“I know that. I want to know who runs itnow.”
St. Silas’s expression blackened. “So that you can offer yourself in exchange for your father?”
She kept quiet, masking her surprise at his astuteness by continuing to stare back at him with bright, defiant eyes. It was none of his business what she wanted to do with her future. Once she found his ghost, she would be free to pursue any life she chose.
His jaw worked. Then he turned away from her abruptly and began climbing up the path toward the forest in long strides, the lamp still clenched in his hand.
“So you will not tell me anything about the Wake, then?” She ran after him, the wind carrying tendrils of her hair into her face.
“No, madam.” His tone held a warning.
She was taken aback by this. She had gambled on the fact that St. Silas had a very vested interest in the ghost of Lady Hargreaves.She’d seen the despairing way the ghost had reacted tohim.That St.Silas would waste such an opportunity, when he wasted very little, was unfathomable to her.
In the silvery light cast by the moon, Leena angled her body toward the sea to retrieve the parchments from her bodice, in case St. Silas turned and saw her efforts.
The first parchment had bonded to the second one and protected it from the elements, leaving the first one ruined and entirely illegible, and the other preserved. Leena had to rip them apart to separate them, and mourned the words lost on that first letter.
She tore into the second one.
It was addressed to someone, but the ensuing years had stripped and faded the name. She broke the seal and unfolded it with frozen fingers, relieved to see that the inky scrawls inside were still legible.
I know what you’ve done and I know the evils you have dallied with—and that poor boy, what has he ever done to you?
You have brought me to visit this cursed estate for months on end, and I’ve begun to believe that we’re all cursed. All those who set foot on these marbled floors, all who breathe this moorish air, all who have eaten its food—we are all cursed.
Weavingshaw has fed on us, and I curse your eyes for having brought me here.
That was all.
A dam of guilt burst in Leena’s throat. She’d taken the last words of a dead woman, reading them like a voyeur peeping through a curtain. She felt numb all over.Was this letter intended for Lord Hargreaves? And what had he done to deserve such a bitter parting note?
Her brows furrowed further. And who wasthe boy? What had been done tohim?
She looked up to see St. Silas standing under the awning of a tree, waiting for her. She was too far away to read his expression, but his silence had teeth. Leena made her way toward him slowly, calculating what she had todo.
“If you won’t tell me about the Wake, then tell me about Mrs. Van. Thetruththis time.”
She waited, her face raised toward him. The lamplight bathed both of them in a yellow glow, giving her the feeling that, beyond this sphere of light, the world was locked in eternal sleep.
His glance fell to the letter in her hands, and he didn’t start walking away again as she expected him to. “Mrs. Van is as preternatural as your phantoms.”
Leena held her breath. “What is she?”
“I trust her with my life.”
“Yes.” Leena accepted this, but still persisted. “What is she?”
“A demon.”
With blood pulsing wildly in her ears, Leena tried to hold hisgaze as her sleep-deprived brain worked rapidly.Was he lying?No, she could not forget Mrs. Van’s appearance in her nightmare: the expanding eyes, the long fingers, and, most important, the years of life that Mrs. Van had accumulated.
To most people, Leena would be considered utterly mad for seeing ghosts, although they were her daily truth. So why shouldn’t other supernatural creatures also exist?
Butdemons?
If she had not been standing by St. Silas, she could’ve sworn the ground was shifting beneath her, a formidable crack forming underneath, dragging her down to an unknown abyss where nothing was what it seemed.
“Is Mr. Orley a demon as well?”
