The Kingdom (27 page)

Thirty-One

I
left Sidra in the clock tower and drove home to Angus. He had to go out, and I stood shivering on the steps, encouraging him to hurry. Mist swirled over the lake, but the bells beneath were silent. I wondered if the ghosts had already returned to their graves.

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 the 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.