“You already have the key. Here and here.” She pointed to my head and heart. “All you have to do is go back through the door.”
“I can’t. It won’t let me.”
“You can,” she said. “But you have to hurry.”
The younger ghost was back at my side now, clutching my arm. “Yes, hurry,” she said. “Someone is waiting for you.”
I turned on the path to find a gate some distance from me. It was an illusion, of course, created by the limitations of my imagination.
Devlin stood on the other side, peering at me through the mist. I floated right up to the gate, but I couldn’t pass through. I didn’t have the key.
He clutched the metal pikes in desperation. “Come back, Amelia. Come back to me.”
“I’m trying, but I can’t pass through.”
“Try harder. You don’t belong there. It’s a place for the dead.”
“But I don’t belong on your side, either,” I told him. “You should go back.”
“Not without you.”
“You can’t stay here.” I felt the wrench of that awful presence. “It’s not safe.”
The young ghost took my hand. She looked tense and frightened. “It’s coming.”
“I know,” I said with a shudder. “I can feel it.”
“You have to go. Someone’s waiting.”
“I can’t pass through the gate. Maybe I’m meant to be here with you.”
“Shush.” She put a fingertip to her lips. “Listen. Can you hear it?”
The rhythmic thud came to me faintly, but I was instantly comforted. I’d heard that sound once before a long time ago, before my birth. Before my mother’s murderer had silenced it. “I hear a heartbeat,” I said. “But why is it so faint?”
“You have to go,” she urged.
“I can’t. The pull is too strong.”
“You’re stronger.” She took both my hands in hers. “You are as strong as you need to be, baby girl.”
I gazed at her, awestruck. “You’re my mother, aren’t you? You’re Freya.”
“Shush. Just listen.”
I could barely hear the heartbeat now. Somehow my presence in the dead world was causing her to fade away.
“Don’t go,” I pleaded. “I need you.”
“You don’t need me. You never needed me. But there’s someone who needs you.” She glanced beyond me to the gate.
“Devlin,” I whispered.
“He can’t stay here,” she said. “It’s too dangerous. The longer he tarries, the harder it will be for him to find his way back. But he won’t leave without you.”
“And I can’t leave you.”
“You have to.”
“I can’t.”
“Baby girl, listen.”
I could no longer hear the heartbeat. A terrifying hush engulfed me. I knew that silence. I had experienced it before at the moment of my mother’s death.
“Go,” she said.
“How?”
“A door has opened. Someone close to you has passed.”
She nodded once more toward the gate and I turned to see Dr. Shaw. He hovered on the threshold as if he had just come through. Someone waited for him, too. His late wife, Sylvia. But he didn’t go to her immediately. Instead, he gazed upon me.
“Hurry,” he said.
“Dr. Shaw...” I wanted to go to him, fling my arms around him and tell him how much he’d meant to me, how much I had always valued our friendship.
“I know.” His smile was warm and content. “I’m where I belong. I’m where I want to be. But you must go back, my dear. Come now. I’ll close the door behind you.”
I whirled back to Freya. “Mother...”
She was still there but fading. “Baby girl,” she whispered. “Listen.”
The heartbeat was faint but steady. And growing stronger...
* * *
I floated up out of the darkness and opened my eyes. For the longest moment, I didn’t know where I was or even who I was. Machines surrounded my bed and I still had a tube down my throat. My first inclination was to claw myself free of all those tubes and wires, but I couldn’t move my arms. Panic overwhelmed me and I wanted nothing so much as to sink back into oblivion.
I must have made an involuntary sound because a shadow was instantly at my side. I heard a familiar voice calling my name and then suddenly there were other shadows around my bed. One of them asked if I knew my name and what day it was. Another reminded me soothingly that I was in the hospital. I’d been badly hurt, but I was going to be fine. Just fine.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness claim me.
I drifted in and out any number of times until the haze began to lift. I remembered that Claire Bellefontaine had shot me. I even remembered my time on the other side, but all of it seemed like a dream.
The next time I awakened, I felt a sense of peace. Devlin was dozing in a chair at my bedside. When he heard me stir, he rose at once to peer down at me. “Can you hear me?”
I nodded.
He put his hand on my forehead and smoothed back my hair. “It was touch-and-go for a while, but the doctors say you’ll make a full recovery. You’re going to be fine. Do you understand?”
Another nod.
He took my hand in both of his and smiled at me tenderly. “Welcome back, Amelia.”
The drawl of my name would always do me in. I sighed and went back to sleep.
* * *
Days passed. Doctors and nurses came in and out of my room at seemingly all hours, and my family took turns sitting with me. I was never alone. The haze continued to lift and my memories slowly returned, along with a niggling worry that there was something I needed to know.
Devlin and I were alone one afternoon when I said out of the blue, “Why hasn’t anyone told me about Dr. Shaw?”
He sat on the edge of my bed and took my hand. “What do you mean?”
“I know he’s dead. Why hasn’t anyone said anything?”
Devlin said carefully, “How do you know?”
“I was dead, too. My heart stopped beating and I floated away for a while. I saw him. He came through the door, although it looked more like a gate. Then he waited to close it behind me. I don’t think I’ll see ghosts anymore.”
Devlin gave me a bemused smile. “No?”
“The voices in my head are gone. I don’t hear anything but silence.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“I think so.”
His expression sobered. “About Dr. Shaw...there’s something you need to know. He had an inoperable brain tumor. That’s why he acted so erratically before he died.”
“But the tumor didn’t kill him,” I said.
“No.” Devlin’s fingers squeezed mine. “There’s no easy way to say this. He shot himself, Amelia.”
I was shocked but not surprised. I remembered our last conversation and his speculation that once someone close to me passed, the door could be closed before evil came through. “He did it for me,” I murmured.
Devlin frowned. “What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m safe now.”
“Yes, you’re safe and I’m grateful. We all are. Your papa went back to Trinity for the night, but your mother and aunt will be by later. They stayed with you night and day. You’re very lucky to have them.”
“I am. I love them all very much. But there’s something I need to tell you.” I clutched his hand. “It’s about my aunt Lyn.”
“I know all about that.”
I gazed up at him in surprise. “You do?”
“She told me that she’d gone to see my grandfather before he died. She was very angry with him for his deception and she had every
right to be. But she didn’t kill him. No one did. He died of heart failure.”
“But the letter opener...?”
“Not a life-threatening wound.”
I frowned. “But someone tried to kill him.”
“Yes, but it may be a case that never gets solved,” Devlin said. “No prints, no trace evidence.”
“You said something always gets left behind.” I was thinking of those drops of blood on Jonathan Devlin’s desk.
His gaze flickered. “We’ll let the police worry about that. In light of everything else that’s happened, they’re taking a long, hard look at Claire and her stepbrother.”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re free. We both are.”
“There’s still the matter of the Congé. My investigation isn’t finished, not by a long shot. But I don’t want to talk about that right now. We’ve too much to celebrate.” He lifted my hand to his lips. “When I think how close I came to losing you...”
“I know.”
“You seemed so far away. So unreachable. I didn’t know how to bring you back.”
“You came for me,” I said.
“I did?”
“You don’t remember? You were there waiting for me on the other side of the gate. You wouldn’t leave without me. You were there with me in Seven Gates Cemetery, too. You may not remember it, but you were there.”
He smiled. “If you say so.”
“You were there.”
He bent and kissed me gently.
I clung to him. “You brought me back. You and Freya.”
“Freya?” He pulled back to gaze into my eyes. “You mean your birth mother?”
I took his hand and placed it on my flat stomach. “I mean Freya...our daughter.”
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from THE SINNER by Amanda Stevens.
“Ms. Stevens has managed the difficult feat of combining charm and chills.”
—Heather Graham, New York Times bestselling author
If you enjoyed The Awakening, be sure to follow Amelia Gray on her thrilling journey
with the entire Graveyard Queen series:
The Abandoned
The Restorer
The Kingdom
The Prophet
The Visitor
The Sinner
Looking for more great reads from award-winning author Amanda Stevens?
Don’t miss her other bone-chilling tales:
The Dollmaker
The Devil’s Footprints
The Whispering Room
and
Dead of Night
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Charlaine Harris
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The Sinner
by Amanda Stevens
One
The caged grave was an anomaly in Beaufort County. In all my cemetery travels, I’d come across only a handful of mortsafes, all of them in Europe. They were a Scottish invention, cleverly devised and manufactured in the early nineteenth century as a means of thwarting the nefarious grave robbers who dug up fresh human remains for profit.
But body snatching wasn’t a modern-day concern, and from what I could see through the tall grass, the cage didn’t appear that old. No more than two or three decades, if that. The heavy iron grates had rusted in the salt air, but the rods and plates were still intact and I could see the dull gleam of a steel padlock on the gate.
My pulse quickened as I made my way along the overgrown pathway. It wasn’t every day I stumbled across such a fascinating find. Although stumbled was perhaps a misnomer because I’d been drawn to that desolate spot for a reason. Lured from my work in Seven Gates Cemetery by a presence as yet unknown to me.
For the past several months, I’d been working in a small graveyard that was located near the ruins of an old church in Ascension, South Carolina. Until now, there had been nothing unusual about the restoration. I gathered trash, cleaned headstones and chopped away overgrowth until sunset, and then I went home to a cool shower, a solitary dinner and an early bedtime.
It had become a welcome routine. Even my nights had been uneventful and mostly dreamless. The dog days of summer left me so drained that I slept the sleep of the dead as the Lowcountry sweltered in the August heat. The small air conditioner in my rental provided only the barest relief and so I’d taken to sleeping in the hammock on the screened porch. There was something intrinsically soothing about the sea breezes that swept in from the islands and the songbirds that serenaded me from the orange grove.
Here in this coastal oasis, Charleston seemed a million miles away and so did John Devlin. I told myself that’s what I wanted. After the events that had unfolded over a year ago in Kroll Cemetery, the gulf between us had widened until I’d felt I had no choice but to give Devlin the space he seemed to need.
His leave from the Charleston Police Department had turned into a permanent resignation, and the last I’d heard he was working for his grandfather, a situation I couldn’t have imagined a year ago. A lot of things had happened that I could never have imagined, not the least of which were the changes I’d undergone. The one constant, however, was the ache in my heart. After all this time, Devlin’s absence from my life still pained me.
Which was why a challenging restoration in a new location was a welcome distraction. Seven Gates had come at just the right time after a long, lonely winter of hibernation. Spring had brought resolve and renewed commitment to my work, and the peace and quiet of the cemetery had restored my rocky equilibrium. But I should have known the calm wouldn’t last for long. It never did.
A shadow passed across the landscape and I glanced skyward where a buzzard floated in lazy circles over the treetops. The day was hot and still. The Spanish moss hung nearly motionless from the live oaks and the resurrection fern clinging to the bark had curled and browned in the heat.
As I stood watching the vulture, my heart started to pound even harder. Nothing stirred. Animal, ghost or otherwise. And yet I knew something—someone—was there, hidden among the shadows.
Why did you bring me here? I silently implored as I turned to scour the woods behind me. What do you want from me?
No answer. Nothing but the silken rustle of the palmettos.
The mortsafe was an intriguing find, but I didn’t think it the sole reason I’d been drawn to this place. Nor was the isolation of the interment. Quarantined graves were hardly unique, and in bygone days, any number of reasons—suicide, thievery or suspicion of witchcraft—could have kept the deceased from a consecrated burial in the churchyard. No, something more was at play here. A mystery that had yet to reveal itself.
A stray breeze ruffled the damp tendrils that had escaped from my ponytail, and despite the heat, I felt the dance of frosty fingers up and down my spine. Another vulture joined the first and I tracked them for a moment longer before dropping my gaze to comb the shadowy tree line. I could have sworn I heard chanting coming from somewhere deep in the woods. A distant singsong that dissolved into silence as the wind died away.
The fingers that tickled the base of my neck now slid with icy precision across my scalp. The hair on my arms lifted as the still air suddenly became rank with the sulfurous odor of the nearby salt marsh. The chanting came to me again, hushed and distant, no more than a whispered repetition that vanished the moment I glanced over my shoulder.
I hurried my steps, driven by a force I had yet to understand. Not once did I consider the alternative of fleeing back along the path to the cemetery. I had come too far and the prodding from the watcher in the woods was too strong.
As I drew closer, I could see the cage more clearly through the weeds. It was a heavy device with a series of rods and plates padlocked together to safeguard the buried remains. In the old days, the contraption would have protected the grave until decay rendered the corpse useless to the medical schools and anatomists that employed the body snatchers. Then the mortsafe would have been unlocked, removed and placed over another grave.
Not so this cage. The edges were anchored in cement, making the safe virtually immovable by human hand or Mother Nature. Thorny vines with heart-shaped leaves coiled around the rods and weeds jutted up through the grates. So thorough the camouflage, a casual passerby wouldn’t have glimpsed the cage at all. No telling how long it had remained hidden and forsaken until the watcher in the woods had summoned me here to find it.
I was near enough now that I could see the sunken dirt beneath the grid. At any other time, I would have searched for a marker or headstone, but now I gave the grave only a cursory examination because something else had caught my eye.
About ten feet to my right, I’d glimpsed another cage. From what I could see through the weeds and vines, the device appeared identical to the first except for one grisly addition.
Inside the mortsafe, a pair of hands rose up out of a freshly mounded grave to grasp the iron grate.
The Awakening Page 29
