“Have you ever been down there?” I asked Thane. “To Thorngate, I mean. It seems like something an adventurous kid would want to see.”
“I did dive down there once,” he admitted. “I was maybe twelve or thirteen at the time.”
“What did it look like?”
“Visibility is pretty limited. There’s a lot of sediment and debris. I didn’t see any graves or headstones. No coffins or bones, either,” he said with a grin. “But there was a statue…an angel. It was tall and still upright and it seemed to appear out of nowhere right in front of me. There was just enough light shining down through the water that for a moment, she looked alive. It was…unnerving to say the least.”
“What did you do?”
“Surfaced and got the hell out of there.” The grin flashed again.
“You’ve never gone back down?”
“No, but not because of the angel.” He rested his arms on the railing and stared out across the calm water. “It seemed intrusive somehow. Disrespectful. Like I was disturbing their rest.” He slanted a glance. “Feel free to call me crazy.”
I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m the woman who feels phantom vibrations, remember?”
I saw a smile in his eyes and something darker. Something that made me tremble in anticipation as he put his hand over mine on the railing. “About those vibrations. Maybe it’s not the land you’re responding to.”
I glanced away.
“Do I make you uncomfortable?” he asked.
“Yes, because I think you’re somehow a part of this.”
“That’s ridiculous. There’s no grand design to all this, Amelia. There’s no such thing as destiny. What you feel is what you feel. You just have to trust it.”
I thought about the girl he’d wanted to marry—Harper—and wondered what she’d been like. Pell had said she was unstable. A danger to herself and to others.
Like Devlin’s family, she’d died in a terrible car crash. But her ghost hadn’t lingered. For whatever reason, she didn’t haunt Thane. I wondered if that was his doing or hers.
I could feel his warm gaze on me. Shakily I said, “This is hard for me.”
He nodded. “I understand. You still have issues with that detective. No one knows better than I do how hard it is to let go of memories. But the past is no place to live your life, and sometimes the best way to move on is to move on.”
“And if I’m not ready?”
“Then you’re not ready. I won’t push you. But I won’t go quietly away, either.”
“You won’t have to. Once the restoration is finished, I’ll be the one to go away.”
His eyes darkened as he stared down at me. “Charleston isn’t so far.”
Wasn’t it? At the moment, my beloved city—and my beloved Devlin—seemed a million miles from me. “Why me?” I asked softly.
He stroked a knuckle down my cheek. “Why not you?”
I closed my eyes on a shiver. “Ivy once told me that you would never choose me…an outsider.”
“She said that?” He sounded annoyed. “Ivy’s a troubled girl. I don’t think she has much family support. Her father is some high-powered attorney in Columbia and her mother is always traveling. Half the time, Ivy is left on her own. Poor kid’s starved for attention. That’s why I’ve tried to cut her some slack. But she knows nothing about my choices. Or anything else about me, for that matter.”
“But there is a caste system in this town. Sidra told me earlier that she’s not allowed to visit Tilly Pattershaw’s house because Tilly isn’t one of them.”
His hand dropped away, and I could sense his irritation. “She’s probably just parroting what she’s heard her mother say. Bryn’s an insufferable snob.”
“No. Catrice said something like that, too.” I glanced down at the blisters in my palms and thought of Tilly’s burned hands. “She said that Freya was always trying to fit in where she didn’t belong. I suppose that’s why she turned up in all those pictures. She wanted to be one of them.”
He sighed. “You do realize you’re sounding a little obsessed.”
“Yes.”
He watched me for a moment. “Why does this stuff matter to you so much? It’s ancient history.”
“You said the other day that you have a responsibility to find out who’s buried in that hidden grave because it’s located on Asher property. I feel a similar responsibility to Freya.”
“But why? You never even knew her. And she’s been dead for years.”
I thought of her ghost wavering at the end of the pier, right where we stood now, and I felt something well inside me, that deep sadness that wasn’t my own but had somehow become a part of me. “I don’t understand it myself, but I feel driven to find out what happened to her. To find out why no one will talk about her death.”
“That’s just the way it is around here. Folks tend to mind their own business.”
“Even when it comes to dog fighting and hidden graves,” I said bitterly.
“When it comes to anything.”
I stared down into those gloomy depths and envisioned Freya’s ghost. I could see her in my mind, dressed in her burial finery, hair blowing in the breeze. If I found out what happened to her, would she be able to rest? Would she leave me in peace?
Or would she come back at every twilight to feed on my warmth and energy so that she could sustain her presence in the world of the living?
Either way, I had to know.
After Thane left, I stayed outside to watch the sunset. As late afternoon drifted toward evening, the air and light shifted, and the scattering of clouds across the western sky turned bloodred. Dusk dropped and I felt, not a vibration or even a ripple, but a waiting stillness. A held breath… .
And then she was there as I somehow knew she would be. Freya’s ghost.
Her shimmering form appeared to me a split second before Angus growled a warning. I didn’t turn toward her, of course. I couldn’t discard my father’s rules that easily. So I sat there quaking in that abnormal chill as I watched her from the corner of my eye.
She floated up from the lake, pausing on the stepping-stones as if some invisible barrier kept her from coming any closer. As I tracked her in my periphery, I talked soothingly to Angus, but he wouldn’t settle down. He paced in front of me, hair bristling in agitation.
“It’s all right,” I soothed. “We’re perfectly safe here.”
A few steps and we would at least be on hallowed ground. That was the one rule that hadn’t changed since my time with Devlin. My sanctuary had yet to be penetrated by ghosts. I had to believe that Freya’s spirit wouldn’t be able to breach my refuge, either.
But instead of retreating into the house, I turned my head slightly, pretending to gaze out over the lake. The first thing I noticed was her demeanor. She wasn’t staring up at me as she’d done on that first night. Nor did she challenge me as she had on the second. I didn’t feel her confusion or her anger or any other emotion. She was just…there, suspended in that strange in-between time when the glow of the sunset lingered even as the moon started to rise. Trapped in that eerie light, she hovered motionless until I looked at her. And then slowly she lifted her head and impaled me with her ghost eyes.
My heart tripped, and the air expelled from my lungs in a painful rush. There was no wind to speak of, but I felt the icy bite of a draft down my spine, the bristle of fear at my nape. Now I was desperate to retreat, but I couldn’t move. I sat frozen in terror, frozen in time as those nebulous tentacles reached out to me, connecting for one split second my mind to hers. In that fleeting moment of illumination, everything around me and inside me went very still, and yet the silence teemed with imagined noises. With moans and whispers and a million hellish sounds that threatened to blend at any moment into one very real scream.
