CORDELIA LAY INthe dark trying to ignore the fact that the man she desired beyond all reason was in the house, just above her. Sleep was slow to find her when her heart kept thumping at her chest, her mind wandering up the stairs, her legs itching to go to him. She turned from one side to another on the couch, hoping that with time her body would give up this foolish want.
It must have been near midnight when she heard the first notes drift down the stairwell. Just a whisper of strings, thehush of an electric guitar unplugged. She didn’t recognize the tune, but it had a mournful quality that pulled at her. Her mind tripped over melodies long forgotten, sounds she heard as a girl in her heart, songs that could not be sung. The headache that had sent her winging from the house, dulled by the bourbon, finally unclamped itself from her skull.
Rising on bare feet, she made her way up the stairs, pausing between each one to listen. At the top, she stopped and watched him, his naked shoulders draped over the instrument, hands light as swallowtails. His head hung, nodding gently, dark, loose waves falling in deference. The ink on his skin moved with him, crawling like living shadows. She could see the enormous tattoo wrapped around his chest—a rib cage twining with flowers, the heart strapped to it with thorny vines.
She lowered herself onto the top step as he played, unaware of her presence, and soaked him in, losing perspective on where Gordon ended and the music began. Her heart skipped like a pebble on the surface of water—bounding, touching down, then bounding again, a rhythm all its own.
She didn’t know how long she sat there before he finally glanced up, eyes meeting hers, hands slowing to a still. She stood, walked toward him, vaguely aware that she was in nothing but a white V-neck and panties.
“Did I wake you?” he whispered.
She didn’t respond, just reached down and brushed his hair back with her fingers, cupping his wide jaw in her hands. And then she gently lowered her face, letting her lips graze his, feeling them part beneath her, the hungry slip of tongue. He slid the guitar aside and wrapped arms big as tree roots around her, pulling her onto his lap. Her hips rocked against his.
“Cordelia,” he whispered into her neck, her hair, lyrical.
Every cell in her body screamed that she wanted this—to taste him, feel his weight inside her. But the sound woke something inher mind, something uncertain. The tabulator inside her stirred, disgruntled, exacting.
“I’m sorry,” she said abruptly, unhitching her legs and backing away. “I can’t.”
Gordon rubbed his large hands over his face.
“I don’t know what I was thinking.” She hadn’t been thinking. She’d been instinctual, feral, possessed by the music and the shimmering dulcet heat of him. She turned to go back downstairs.
“No,” he said. “Stay here. Take the bed.” He stood and gripped the neck of the guitar, struggling with his own arousal. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t,” she tried to say, but his eyes were hard and treacherous when they met hers.
“I can’t sleep anyway,” he muttered, breezing past her, leaving her alone in his room.
Pitiful and unsettled, Cordelia stretched out across his bed, her muscles eventually releasing to the rub of his sheets, his musk around her. She felt confused and embarrassed by what she’d done. As her eyes drifted closed, his words taunted her—This place changes people.
Her dreams were heavy and full of whispers, the faces of the dead. She saw a woman with thick, dark hair falling to the ground, her body curling in impossible ways. And she saw Morna stroking a pair of ravens on a tree stand, whispering low into their feather-covered ears. She watched Arabella twirl her way through the garden, face lit with a stolen smile. But it was her mother that shook her—young, winding through the trees, palming the rough bark until she stood at the edge of the street, staring at the asphalt like it was a river that could carry her away.
And then her mother was old, walking through a dim parking lot, mind elsewhere as she dug through her purse. The quiet clap of soles on pavement. A shadow emerging from the puddlesof dark. Arms around her mother’s throat, grappling her, both of them writhing, and the ripping sound she would never forget, a patch of limp flesh held high, a garbled, maniacal laugh, and her mother’s earsplitting scream, the kind made with a dying breath.
Cordelia jumped out of Gordon’s bed so fast she toppled over his desk as she hurried to the stairs and barreled down them, fumbling for her jeans on her way to the door.
He rose from the couch, eyes weighty with sleep. “Are you all right? I heard a crash.”
Outside the morning was slate gray, the sun just a promise.
“No.” She reached for the door. “It’s my sister. I heard her scream.”
CHAPTER SIXTEENTHERUNE
CHEAR THAT SCREAMringing in her ears—a ravaged shriek, primitive and wild—as she tore across the property to the big house, chest heaving. As she neared the main house, she could see it was dark inside. The front and vestibule doors were flung open, swaying on their hinges. She entered gingerly, the stair hall black as pitch and uncomfortably quiet.
“Eustace?” she called. The low croak of an old board sounded on the stairs, as if someone had made a wrong step.
Cordelia took careful steps forward. Something slick caused her to slip, but she recovered and inched toward the nearest switch plate, flicking on the light, blinking in the abrupt change.
Her gaze dropped.
It began at the base of the stairs, dragging across the wide hall and into the vestibule, where it finally pulled to an end just before the open door. A harsh,redline, wet and glistening in the lamplight, with a smaller stripe slashing through it at a downward angle like an off-kilter cross.
Near the doorway, the smudge of her own footprint, where she’d stepped into the mark.
Cordelia didn’t know what it meant, but she knew it wasn’t good.
