Harlequin E Shivers Box Set Volume 3: Valley of NightmaresHis to PossessThe Girl in BlueThe Ghosts of Cragera Bay

by Jane Godman

  Her eyes opened with her release and, as Creed followed, the dark night was only a few feet from her face, still frightening, but also a part of the ecstasy they shared.

  * * *

  They had collapsed, afterward, on the cool cushions of the oversize sofa softened by a pile of woven throws. When Trinity woke some time later, it was still dark and she was alone. Her eyes fluttered open and her body jerked as if she’d been falling though she had no memory of it in the pit of her stomach.

  Unease claimed her.

  A thick fog curled against the den’s wall of glass swirling up insidiously from the lake below.

  “Creed?” she called softly, not really expecting a reply.

  The cottage around her felt empty, barren save for her and the sound of her quickening breaths.

  The movement of the fog against the glass made her edge off of the sofa and away from the windows. The move brought her to the counter where Creed’s box still sat unopened. In the soft glow of a phone charger’s light, Trinity didn’t resist the urge to lift the lid. She cringed at the gleam of button eyes, but when she reached inside —worse, much worse—was the brittle rattle of loose match sticks against her fingers.

  There were dozens of them in the bottom of the box.

  Was Creed trying to tempt The Girl in Blue? At Hillhaven, had he been distracting her so that the fire could happen?

  A creak interrupted Trinity’s horrified thoughts.

  She turned quickly, but saw nothing…save for a long sliver of night at the edge of the front door where the sliding glass hadn’t been pulled up completely to its latch. Had Creed gone outside and neglected to fully close the door?

  Trinity knelt to pick up the trench coat off the floor without taking her eyes from the door. She shrugged into it and belted it tightly—naked, vulnerable and so not girded at all.

  Maybe he had gone back out on the deck.

  Trinity quietly stepped to the door and opened it before she lost her nerve. The deck was empty. Creed was nowhere in sight. An image constructed itself from long buried memories and it wasn’t one she wished to recall. Creed’s face white and deathly still, his brown eyes blank and staring. What if he had gone down to the lake’s edge alone?

  The memory spurred her out the door.

  But when she stepped onto the deck, she saw more than swirling fog. She saw a flash of pale blue. It disappeared into the trees where the back cobbled path led toward the lake.

  Where was Creed?

  Trinity paused long enough to slip her feet back into the ballet flats she’d worn earlier in the evening and then she followed the flash of blue into the thick predawn fog rising from the surface of High Lake to engulf Scarlet Falls.

  * * *

  Blood.

  As she hurried down the stone path, she finally placed the metallic iron scent of High Lake’s waters. Her stomach clenched and her steps faltered, but then she heard eerie childish laughter floating back to her through the fog and she pressed on.

  The trench coat wasn’t enough. Heavy moist fog damped her skin and wet her hair. Soon she was racked with shivers and awash in gooseflesh. She called his name only once and it sounded too thin and strange to penetrate more than a few inches of the dank atmosphere in front of her lips.

  She could hear the persistent whisper of rushing water gurgling in the distance. The path she was on didn’t lead to the falls that had given the town the second half of its name. She was glad. Choked by rocks and rotten leaves, the falls had always repelled her. It was rumored to be a place for suicide in days gone by. She only knew the one time she’d been there it had held the same dark shadows she avoided in cemeteries.

  She was silent, now, hurrying through briar and bramble until she came to the water’s edge with a sudden gasp. High Lake. Murky black liquid met and soaked her toes before she back peddled from its pungent touch.

  “Creed?” This time her shout was stronger because seeing the water brought more horrible memories flooding back. Pulling. Oh, how she had pulled. But he’d been much heavier than her and she’d come very close to being pulled in instead of being able to pull him out. She could remember the way his hair had floated around his white face. The way his coat—a trench coat like the one she wore—had billowed out from his body in the sucking waves.

  She strained her eyes. She tried to see through the fog along the water’s surface and at its edge.

  But then she heard the sand paper slide of a striking match behind her. Not ghostly like the laughter. Solid. Real.

  She turned and saw The Girl in Blue very close this time, only a yard away near the trees. She stood like she had in the photograph, her empty arms clasped to her chest where the rag doll should be, but at her motionless feet, a fireplace match burned harmlessly, yet horrifyingly, on the rocks.

  Trinity could smell the sulfuric flame. She watched it flicker and dance. And, suddenly, her own thoughts came back to her, but in a little girl’s voice sing-song and sweet.

  She was a child of Scarlet Falls. Of course she was afraid of the dark.

  The flame seemed to hold back the fog. It seemed to hold back the dark with its tiny flickering halo of light.

  Trinity experienced a moment of revelation, but then Clara Chadwick vanished and in the vacuum of her wake the flame went out. Wet rocks under Trinity’s feet inexplicably shifted and she fell in the same instant. She fell back and in and was submerged. Her startled cry cut off by rivers of metallic water flooding into her nose and mouth.

  Blood.

  Again she tasted blood, smelled blood, swam in blood, but couldn’t get her head above the water. She thought she felt rope binding her arms to her body. She couldn’t move them. Couldn’t claw her way up to the oxygen her tender lungs craved. Her body began to sink in a slow sucking descent to the black bottom of the lake, fathoms below. Time stilled. The water was thick around her. She was frozen, immobilized by ropes she couldn’t see to fight.

  She had been nine years old when it happened, already long familiar with The Girl in Blue. The night before had been a restless one, huddled beneath a mound of blankets as the dead girl stood vigil beside her bed.

  Each time Trinity’s eyes had closed in exhaustion, the pale figure had seemed to manifest a little closer and then a little closer still, until she stood in the warm glow of a bedside lamp, horribly gaunt and hollow-eyed.

  Trinity had opened her eyes to the sight of The Girl in Blue less than a few feet away. And there she had stayed the rest of the night as if held by the weak circle of light. She had no matches that night. Perhaps there had been none to be had in the house.

  Trinity hadn’t called her parents. By that time, she’d known they wouldn’t see the child that, to her, was as solid and real as a living girl. Instead, Trinity had fought the tiredness that was sandpaper behind her eyelids. She had stayed awake, if not alert, watching The Girl in Blue in fear that she would break the rules of the macabre staring game they played and move to the edge of her bed while Trinity watched helpless in terror.

  The sun had risen.

  Trinity’s eyes had finally closed.

  And the dead girl was gone when she opened them to the midmorning Saturday light.

  She remembered the pancakes she’d eaten for breakfast. They’d been extra fluffy and sweet, seasoned with her relief. She remembered her mother saying her father was down by the bridge filling in gravel where the road ended and the planks began.

  With perfect clarity, she recalled climbing the stairs all the way up to the Widow’s Walk to “spy” on her father. He would turn and see her and wave. It was something he’d always done since she was small and her mother would bring her up to the great glass telescope to watch him on his postal rounds. She anticipated his wave. It would further dispel the horror of the night before.

  Only that day when Trinity was only nine, she’d seen something far less cheerful when she focused the tarnished telescope.

  Her father’s small pickup with its bed full of gravel had rolled
back while he worked behind it. She saw it begin to roll. She cried out, but was too far away to warn him. She saw her father fall. She saw the truck come to a stop on one of her father’s legs.

  He had waved feebly from the ground where he laid bleeding and crying out, too far for anyone at the house to hear. The noise of the river must have muted his cries from the town close beyond.

  She saw their friends and neighbors going about their Saturday business in the distance, unaware. She saw her father helpless and hurt, his lips moving as he called for help.

  She answered that call.

  Trinity flew down the stairs on panic-fueled legs. Using the adrenaline and not letting it confuse her, she yelled for her mother. She dialed 911. While her mother eavesdropped long enough to understand, she told the operator her emergency.

  Then she and her mother ran down to the bridge.

  She remembered the blood.

  She remembered her mother exclaiming about the emergency brake not being engaged and the truck’s gearshift being in Reverse.

  Her mother had stooped to comfort her father as the paramedics arrived so only Trinity had seen the gear shift slowly move back into park.

  Most of all, she remembered the hospital. The antiseptic bustle of men and women in white and green helping, healing and making things right.

  The night before she’d been helpless, held captive by the ghost of a dead girl. That afternoon she saw people holding back the darkness with action, with knowledge, with determination and heart.

  “I engaged the brake. I did. Of course, I did,” her father had protested.

  Trinity stood silently while her mother lamented her father’s “mistake.”

  There were people determined not to see in Scarlet Falls, people who gladly grew up to turn a blind eye on restless spirits and “accidents” and whispering shadows.

  That day, Trinity watched the people helping her father and she vowed she would never close her eyes.

  The helpless pause only lasted a few seconds. She sank down, down, but then she fought the invisible ropes. She couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. She clawed against their scratchy tight hold as her lungs threatened to give in to the instinctive pressure to breath water instead of air. Finally, she broke free and kicked out with her legs. She reached up and desperately pushed the water out of her way. She strained every muscle to swim for her life. Then, her face broke the surface and she gasped for breath.

  Kicking, gasping, scrabbling for purchase on the slippery rocks of the bank, Trinity pulled herself up with handfuls of rocks and mud before she collapsed in a wet heap on thousands of pebbles shaped like tears.

  “Trinity!” Creed shouted.

  Through the fog he stepped, materializing from nowhere to stride right over the still smoldering match stick near the trees. He ignored it completely.

  “Where have you been?” she asked as he pulled her to her feet.

  “I was walking,” Creed said.

  Walking. Around the blood-scented lake where he’d almost died.

  Chapter Eight

  A long hot shower and several shampoos with suds that left her hair perfumed with sandalwood finally dispelled the scent of blood. The town’s water supply was piped out to the few houses around the lake because even filtration systems and purifiers wouldn’t make the lake’s water potable.

  Trinity tried to ignore the faint smell of smoke that clung to the clothes she’d brought from Hillhaven in her backpack. She shrugged into a thick cable knit sweater and leggings before leaving the bathroom with damp hair and freshly scrubbed skin to face Creed.

  He stood at the bank of windows and looked out at fog that had grown thinner with the rising sun.

  “There’s a girl. I’ve seen her most of my life,” Trinity began. She didn’t mention other things she’d seen. “I thought she was harmless. Horrible, but harmless. Until I saw her the night of the fire in Boston.”

  She walked into the room with her arms wrapped around her still-chilled body.

  “A girl?” Creed asked. He turned only slightly from the window, looking at her sideways as if he was afraid his full attention would cause her to go silent.

  “A dead girl. Clara Chadwick. The Girl in Blue. The same one in the photograph from your collection,” Trinity said.

  “She was there at the grave in the cemetery. You saw her,” Creed guessed. He was still, almost motionless though outside the ethereal fog swirled as it rose and vaporized into the sky.

  “I see her everywhere. I followed her to the lake just now. She disappeared as I fell in,” Trinity said.

  Now, Creed faced her. He turned his back on the windows.

  “You fell?” he asked.

  Trinity remembered what it was like to pull against a force intent on pulling the boy she was trying to save into the depths. Had she felt pulled? Is that what Creed was asking?

  No.

  She hadn’t been pulled, but she had felt bound. She could still imagine the press of ropes around her arms and chest.

  “The rocks shifted under my feet. They were stable and then they weren’t,” Trinity said. “Accidents happen,” she finished in a low voice, but one he was close enough to hear.

  “Yes. They do,” Creed said. He stepped closer. “Though I think you probably have more firsthand experience with that phenomenon than most.”

  “I try to help,” Trinity said.

  Creed moved closer until she had to tilt her chin to meet his dark eyes.

  “I know,” he replied.

  He reached up to touch her cool cheek. Trinity didn’t flinch away. He’d always seen more than he should. He noticed her every blink, her every sigh or every time her body tensed because something was about to happen or when she was no longer alone.

  She saw The Girl in Blue.

  She saw the malevolent intent of invisible forces that seemed to want to hurt and harm.

  And Creed saw her.

  He always had. Ever since she’d forced air into his water-logged lungs all those years ago. Ever since his lips had come to life and clung to hers with delicious decadence—with that kiss that had flung the fear of death back at whatever had threatened them with it. Following it, they were in tune, in sync, engaged in a smooth dance of cause and effect that the rest of the world failed to see.

  Trinity—because she had a fierce natural instinct to heal and help.

  Creed—because he had another kind of ferocity directed entirely at her.

  She wished she could trust it. She’d saved him. They had chemistry that crackled, but his intense focus couldn’t be explained away by gratitude and lust, could it? What if his interest was weighted by darker things as she had feared? His fascination with the occult and his near death experience might extend to an unhealthy interest in the danger of Scarlet Falls and the woman who could see it. After all, being interested in the history of this town meant being interested in death.

  Trinity shivered and Creed brushed his warm thumb along her cheek and down to her jaw as if fascinated by the gooseflesh rising on her skin.

  Then he looked from her skin to her eyes to gauge her reaction as he leaned closer.

  “But who helps you? Who saves you when you need saving, Trinity Chadwick?” Creed asked.

  Not him. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. Yet she tasted salvation when he pressed his warm lips to her cool ones. When his mouth opened and his tongue flicked, taking advantage of her sudden intake of breath to seek and claim, she found warmth. His warmth. The heat they generated together banished the darkness even if it was only for a little while. It spread from where their tongues lazily twined outward until her whole body was warmed by what seemed like more than a kiss.

  This was an offer to have him to hold against whatever evil tried to harm her.

  Trinity reached and slid her hands up his hard chest to find his broad shoulders. His body’s heat seemed to blaze compared to hers. She was still chilled by the icy lake waters.

  She stepped into his hea
t as he deepened the kiss. She pressed against him while he pressed his lips more insistently to hers. He moaned, not put off by her chill or her need. His hands spread and stroked down her back, molding her body to his, gifting more than heat through the friction of his kneading fingers.

  He pulled her against the heat of his erection. Its hard ridge met her stomach and this time she moaned, deep in her throat, because he felt so good against her, but she knew it could be better. It would be better.

  She’d had a hot shower. There was a fire in the hearth—gas logs with a safe blue-green flame. But she wouldn’t be warm again until she could get closer to Creed.

  Skin to skin.

  His lips broke from hers and she drew breath to protest, but he silenced her with a squeeze of his hands on her hips. He wasn’t letting her go. He wasn’t stepping away.

  “My office is in the loft. It’s the warmest place in the house. The sun flows from all these windows into that space,” Creed said, gravely and low.

  Trinity’s body responded as if he’d used more graphic words. She could already see his naked body in the sunlight. She could already feel its warmth on her bared flesh.

  She nodded, unable to speak. The casual response to a casual offer that was in fact not casual at all.

  Creed stepped back then. He took her hand and led her to the small spiral stairs all but hidden by a bookcase in the corner. He led the way urging her up one tread after another until they were in his hidden creative space.

  He had a smaller desk here and a closed laptop computer. She noted the ever present bottle of Scotch beside it, but he ignored the whiskey. His attention was on her.

  The loft was warmer. Much warmer than down below.

  Trinity reached for the hem of her sweater and pulled it over her head.

  Creed moved close, meeting her eyes for a moment. His gaze warmer and more golden in the sunlight than she’d seen it before. Then he buried his face into her neck and cupped her lace-covered breasts. His lips ran softly across her skin down to the swell of her above the pale pink bra.