The Restorer tgqs-1

by Amanda Stevens

  It was a very liberating moment, a casting off, but then I turned toward the house—her house—and something darker coursed through my veins. Someone stood in the front window. A shadow that darted away when I saw it.

  Shivering, I knocked on the front door. It swung open and I took a cautious step inside. “Devlin?”

  I took a moment to acclimate my eyes to the gloom. Directly in front of me, an elegant staircase curved up and around to a wide second-story gallery. Beyond the stairwell, a long hallway led back into the house and to my right was a murky parlor.

  Moving to the arched doorway, I allowed my gaze to travel over the old-fashioned furniture, which surely had not been Devlin’s choice, and the imposing portrait of Mariama over the mantel, which surely was. The air smelled faintly of sage and lemon verbena—like Essie’s house—with a musty undercurrent of dust, abandonment and unspeakable despair.

  Veiled moonlight shone through the large front window, and for a moment I saw Shani standing there staring out. Watching for Devlin. Waiting for him to come back and say goodbye.

  She was tiny and luminescent, and as I stood there observing her, she faded into nothingness.

  The fresh coat of blue paint on the porch had not kept out the ghosts. The chill of their presence surrounded me. Not just Shani and Mariama, but the ghosts of another life. The ghosts of a happy family. The ghost of the man Devlin had once been.

  As I backed into the foyer, my gaze lifted to a flickering light beyond the gallery. I could hear music up there now, something exotic and tribal. A drumming that stirred primitive instincts.

  Slowly, I climbed the stairs, calling out Devlin’s name. Some thing cold swept against me, the merest brush of a silk dress, and I knew it was her. A mirror hung on the wall, and as I passed by, I caught a glimpse of my reflection. Only this time…I didn’t see my eyes, my nose, my mouth. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw Mariama staring back at me, but the illusion was fleeting. Once again it was me in the mirror. Wide eyes, freckled skin, bedraggled ponytail. Hardly the vision of a temptress.

  And yet as I neared the top of the stairs, I grew bolder, freer. When I reached the landing, I paused to remove the band from my ponytail and shake out my hair. My head fell back, swaying in abandon as the rhythm of the music seemed to crawl inside my skin.

  The sound came from the room down the hallway. The door was open and the beat seemed to intensify as I approached.

  Inside, everything was hazy and candlelit. It was like stepping into someone else’s dream. The breeze that blew in through the balcony doors stirred the flames and rippled like waves through the silky fabric that cocooned the bed. An eerie audience of African masks hung from the walls, and the hollow eyes seemed to watch me as I walked across the room to Devlin.

  He stood on the veranda looking down on the garden. His shirt was open and the wind blew it back. As he turned, something cold floated between us. I felt her touch, her icy breath, and shivered. But I wasn’t afraid. Which was strange because here in her house she would be at her strongest. I had already seen what she could do and yet…I wasn’t afraid.

  My gaze locked with Devlin’s and a current of heat surged through me. He felt it, too. His eyes flared and his body went very still.

  The moment stretched on and on.

  And then he closed the distance between us and I heard him mutter, “I knew you’d come,” but I didn’t know if he meant me.

  I reached up and traced the silver medallion with my fingertip. A symbol of his mysterious past, a talisman of all his secrets. The metal was cold, but I could feel the heat of his skin drawing me to him as surely as his warmth enthralled his ghosts.

  Rising on tiptoes, I offered him my mouth. He took it with a groan, crushing me to him in an embrace that seemed at once familiar and foreign, desperate and devastatingly controlled.

  He tasted of whiskey and temptation and my darkest fantasies. I wanted to hear him say my name in that seductive, decadent drawl. I wanted to skim my tongue along his hot skin, press my mouth to the throbbing pulse in his neck, wrap myself around him until nothing could come between us. Not time, not distance, not even death.

  Backing me up against the wall, he tore aside my clothes right there on the balcony while a voice inside my head warned: This is not you, Amelia. This is not you.

  But it was me. It was my hands that flung his shirt aside. My mouth that opened so readily beneath his.

  My decision to discard the rules by which I’d lived my whole life.

  He lifted my legs around him and, half drunk with desire, I let my head fall back against the wall, exposing my neck. He devoured me hungrily, his teeth nipping and tugging the tender skin at my throat, his tongue laving and soothing the pleasurable sting.

  Through slitted eyes, I caught the barest hint of movement down in the garden. When I looked again, I saw only the flutter of leaves in the wind.

  And then I saw nothing at all as Devlin whisked me into the bedroom. The charged air came with us, tingling over bare skin, feathering along aroused nerve-endings.

  From where we stood, I had a view of Mariama’s dressing mirror, oval and ornate. In the candlelight, I could see the ridges of muscle in Devlin’s back as he bent over me. I had the strangest sensation of being outside my body, of watching something forbidden, something dangerously taboo.

  I slipped from his embrace and when he turned, I pressed him against the wall, trailing my lips down his chest as I fumbled with his belt buckle and opened his zipper. Smiling up at him, I slid to my knees and then I did things to him I never knew I was capable of. He shuddered as I encircled him, and when I felt he was on the verge, I turned again to glance over my shoulder at the mirror. My smile now was sly, wanton. A temptress’s invitation.

  Rising, I put my lips against his ear. “I will never leave you,” I whispered, and where those words came from, I had no idea.

  Devlin’s eyes smoldered and before I could move away, his hand shot out to grip my chin. He tilted my head back, searching my face.

  “Amelia.” It was almost a question.

  The sound of it made me tremble. “Yes, yes, yes,” I breathed and wound my arms around his neck, pulling him down for my kiss.

  The breeze through the open doorway whipped the candle flames as the silky curtains billowed and beckoned.

  Devlin pulled away and stared into my eyes for the longest moment, and then with a muttered oath he swept me up and carried me to the bed. The fabric parted in the breeze, and before I could catch my breath, we were falling through that shimmering fabric into another world, dark and lush. Devlin’s world. Mariama’s world.

  I heard nothing of the music now but the drumbeats. The primitive sound thundered in my ears as he rose over me.

  Trapping my wrists, he lifted my arms over my head, kissing me again and again and again. Long, hot, out-of-control kisses that left me thrumming. That left me begging. I closed my eyes tightly as his lips slid over my stomach.

  My arms were still over my head, but the fingers around my wrists had turned cold. I tried to move, but I couldn’t. Something held me in place as I felt Devlin’s tongue skim the inside of my thigh.

  I squirmed and tried to free myself. Tried to say his name.

  He lifted my hips to meet his mouth, and as a white-hot pleasure filled me, I heard her laugh.

  Slowly, I opened my eyes.

  A ghost hovered over the bed. Eyes burning into mine. Mouth twisted in a ghastly grin.

  I tried not to react, but how could I not?

  Tearing my hands free from whatever held me, I tried to push Devlin away. He looked up, eyes heavy with desire. “What’s the matter?”

  They were all around us. Drawn by the heat and energy of our lovemaking. Drawn to the most elemental act of life…of what they could never experience again.

  Hungry and covetous, they watched us. Leering from the darkest corners. Crouching like gargoyles atop bedposts. Touching diaphanous body parts in grotesque parody.

  A scream
rose in my throat as Devlin moved up beside me. “Amelia? What’s wrong? Did I hurt you? Scare you…?”

  He didn’t have a clue they were there. How could he not feel the cold dankness that surrounded us? The evil that had blown in with the breeze?

  Across the room, the entity I’d seen in the garden at Rapture sat slumped in a chair. He wore shackles, one clamped around his wrist, the other dangling free. Lifting the loose end to his face, he sneered knowingly at me through the hole.

  Devlin touched my shoulder and I flinched away. “I…have to go.”

  “What is it? What did I do?”

  I slid out of bed and grabbed my clothes. “I’m…” Haunted. “I have to go!”

  I ran blindly from that room, Devlin’s voice calling after me. “Amelia!”

  Later when I looked back on that night, I never remembered dressing or leaving the house. Had I not been so traumatized, I might have noticed the shadow that lurked at the corner of the veranda. I might even have recognized the troubled visage that tracked me.

  As it was, I barely had any recollection of how I got home. I knew that I must have driven like a bat out of hell, though, because I was already inside my house, locked in my own little sanctuary, by the time Devlin caught up with me.

  He beat on my front door, called out my name, but I didn’t let him in. I slid to the floor, arms wrapped tightly around my legs, shaking uncontrollably as my father’s warning pounded through my head.

  …take care you don’t let them in. Once that door has opened…it cannot be closed.

  “Papa,” I whispered. “What have I done?”

  Thirty-Eight

  I woke up the next day to sunlight and a ringing telephone. I was in my bedroom, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there. The details of last evening were cloudy. Something told me I was better off that way.

  Drawing the covers over my head, I waited for the caller to give up. I wasn’t up to dealing with real life. I wanted to drift a little while longer, but little by little, everything came back to me and I felt very alone and afraid. I had no one to talk to, no one to turn to. I couldn’t tell Papa. I couldn’t bear to see the look in his eyes. I couldn’t tell Devlin, either, because he would never understand, no matter how hard he tried.

  He’d spent the night on my front porch, only inches from where I lay curled on the floor in the foyer. But he may as well have been a million miles away for all that it mattered. I couldn’t open the door to him. I imagined them out there, circling like vultures. As long as I remained in my sanctuary, they couldn’t touch me. As long as I stayed away from Devlin, they wouldn’t want me.

  Or so I told myself. But I wouldn’t know for sure until dusk.

  He’d finally left at sunup and taken his ghosts with him. I’d pulled myself up off the floor and staggered into the bedroom to collapse fully dressed on top of the covers. I didn’t remember nodding off, but I must have slept deeply because now I had that sluggish, hungover feeling of daytime slumber.

  I wished I could doze off again, but I couldn’t afford to sleep the day away. I had work, things to take care of. Life went on for me and for Devlin…just not together. Unless I could find a way to shut out the ghosts. But even here in my sanctuary I wasn’t safe. Not from Devlin.

  The phone started ringing again. This time I picked it up, thinking it might be him, though I hadn’t a clue what I would say to him. I wasn’t ready to face him. That much I did know.

  “Hello?”

  “Amelia? It’s Ethan. Did you forget our date?”

  I sat up. “Our date?”

  “You were going to come by the morgue today. Unless you changed your mind.”

  I pressed my fingertips into my temple. “We talked about this last night, right? At your father’s party?”

  “Yes. Are you all right?”

  “Just a little groggy. I guess I overslept.”

  A pause. “Overslept? It’s almost two o’clock in the afternoon.”

  My gaze flew to the clock. “That’s impossible.” But there it was in bright, neon blue.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Ethan asked worriedly.

  “I just need a minute to pull myself together.” Of course, I needed a whole lot more than that, but it was a relief to have something to think about other than the ghosts. Other than Devlin. Suddenly, I had an overpowering urge to be out among the living. A morgue would not have been my first choice, but the appointment had already been set with Ethan and I was curious about the skeletal remains we’d found in the chamber. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Call when you arrive so I can walk you in. And, Amelia?”

  “Yes?”

  Another pause. “Nothing. I’ll see you soon.”

  I hung up the phone with one thought uppermost in my mind. How many hours did I have until twilight?

  Ethan came out to greet me at MUSC. As we rode the elevator down to the morgue, I could feel his inquisitive gaze on me. He must have wondered about my appearance, but was too much of a gentleman to ask. One glance in the mirror after my shower had confirmed a cold suspicion. My eyes were sunken, my cheeks hollow. Already I had assumed the gaunt visage of the haunted.

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” Ethan asked as we walked down a short hallway.

  I offered him the first excuse I could think of. “I’m just feeling a little under the weather today. It’s nothing serious.”

  “If you have a weak stomach, this probably isn’t the place for you,” he warned.

  “No, I’m okay.”

  Famous last words.

  He pulled open a door and we were met with a swoosh of cold air and the pungent aroma of antiseptic layered over the putrid, slightly sweet scent of death. My stomach recoiled as he led me into the locker room of the autopsy suites. He handed me a set of scrubs and then disappeared while I changed out of my street clothes. After a few minutes, he came back to collect me and we went into one of the rooms where the skeletal remains had been placed on a stainless-steel table.

  “He’s just a number right now,” Ethan said. “No name, no face, but we actually know quite a bit about him.”

  “Him?”

  “The shape of the hip bone tells us the remains are those of a male.”

  The other victims were female. The pattern had changed yet again. If there was a pattern. “Does Devlin know?” Ethan nodded.

  “What did he say?”

  “You know John. He doesn’t give a lot away.”

  I thought it odd that even here, Devlin’s presence was with us.

  Ethan walked around the table as we talked, but I stood in one place, not wanting to jostle my stomach, though there wasn’t much smell in here and the bones looked scrubbed and disinfected. Still, we were dealing with human remains.

  “The skull indicates that he was Caucasoid. Around five-ten, stocky build. He was young—between eighteen and twenty-five. His bones were still growing.” Ethan traced a finger along the collarbone. “The raised ridges indicate a young adult. You can feel them if you like.”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll take your word for it.”

  He flashed a grin. “Some of the teeth are still in their sockets, but in poor condition. We can’t identify him that way.”

  “How long was he in that chamber?”

  “Going by the lack of articulation and the gnawing—”

  “The what?”

  “Rats,” he said. “Over time, they can do a lot of damage. I’ve noted tooth marks on the ribs, pelvis, carpals and meta-carpal bases…” He gestured toward the skeleton. “There’s also a hole in the skull, probably made by rodents or insects, and a good amount of bone and cartilage rot. He had to have been down there at least a decade.”

  “That long?”

  “Maybe longer.”

  I went over the kills in my head. Afton Delacourt was murdered fifteen years ago, this unknown male at least ten years ago, Jane Rice nine years ago, and Hannah Fischer and Camille Ashby mere weeks ago. There seemed to
be no rhyme or reason to the timeline. No continuity to the killer’s victims or methods, although such a large gap might indicate he’d been out of commission for whatever reason until recently. It might also mean all the bodies had yet to be discovered.

  “Do you think more bodies will turn up?”

  “John seems to think so.”

  “How do we find them?” I murmured. “A combination of electrical resistivity and terrain conductivity? Ground penetrating radar? It would take forever to check every grave.”

  “I imagine the simplest way is to find the killer,” Ethan said.

  My gaze dropped to the skeleton. “He must have family, friends. Someone who’s been missing him all this time.”

  “One would think.”

  I studied the remains, a tightness in my chest. He’d been left in that chamber to be forgotten. “You said last night you’d identified some interesting characteristics.”

  “Yes. I can’t tell you who he is, but I can tell you how he died. The breastbone is punctured and cuts in the ribs indicate wounds to both sides of the front chest and two more in the upper back. Seven major wounds altogether. And more could have penetrated the soft tissue without touching bone. It was a vicious kill.” He noticed my grimace and said, “Let’s move on to something a little less gruesome.”

  I nodded.

  He opened a black plastic bag and displayed the contents. “Interestingly enough, the clothing that was found with the remains may be our best hope of identification.”

  “Really? I only saw bits of fabric. Hardly anything.”

  “On the body, yes, but some other items were found nearby. Shoes, belt and, more important, a leather letterman jacket. The rats didn’t leave us much—”

  “Wait a minute.” The room started to spin. I put a hand on the wall to steady myself. “Did you say a letterman jacket?”

  “Maroon with a gold letter, possibly a V or W.” He glanced at me in concern, then closed the bag. “Come on, let’s get you out of here. You’ve gone as white as that sheet.”

  It was a gold W, in fact. I knew because I’d seen that jacket on a ghost lurking in the garden at Rapture and again last night as he’d leered at me through the shackle that dangled from his wrist.