The Kingdom

by Amanda Stevens

  Dark thoughts plagued me. You belong to them.

  You’re special and you don’t even know it yet.

  No, no, no. I belonged here. I was alive, not a living ghost, not an in-between, not some restless abomination who walked on both sides of the veil.

  It fears you, so it seeks to control you.

  I couldn’t stand to think of it any longer, so in desperation, I forced my mind back to Freya. Had she been killed by someone whose baser instincts had taken control of them? Someone whose deviant pleasures had driven them to savagery? Someone who had painted a hex sign in a secret room?

  Was her killer out there even now watching me?

  Hurrying into the house after Angus, I showered and changed into my only dress and then restlessly paced as I waited for Thane, my mind churning. I was still pacing, still denying, a few minutes later when he rang the bell. He knew at once something was wrong. Taking hold of my arms, he turned me to face him. “What is it?”

  I cast an uneasy glance toward the window. “It’s this place. I’m suffocating here.”

  “This house, you mean?”

  I nodded, but it wasn’t just the house. It was the lake, the woods, the town. It was Tilly’s warning, Sidra’s terrible claim and the murky details of my birth. All of it bore down on me like stones heaped upon a grave.

  He searched my face. “Let’s get out of here, then. Maybe go for a drive.”

  Go back out into the dark, into that mist? Into those ghosts?

  “It’s late…”

  “It’s not late at all,” he said. “The moon’s barely up.”

  “I know you mean well, Thane, but I’m not fit company tonight.”

  “But you’re all dressed up.” His gaze took me in, and I shivered. He was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket, looking darkly handsome and mysterious. When I hesitated, his voice lowered persuasively. “Come on. It’ll do you good to get out.”

  As I stared up into his green eyes, I realized how badly I wanted to go with him. I wanted it more than anything because I was tired of being alone. I was tired of always being on guard. All I wanted at that moment was to feel like a normal twenty-seven-year-old woman who could love and be loved. Not someone who could see ghosts. Not someone hunted by Evil.

  “We don’t have to go anywhere special,” he said. “We’ll just take a drive. Besides, there’s something I want to show you.”

  A warning bell sounded in my head despite my baser desires. Tilly had told me to stay away from him, but if I allowed myself to believe that Thane was dangerous to me, then I had to believe the rest—that Evil stalked me and only me because I walked on both sides of the veil. It feared me, so it sought to control me.

  If I mentioned any of that to Thane, he would probably think me crazy. And I wondered if he might be right.

  “What do you want to show me?” I asked.

  He smiled down at me. “You’ll just have to trust me.”

  Still, I hesitated. I shouldn’t go. I knew that. My place was here, sequestered on hallowed ground, shackled to what remained of my father’s rules.

  “Come on,” Thane urged softly.

  There was a time when I would have continued to resist, but the bleakness of the coming years hounded me as I felt myself drowning in loneliness.

  “I can’t be gone long,” I said.

  His grasp tightened as he stared down at me. “I’ll bring you back whenever you want.”

  Against my better judgment, we went out into the evening, and I tried to keep my guard up against the ghosts, perhaps even against Thane. The moon hovered just above the treetops, and an owl called from deep within the woods. The night seemed dark and primal. Full of danger and promise, and my heart raced in anticipation.

  Thane put his arm around me as we walked to the car, and I leaned into his warmth. He was alive and vital. Nothing haunted or ghostlike about him. I could almost hear the beat of his heart in that quiet. The throb of blood through his veins.

  We settled into the car, and he smiled again as he started the ignition. I lay my head against the seat and stared out the window as we drove through the evergreens and through the encroaching shadows that shrunk the outside world to that which could only be seen in our headlights. When we reached the highway, Thane turned left, making me wonder if we were going to that cliff-top mansion. I had no desire to see Pell Asher tonight. Not with Tilly’s warning still echoing in my head.

  I turned to stare at Thane’s profile. He drove fast, taking curves with a reckless abandon that both unnerved and thrilled me. I welcomed the adrenaline rush. It made me feel alive. “Where are we going?”

  A dark glance. “You’ll see.”

  We drove on, the shadowy countryside flying like dreams past my window. And then he slowed and nosed the car up the hill toward the cemetery. We ascended through the cedars, and he pulled to a stop at the entrance. There was no mist up here, no willowy forms gliding through the headstones. The graveyard seemed almost surreal in its stillness. A dreamscape aglow in moonlight.

  But something lurked. In the distance, the mountains were a hovering darkness.

  “Why did you bring me here?” I asked.

  Thane had been staring out the window, too, but now he turned, his gaze seeking mine. We were sitting very close in his sports car. Cocooned from those mountains and the evil that swept down with the wind. At least…I wanted to believe so.

  “I told you once that the cemetery was designed to be viewed in moonlight, remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want to see it?”

  Did I dare? It wasn’t as if I’d never gone into a cemetery at night. As a child, I’d often played in my graveyard kingdom by moonlight. But Thorngate wasn’t Rosehill. It wasn’t a sanctuary. Something had whispered to me in the mausoleum, attacked me in the briar thicket. That same something had come after me at the hidden grave and again in the woods. But Tilly was right. It wasn’t the cemetery that was afflicted. It was me.

  Thane’s hand brushed my shoulder lightly, and I shivered. “Well?”

  I nodded, and we got out of the car. He took my hand as we walked through the graves and passed side by side through the lych-gate. I caught my breath as I lifted my gaze to the angels, to those eerie, incandescent faces. They stared now, not at the sunrise, not at the mountains, but at the moon gliding up over the treetops. Snakeroot and yarrow shimmered in the underbrush, and I could see the spangle of dewdrops on the leaves from a lingering dampness.

  Something shifted in the air, inside me, and I stepped into that circle of angels, lifting my own face to the sky, turning and turning, eyes closed, arms flung wide, the way I had as a child in Rosehill. Embracing the night. Embracing my difference. Unharnessed from the remnants of Papa’s rules, the loneliness faded, my fears melted, and I let myself fly.

  It began as a low hum. I didn’t even notice it at first. Wouldn’t realize until later that the brief moment of liberation had probably invited it into the ruins of that white garden, into that withering moonscape. Or had it been there all along?

  The hum grew and grew until something inside me began to respond, and I felt that strange pulse, that primordial heartbeat that pounded down from the mountains and up through the ground, hammering its way into the core of my very being.

  Thane touched my arm, and my whole body thrummed like a plucked wire that had been strung too tight. I had never felt so attuned to the night. I’d never felt so alive.

  Backlit by the moon, he stared down at me, a mesmerizing silhouette that embodied my secret desires, all my dark dreams. Those visions came back to me now, the entwined couple at the falls, straining and gasping, the woman’s head thrown back in wanton abandon as she rode him. I couldn’t see their faces, even when he turned her, even when he rose up behind her, and the night creatures began to howl. I had a sense that it was Devlin and his dead wife, and a part of me wondered if Mariama had somehow managed to invade my thoughts even here in the mountains, even here with Thane, or if th
e insidious evil that Tilly spoke of had found my weakness.

  It was only a fleeting worry because already my arms were winding around Thane’s neck as he drew me close and pressed his body against mine. He kissed me, again and again, his tongue weaving a trail of black magic that lured and enthralled and seduced.

  We sank to our knees in the circle of Asher angels, in the remains of that romantic white garden, and I skimmed my hands down my sides, lifting my dress as I lay back, drenched in starlight.

  I no longer wondered or cared about the consequences of my actions or the desecration of a place I would have once revered. There was nothing in me now but need, a greedy, grasping hunger. Thane’s hands were all over me, strumming and stroking, his mouth hot against mine. I tangled my fingers in his hair, pushing him down, down, down until the feather of his lips on my thigh evoked a shudder, until the dart of his tongue within drew a moan.

  My cries mingled with the primitive sounds in my vision, those carnal screams that called forth the creatures, the half-beings, those terrible atrocities that crawled up from the underworld to slink through the door that could never be closed.

  As Thane brought me to the very edge, the night came alive with sound and motion. With moans and whispers and shadows creeping from the woods and flitting through the treetops. Moonlight animated the statues, and I could feel those sightless eyes cast upon us now as those stone lips whispered my name over and over, an incantation that stoked my frenzy.

  Thane yanked off his shirt and moved over me, and for one breathless moment, he didn’t look like Thane at all, but something dark and beautiful and otherworldly.

  A familiar medallion dangled from his neck—a painful reminder of my time with Devlin. I tore it away with a vicious jerk, and I heard the sharp intake of his breath as though I had ripped something up from his soul. I sensed a hesitation, a withdrawal, but I would have none of it. I pulled him back to me, arching violently into him as my hand went to his face and I sank my nails into his flesh.

  He reared back with an oath.

  I’d broken the skin. The ooze of crimson both frightened and exhilarated me. I reached up and touched a fingertip to the blood, drawing a deep shudder from Thane.

  A breeze trembled through the trees and a distant howl brought his head up. “What was that?”

  “It’s coming,” I whispered.

  He scrambled to his feet, his gaze scanning the darkness as I rose more slowly, in the grip now of a strange lethargy. The wind picked up, thrashing branches and whirling dead leaves underfoot. I turned instinctively to the mausoleum and could have sworn I saw a silhouette squatted and hunched on the rooftop, pale eyes gleaming, the tails of a coat flaring in the wind. And then a rasping laugh sawed through the trees.

  I gasped.

  Behind me, Thane said urgently, “We should go.”

  We didn’t run back to the car, but neither did we tarry. All the way home, I trembled, staring out the window as a terrible acceptance settled over me.

  Thane walked me to the door, but he made no move to hold or kiss me. Why would he?

  “Something was out there,” he finally said. “You felt it, didn’t you?”

  My gaze went to those claw marks on his face, and I shuddered. “Yes.”

  He turned to the woods. “It wasn’t just out there. It was in me.” He lifted a shaking hand in front of him. “It was in you, too,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “What was it?”

  “Tilly called it Evil.”

  To my surprise, he didn’t question it. Instead, his eyes rose to the mountains. “Even as a kid, I knew this place was different. I sensed a darkness. It was like a spider always trying to creep inside my head. I told myself it was just my imagination or a nightmare. A waking dream,” he said. “Even so, I would never allow it in. But something changed tonight and I wanted to let it in. I welcomed it.” A tense pause. “I know I sound crazy.”

  “I almost wish you were,” I said weakly.

  “Why?”

  I drew away from him. “Because it wasn’t you that let it in. It was me.”

  Thirty-Two

  I slipped from bed that night, and I went to stare out at the darkness. The moon was still up, shimmering on the lake and silvering the edges of the pines. As I gazed up at those distant peaks, I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu, but the source of that familiarity came to me almost at once. I could see my reflection in the glass, and it reminded me of all those stone angels—all those upturned faces—gazing toward the mountains. Watching and waiting just as it had watched and waited for aeons.

  It had always been there, Thane said. Scratching at his mind like a spider. An evil as old as the mountains. A darkness that stirred the dead and unleashed unspeakable desires.

  Asher Falls is a ghost town.

  I’d had only an inkling of what Sidra had meant that first day in the library. A mere suspicion until the tolling of the bells had awakened me. And then I’d seen the diaphanous forms in the swirling mist. I’d witnessed those phantom hands reaching out for me, felt a presence in the wind, heard that terrible howling, and still I remained in Asher Falls because I had a sense of destiny here. Like it or not, I was connected to this terrible place.

  I moved away from the window, then glanced back, my heart jumping. Was Freya’s killer out there at the edge of the woods?

  I watched for the longest time, but nothing stirred. It was just a tree or a shadow, I told myself. Angus was already sleeping peacefully at the end of my bed. If anyone or anything had been about, he would have roused to sound the alarm.

  Or so I wanted to believe.

  I climbed into bed and curled up under the covers, but I didn’t want to fall asleep. I intended to lie there and wait out the darkness. But my eyes soon grew heavy, and I kept drifting off only to startle awake every few minutes. During those short naps, my sleep was filled with the strangest images. I dreamed about Devlin and Mariama. About floating with ghosts and destroying hex signs.

  And I dreamed about being back at the falls stretched out on the ground as faces hovered over me, and those in-between creatures crawled out of their holes to stare down at me. I felt something wet on my neck, and my fingers came away bloody. Someone said softly, “It’s done,” and then I heard a baby cry in the dark.

  I woke up with tears on my face. I had no idea why that dream disturbed me so much, but I refused to close my eyes for the rest of the night.

  Rising at dawn, I packed up the car and Angus, and I caught the first ferry. It was raining when we left, the kind of downpour that seemed portentous, as if it could wash the whole doomed town right into the lake. I stood under the cover, protected from the slash of rain as I watched the mountains slowly recede. But I didn’t feel a sense of relief until sometime later when we drove out of the deluge and headed east, straight into the sun.

  The light streaming through the windshield was warm and healing. A weight lifted. I plugged in my iPod and hummed along to some music as we left the foothills and entered the gentle rolling countryside of the Piedmont.

  Angus watched the passing scenery with avid interest, and I cracked the window so that he could feel the wind in his fur. At that moment, I wanted nothing more than to just keep driving until we reached the coast. I didn’t want this feeling of lightness to ever end for him or for me.

  I stopped for gas and a quick breakfast in Columbia, and my euphoria held until I approached the Trinity exit. And then the questions resurfaced. My need to know where I came from so that I could understand my place in this world and the next. I didn’t want to be a living ghost. I didn’t want to be hunted by Evil. I wanted to be normal.

  The original plan was to drive straight through to Charleston, but instead I made the turn to Trinity and headed for Rosehill Cemetery, the place where I had seen my first specter.

  * * *

  The white bungalow where I grew up hadn’t changed much over the years. It was shaded by hundred-year-old oak trees that kept the house cool
and dim even in the summer months, making it a pleasant refuge for Papa after hours of working under a baking sun. The front porch had always been my mother’s domain. She and my aunt had spent many an hour out there sipping sweet tea and gossiping as the scent of roses drifted up from the cemetery.

  My bedroom window looked out on Rosehill. The view of the graveyard never bothered me even as a child, even after my first ghost sighting, because Rosehill had always been my refuge, and the hallowed ground had always protected me. Even after all these years, I still felt safe and at peace there as I never had anywhere else, even my own sanctuary in Charleston.