He shook his head. “No more crazy than if I were to tell you that Fenn and I used to talk to each other in our heads. Not with words exactly, but more like images, sensations. I…” This time he looked away. “I never told my parents about it. But that’s how I knew he was dead. I felt that connection die the night I escaped.”
Sophie inhaled a breath. The old prickling on her neck began again, as it often did when she was close to a revelation.
“What is it?” Emery asked, his gaze astute on hers.
“So you can’t feel him anymore…Do you ever get a sense of anything, though? Something you don’t recognize?”
“Well…yeah…” He stared at her, hard, as though his brain was sifting through the evidence of something important. “There have been times when I’ve had these…I guess you could call them glimpses. I see myself in a mirror, but it’s not me, or I hear something that’s not actually hearable. I’m not explaining this well…” His cheeks turned ruddy.
“Emery, what if there was an explanation for that?” It had to be Fenn he was seeing and feeling. God, she wanted so badly to tell him the truth. His brother was alive.
“Oh, there is. I’m going crazy. It’s probably some form of PTSD or something.” His self-deprecating laugh sliced her heart.
He gestured for them to start walking again. “This way.”
He led her through a maze of both ancient and modern grave stones until they reached a place at the back of the cemetery. There was a lovely little area surrounded by three willow trees. Their long branches swayed low, rustling over the soft grass. Despite the breeze moving through the trees, there was a stillness to the place. Sophie shivered, very aware of the spirits that still lingered in the earth below her feet.
There was something ancient in the way the willows drifted, as though their branches were alive. Even when there was no wind, the trees would often seem to move of their own accord. The power that dwelt in nature was so often overlooked or drowned out by the modern rush of the day. But here, in this moment, it was impossible to ignore the rhythmic pulse in the ground and the trees speaking in hushed whispers of secrets belonging to the earth and the earth alone. Sophie remembered something her Granny Bells used to say. “Man has no power here, where spirits of the soil dwell.”
Sophie shuddered and the knot of tension in her stomach grew tighter.
There was one large tombstone in the center of the willow trees. An angel had been carved so that she was kneeling behind the headstone, her arms folded over the top of the grave marker and her forehead resting on her arms. Her wings were spanned out but the tips touched the ground, making her look like a wounded dove with injured wings. The scene was powerful, the angel looked as if she was weeping against the headstone, showing her deepest grief for the bearer of the stone.
FENNLOCKWOOD.
BELOVED SON AND BROTHER.
AND THE DEAD SHALL RISE…
“We never had a body to bury. I couldn’t bear to lead my parents back to the place where they kept us. I doubt we would have found him, even then. The men probably buried him somewhere else. My parents had to have a place for him, though. Funny, they never come here. I do, though. I talk to the stone sometimes. Other times, I don’t talk; I just remember.”
The gravity in his voice made Sophie’s eyes burn with tears. He reached out and touched the stone angel’s head.
“It’s nice to think angels are weeping for him, that he was loved in this life and the next. But nothing eases the guilt in here.” He tapped his chest above his heart. “I cost him his life. Me. It doesn’t matter that I was only a kid. He’s dead and I’m not. Survivor’s guilt or not, his blood is on my hands.”
It won’t be for long. She wanted to say the words, but she bit her tongue and held back. She had to, or he’d rush off to find his brother and get killed. She had to be patient, or else she’d lose him too.
Just hang on, Emery. Soon you and Fenn will be together.She vowed it in the deepest part of her soul. She would reunite them with her last breath if she had to.
***
Emery was sick of being in the hospital. The sickly sweet smell of death and illness filled his nose and the chill of the cold halls made his hands clammy. It made his skin crawl and horrible memories kept shoving to the forefront of his mind. He forced them back down, buried them as deep as he could. They’d come crawling back to the surface, refusing to stay dead. But everything was changing, after so many years of silence, and worrying about it all coming out in the open. People he cared about were getting hurt. He had to stop it, but how could he? It wasn’t as easy as just handing himself over to the man who’d kidnapped him. And he sure as hell wasn’t going to just surrender to the sick creep that had obviously come back for more.
He approached the nurse’s station next to Cody’s room. A middle-aged nurse was filling out a report and smiled when she recognized him.
“Mr. Lockwood, it’s good to see you back so soon. Mr. Larson is getting restless and your visits seem to calm him down.”
Emery smiled, even though it was a bit forced.
“Good to know I help.”Considering I got him into this mess.
The nurse grinned. “Go on in and see him. He should be awake.”
“Thanks.” He walked past her and nudged the door to Cody’s room open with his shoulder. Cody was sitting up, a small netbook on his lap. His uninjured hand was pecking away at the keyboard and from the dark look on Cody’s face it wasn’t going so well.
“Damn it!” He slapped the small laptop lid down before he noticed Emery.
“Oh…hey, boss.” He set the computer on his tray table and fisted his good hand in his blankets as he tried to pull the sheets up higher on his waist.
