The Kingdom (21 page)

A swooping shadow drew my attention to the window. “What was that?”

“Come see,” Catrice said, and as we gazed out on that magnificent vista, a hawk glided down, talons extended, and snatched something from the grass, winging skyward with a triumphant scream. I was jolted by the scene even though it was perfectly natural. Survival of the fittest.

Catrice said in amusement, “That one didn’t last long.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The mouse.” She turned to me, eyes gleaming. “Hawks are such marvelous hunters, aren’t they? They can spot something as small a rodent from above the treetops. They rule the skies, too. Other birds fear them. Did you notice how quiet the forest was when we walked through?”

I said slowly, “How did you know it was a mouse?”

She smiled and cocked her head. “I hear the teakettle,” she said and disappeared.

I stared after her. In her own way, Catrice was every bit as off-putting as Luna and Bryn, and I was suddenly reminded of how Thane had referred to the three women after dinner the other night. The Witches of Eastwick, he’d called them.
Or I should say Asher Falls.

I tracked the hawk for a moment longer, and then as I moved back into the room, I suddenly had the uncanny sensation that
I
was being watched. I decided that it must be the painting. Edward Asher’s eyes. Even on canvas, his face unnerved me. But as I moved about the studio, I could have sworn an invisible gaze followed me. It was all I could do not to glance over my shoulder.

Somewhere to my right came a very faint click—like the stealthy closing of a door.

Catrice had gone through a doorway near the windows, but this sound had come from the opposite side of the room where three arched niches had been cut into the stone. As I moved in for a closer look, I saw that one of the arches was actually a door. Had someone been standing there watching me while my back was turned?

I stepped into the alcove and pushed on the latch. The door silently opened, and I heard the distant murmur of voices. I didn’t know why I felt so compelled to discover who else was in the studio. I told myself to let it go. I shouldn’t go snooping through someone else’s private space. My mother would be appalled by my bad manners.

But despite that internal censure, I slipped through the opening and followed a dim hallway until it curved around to another partially open door through which I spotted Catrice.

“—I’m telling you, it’s
her,
” she insisted.

“I pray you’re wrong,” someone else said, and I thought I recognized Bryn’s voice. “Because that would mean—”

“Oh, God, don’t say it.” Catrice shuddered. “It’s too horrible to contemplate.”

“I’ll tell you what it means,” Luna said softly. “Someone knows.”

* * *

When Catrice came out of the kitchen a little while later, I was back at the windows. I turned with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry you went to so much trouble, but I really have to be going.”

“Oh, you have to at least try the tea,” she said anxiously. “It’s my own special brew.”

My gaze fell to the steam rising from the porcelain cup, and I suppressed a shudder. After what I’d just overheard, I didn’t trust her. And I certainly didn’t want to drink her tea. “I really do have to go,” I said, edging toward the door. “I’ll try it next time.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” She set aside the tea tray to walk me to the door. Her eyes lifted as she stepped outside, and I knew that she was watching the hawks. For some reason, her rapt expression frightened me.

“You can find your way back up to the house?” she asked.

I forced a smile. “No problem. I’ll just follow the path.”

She stood outside until I was out of sight. I never glanced back, but I could feel her eyes on me. The others watched me, too. I had a terrible thought that they had all gathered at the studio to observe me, but how could that be? How could they know that I would give Catrice a ride home…unless it had somehow been prearranged?

But why?

As I hurried along the path, my nerve endings tingled with an awareness I didn’t understand. It was as if some long-dormant instinct had suddenly come alive, and I could feel the forest reaching out to me, hear the leaves whispering to me once again. Even the screams of the hawks somehow seemed familiar.

I was so attuned to my surroundings that even the miniscule sound of a snapping twig brought me to an abrupt halt. I told myself it was nothing, just an animal rustling in the underbrush. A bird flitting in the treetops. I didn’t believe it, of course. Someone was out there.

The silence seemed palpable as I stood on the trail holding my breath. My heart began to hammer, and I could feel the blood pulsing in my ears. So many things rushed through my head. Wayne’s warning about wild animals. The face wavering in the pool at the waterfall. The chill of the wind, that awful howling. I had the sense that I was being stalked, but was the tracker human, animal…or something from the other side?

I took a few tentative steps along the trail and heard the rustle of leaves as the pursuer moved with me. Now I really was scared. I considered turning and making a run for the studio, but how could I be sure it wasn’t one of
them?

Swallowing hard, I willed my pulse to slow. The last thing I needed was to succumb to a full-blown panic. My father had grown up in woods like these. I tried to remember everything he’d told me about wild animals.
The moment they sense your fear, you become prey.

Prey.

The very word sent a shiver of dread up my spine. I hadn’t understood before, but it came to me clearly in that moment. I’d been watched at the cemetery, lured into the woods, followed to the laurel bald and now something was stalking me up this trail. I’d been prey ever since I arrived in Asher Falls.

And with that thought, I gave up all pretense of calm. I whirled and plunged headlong up the path, my footsteps pounding in time to my heartbeats. I didn’t know if I was pursued. I had the sense of something rushing through the woods, but I didn’t look back until I rounded the corner to Catrice’s house, and even then I spared only a brief glance over my shoulder.

He came out of nowhere.

In the split second my attention was diverted, he appeared on the path in front of me and put out his hands to stop me.

If not for years of suppressing fear, I would have shrieked louder than the hawks, but instead I gulped back the scream and wrenched myself free of him. I heard him laugh, and in my agitated state, the sound took on a sinister connotation. But when he spoke, his voice was almost pleasant. “Whoa,” Hugh said. “Where’s the fire?”

“I—”

He gazed down at me in bemusement. “Are you all right?”

Even in broad daylight with the pine boughs stippling the sunlight, Hugh Asher’s looks rendered me speechless. Everything about him, from the casual but elegant attire to the way he carried himself, was so excessively perfect.

Once again, I searched for the flaws, and this time they were easy to spot—a faint tinge of yellow beneath the jawbone where a bruise had almost faded and a scab above his left eyebrow where the skin had been split. He’d been in a fight recently, and the thought was so incongruous as to take my breath away. My mind shifted at once to Thane’s cut temple, his bruised knuckles. Had he and Hugh fought?

I tore my gaze from his face. “I was just coming up from the studio. I thought I heard something in the woods.”

He looked past me down the path. “Probably a deer. Could have been a coyote but they don’t normally come out until dusk.”

Like ghosts.

“I’m a city girl,” I tried to say lightly. “I’m not used to the wildlife around here.”

“It does take some getting used to.”

The way he stared down at me made me increasingly uncomfortable, and I had to wonder why he was there. Had he come to observe me, too?

“How’s the restoration coming along?” he asked, still in that pleasing cadence. But no matter how agreeable or personable he seemed, I had no wish to make small talk. I really just wanted to go home, and I glanced longingly toward my car.

“Fine.”

Still he lingered, but I didn’t think he was as relaxed as I’d first thought. There was something about him, some tension or excitement that made his eyes overly bright. “When I was a kid, we used to play hide-and-seek up on that hill. Not a game for the faint of heart. It could get a little hairy after dark.”

“I can imagine.”

“There are places up there where you could hide and not be found for days. If ever.”

Like the laurel bald, I thought with a shiver. “Speaking of the cemetery…I should get going,” I said, latching onto the first excuse I could think of.

“I won’t keep you. But you’ll have to come to dinner soon. Maris has gone away for a few days and it gets dull in that big house with just us three men.”

“I’m sure Luna will be more than happy to accommodate,” I said, surprising myself as much as him.

He lifted a brow, eyes gleaming in amusement. “I think Father may have underestimated you,” he murmured.

“What does that mean?”

Something dark flashed across that handsome face. “You really don’t know, do you?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. If you’ll excuse me…I have work to do.”

I brushed past him and headed toward my car. This time, I did glance back, but Hugh Asher had vanished.

Twenty-Five

T
hat afternoon Thane came by to see me. I let Angus out the back door, and he prowled the yard while we sat on the steps in the sunshine. Neither of us talked much at first. I was too preoccupied and disturbed by what I’d heard at Catrice’s studio and by that brief clash with Hugh. I still couldn’t understand why he thought Pell Asher had underestimated me.
You really don’t know, do you?

Thane leaned back, elbows propped on the top step as he looked out over the glistening surface of Bell Lake. I followed his gaze. The uninitiated would never guess at the darkness that lay beneath that silken shimmer, but my time with ghosts had given me nothing if not sufficient imagination to envision that sunken necropolis with its overturned monuments and encrusted angels. I could picture Freya down there, too, floating among the headstones.

I turned back to Thane. “Can I ask you something?”

He shrugged. “Sure.” His eyes were very clear and very green in the sunlight, but like Bell Lake, his secrets were hidden beneath that placid surface. In the short time I’d known him, I’d detected ripples of some underlying disturbance. Flashes of some deep-rooted anger.

“Why did you tell me about the flooded cemetery that day on the ferry? Were you trying to scare me away?”

He smiled, but his face remained impassive. “Not at all. I only meant to entertain you with a little local color. I figured a cemetery restorer would appreciate a good ghost story. Was I right?”

“You have no idea.”

“See? I knew it.” He closed his eyes, basking in the sunlight.

“It’s funny to think about that conversation now,” I said. “I’d never set eyes on you or this place, and yet you already knew so much about me.”

“Not enough.” He smiled teasingly. “Tell me your deepest, darkest secrets.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“How about your childhood? Or your teenage years? What were you like in high school? Did you have a lot of boyfriends? Were you popular?”

I gave him a look. “Hardly.”

“Late bloomer?”

“You might say that.” A ghost had haunted the hallways of my school, making it impossible for me to participate in extracurricular activities after dusk. Not that I would have wanted to, anyway. By the time I entered high school, my reputation as a loner had become local canon. Rather than reinvent myself, I had embraced the solitude, retreating with my beloved books to the sanctuary of Rosehill Cemetery. “I grew up in a graveyard. You can imagine how popular I was.”

He grinned. “Were you teased?”

“Not really. I was pretty much just ignored.”

“Were you lonely?”

I hesitated. “Yes, sometimes. But being alone was all I ever knew. And in some ways, my childhood was idyllic. At least…for a time.” Until the ghosts came.

“That’s more than most people can say.”

I glanced at him curiously. “What about you? I can’t imagine that you were ever an introvert.”

“No, not an introvert. I had too much to prove. Too much to live up to.”

“Because you were an Asher?”

A shadow flickered across his face. “Because I wasn’t an Asher.”

“Was it hard when you first came here to live?”

“Yes, but I survived. It was eat or be eaten at Pathway Academy. And at Asher House.”

“That doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

He squinted into the sun. “It is what it is. Survival of the fittest.”

That made me think of Catrice’s hawks, and my mind turned once again to that troubling conversation I’d overheard. I wrapped my arms around myself and shivered.

“Cold?”

“No…just someone walking over my grave.”

“Cheery thought.”

“Can I ask you about your stepfather?”

“Edward? What about him?”

“What was he like?”

Thane considered the question for a moment. “He wasn’t like Hugh or Grandfather. He had the Asher charm, but he was quieter. More introspective. At least that’s the way I remember him.”

“What did he do? For a living, I mean.”

“I have no idea. He tried any number of things, but he always seemed to fall back on his trust money.”

Was that bitterness I heard in his voice? I didn’t think so. More like resignation. He’d done more to restore the family’s holdings than either Edward or Hugh, his grandfather had told me. And yet he still had to fight for his place.

“He wanted to break free of the Asher shackles,” Thane said. “He just never quite managed.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not imprisoned. I like what I do.”

“And what is it you do, exactly?”

“I guess you could call me an overseer. The Ashers made their fortune in timber and mining, but these days, it’s mostly a matter of managing the investments, dwindling though they may be.” He paused. “I do understand why Edward left, though. Grandfather can be overbearing. Sometimes it’s hard to take.”

“Like trying to end your relationship with Harper?”

“Like trying to play God,” he said grimly.

“Do you think Edward was involved with Freya?” I asked.

He lifted a brow in surprise. “Where did that come from?”

“I don’t know. I’m just curious.”

He shrugged. “Given his reaction to her photograph, I’d say it’s a safe bet they had some sort of relationship, and I can’t imagine Grandfather being too happy about it.”

“Do you think he broke them up?”

“Does it matter? It was a long time ago and they’re both dead now.”

“I know, but I find all these relationships fascinating. Freya and Edward. Edward and Bryn. Wayne and Luna. Luna and Hugh. It’s all so—”

“Incestuous?”

“I was going to say entangled.”

“That’s the nature of a small town,” Thane said. “Especially one as isolated and insular as Asher Falls.”

“You’ve never considered moving?”

He frowned. “Why would I move? This is my home. This is where I belong.”

I thought about the familiarity I’d felt in those woods, and I pulled up my legs, hugging them to my chest as I rested my chin on my knees. What an odd, scary place this was. So much dark history. So many lingering emotions bubbling beneath the pastoral façade. Yet here I was and here I would remain because I couldn’t leave without knowing the truth. Without finding my place.

Lifting my gaze to the highest summit of the mountain ridge, I listened for that whisper. That telltale ripple through the trees.

Beside me, Thane caught his breath, and I turned to find his eyes on me. He looked pale and unsettled, though I hadn’t seen or heard anything to disturb the calm setting.

“What is it?” I asked sharply.

He reached out as if to touch me, then let his hand fall away before he made contact. “My God,” he whispered. “Who are you?”