Forsaken (27 page)

I don’t know if I can do
this
, I thought to myself. I was fighting
off a fully-fledged panic attack.

“
You ready?” Cormack asked
as he unbuckled his totally unnecessary seatbelt.

“
Um, hum,” I lied as I
undid mine and opened the door.

The air around us seemed unnaturally
silent as we walked across the soggy grass up to the front door.
Every nerve in my body was screaming at me to turn and run. Fear
that Cole could be watching us from a busted out window saturated
my system. I felt sick. I felt like I might pass out.

Without even realizing what I was
doing, I grabbed Cormack’s hand in mine. Had he been human, my grip
would have broken every bone in his hand.

The front door was broken in and it
hung skewed on the hinges. The grand entrance showed obvious signs
of squatters, broken bottles, newspapers, stray socks lay scattered
across the cracked and dusted floor. A mirror hung on one wall and
it had been broken, a spiders-web of seven years bad
luck.

My body shook violently
with fear and the numbers rattled off in my head, faster than I
would have been able to say out loud. I looked at Cormack. It was
obvious he was trying to look brave and unnerved but I saw his
underlying emotions. Fear and nervousness. It terrified me to
think
why
Cormack
would be afraid.
He
was already dead. What could Cole do to him?

He met my eyes briefly and we both
seemed to understand what the other was thinking. It was me Cole
wanted to see.

“
Cole?” I said aloud, my
voice seeming to fall flat in the vast expanses of the mansion.
“I’m here.”

We both listened with expectancy,
straining to pick up on the faintest of noises. Our ears fell only
on silence.

I pulled Cormack down a hallway that
looked as if it stretched on and on for miles. We checked every
door. With each one, I felt afraid my heart might explode with my
fear as it was opened, only to reveal an empty room. I knew that if
Cole was here he would have heard us the moment we walked through
the door. The floor gave us away as it creaked and moaned under our
weight.

Finding nothing down the hall, we went
up a flight of stairs and continued checking doors. At one point we
had to turn around and go back down when we found a section of the
house that had given way, the hallway dropping down into another
room below.

I didn’t like this game of
hide-and-seek. The shadows seemed to move and dance but neither I
nor Cormack saw or heard anything actually move. I wasn’t sure how
much more of it my nerves could take.

The bottom floor of the house was
completely empty. We moved onto the last section of the house, the
upper south wing. It was behind the fourth door we found
her.

Emily was standing at the window,
looking outside toward the rear of the house, her back turned to
us. She didn’t turn to look at us when the door noisily
opened.

“
Emily?” I whispered
hoarsely.

When she still did not turn around I
stepped hesitantly into the room, Cormack followed me. My eyes
darted nervously around, watching for any signs that Cole was in
the room with her.

“
Emily,” I whispered as I
got closer to her. “We’ve got to get out of here. Don’t you realize
what is going on?”

I placed a hand on her shoulder and
Emily whipped her head around to look at me. I nearly didn’t
recognize the woman who looked into my face.

Emily’s normally tan skin was pale and
lifeless looking, her eyes shallow and dark. The skin of her lips
was dried and cracked. But it was her eyes that frightened me most.
They were bloodshot and fierce, hatred spewing out of them. They
were the eyes of a crazed woman.

“
You’re too late,
Jessica,” she said with malice in her voice. “Cole will be mine
forever now. I’ve already taken that step. You can’t have him
now.”

I didn’t understand what she was
talking about.

“
Jessica,” Cormack
whispered as he came to my side and my eyes followed
his.

I hadn’t noticed the knife in Emily’s
hand. Or the blood that dripped from it and her wrists onto the
floor.

“
You’ve got your own
beautiful man, you can’t have mine. He’s mine, no matter what he
says,” Emily said as she turned her body toward me, the knife held
tightly in her fist. Her eyes looked wrong, unfocused and confused.
“We’re going to be together forever in the afterlife.”

“
Something’s wrong with
her,” Cormack said.

“
He’s manipulated her,” I
said quietly, very aware of the sharp point of that knife. “Cole
made me think things that weren’t real.”

“
He’s done nothing to me!”
Emily shrieked, but her tone didn’t sound so sure. “We’re going to
be together. I’ll finally have what you and Alex have.” Her tone
was losing confidence with every word she spoke, her voice
breaking.

Cormack took a step forward, obviously
not afraid of the damage the knife could do. He held Emily’s gaze
steadily as he approached her. She looked at him doubtfully but did
not stop him as he brought his hand up to her temple.

Emily closed her eyes as he did, her
brow furrowing as they stood connected for several seconds. She
suddenly took several gasping breaths, making me jump violently.
When she opened her eyes again, they looked clear and focused.
Tears streamed down her face as she looked at me.

“
He… I’m so sorry…,” she
started to say but her eyes suddenly rolled back into hear head.
Her body went instantly limp but Cormack caught her before she hit
the floor.

“
Well, well,” a chillingly
familiar accented voice said from the doorway. “They sent the
conveyor to drag me back. Did they promise you your own final
judgment in return for your services?”

The world seemed very quiet as I
turned where I stood to where I had heard the voice come from. Cole
stood in the doorway, wearing only a pair of white cotton pants,
his menacing wings in full view as they brushed the
floor.

I didn’t even hear it as Cormack’s
shirt shredded to pieces and his own wings burst forth.

“
Two things can happen
right now. The first is that he stays and your friend here bleeds
to death for no reason. I don’t want her and have promised her
nothing, despite what she has led herself to believe.

“
Two, he leaves and gets
her to a hospital and you and I can have a little chat.”

Strange feelings flooded
through me as I met Cole’s eyes. I remembered all the feelings of
desire for him that coursed through me as I lay dying. The way I
craved for him to touch me, the way the sound of his voice made me
feel alive. I knew they weren’t real, but they had
felt
real.

“
Cormack, you have to go,”
I said quietly, my eyes never leaving Cole’s flawless
face.

“
I promised Alex, though,”
he hissed as he readjusted his hold on Emily’s body.

“
Ah, Alex,” Cole said with
a chuckle. “Now there is quite a problem. Taken care of for the
moment but I’m sure it won’t be long before he causes me trouble
again.”

My blood boiled as Cole
spoke of the man I loved more than my own life. Before I even
thought about what I was doing, I rushed at him. “You will
not
speak of him!” I
screamed and slapped my hands at his chest and shoved with as much
force as I possessed.

It made me sick that the
haunting, familiar feeling of longing and desire flooded through
me. But at the same time it felt as if I had just put my finger
into an outlet, a jolt of
something
radiated from where my hands connected with
Cole’s skin. I jerked back, feeling like my brain had been
slapped.
What was that?

But the most startling thing was
Cole’s reaction. I was in no way strong enough to cause Cole pain
but as I struck him, he jerked away from me, a terrifying hiss
escaping his lips. A perfect imprint of my hands remained on his
chest, his skin looking gray and decayed.

“
Alex’s plea has worked
well,” Cole said, his voice sounding light but his eyes burning
with malice as he looked up from his chest at me. “It seems I
cannot touch you.”

My brain struggled to catch up with
what had just happened. Cole couldn’t touch me. He couldn’t hurt
me. While I was still terrified of him, he couldn’t harm
me.

“
Everything’s fine,
Cormack,” I said as I looked back at him for a brief moment. “Get
Emily to a hospital before she bleeds to death. I didn’t come all
this way after her for nothing.”

“
Jessica, I can’t,” he
started to argue.

“
Now!” I screamed at him,
my nerves starting to crack. “Get her out of here!”

He gave me a serious look, going back
and forth between me and Cole. I thought I heard a low growl escape
his chest before he balled Emily up in his arms and leapt straight
out the window.

Now alone, I turned my attention back
to Cole. I wanted to run, I wanted to scream. I wanted to beat Cole
until he bled and begged me to stop. But I couldn’t do any of those
things right now. I could only stare back into those cold, black
eyes.

“
It is a pity really. She
is quite a beautiful creature. It would be a waste if she were to
die,” Cole said as he never broke his probing stare. “She was not
the one I wanted and still want though.”

“
How can you possibly
still be hopeful?” I asked, my voice surprisingly calm. “After
everything that has happened?”

“
Your beloved Alex said
once, that I had no idea what real love is. He was wrong. I think
you know that.”

I didn’t want to admit it but Cole was
right. I did know that Cole was capable of real love. The way he
loved though had gotten twisted into obsession and had led to
dozens of women’s murders.

“
But you don’t love me,” I
whispered. “I’m not her.”

“
No, you’re not,” Cole
said, the corner of his lip twitching, itching to crack a
smile.

I had been so focused on the
more-than-man before me, I did not notice at first how the walls
were patching themselves together, how the glass grew in the window
frames, how the dusted floor became polished again. When our eye
contact finally broke, my mind blanked momentarily in surprise at
the difference there was from just a few moments ago.

The room we were in was no longer in
ruin. It was instead a lavishly decorated bedroom, a massive four
poster bed sitting in the middle. A small crystal chandelier hung
from the ceiling. Paintings and tapestries hung from the
walls.

I marveled at the eighteenth century
décor around me. It was a few moments before I realized what I was
seeing meant.

“
Get out of my head!” I
screamed, the force of it surprising me.

“
I may not be able to
touch you but I can still make you see what I wish,” Cole said as
he took a step toward me, that smile tugging on his lips again.
“Will you walk with me Jessica? See my home as it once was? The way
it was when I should have inherited it?”

My initial instinct was to scream at
him again and tell him to go back to hell. The feeling of being on
a heavy drug seeped into my system, bringing with it all sorts of
horrid memories. But I didn’t think Cole could harm me. I wouldn’t
let him get that deep into my mind. I wouldn’t allow him to make me
want to hurt myself again. And besides, I needed to get on his good
side, if he had one, and convince him to go back to the world of
the dead where he belonged.

In answer to his request, I stepped
out into the hallway with him. I tried to ignore the satisfied
smile on Cole’s face.

“
I told you once of my
family’s wealth,” Cole said as he led me down the hall. “You have
no idea. In the late seventeen hundreds, my family was one of the
most influential this side of England. Second only to the
Anthony’s.”

I understood now why the woman from
Cole’s letters had agreed to marry James Anthony. His family was
still worth more than Cole’s.

“
All of this should have
been mine. My father was well past his expiration date and I was
the only child. My mother had internal problems; she couldn’t have
any more children. I was robbed of all of this.”

We wandered into a library. Cherry
wood shelves lined the walls, from floor to ceiling. Books were
crammed onto them, their spines looking old and worn. I recognized
some of the titles, knowing they most have been first edition
copies, and very valuable in today’s world. Other books were
written in languages I didn’t even recognize.

From the library we took a set of
stairs to the ground floor. A few doors down Cole opened
one.

This room looked like a mini version
of the library. Shelves and books lined the walls but a massive
desk dominated the middle of the room. Dark tapestries gave the
room a sinister but sophisticated look.

“
This was my father’s
office,” Cole said as he approached the desk, running his fingers
over a large leather volume. “This is where he laid out his plans
and built his empire. I spent many hours in this room, learning of
his ways that I would never be given the chance to use.”