She would too. That was a given. If there was one thing he had already figured out about Alex O’Neill, it was that she would charge into a raging fire if she thought she would solve a mystery, or help a friend.
Was that what they were becoming? Friends?
Was that all?
Well, it had to be all. And it had to be enough. He had no right to be thinking any of this, and how did he even know if what he was feeling was real anyway? And Theo had just made his feelings known. The house had a way of playing with you, Sally had always said.
Like now. Like then.
And friends? What had he ever done to deserve friends?
It was much later than he thought. He stepped into the kitchen and…
The door to the cellar was standing wide open.
A dark and endless hole, a mouth waiting to swallow him up. He was sure he had closed it the last time he was in here, but that was the way of this building. He turned on the light and took a deep breath.
It was always cold down there. Icy. Part of that was by design, of course. It was a cold room, storage. And part of it…
Well, this was Wildewood Hall. And the cellar was the oldest part of it. Deep under the earth, small for so big a house, a pocket of malice in the depths of it, clad in ancient stone…
Stone far older than the house itself.
Some of the stories said Blaise Chambers had died here. Right at the bottom of those steps.
Nick steeled himself and stepped into the cellar, closing down every emotion as he crossed the threshold and felt the touch of something old and vast.
Was this where the stones from the cairn had been used? That was what the professor had thought, but he had never found any real evidence. Just stones. And surely it wasn’t big enough. But it was where Nick felt the darkness most keenly.
Sally had always said, whatever happened, it couldn’t touch him. He was protected. She had woven the charms which still hung above the door, and were strung above the steps leadingdown. She had refreshed them year after year. Layer upon layer of protection.
He wasn’t sure about any of that. He never had been. But he had to believe her. She was all he had.
Like the protection the wild offered. But this came from Sally. It was woven with love and all the more powerful for that.
Her protection had been everything to him. And he had lost it.
The hiss beside his ear was bad enough. He could imagine teeth and claws on his skin, waiting to sink in, to end him. It came close, that malevolent presence, but it couldn’t touch him. He descended the stone steps and his feet hit the compacted earth at the bottom. The wine was only the reach of his arm away. He should have moved it up to the kitchen.
But he had to come down here every so often. It was necessary. A sacrifice that needed to be made. A test of will. And a way to make sure everything was still intact.
‘Why not just lock the door and throw away the key?’ he asked Sally once.
She’d smiled. God, he missed her smile. ‘Because then he would just get more powerful, like a pot with the lid left on. It would boil over eventually. And we don’t want that,mo stór.’
So that was why he still kept things down here, still offered that small sacrifice of coming down here once in a while and facing the darkness. He wasn’t sure it was working. Not anymore.
It was boiling over anyway. Just because Alex was here.
With Theo it had been hungry, needy. But Alex…Alex was a whole different thing. It was ravenous. Like her presence was feeding an addiction. Like it had been waiting for her all along.
And not just in the house. Not just Blaise Chambers. In him as well.
‘Help me, Sally,’ he murmured. ‘I need you now. More than ever.’
He felt the teeth press close again, sharper, far more vicious. And then…
A scent like wildflowers. He breathed it in, relieved to sense her presence at last.
