear to watch, I found impossible to look away from.
How well their bodies conformed to each other. How lovely and alive they looked entangled. And how poor a judge I had been. To think that the worst could have ever been prevented. To think that, in her presence, a heart—any heart—would not break.
Another swell of pain rocked me. With it, though, I managed to tear myself from the window, from the scene that would forever replay in my hollow head.
His lips on hers. Her answering embrace. Their desires united and undenied.
My footing compromised by the slickness of metal, I staggered forward to grab the railing. When my hand came away from my chest, though, it brought with it rivulets of red. A glance down at my personage showed a stain of crimson spreading its way out from my sternum, saturating my already soaked white dress shirt.
But . . . how could this be?
I descended, my feet clanging over the stairs that brought me to the landing below. With difficulty, I reentered Charlie’s room, where both rainwater and blood dripped from me to the floor. I could not stay here on this side. Not in this state that would quickly have me discovered. And yet, with the rose obliterated, I could not dare to return to my Moldavia, either.
Undecided, I staggered to the hallway door as thunder rumbled overhead. But I did not have to grasp or turn the knob. For the door, with a low and ominous creak, opened all on its own.
Beyond, against the backdrop of the lit chandelier that, on my side, still hung perfect from its chain, stood a figure resplendent in crimson. The plush hallway runner under him softened the booted steps that brought him nearer to the threshold. The one that, for the second time that day, stood as the only barrier between us.
“Even now,” I said, my voice little more than a labored rasp, “I cannot let you win.”
“You speak as though you have not already lost,” he replied, the calmness in that horrible voice slicing deeper the pain that resonated all the louder within me.
Stephanie. My Stephanie.
“Ours,” hissed the figure of Wrath.
“No.” My hand returned to clench the inexplicable wound in my chest, stoppering the blood, the presence of which should not have been possible.
“I shall not cross,” I wheezed, taking a step back, away from the door and from him. “And . . . even you cannot take . . . what does not lie within your reach.”
“I can only agree,” he said before ever so slightly tilting his head at me. “But when, dear Erik, have any of us, least of all me, ever truly existed outside of you?”
With these words, Wrath parted the cloak that had heretofore swathed his figure, revealing a pit in the center of his own chest. But the hole was not hollow so much as it was a transparent nothingness through which the wall behind him could be viewed.
And that nothingness. It grew.
“W-wh—” I murmured, unable to comprehend what it was I was witnessing. One of my masks dissolving from the center out?
That’s when the horror of the correlation occurred to me.
With terror I glanced down at myself, at the blood that, even as it covered me, transformed me, vanquish
ing Valor’s garments in favor of heavier vestments of the deepest and most devouring of crimsons.
“You . . . cannot,” I said as I moved into the doorframe and then through it, toward the figure whose form peeled back on itself from the center, dissolving even as the same crimson garbs began to envelop me. “Please. No.”
Wrath spread his arms, several of his ringed fingers gone already.
“Take heart, Valor,” he said mockingly, his mask disintegrating now, too. “If you held any power to stop this, do you think I would just stand here?”
Panic gripped me. I grasped for my mask, prepared to rip it free.
But . . . then, with gloved and ring-lined fingers pressed to the mask’s altered outline, I halted.
Because was I not now free? As free as I might ever be? Unfettered and at liberty to now take what I desired? And to destroy, in good time, what I loathed.
Was there anything I wanted more than Stephanie?
Contrarily, was there anything I hated more than the boy?
FIFTY-ONE
Stephanie
“Wes,” repeated Lucas as he took a step back from me. “After the dance . . . he told me he was going to make a move if I didn’t. Do you like him?”
I folded my arms, trying to get a grip on his thinking. Two seconds ago, I’d been showing him just how much I liked him, and now here he was asking about Wes?
“You asked me on a date,” I took the liberty of reminding him.
“Y-yeah, I know.”
“And I said yes.”
“Yeah, but you guys were dancing together last night. And I didn’t know if maybe you—”
“I don’t like Wes,” I said. “Do you think I’d have let you kiss me that way if I did?”
A flicker of hope flashed in those stained-glass blues.
“Hello,” I said. “I like you. A lot.”
A beat passed. Then we each took a simultaneous step toward one another. Lucas reached for me a second time, eyes hungry. I drifted into him, allowing his arm to slip around my waist, his hand to press into my lower back, bringing us together once more.
