The stillness of death.
Cal felt that stillness thickening the air, forming a weight between his shoulder blades that made it effortful to breathe. He had planned to work in his bedroom but the library seemedlike a good idea, after all. Like a shadow, he slipped through the house unseen, his feet following a silent path over the old and squeaky floorboards. He even startled one of the maids, who took one look at him and fled. What had she seen in his face to make her run?
Whatever it was, Nadine saw it, too.
Argentum changed people. The history here was oppressive; people could feel the weight of it just the same as if it were a millstone dangling from their necks. That history was marked in the ancient trees that clustered around the town like pagans converging on an ancient ritual, and it was in the silent lake that gleamed like a mirror from his bedroom window. It was even in the ghost pipes that sprouted from the ground, streaked with the rusty color of old blood.
Ravensgate had been carved out of the forest itself and sometimes Cal imagined that it was the house looking out at him from the glassy eyes of his family’s various kills, as if each orb was a window into something liminal and chthonic.
Cal shut himself up in the library and phoned his most recent client, who was just as pleasant as his initial email suggested he would be, which was not at all. He allowed a bit of his real self to bleed through his ruthlessly cultivated façade, the deep echo of his voice sounding loud and overly distorted in the small, enclosed space.
Other voices layered beneath his own in shallow ripples. At first he thought it a curious effect of the architecture, but Ravensgate was built of old lumber and the solid wood absorbed most sounds. But Cal had yet to meet a tree durable enough to take on Odessa Cullraven at maximum volume.
He muted the phone and flung open the office door and was greeted immediately by the sight of his smirking older sister and a rather terrified-looking Nadine.
“—they liked to pretend married couples didn’t ever fuck,” she concluded, looking up at him with a feigned and unbothered innocence. “Oh,hi, Baby Cal. Are you fighting with your clients again, or is that sourpuss look for me?”
“What is she doing here?”
“Jessica kicked her out of her AirBnB. Isn’t that rude?” His sister shot him a wicked, knowing look. “Apparently she didn’t want a Cullraven under her roof. Probably afraid she’d get her eyes pecked out.”
Nadine looked between them nervously. “She said she double-booked.”
“I see.” Cal felt a flicker of amusement as he remembered the threatening email Jessica had sent him in response to his list of code violations. Self-preservation was a very useful tool.
“Isn’t she a liar?” Odessa’s eyes glinted like a crow’s. “I’m pretty sure that lying isn’t Christian. I should join that stupid little bible study group of theirs just so I can tell them that. In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a quote in their book about that. They have quotes for everything. It’s like Pinterest for sanctimonious people.”
Noelle hadn’t been religious but it occurred to Cal that her uptight little sister might be. She wore a necklace around her delicate throat but he was fairly certain it wasn’t a cross.
“Proverbs 12:22,” he said, and Nadine’s eyes snapped to his. “The Lord detests lying lips, but delights in people who are trustworthy.”
“Ooh, I like that,” Odessa said. “Lying lips. Doesn’t that sound sexy, Nadine? I knew there was a reason people spend so much time on their knees in church.”
Her gloating should have annoyed him but he was distracted momentarily by the thought of Nadine on her knees. “You two need to leave,” he said. “I’m about to have a meeting with a client. If you insist on discussing fellation and blasphemy, you’ll have to do it elsewhere.”
“Yes,Daddy.” She flashed a conspiratorial grin at Nadine. “Baby Cal became a real stiff in law school. He used to be quite the jock, but then they brain-washed him at his fancy little Ivy League and now he just acts cross and makes stupid money by yelling at people all day.”
“Stop fucking with me or you’ll be next,” he warned. “And don’t ever call me Daddy again.”
“What about Nadine?” Her grin was feral, cat-like. “Canshecall you Daddy?”
Cal slammed the door on her, just missing her snub nose. But not before he noticed the rather interesting expression on Nadine’s face.
Not disgust—panic. Like she’d been caught out.
His sister’s voice picked up again, muted by the wood; it was floating away in the opposite direction, punctuated by the creak of the floorboards. That would have been Nadine. The boards creaked on purpose, like nightingale floors. The original Caledon was a hunter through and through, and had designed his house so that no one but him and those he favored could slink around undetected.
There were stories of how he had used to hunt his staff through the many halls and back corridors in what his father referred to wistfully as “the glory days.” Back when families werequietly paid off for their trouble, he meant, and it was an easier task to make people disappear.
Cal unmuted his client and listened to the man’s outrageous demands as he mentally tracked Nadine’s progress through the house, trying to figure out which room they had placed her in. If the lack of interest in his voice was obvious to him, his client was probably picking up on it as well. Maybe that was why he chose to linger as long as he did, asking the same questions repeatedly. They could sense when they weren’t wanted.
His mind drifted again—towards the house and its many dangers, hidden and not. As long as Nadine stayed with Odessa, she would be safe enough, but Odessa was nobody’s guardian and Ben saw her presence here as a challenge to his authority. It would be more difficult for her to nose around undetected, but he still needed to keep an eye on her, and setting her free amongst the townsfolk might still be worse.
As soon as he ended the call with his client, Cal slipped on his shoes and left the office.
The air was cooler in the main part of the library, but humid. It was causing the blue flocked wallpaper to peel, tinged with that sweet molder of old paint and rotting wood. Ravensgate was poorly insulated and full of long back corridors.
The rot, like the past, always came back.
