The Shadow and the Night: Glenncailty Castle, Book 3

by Lila Dubois

  “I don’t know these things.”

  “Jacques, tell her what you told me—about her.” Tristan squeezed Melissa’s hand.

  “You are protected.” Jacques dropped into a sitting position, and Melissa was again struck by how real and solid he looked.

  “What does that mean?”

  “When I looked at you, I knew you couldn’t see me. That you wouldn’t feel me. Some people cannot see, but they feel. They look over their shoulders or turn up the heat because I make them cold.”

  “Maybe I’m just naturally impervious.”

  “There’s a light around you. Not always there, but when I tried to touch you, it was there.”

  “Why were you trying to touch her?” Tristan demanded.

  “I was going to scare her so you could comfort her.” Jacques grinned.

  “That is so disturbing. Tristan, you use your dead brother to get women?” Melissa shook her head.

  “What? No! I do not need his help.” Tristan rubbed his forehead.

  “Sometimes you do.”

  “If you weren’t already dead I would strangle you.”

  “You’re so cruel,” Jacques covered his face with his hands.

  “Tristan,” Melissa hissed. “That’s a horrible thing to say, considering…how he died.”

  Tristan groaned. “Jacques, you are a brat.”

  A gasp drew Melissa’s attention back to the ghost. He raised his face from his hands—he was laughing. “Pardon, pardon. I’m sorry, but it is too much fun to tease him.”

  “Okay, you are kind of a pain in the ass,” Melissa said, but she was smiling. She liked Jacques. As long as she didn’t think too hard about the fact that she would never be able to actually meet him, she could just live in the moment. “Before we get derailed again, I need to understand what this light thing is that you can see around me.”

  “I’ve never seen it before. We—Tristan and I—have seen many ghosts, spirits, memories, but nothing like what protects you.”

  “Okay, so when a ghost tries to interact with me, this white thing stops them.”

  “Yes, it is the same as that.” Jacques pointed at the door.

  “That?” Melissa looked at Tristan in confusion. “That’s black. It’s creepy black fog.”

  “Non, c’est blanc,” Jacques said.

  “Non pour moi.” Tristan was frowning.

  “Can I leave this circle, Tristan?” Melissa asked.

  “I don’t know. You might not be able to see Jacques anymore. Why do you ask?”

  “I want to touch it again.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I feel like I have to.”

  Melissa’s heartbeat was in her throat as she stepped out of the circle of candles. Tristan touched her leg as she passed.

  It took more courage than she knew she had to walk toward that door. From far away, it just looked normal. It wasn’t until she got close that the black mist appeared. She tried to reach out, but the memory of how it felt to have her hand in that had her pulling back.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Tristan said.

  “I do.” Melissa steeled her nerves and pushed both hands into the blackness. Light flared, blinding her. She stumbled back, eyes squeezed shut. Turning her back on the door, she blinked, focusing on Tristan. He was still sitting on the floor, twisted to watch her. Jacques had risen to his feet. The slim young man smiled at her, but then he melted away. Instead, a swollen black and purple body hung from one of the rafters, an extension cord wrapped around its neck, an engorged tongue hanging from thick, bloated lips.

  Melissa pressed her hands over her mouth, looking from the image of Jacques’ dead body to Tristan. She could only imagine the horror he’d felt seeing that in the flesh. Liquid dripped from Jacques’ feet, hitting the floor with a little plop.

  She turned away from the horrifying sight.

  “Melissa?” Tristan asked.

  A white light obscured the door. It pulsed with color, and she thought that there was music coming from it, but she couldn’t hear it clearly.

  “What are you?” she asked, with more courage than she knew she had. “Why are you protecting me?”

  You would see their death.

  The words were faint, seeming to come from nowhere and yet echoing from each of the walls.

  “Whose death?”

  All of them.

  “I would see the ghosts?” Melissa said, trying to make sense of the reverberating words.

  Not just the ghosts. The deaths. The bones would show you. The ghosts would show you.

  She understood. She wasn’t sure if she inferred the explanation from what was said or if the light somehow made her understand, but in that moment she knew.

  “I don’t think I can go on. I can’t deal with the fact that the suffering doesn’t end.”

  Death is the end of suffering.

  “How can that be true? Jacques is right there. Maybe he’s not exactly suffering as a ghost, but what will happen to him when Tristan’s gone? Will he just wander, hoping to find someone who can hear him or see him?”

  The body returns to the earth, and the spirit returns to that which gave it. Everything that remains is neither body nor soul.

  “I need to know. I need proof that everyone is okay when they die.”

  The light dimmed, then faded away entirely.

  Melissa looked over her shoulder. “Where’s Jacques?” she asked.

  Tristan frowned. “He’s right there. In the same place he was before.”

  “I can’t see him.”

  “Never mind that.” Tristan got to his feet and hugged her. “What was it? You were able to talk to it?”

  “You couldn’t hear that strange voice?”

  “No. I only heard what you said.”

  “It said I’m protected because if I could see the ghosts, I wouldn’t just see them, I’d see how they died.”

  “Sometimes that’s how ghosts are.”

  Melissa rested her hands on Tristan’s chest. “Jacques is wearing a white T-shirt and jeans.”

  “Yes.”

  “But when he died he was wearing a blue shirt.”

  Tristan went pale. “How did you know that?”

  “When I looked back, I saw him looking normal and alive, but then he disappeared, and I could see a body, hanging from the beam.”

  Tristan closed his eyes.

  “It wouldn’t just be ghosts. I would see the deaths of any bones I touched. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people’s deaths just sitting in my memory making me crazy. That’s what I’m being protected from.”

  “And who is protecting you?”

  “I don’t know. But I think, from something it said, that maybe the ghosts aren’t real.” Tristan opened his mouth to protest and Melissa held up her hand. “I don’t mean it like that. I know they’re real, but I don’t think they’re souls.”

  “Some aren’t. Some are memories.”

  “I don’t think any of them are spirits, or souls, or whatever you want to call it. It said, ‘The body returns to the earth, and the soul returns to that which gave it. Everything that remains is neither body nor spirit.’”

  “What could it be besides the soul, or the spirit?”

  “I don’t know. You yourself said memories. Maybe bits of consciousness that are somehow left over?” Melissa pushed open the door. Sunlight flooded the church and a gust of wind extinguished the candles from the séance.

  “The world looks the same,” she said quietly.

  “Did you expect it to be different?”

  “Part of me did. I just found out that ghosts are real, that without some strange paranormal protection, I’d have been stark raving mad from seeing thousands of horrible deaths, and that even though there are ghosts it might be okay, because the soul really does move on after death.” She took a deep breath. Later, when she had time and space, she would sort everything out and reconstruct her worldview. Right now she’d had enough, so she would do the thing she was go
od at. She would find and identify human remains.

  Tristan watched Melissa leave the church. Jacques came up beside him.

  “Could you hear whatever was talking to her?” Tristan asked his brother.

  “No, but do you see it? On the wall?”

  Tristan took a deep breath and nodded. He wasn’t ready to deal with what Jacques was talking about yet, so he asked, “Are you my brother’s soul?”

  “I don’t know. How could I tell? I feel like I always have.”

  Tristan wished he could hug his brother’s ghost. “I’m not sure if I want her to be right. If you’re not Jacques’ soul, then what are you? Yet I want to believe that he, that you, are at peace. That you are not damned to this hell.”

  Tristan had not expected that Melissa’s learning the truth would leave him floundering for answers. She’d said that her world was changing, but his was too.

  “Do you remember your scripture, Tristan?”

  “No.”

  “Her protector said, ‘The body returns to the earth, and the spirit returns to that which gave it.’”

  “So?”

  “Ecclésiaste 12:7: Avant que la poussière retourne à la terre, comme elle y était, et que l’esprit retourne à Dieu qui l’a donné.”

  Tristan translated. “Ecclesiastes 12:7: ‘Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.’”

  Standing beside his brother’s ghost, Tristan looked at the wall of the church, where the image of two huge wings was burned into the stone.

  Chapter Eleven

  Tristan worked until his muscles burned. Melissa tried to clear some topsoil herself, but her left arm wasn’t strong enough. Rory and his younger brother Gerard were helping dig. They’d started at what Melissa had identified as the outer boundary and were digging to make sure she was right. So far they hadn’t come across any artifacts.

  Tristan periodically had short, one-sided conversations as he worked, but no matter how hard she tried, Melissa couldn’t hear or see Jacques. She was glad that she knew who Tristan was talking to but was rather sad that she could no longer joke with the brothers. Then again, she wouldn’t soon forget the image of Jacques’ body dangling from the beam.

  One puzzling thing was when Tristan had taken Rory into the church, saying he wanted to show the other man something. They’d emerged a few moments later, Rory saying he couldn’t see anything, but he felt something. Melissa had asked Tristan if the thing they’d encountered was still there, but he’d said no, that he’d just wanted to check something with Rory. Tristan didn’t explain further.

  Having something routine to do with her hands freed her mind to process what had just happened. She felt…peaceful. That didn’t make sense, considering how panicked and freaked out she’d been when she first started to accept that what was happening in the church was real. She’d learned that ghosts were real, and yet not.

  She adjusted her camera strap, then stopped to look at something Rory held up. It was a bit of glass, and she tossed it into the labeled bucket.

  Rory, who was wearing a walkie-talkie, let Sorcha know that they were done for the day. Tristan was called back to the kitchen to help with tomorrow’s food and Melissa returned to her room to call an anthropologist friend for guidance.

  She got so wrapped up in planning the excavation that she didn’t notice the time until someone knocked on her door. The clock on the wall said it was just past nine—she would have guessed it was no later than six.

  Melissa stood and stretched, wondering who was at the door. Two steps later she remembered what had happened this afternoon before the séance. She looked from the door to the bed, which was covered in papers and books, to her reflection. Her hair was up in a messy bun, she was wearing a sweatshirt from an American university where she’d spent a semester and her legs were bare except for fuzzy socks that came halfway up her calves.

  “Just a minute!”

  She spun in a circle, not sure where to start.

  “Dr. Heavey? It’s room service,” a female voice said.

  Melissa paused, hair half-down. It wasn’t Tristan.

  “What?” She found her pants from earlier, put them on and opened the door. “I didn’t order room service.”

  “Chef asked me to bring this over to you.” A pretty young woman wearing a uniform from the pub was standing outside with a cart. “It’s not really room service, we don’t do that, but we do whatever Chef says.”

  “I bet you do. Where is Tristan?”

  “He’s gone for the day, ma’am. I mean, Doctor.”

  “Ma’am is fine. Thank you for the food. What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. The Chef made it for you himself.” The server was trying and failing to hide a smile.

  “Thank you.” Melissa examined the girl’s face. “You have very pronounced but horizontal zygomatic bones. By the time you’re twenty-five, your face will have finished shaping and your bone structure will be in line with historical and current beauty standards.” She patted the girl on the shoulder.

  “What?”

  “Your cheekbones. They’re horizontal right now because your face is still developing. In five to ten years, they will be angled.”

  “I…still don’t understand.”

  “Plan for a career in modeling in your late twenties. Goodbye. Thank you.”

  Melissa pushed the girl out the door. Some people just didn’t know how to take a compliment.

  The rolling cart was covered with a white tablecloth. A bud vase with a single peach rose sat in the center of the covered plates. There was a card propped against the vase.

  Melissa took the card and sank down onto the bed. She didn’t want to open it right away. She wanted to savor this moment. She’d never had what many of her peers deemed a “normal” relationship. She hadn’t even had a relationship until grad school, and they’d both been so poor and busy that it mostly consisted of exciting but hurried sex and proofreading one another’s papers. During her post-doc, she’d been with a young Australian professor working on the same recovery project she was studying, but their relationship began while they were stationed in the Congo and ended as soon as she left.

  He’d never taken her on a date, given her flowers or written her a card. Their relationship had been more of an academic interview, to see if they were compatible both physically and intellectually. There was a long history in archaeology and anthropology of power couples. Since so much time was spent away from home, it made sense. Melissa had assumed that was what she would end up with, but nothing ever worked out. She’d had short affairs with colleagues, but none had seemed interested in being with her in a more romantic or permanent way. Eventually she’d learned to be the aggressor, which guaranteed that she got physical contact and pleasure when she needed it. Unromantic but practical, given her lifestyle.

  Tristan made her feel like the kind of girl who men gave flowers to and took out on dates. She wasn’t sure that was really who she was, but it was a nice feeling. Shucking the dusty pants once more, she sat on the bed and pulled the cart into place as a table.

  The card was thick, creamy paper. Tristan’s handwriting matched his personality—bold and strong.

  Food is not better than sex, unless it’s my food. We’re not finished. Think of me.

  Under that was a phone number. Melissa smiled and hugged the card to her chest. She could picture his wicked smile, hear his voice saying the words.

  She hadn’t really expected him to show up tonight—after everything they’d been through in the church, he had to want some time away from her. The “I love you” was only one piece of a complicated event, but in a way it was the most damning. It seemed like an insane cliché that, when faced with danger, she’d turned into a crying mess and confessed her love to her strong protector. Melissa winced in embarrassment.

  She pulled the covers off plates and her mouth started to water. He’d sent her a beautiful salad of baby spinach, baked kale, oranges
, nuts and soft white cheese. She took a bite and moaned in pleasure—it had truffle dressing.

  The entrée was duck fillet stuffed with herbs, the skin crisped to perfection. Sautéed greens with ginger sauce served as a delicious bed for the poultry.

  The final dish was a small chocolate cake that came with a little cup of vanilla cream.

  Melissa forked up a sliver of duck and greens and picked up her cell phone. Tristan answered on the first ring.

  “Enjoying your dinner?”

  Melissa finished chewing, moaning in pleasure as she did, before saying. “Thank you.”

  “That’s a very nice sound you make when you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “Can’t talk, eating.” She took a bite of salad and lay back on the bed. The flavors were things she would never have thought would be good together.

  “You know that you called me?”

  “Mmm hmm. Thank you, bye.”

  “Oh no, no. You can’t hang up now.”

  “Nope, I said thank you. That’s why I called, now I need to go back to having the best meal of my life.”

  “Ah, Melissa, you flatter me.”

  “No I don’t, you arrogant jerk. You know how good you are.” She swiped some greens in the gingery sauce pooled on the plate and stuck her fork in her mouth.

  “Is that how you talk to the man giving you pleasure?”

  Melissa paused, fork halfway to her mouth, as her body hummed to life. She hadn’t forgotten what it had felt like to have him touch her, and her body was suddenly very unhappy that the promised sex wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Melissa?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “Uh…ducks.”

  “Duck? Then cut off a piece of the fillet and put it in your mouth. Don’t chew it yet, just let it sit on your tongue.”

  Melissa did as he said. The duck had a rich, buttery flavor, and the crispy skin was vaguely sweet, yet tangy.

  “Now chew it, slowly. Make sure it touches every part of your tongue, so you taste all of it.”

  Melissa’s nipples were hard, and she clenched her knees together as she chewed and swallowed.