Then why was she talking to it? Whatever it was.
The kettle clicked off, and the noise made her jump. She was alone in the dark cold kitchen. She busied herself making her tea.
This was no good. She couldn’t go on like this. She was hearing voices, seeing things. She needed help. Maybe she was having a breakdown. Coming back here had been a terrible idea. She had always hated this place. She associated it with the worst things to ever happen to her. With nightmares and horrors.
Theo should have known better than to come back. So should she. Had her brother gone through this as well? Had he told anyone? He and Nick had been close. He and Nick’s wife Sally too. He must have confided in them.
Wildewood was cursed. It always had been. From time out of mind. Everyone said it. Her mother had drilled it into the two of them for as long as she could remember, while her stepfather had tried to make soothing noises and preached rationality. He’d been her anchor in the chaos of the past.
It had taken her dad. It had taken Theo.
There was no one else left. Just as it had said. Just her.
The last of the de Wildes, Nick had called her. And he said whatever had cursed this place, it wanted her too.
The women of the de Wildes were never safe here. Her grandfather had said that. She didn’t know when but sheremembered the words clearly. His voice rising in anger. But why the women?
Alex closed her eyes as the memory grew like a bubble. She’d blocked it out in the days that followed her dad’s death. But she let it come to her now. They had argued, the two of them. Argued about her.
‘—just thankful I never had a daughter. What were you thinking bringing her back here? You must have known that he would sense her and start to rise.’
‘Not this nonsense again. There was no one else to mind her. Susan’s working. And she wanted to come, begged me.’
Her grandfather slammed his hand down on the desk with a fearsome bang. ‘Because they beguile her. Don’t you see it? She’s almost a woman now. Chambers will be on her like a hound on a hare.’
‘That’s enough!’ Dad yelled, furious.
‘Omnes contra omnes, quos amabant, convertam, et meam, corpus et animam, faciam,’ her grandfather retorted. ‘Is that what you want, Edward? Really? She needs a guardian.’
At the bottom of the stairs, Alex had sat alone, listening. And the dark man had wrapped her in his arms and whispered that they lied, they didn’t understand, they never would. Only he would…
The memory was so vivid she might have been watching it unfold for the first time.
Blaise Chambers had held her in his arms and comforted her, whispered promises and lies and she…she had let him.
The same man who had promised to corrupt and destroy every last member of her family line.
‘You do not need a guardian,’that voice had murmured, as if trying to seduce her. It sounded like it was teasing her too.‘You are a woman grown now, my Alexandra. Let me show you what that means…’
A woman grown? She’d only been sixteen! The wave of revulsion at the memory brought tears to her eyes. She should never have come back. She should leave. She should get the hell out of here and just let it fall into ruin. Or burn it down to ashes.
But those who tried to destroy the house died. Or got taken by the woods, which amounted to the same thing.
The phone rang, so loud she almost screamed in shock. The tune was a bright, jangly rendition of ‘Shiny Happy People’, which Daphne had set up for herself as a laugh on a particularly long and uneventful case in West Virginia. An old photo of her friend’s smiling face came up on the screen as well and Alex answered at once, eager to hear a friendly voice, to make contact with the real world again.
What was it, about 7 p.m. there? Daphne had probably forgotten about the time difference again. She never got it right.
‘Daphne, it’s three in the morning,’ Alex started without waiting to hear what it was about, a laugh in her voice. She was awake anyway, after all.
But when Daphne spoke, she was neither shiny nor happy. She sounded frantic.
‘Alex! Thank goodness I got you. You have to get out. You can’t stay there. Not even with your guardian. He can’t help you this time. The walker in the woods isn’t enough and I think he’s already half lost himself. There’s a darkness. It’s old and it’s hungry, and so powerful. Not just the man in the portrait. Something so much worse. It isn’t going to let you go. Not again.’
‘Daphne—’ But her friend raced on.
‘No, listen to me. It knows you. It wants you. I felt it reaching up out of the earth and the stones, out of the darkness below. There’s a – a temple. But not a holy place. That’s its centre of power. Right there beneath you. It’s still there, Alex, waiting. A broken god of lost places. The woods have tried to hold it back but they can’t. Not now. Not with you there. I tried to reach outand focus on you, to strengthen you, to help guard you. I tried to raise a dome of protective light and I-I—’ Daphne coughed, tried to clear her throat and her voice changed, gravelly and agonised. ‘Omnes contra omnes, quos amabant, convertam?—’
She didn’t get any further.
