“Can phantoms disturb your sleep?” The lamplight flickered across St. Silas’s face, giving him a spectral look.
Leena didn’t like how close St. Silas was to the knowledge that phantoms could possess her, so she gave him a half-truth instead. “Not always. Tonight, I had a particularly insistent one.” She also chose not to reveal that it was Lord Hargreaves’s wife. “This does not concern Lord Avon or yourself, so you’re free to go back to the inn.”
Rather than wait for his response, she plunged into the forest, her boots snapping a dry twig, her heart racing. Leena was used to being alone with the dead, to having one foot intheirworld, to being haunted forever and ever and—
St. Silas didn’t leave, but kept pace slightly behind her.
And Leena was so glad of his presence that it unsettled her.
In the flickering darkness, St. Silas became a silhouette, yet she found this more comforting because she could not see him clearly. It was only for this reason that she asked, “And you? Do you sleep well at night?”
They walked in silence for another stretch. Leena had almost forgotten she’d posed a question before his words came back, guarded, as though by a sentry.
“Sleep is for the dead,” he said above the rustle of decaying leaves.
“That’s untrue.” Leena looked over her shoulder. “Even the dead don’t sleep.”
Rather than respond, he took hold of the heavy lamp she’d beencarrying; her muscles had begun to ache from the weight, her arm continuously dropping down before she jerked it back up again.
The forest smelled of buried and dead things: rotten stumps, decomposing branches, withering plants. Lady Hargreaves seemed at one with her surroundings, as if this was a path she traveled daily, like a pilgrim going to pray. Leena had seen ghosts become obsessive to the point of blindness, unable to see or hear anything while their last wishes remained unfulfilled. Lady Hargreaves showed that same all-consuming fixation, still never once turning back to look at Leena, as if she was compelled down the forest path.
“You let your hair down.” St. Silas’s voice jerked her from her thoughts.
For a moment, his remark confused her, until she ran a self-conscious hand across the thick curls cascading down her back.
“I was preparing for bed just as the ghost appeared, and I didn’t have time to pin it back up. In truth, it needs a cut.”
“Do not—” His voice was uneven, but St. Silas broke off before he finished the sentence.
Although Leena took pride in her hair, it was not currently in fashion, nor had it ever been. Never had she received even a half compliment for her wealth of curls before. For an odd, unfiltered moment, she wondered how his fingers would feel brushing through her hair.
Why had he not finished his sentence? She was sure he had been going to say,Do not cut it.Did that mean he had noticed her hair and likedit?
No matter how much she told herself that it did not matter what he thought of her features, her hand still smoothed over the tresses again as if hehadtouched her, her mind feverishly turning over St. Silas’s incomplete sentence. She knew that a part of her would remember it every time she released her hair before bed, and another part of her hated that he had the power to seep into her recollections so easily—with just two single words.
The scent of salty air reached them. A gull screamed overhead. The trees began to thin, the path now descending a steep slope, the piney forest floor transforming into sand.
Leena halted when she caught her first sight of the ocean. Black cliffs crowded the coast, making her breath catch with their magnitude. Lights shone from Weavingshaw’s single menacing tower, watching them from afar like a still vulture.
She had seen the ocean before, of course, but never like this. She’d been to the docks multiple times, but that was only a mess of seamen hauling crates and fishermen weaving nets.
This northern ocean was not beautiful; it was terrible and wild. One wave could engulf a person whole—burst their lungs and bash their head upon the rocks like a monster bent on destruction. Jagged boulders separated the sand from the waves, as if to imprison the sea-beasts that waited in wretched hunger just beyond the shore.
The ghost lingered on the edge of this feral sea. Finally, for the first time since starting this journey, she turned back to look at Leena.
Then Lady Hargreaves’s gaze slid to St. Silas standing beside Leena, and her entire body seemed to shudder, her eyes turning ashen. All at once, her outline started to dim, great ripples of emotion flowing off her. What that emotion was, Leena could not say, only that it seemed to distress the phantom past the point of fading.
“Stay.” Leena lurched forward, toward Lady Hargreaves. There was a history here; she was certain of this now. She would not lose this one opportunity to uncover it. “I will follow where you go.”
Lady Hargreaves turned away from St. Silas, as if looking at him was a punishment worse than purgatory. She pointed fervently at a weeping willow that grew between the jagged rocks, its leaves dipping into the ocean as if it could not decide if it wanted to be alive in sea or on land.
Leena squinted, catching within the moonlight a small metallic box nailed to the bark of the tree.
Leena turned quickly to see St. Silas watching the landscape and then gazing at her with a frozen expression. Sudden understanding dawned in his eyes. “Whose ghost are you following?” he snarled.
She saw him mark the spot where her stare had landed moments before, and her breath hitched.
Without answering, she sprang down the sandy beach toward the tree, desperate to reach the box first.
