Shivers Box Set: Darkening Around Me\Legacy of Darkness\The Devil's Eye\Black Rose (8 page)

And what might come after the icy air if we continued where we’d left off?

I thought about the rain-soaked pad from that morning. The one that had only been filled with me. Those drawings said so much about what was growing between us, but I remembered how the other pad had made me feel. The one where O’Keefe had struggled against the ghost’s influence. Could a dead woman feel jealousy? The very idea chilled me to the bone.

When I returned to my room, I found the sketch torn in two. I didn’t touch it. Those two halves of ripped paper took me back to another place and time when my ordinary world had been torn asunder.

As far as I knew, O’Keefe was the only other person in residence. Mrs. Scott came only occasionally to clean. Mary couldn’t take enough time away from her dolls to plot sketch destruction. Try as I might I couldn’t imagine O’Keefe barging into my room to rend a sketch of his own creation in two. A more sinister vision crept across my imagination. I had seen the impossible bride with my own eyes. I had felt the hall grow icy. If she could materialize on the cliff, if she could make the air around us become unnaturally cold, then what would stop her from slipping into my room for malevolent purposes? I remembered the sound of the door in the distance on my first night here.

Suddenly, I didn’t feel alone. My time at Thornleigh had left me jumpy. I’d felt vaguely like someone or something was watching me from the start. Now that uneasy feeling magnified. The room seemed colder, and age and dampness permeated the walls. Worst of all, I could almost detect a hint of roses. The same heavy, wet scent that had clung to me in the garden.

It was late. My car was on the other side of the garden. O’Keefe was probably back at work. Out the window, I could see the leaded glass of the conservatory glowing with the yellow lamplight below.

I could go to him with the ruined sketch and we could talk about the ghost or I could climb into bed and accept three things: The ghost was real. I had several days before she posed a threat to me. And I couldn’t face O’Keefe again, vulnerable and hungry, without having him in every possible way, ghost be damned.

I wasn’t a wimp. I also wasn’t ready to attack O’Keefe. Oh, I wanted him. My body ached with the need to be with him. But there was so much standing in our way. He was mad. Raving mad. Not because he believed in ghosts that weren’t real as I’d originally imagined, but because he’d been driven there by a ghost who had been plaguing him for years. The Thornleigh Bride had influenced us all, but O’Keefe more than anyone. My heart pounded with dark possibilities. What if she fully possessed him and influenced his actions. How could I not be afraid of him now?

A huge part of me protested the very idea of Miles hurting me in any way. He resisted the ghost at every turn. He had never been anything but gentle with me. Fierce, passionate, but gentle.

But there was no denying that he was in a battle with some kind of entity—one neither he nor I could possibly understand.

I thought about the phone in the hall. I hadn’t spoken to my aunt or my parents since I’d landed at the airport. They would be worried, and hearing their voices might steady my nerves. I couldn’t talk to them about what was happening here. It was too unusual and frightening to put into words, but if I could reach out and hear my aunt’s voice…

Cool air wafted against my face when I opened my door. The hallway was always cooler, I told myself. There was no reason for my pulse to quicken. No need for my breath to catch. My hope faltered when I noticed the lamp was out. Had the electricity failed again? Was there any reason to try the phone at all?

I stepped out of my room anyway, unsure of what else to do. Maybe after I called my aunt, I would hang up and call a cab. I couldn’t make it through the rose garden to my own car, but a cab could pick me up on the opposite side of the house. Never mind that I would have to make it all the way through the house to the rear driveway. Never mind that I didn’t think I could abandon O’Keefe to face this madness alone.

The house was silent around me. No doors slammed. No thunder boomed. The utter quiet made the walk to the table seem interminable. As if the distance from my door to the phone had oddly been stretched out of its usual proportion. Finally I reached it. Finally I reached to pick the receiver up and hold it to my ear.

At first, I was encouraged—there was static on the line. I jiggled the receiver’s rest, hoping to improve the connection. I dialed the digits of my aunt’s number. The clicking whir of the rotary dial seemed to echo in my ear, then the static crackled into dead silence. I stood with the earpiece pressed hard against the side of my head. My heart began to pound. I held my breath. Because I could hear wind rushing in the distance
from over the phone
. I could hear the crashing of waves.

Carefully, I took the receiver away from my ear. But the sounds grew louder. They seemed to fill the hallway, hollow and from far away but, oh, so real. Sweat broke out on my brow and breath I could no longer hold rushed in and out of my lungs in hurried gasps.

Because the wind over the phone had seemed to coalesce into a woman’s terrified scream.

I dropped the receiver back on its rest and backed away from the table.

Suddenly, the lamp came on. It didn’t flicker or falter. It suddenly just shone as if someone had flipped the switch. Then the phone rang. It sounded with a loud, jarring clang I’d only heard in old movies. The
bbbring
made me jump and cry out, but I rushed forward to pick it up. Maybe the call to my aunt had gone through. Maybe I would tell her everything in a wild rush before we were cut off.

Hurriedly, with clumsy fingers, I lifted the receiver to my ear.

“Aunt Caroline?” I asked in a wavering voice so unlike my own. “Is that you?”

Of course, it wasn’t.

“No one knows,” a wet voice gurgled in my ear.

And then an unmistakable scream.

I dropped the receiver back into its cradle to break the connection, as if the voice and the scream could somehow manifest through the line. I jerked back and away and stumbled to my room. Icy fear made my limbs numb and graceless.

Long after I slammed my door and locked it, I stood guarding it with clenched fists and horror curdling my blood.

I was trapped. Caught in the same web that had trapped Miles O’Keefe years ago.

Sometime later, after hours of utter silence had passed, I collapsed into bed.

* * *

I’m not sure what woke me—a rustle, a sigh, a stone tear falling on my face? By the time I opened my eyes, all was silent and the room was empty. And, yet, there was movement. I looked toward it, holding my sheet with two fierce fists.

A shadow passed outside my door.

From one side of the wide oak to the other, in the pale light shining from the hall and under the door, someone or something passed.

It could have been O’Keefe, but wandering the halls at midnight was a little too Edgar Allan Poe even for an eccentric artist haunted by the dead.

I waited, breath held, to see if the shadow would return. And, yes, I called it “she” in my thoughts.
Where is
she
going? What does
she
want?

I could have stayed in bed. I could have stayed shaky and weak following the knife attack, too. I hadn’t. I didn’t. I rose and went for the door.

Two years of intense physical therapy and personal training made me no more capable of ghost hunting than the next person, but it did make it impossible for me to cower and quake and hide any longer. No one knows…what? What did no one know? Maria O’Keefe had jumped off a cliff. Did her ghost want me to know why?

The hall light no longer glowed. Someone had turned it off. O’Keefe? All about energy conservation and saving the penguins? Maybe. But my hands clenched into tense fists. The cliff. The cold air. The sketch. The phone and the light. How physical could this haunting get?

There was once a sunny day when a young woman went off to her aunt’s gallery expecting ten to five and maybe a drink with friends after. She ended up enduring the darkest day of her life. I left my room and walked down the hall, chasing shadows and wondering if my world was darkening around me again.

The house wasn’t silent. Large houses seldom are. Cavernous ones echo at the slightest sound. How could O’Keefe stand all the empty rooms? They bothered me. Door after door. If they’d been open, I couldn’t have done it. One yawning dark hole after another. As it was, I passed closed doors. Too many closed doors. I wondered if there was only one ghost at Thornleigh or if they were legion.

Where was she?

I kept moving, but I didn’t like it when I came to double pocket doors that obviously led to something important.
Dead end
. Even as I thought it, the phrase freaked me out.

I reached and twisted and pushed. The heavy white doors didn’t screech like I expected. They slid silently back into the wall and cool air flowed out onto my face. Too cool. I shivered, but I also stepped forward. You had to face fear to conquer it.

God, I changed my mind. I almost fell back. The room was full of white figures. I didn’t count. I couldn’t. It seemed like fifty. It was probably fifteen and they were all facing me with anguished eyes.

Only statues
.

Only
.

I’m pretty sure I’ll never think that again. It didn’t matter that they were stone, immovable and posing no possible threat. In the gloom of the midnight ballroom, they were terrifying. Their ghostly faces beseeched me for something, anything, to ease their pain. They were also the best possible place for a pale specter in a white gown to wait and watch my approach.

“What do you want?” I asked.

My voice echoed off hard marble bodies that were unable to absorb the sound waves or the meaning of my words. I braced myself, certain my noise would prod the real Bride forward.

“You woke me. You brought me here. What did you want to show me?”

I stepped further into the room, alert to any sound or change in atmosphere.

And then I saw movement.

Among the statues, one white figure was turned away from me, her long black hair in a tangled mass of wet waves down her back. A puddle of water was steadily spreading out and away from her and she swayed slightly back and forth, back and forth as the water flowed.

I edged closer.

Her gown plastered to her as I watched, growing wetter and wetter still. It was impossible and yet I saw it with my own eyes. I smelled seawater…and blood.

The only weapon I’d brought with me was reality. Cold, hard reality. I carried it with me in the scars on my chest and muscles in my legs. I’d earned each day I’d been given following my brush with death and those hard-won hours were in my voice when I spoke again.

“Why do these statues of you matter, Mrs. O’Keefe? Why do you want me to see them?”

At that, she whirled around and I scrambled back. If not for the distance to the door, I might have backpedaled all the way to my room.

Because her face was twisted into a snarl and her eyes were corpse-pale rimmed with torpid gray.

“I couldn’t save him.” She gurgled, and foamy water bubbled past her blue lips. “I couldn’t save him.”

She came toward me, one squelching step after another, while I continued to back away. Our audience of statues was no longer threatening. There was a new game in town.

“No one knows,” she hissed wetly.

She was a ghost, but she was nothing like I’d imagined a ghost would be. She shambled awkwardly like an animated corpse. Her sliding, shuffling feet left watery streaks of blood on the floor in her wake. I saw the wounds on her body where her skin had been broken and torn against the rocks when she’d fallen. Bone and muscle and tendon showed through in places and their forced movement as she walked caused viscous fluids to flow, mingling with the foamy water she must have tasted as she’d died.

I wanted to turn away. I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to scream.

Instead, I froze in horror as she came closer and closer, my perceptions eerily heightened to notice every gruesome detail.

How long had the waves plummeted her body before she’d been found? She was so gray, her skin saturated and sagging.

In a sudden rush of movement, she came at me, and I finally cried out when her cold, damp hand grabbed my wrist. Before I could punch or kick to free myself, she was gone. I was left staring at a still-widening puddle of seawater on the floor.

I ran.

Later, I might be ashamed. I might wonder why I hadn’t forced myself to walk calmly down those halls the same way I’d come. But in those moments pure instinct drove me and it drove me straight to him.

Safety in numbers or looking for a big strapping hero to rescue me? Who knew, but I flew. The honest truth was probably somewhere in between. O’Keefe was warm and alive. And, thank God, right where I’d left him.

I came around the corner of the conservatory doors as if the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels. I ran from a room full of statues and an impossible puddle and the absolute certainty that a week would be too long with the Bride but never long enough with Miles O’Keefe.

I stumbled to a stop when I saw that O’Keefe was sleeping. He lay stretched out on the same settee I’d posed on. Even with a freakish dead woman out stalking the night, the sight of him stunned me.

I wasn’t a portrait artist, but I wished I was. Though I knew stick figures would be the only result, I suddenly longed for charcoal, paper and enough talent to capture this moment forever.

He looked younger…and ageless. His shirt was open down the front and his head was thrown back. He might have been a turn-of-the-century lover in a swoon following coitus. Or he might have fallen asleep waiting and wishing…

I took a step toward him and then another. My heart still pounded from fright and exertion—I had sprinted the whole way—but now my pulse also reacted to him.

Miles
.

I could see a pale glimpse of muscular chest and lean stomach. I watched the rise and fall of his breathing for long seconds. His dark lashes fluttered against his sharp cheeks and I knew he dreamed. Of what? Of whom?

“O’Keefe,” I whispered, suddenly afraid it wasn’t me.

I dropped to my knees beside him and at the same time his eyes opened, penny-bright against the pale skin of his angular cheeks.

He sat up and leaned over me. I knew he had to see my panic, the memory of horror reflected on my face.

“It’s happening too quickly,” Miles said, angst and shadows in his throat.

The Bride’s threatening manifestations or our attraction or both? I didn’t know.

“I won’t leave,” I insisted.

“Yes. You will,” he replied. “Tomorrow. It won’t be safe to cross the garden tonight, but tomorrow…you will go.”

He held my face and tilted it up toward his as he proclaimed the plan. I ached at the very idea that I wouldn’t get a full week of that touch, so firm yet so gentle.

“Come with me,” I urged, crazy bold and throwing my yearning for him on the line.

“She would only follow, Samantha. If I stay, she stays.”

“But how? Why? I’ve read the stories. She committed suicide two years after she married Dominick O’Keefe. It was a huge scandal because the rumor was that she’d fallen in love with another man while her husband was in Europe on business.”

“I came to the house ten years ago. O’Keefe was my great-uncle, but the house had been empty for years. I thought it would be the perfect place to work, an escape, but with plenty of room for friends when I got tired of sculpting alone. The stories didn’t scare me away.”

“The statues?”

“I thought I’d been inspired. I’ve never worked so hard and so fast. Then, one of my friends noticed that they were all the same. I didn’t care at first. But my friends quit coming. A few tried to get me to read the news stories about old disappearances and violent murders on the property. One day I woke up with the chisel in my hand. It was worn down and my hands were raw and bloody. I must have been working in a fugue for days. I didn’t order any more marble. I packed a bag and left, but found myself creating the same sculpture in clay wherever I tried to travel. And it wasn’t just me. If it had been, I might have thought of seeking professional help. But people around me, wherever I went, saw her, again and again…so I came back here. I thought if I could keep her away from others and somehow fight…”

“Ten years,” I whispered against his trembling fingers.

I kissed them, one after another. Those beautiful, talented, calloused fingers. How horrible that they weren’t free to create what was in his own heart.

“She’s never been like this. It usually takes her a week or even more to manifest,” Miles said. He leaned his forehead against mine. “But I was taken with you before you even arrived. Fascinated by your strength and spirit. You’d been through hell and come out the other side, better and stronger. God, I think I fell in love with you the day I got your second note. The one that said you weren’t afraid of ghosts.”

“I’m afraid of her now, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up,” I said.

I didn’t mean it to sound seductive, but I was on my knees and my lips were on his skin. He took his hand away from my mouth and buried the fingers I’d been kissing in my hair. He gripped me firmly, almost desperately, and held me in place…as if I would have moved away. Then his lips descended to mine in a grateful swoop.

My stubborn refusal to leave him was gasoline on the steady flicker of flame that had already been burning between us. I reached for his arm, not to loosen his hold, but to find purchase myself, because when his tongue slid into my mouth I needed to hold on tight. When my tongue licked and swirled and tasted into the depths of his hot, sweet mouth, I held tighter still. Heated exhilaration threatened to vibrate my cells apart.

I’d been careful and controlled for so long, but a woman had to be brave at Thornleigh, and Miles would have made me bold anywhere on earth.

“I wanted to touch you. This morning. When you were touching me,” I confessed against his lips. I reached up to brush my hands along his gaunt cheeks and into the lush, thick waves of his ever-tousled hair.

He groaned even as he sucked my lower lip hotly between his own before lathing it with his tongue.

“I’ll never recover from this morning. Never. I was in agony. I wanted to taste you, to explore every inch of you with my tongue. To only be able to barely touch you—and even that was out of line. The whole time I was as controlled as I could be, but, still, touching your skin—ever so slightly—was decadent. When I saw what my touch had done to you, I had to…”

“You don’t always…?” I asked, heat flaring in my cheeks.

“No. Of course not. It’s usually a very visual and detached process. But with you…”

“I wanted more,” we both said at the same time.

Miles slid his hands down to my arms and pulled me up while he fell back on the settee. Now, we lay together with me spilled and sprawled over his reclining form. I kissed him again, slowly taking his mouth the way I’d wanted to when I’d first entered this room. He was a lean man with a cut jaw, everywhere straight lines and angles, until you discovered the lush fullness of his sensual lips. Here was his passion and artistry while all else was tight and spare. I licked across the full swell of his lower lip, teasing the tip of my tongue just inside to find sweet moisture. A soft exhale of pleasure was my reward.

He shifted our bodies again while I kissed him, and I found myself straddling his obvious arousal, hard between my legs.

I rocked against him, using my plunging and receding tongue to mimic with our mouths the true fuck I desired. My sleep shorts were blessedly brief and thin, but the long, thick ridge of his erection was bound behind denim.

I made a noise into his mouth that was half pleasurable moan and half disgruntled protest. His hands left me long enough to unzip and loosen. The move was all I needed to encourage me. I rushed my hands down to help free him. It wasn’t graceful. I was shaking and eager and my hands warred with his, fumbling and bumbling, but all I cared about was claiming whatever we had together while we still could.

My shorts came off much easier than his jeans. But not fast enough. We wanted this, he and I, for the same desperate, life-affirming reasons.

I’m more of a craftsman than an artist.

I run. I once designed jewelry. I’ve been known to appreciate a sunset or two from the high peak of a mountain I’ve conquered.

I couldn’t tell you how beautiful Miles O’Keefe was when he was naked between my thighs. Did I say he wasn’t exactly tall, dark and handsome? Well, it was true. He was so much more. He was the thrill of the finish line, the glow of the sunset and the challenge of the mountain all together in masculine form, and when his oh so talented fingers found the bud of my slick clitoris, I cried out. I opened my thighs wide to his touch and the hot shaft of his penis. He didn’t penetrate. He teased. Spreading my labia with his fingers, he thrust his hips so that he would slide and grow slick against me. The calloused pads of his forefinger and thumb plucked and played until I stiffened and clenched and then, only then, did he urge himself up and into my tightened folds. I shuddered my release as he thrust deep inside me. I tried to open to him, but I was tight and pulsing. He rocked against the incredibly snug fit and I came again in a sudden arch of pleasure before the tremors of the first had passed.

I tasted salt this time when I kissed him again and I knew it was sweat, but also tears. When he came, I held him and made promises about forever that I intended to keep.