My pulse fluttered, and I fought the temptation to lean into him. He was so close I could feel the warmth of him even in the humid air. ‘That much I did know.’
Nothing was settled, and few of my questions were answered, but it was a struggle to straighten my spine and stiffen my resolve. ‘But what’s your part in this?’ I asked, too breathlessly. ‘Why couldn’t you just tell me, or ask me outright? Did you come here knowing about the TTC, or did you just stumble on them?’
He looked pained by my badgering, but not annoyed. ‘That’s a lot of questions, princess.’ His fingers traced lightly down my arm, to skim over my palm and finally tangle with mine. ‘Which will take a while to answer.’
A magical potential of our own was building, and my questions, while vitally important, seemed less urgent at the moment.
I asked one more, my eyes on his, looking for evasion. ‘Are you trying to distract me?’
With a small smile, he admitted, ‘Maybe a little bit.’ He drew me closer by our linked fingers, until my arm was wrapped around his waist, his hand holding mine, unresisting, at his back. ‘Would that be so bad?’ he asked, brushing my cheek with his other thumb.
‘Just this once,’ I whispered, already knowing it was a lie. More than ever, there was the past, present and future in the touch of his lips to mine.
He kissed me softly, and after one gently enquiring pause, kissed me again. And that was the end of asking anything. I tugged my hand from his, but only so I could wrap my arms around him properly and he could draw me even closer, which he did, without hesitation. For all the confusion he’d caused me, there was nothing equivocal about the way his mouth caressed mine, the way his fingers slid into my hair to cradle the back of my head.
The timing was bad, but the kiss was so right. Not just the feel and taste of him, but everything – the sheltering woods, the water rushing nearby and the green, wet scent all around us.
Too soon, but too late for me to ever be the same again, Rhys pulled back, setting me away from him as if he needed to break the connection or go mad. I knew how he felt.
‘We do not want to do this here,’ he said, his hands still on my shoulders, his thumbs tracing my collarbones. My shirt was crooked and out of place, but not as much as I wanted it to be.
‘OK,’ I said, still breathless. ‘Where do we want to do it?’
He accepted the invitation, pulling me close again, hands spanning my waist. I twined my arms around his neck like the vines that wrapped the standing stone in my garden. One endless kiss, new and familiar as the last, then the world spun and we were falling onto the thick carpet of pine needles and oak leaves. They scratched my skin as my shirt rode up, but the feeling anchored me to the earth, like Rhys’s welcome weight, his arms still around me.
My head reeled with sensation and emotion, not all of which I could sort out. His and mine, and some memories that seemed overlaid from some other time. I felt a dread of being caught, but it paled next to this longing.
It was that specific dread, not of anyone living, that made me finally pull away – put cool, damp air between us. There was more in that moment somehow than my brain could hold, and I felt that if I let the kiss continue, if I let my thoughts continue, I might splinter.
‘Don’t,’ I whispered, when he would have drawn me back down. ‘I have to get back. The Colonel is watching.’ I was oddly aware it was a nonsensical thing to say, that I was losing the division between myself and the echoes of the past.
‘I don’t care,’ said Rhys. He ran his fingers through my hair, combing out the pine needles and letting the tangled strands fall around us like a curtain. ‘He’s just a ghost in a window. He can’t hurt you now.’
‘Then why am I so scared of him?’ I breathed the question, trying not to let him distract me. ‘Whenever I feel that awful, freezing cold in the stairs—’
My mind snagged on a thought, and I pushed my hair back so what moonlight filtered through the trees illuminated his face. ‘Have you seen him?’
His eyes narrowed warily, as if he didn’t like where this might be headed. ‘Not exactly. A hint, maybe. A bit of cold.’
I pushed myself up with a hand on his chest. He winced, and I remembered his bruises, but didn’t let remorse dull my anger. ‘It would have saved me a world of anxiety if you had mentioned that sooner.’
‘I did tell you that you weren’t crazy.’ He propped himself on his elbows. ‘If you’d told me you were seeing things, I would have reassured you sooner.’
‘Now I remember why I was irked with you.’ I sat up, straightening my clothes, wishing I could do the same with my dignity. ‘Even after the river, you still didn’t trust me.’
‘Sylvie,’ he began. I thought – hoped – he would try and smooth things over, but he just said, ‘Keep your voice down.’
That was the pin that popped the last bubble of the dreamlike interlude. The right answer was ‘I trust you now,’ or even better, ‘I was a jerk.’ It was definitely not ‘Be quiet.’
‘I’ll do better than that,’ I retorted – in a whisper – as I pulled myself up off the forest floor. ‘I’m out of here.’
I flounced off in a truly prima ballerina exit, too furious to think about what might be waiting. Too angry to listen for his footsteps behind me. When I reached the edge of the woods, though, I stumbled to a shocked halt. Rhys almost ran me over, and caught my shoulders to steady us both. Then his fingers tightened, and I knew he felt it too.
The cold was distinct and bitter next to the humid night and my heated emotions. I’d never felt the chill so strong outside the house. Fear wrapped an icy fist around my heart, and I felt the full brunt of the supernatural imprint, one hundred and fifty years of furious waiting, aimed like a naked spotlight from the upstairs window.
‘He’s not watching the summerhouse,’ I whispered. My stomach knotted until I thought I might throw up. ‘He’s watching the woods for her. Hannah.’
Rhys stepped closer to my back, a sheltering, protective action, and a possessive one. ‘He’s watching for them both.’
I didn’t ask whom he meant. Hannah and her lover. Had they met here in the woods, where Rhys and I kept meeting? Had Hannah stood here, with her sweet-heart’s hands on her shoulders, and known she’d been caught? Or did they say goodnight, thinking their secret was safe, while the Colonel watched and seethed?
As awful as the malevolent attention was, the suddenness with which it turned away was even more jarring. ‘It’s never moved from the window before,’ I said, a whole new level of fear twisting my heart.
There was a cry, a shriek of bone-deep terror, not from the woods, but from the house.
The sound broke our stasis. I might not have been limping any more when I walked, but running was another thing. Rhys slowed as I hobbled over the uneven lawn, but I urged him ahead. ‘Go on. Run.’
He took me at my word and lengthened his stride. I followed, dread pushing me up the hill to the house. It wasn’t nearly as late as it felt. The downstairs windows were still mostly lit. I could hear Gigi barking, rising to a frenzy as I hurried through the porch, past her crate, then through the kitchen towards the front of the house.
When I reached the foyer, Paula and both Griffiths were already there. Clara lay crumpled at the bottom of the stairs, like a rag doll thrown down the steps, the impression of a cast-off toy heightened by my jeans scattered around her. She must have dropped them when she fell.
Paula knelt in her pyjamas, her face ashen, her hands trembling. Professor Griffith was restraining her from moving her friend, talking in soothing, crisis tones about paramedics and neck braces, while Rhys carefully checked to make sure Clara was breathing.
He stayed with them while I pushed away my shock and hurried to the den, where I grabbed the phone and dialled with trembling fingers.
‘Nine-one-one,’ said the calm woman on the other end of the line. ‘What’s your emergency?’
Where to start. Somehow, I managed to block out ghosts and s
ecret rites and magic spells, and concentrate on the facts. ‘There’s been an accident. My friend has fallen down the stairs, and she’s unconscious. We need an ambulance.’
Chapter 30
Paula rubbed her arms against the chill in the foyer. The professor fetched a crocheted afghan from the back of a sofa in the parlour, and covered Clara with it while they waited for the paramedics.
I didn’t wait. Handing the phone to Rhys, I said, ‘I’m going to get Addie.’ Shock had chased away my fear. Besides the cold, which the others seemed to feel but not acknowledge, there was no sign of the Colonel.
‘Sylvie!’ Rhys met my eye with a warning. ‘Play it cool.’
With a quick flash of anger, I thought he meant I shouldn’t bait Addie when her mom was injured, as if I would. Then reason kicked in, and I got that he was advising me not to let on what I knew about the council. As if I would be that stupid.
I nodded and cut through the den to the side door. The route took me into my garden, and to the stone monolith that marked it. Immediately I could sense that whatever the circle had been doing, it was done. The same way I could feel the energy moving before, I could sense its stillness now. Not gone, not dissipated, but resting. Now that I was attuned to it, I didn’t know how I’d ever not felt it.
Out on the road, car headlights were coming to life as some of the council left straight from the summerhouse. A smaller group walked towards me, their silhouettes distorted by backpacks and book bags, as if they were coming in from a late-night study session.
But the energy level gave them away. It was the intangible aura of stage presence, the indefinable glow that made certain people rivet attention. All four had it, but Shawn’s was so bright, it cast the others in shade.
I waited for them, stewing in suspicion. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to hurt Clara. Especially her daughter. Maybe Clara was only collateral damage, but the timing of her fall was too coincidental, and it was hard to keep the blame from my face as the group – Shawn and Addie, Kimberly and Caitlin – reached me.
Shawn seemed amused by my expression, and I wondered what I’d given away. ‘You could have just asked to join us,’ he said.
His complacency ratcheted up my anger. But I turned to Addie, who stood at his side. She stared back with a challenging lift of her chin and I forced myself to keep my voice even. ‘Your mother’s had an accident. The ambulance is on its way.’
Her face went slack with shock, the kind you can’t fake. It was too dim to see her colour drain, but in the charged air I sensed it. All my senses seemed to be on high alert, supercharged. Addie staggered a step, and Kimberly steadied her with a sympathetic arm around her shoulders.
Just for a moment, I had considered how, if something happened to Clara, it might bring Addie her wish. No one would tell her to stay in school instead of becoming the next Naomi Campbell. But her stunned expression, the dawning horror and worry, cleared her in my mind. At least of any intentional harm.
‘She’s in the foyer,’ I told her more gently. ‘At the bottom of the stairs.’
Addie took a few unsteady steps, then broke into a long-legged run. Kimberly touched my arm, get?ting my attention. ‘Is her mom hurt bad? What happened?’
I cast my gaze over them, reassured by how stunned they looked. All except Shawn, who seemed concerned but not genuinely surprised. ‘She fell down the stairs.’
Kimberly and Caitlin exchanged a worried glance. I turned to leave them, heading through the garden. Dimly I heard Shawn tell them to go on home, which didn’t register until I caught the sound of his footsteps on the gravel path behind me.
Turning back, I tried to play it cool, like Rhys had told me. ‘This is a family matter, Shawn.’
He seemed surprised, and a little hurt. ‘I am family.’
I didn’t know what to believe from him any more, and it came through in my tone. ‘Fourth cousins twice removed is not close enough.’
As I turned to go, he snagged my hand in his. I whirled, spoiling for a fight, but he did nothing but grasp my fingers, our arms at their full extension, and run his gaze over me.
His eyes narrowed and I wondered what had given me away – the pine needles in my hair, my rumpled shirt or the scalding blush that raced to my cheeks.
He seemed to wrestle with thwarted anger, then tamp it down behind a mask of imperturbability. I marvelled that I could see it all so clearly, as if some filter had been lifted.
‘Well,’ he said, with an unconvincing echo of his easygoing charm. ‘Someone has been a little naughty.’
The words were teasing, his tone amused. But there was a thread of steel underneath, possessive yet oddly cold. The way he’d examined me at arm’s length, impassively evaluating, reminded me of the Colonel at the window. And that gave me the creeps more than an innuendo would have.
‘I don’t see how that’s your business,’ I said, trying for cool, and failing.
Shawn laughed, and it was genuine. ‘Don’t be stupid, Sylvie. I told you this afternoon. You and I could be an amazing team, if you don’t go messing it up by messing around with someone else.’
That was the final twist that snapped the rubber band of my temper. ‘Maybe I don’t want to be a team with you, Shawn. Does the circle even understand what’s going on? Or are you playing them like everyone else in town?’
Annoyance flashed over his face. ‘I don’t know what your boyfriend has been telling you, but I’m just trying to do what’s right for this place. Like my ancestors. And yours.’
‘I don’t do magic spells.’
‘Of course you do.’ His hand squeezed mine, drawing me a reluctant step towards him. ‘I see it. Rhys sees it. And I know you feel it too.’ He gestured to the garden, to the stone, encompassing all my work. ‘You could do amazing things with your connection to the earth, your elemental abilities. He won’t show you. But I will. All you have to do is ask.’
I could hear Gigi barking on the porch, as if she knew I was in trouble, that even with my eyes fully open, I could still feel that pull of temptation. ‘You need to leave now,’ I said, wrenching my hand from his grasp.
Shawn reached down and picked up the backpack he’d dropped earlier, slinging it over his shoulder with a lack of concern, as if my surrender were inevitable. ‘You could do anything, Sylvie. Remember that.’
‘Just go,’ I said, dredging up all the pack-leader authority I could muster. My voice hardly shook at all.
His voice, however, played inside my head, all the way back into the house, rising and falling in time to the approaching siren. You could do anything.
The moulded plastic chairs in the waiting room of the county hospital ER must have been designed by a chiropractor trying to drum up future business. They were, impossibly, making my body even edgier than my nerves.
Rhys and his father sat on either side of me. After the ambulance had whisked Clara off, the professor had driven my shaken cousin and Clara’s ashen daughter in the station wagon, and Rhys and I had followed in the rental car. When we’d arrived, Paula instructed us to leave her car and return home, but, without even talking about it, the Griffiths and I took seats in the plastic torture devices while Paula and Addie were allowed into the treatment area.
I’d been forced to reevaluate Addie. After her initial tears and shock, she had pulled herself together and had the presence of mind to grab Clara’s purse with her insurance and health information. Paula had barely remembered her own bag.
On the drive to the hospital and even in the waiting room, Rhys and I had been mostly silent. I had plenty to think about, and from the way the muscle in Rhys’s jaw kept flexing, I could guess his mind was working overtime as well.
Finally, Professor Griffith had had enough waiting and stood up stiffly. ‘I’m off to search – in vain, I’m sure – for a cup of tea. Call my mobile if Paula comes out with news.’
He wandered down one of the antiseptic tile hallways; he’d dressed hastily in a blue knit shirt and a black pa
ir of trousers. Rhys still wore his jeans and rugby shirt, both rather dirty, and I’d grabbed a cardigan from the back of the desk chair in the den to cover the grass stains on my clothes. Fortunately, everyone had more important things on their minds than our incriminating condition.
I wrapped the sweater more tightly around myself and said miserably, ‘I wish I could have brought Gigi.’
Rhys reached for my hand, holding it in both of his. My head spun, adjusting to the changes in the past few hours. No argument about who didn’t trust whom seemed very important any more. ‘She’ll be fine in your room. We checked all the locks and windows before we left. You’ve never felt anything weird in there, right?’
‘Nothing bad.’ The dread and bone-biting cold had only manifested on the landing and in the hall, reaching down the stairs. The only other ghosts that bothered me were the crying in the woods, and the girl. Hannah.
As for the rest, I’d come to accept that the house was permeated with the past, and all the half-sensed things – glimpsed shirttails and apron strings disappearing round corners, caught whiffs of perfume or tobacco, snatches of a tune on the pianoforte – were just imprints of life, like Professor Griffith had suggested.
Except for the prison area at Cahawba. Those imprints were darker, the deep footprints of a lot of misery.
I’d been trying to fit together all the puzzle pieces I’d gathered. My standing stone must mark some kind of energy spot – metaphysical, electromagnetic, geo-whatever – that made what Shawn and the circle were doing possible. But what about the ghosts? If the ley line thing Professor Griffith had talked about extended from Bluestone Hill to the ruins of Old Cahawba on the north side, then could that make it a hot spot for ghosts as well as magic?
Eyeing the distance between us and our near?est companions, a whispering prayer circle in the corner, I lowered my voice and asked Rhys, ‘If you’ve experienced’ – I was hesitant to say ‘magic’ in public, no matter how quietly – ‘strange things before, why do you say the power of rocks and crystals is pseudoscience?’