Haunted, page 8
“Looks deserted,” David commented, gesturing toward the bare boards of the old farmhouse, the weather having stripped whatever color paint from it long ago.
Ariel would argue with him, but she couldn’t explain that the place was far from deserted. Spirits remained. She had yet to see them, but the mist and light assured her of their presence. Maybe this was where her mother’s life had ended.
“There’s a car parked by the barn. It looks like it runs. Someone must be here,” David observed, as he turned off the engine. He turned toward her, his brown eyes bright with excitement.
She wished she could summon some excitement, too, but she’d finally heeded his earlier cautions not to get her hopes up. If only spirits lived here, they wouldn’t be able to help her. She wouldn’t hear what they tried to tell her.
When David exited the car, she didn’t wait for him to open her door as he always did. She threw it open and climbed out, her legs tingling from the long ride. Then she glanced toward the house again.
A shadow emerged from under the sagging roof. A dark-haired woman with large, dark eyes stared out at her. Ariel started, for a moment thinking it was again the vision of her mother. But, no, this woman was older, her features a little rougher. One of Ariel’s aunts.
David took her hand. “Let’s go knock, see if anyone’s home,” he said, looking straight at the house, at the woman on the porch. But he didn’t see her. Ariel realized she wasn’t real. Not anymore.
Ariel’s breath shuddered out.
“Nervous?” David asked. “Don’t worry. I’m here. I’m with you.”
And so was someone else…in spirit. Was the body here, too? She didn’t have to wait long to find out. As they walked across the porch, the front door creaked open. Even in the dim interior lighting, Ariel glimpsed the dangling legs.
David gasped. “Oh, my God!”
He rushed forward, shouldering open the door the rest of the way as he reached toward the woman. But Ariel caught his arm, her fingers clutching at his sleeve.
“No, it’s too late.” Even without seeing the woman’s blank stare from a stiff face drained of color, Ariel would have known she was already dead. Her ghost hovered near her body, her mouth open as she tried to communicate. But Ariel would never know what the woman might have been able to tell her about her mother or her sisters.
“Oh, my God,” David said again, staring up at the corpse. “Ariel, are you all right?”
No. Fear pressed hard against her heart, slowing its beat. As David had warned her earlier, this had turned out to be a dead end. For this poor woman.
And for Ariel.
Chapter 5
Ariel leaned against the porch railing, testing the rotted wood as she watched the van back down the driveway toward the gravel road. David searched for a cell signal. Thinking Armaya might not have a satellite, he’d wanted her to go with him to find the police station. But she’d pleaded the need for air so she could stay behind.
She’d promised she wouldn’t leave the porch. But as soon as the dust kicked up from behind the van’s tires, she pushed open the door to the house and slipped around the woman’s dangling body. Maybe Ariel was more like her mother than she thought, because with each lie she told, the next one came more easily.
But she’d come to Armaya to look for information that would help locate her sisters; she wasn’t going to leave without at least trying. Better to search the house with David gone. He wouldn’t understand how finding this woman dead increased her urgency instead of distracting her from her goal, not unless she told him everything—and she wasn’t ready to do that yet.
She glanced up at the body hanging from one of the open rafters in the old country kitchen. From her approximate age and Gypsy appearance, the woman was likely her aunt, probably an older sister to her mother. Her ghost hadn’t sought out Ariel. Ariel had had to come to her. Why? Was there something in the house that would lead her to her mother’s body, or her sisters?
She wished she had remembered the town before, when she was eighteen and desperate to find her family. But she’d been so scared that they wouldn’t want to see her she’d probably mentally blocked out the name of the town then. She’d only remembered now because she thought her sisters were in danger.
As she headed toward the back of the house, worn pine floorboards creaking beneath her feet, she glanced over her shoulder at the body again. She was certain her sisters were in danger.
Smoke poured into the low-ceilinged hall and orange light glimmered from under the door of a room at the end. Hand trembling, Ariel turned the knob and let herself inside. Dust motes danced on the afternoon sunshine streaking through a dirty window, and the scent of sandalwood and lavender hung heavily in the air. “Mama?”
Even though she couldn’t hear her, her mother’s ghost might still lead her to what Ariel needed. But someone had beaten her to the back room. Drawers stood open, pulled from a desk in a corner of the room. Boxes had been overturned, the contents spilled across the scarred wood floor.
Ariel dropped to her knees and delved trembling hands into the papers, desperate to find anything that might help locate her sisters. But there was nothing left to be found. Had he found where they were?
The barest brush against her shoulder startled her. But when she whirled around, no one stood behind her. The smoke thickened, then her mother appeared, her ghost glowing as if afire, her eyes wide with pain and fear. Her mouth moving.
“I can’t hear you, Mama,” Ariel said as she blinked back tears. Her ability to see ghosts couldn’t help her. Her mother couldn’t help her. Only Ariel could help Ariel. She glanced down at a small square of glossy cardboard on the floor. A postcard. She picked it up and flipped it over. Across the back was scrawled a message, something innocuous. The words didn’t matter; the symbols below her mother’s signature did. A moon, a star and a sun.
The charms.
She reached for the pewter sun dangling against her wrist, rubbing the warm metal between her fingertips. “It’s supposed to keep me safe,” she remembered. “God, I hope Elena and Irina still have theirs.”
But would the little charms be enough to protect them from a killer? Staring into her mother’s terrified face, she doubted it. Then Mama’s ghost pointed toward the card, so Ariel glanced down at it again, noticing the circle drawn around those symbols.
Did they need to be together, all three charms, to protect them?
“I’ll find them,” she promised Mama as she slipped the postcard into her pocket.
Sirens wailed in the distance, and outside the single-paned window, tires crunched over gravel. The black van cast a shadow into the room as the smoke and light receded. Despite David’s return, she felt alone. Vulnerable. She needed her sisters, not just to keep them alive but to stay alive herself.
“Turn in here,” Ariel said, reaching over to grasp David’s arm, her trembling fingers clutching at his leather sleeve.
He obliged, steering the van through the opening in the cobblestone wall surrounding Armaya Cemetery. “What do you want in here?”
Not more ghosts. She already saw too many of them. She was hoping instead to find answers. “I need to see my family plot, David.” Her breath caught, then escaped in a ragged sigh. “I need to see if my mother’s…”
Buried.
He shut off the ignition and clasped his hand over hers. “She’s not dead, Ariel. When I used the laptop back at the car park, I looked for a death certificate for her. There wasn’t one. Unless she got married and changed her name.”
Irony tugged Ariel’s lips into a smile. “Oh, I doubt my mother ever got married.” Since she hadn’t wed any of the fathers of her children, she wasn’t likely to have ever become a bride. And now she would never have the chance. Ariel’s mouth pulled down, and she bit her bottom lip to still its faint tremble.
“You haven’t seen her in a long time,” David said.
But he was wrong. Ariel saw her now, in the smoke and the orange light that glowed through the thick branches of the oak under which the woman hovered.
“From what the sheriff’s deputy said, no one’s seen your mother in Armaya in a long time,” David continued. “She’s not here, Ariel.”
Wrong again. Just as the deputy had been wrong when he’d said her aunt’s death was most likely a suicide. Ariel hadn’t corrected him, knowing that without proof the deputy and David would have thought her crazy. They didn’t realize hanging was one way witches had been killed. Hanged. Burned at the stake.
Fear chilled her, raising goose bumps on her skin and lifting the fine hair on her nape. She knew what it all meant. Someone had started the witch hunt again.
“Ariel, are you all right?”
She only nodded, not trusting herself to speak. When his arms closed around her, she pressed her cheek against his chest, where his heart beat sure and steady. But she didn’t want to use David, as her mother had used rich men, to keep her safe. Ariel was stronger than that; she was stronger than her mother had been. And when she found her sisters and their charms, she would be even stronger.
“I’m fine,” she assured him, pulling from his embrace.
David stared at her for a moment, as if gauging her truthfulness, before he started the van back up.
“Maybe we should talk to the caretaker,” he said, slowing to a stop just inside the cobblestone wall, “and make arrangements for your aunt.”
“Like you did for Haylee.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. “How’d you find that out?”
His generosity—and his desire to keep it anonymous, was what had first attracted Ariel to David. That and his golden hair and deep brown eyes. Her heart fluttered a bit, lighter than it had been since they’d found her aunt.
“Margaret told me,” she admitted.
“The social worker? You’ve seen her?”
Ariel narrowed her eyes, studying his profile. Was he really surprised or feigning it so that she wouldn’t suspect it had been his van in the parking garage the day she’d gone to Margaret’s office? Mistrust pressed against her heart, weighing it down again.
“I talked to her,” she said. “Tried to get her to give me information that would help me find my sisters.”
“She wouldn’t help?”
Ariel shook her head. “She couldn’t, not without risking her job. I shouldn’t have asked.”
“Not her, Ariel. You should have asked me. I can help you. I can pull up all kinds of stuff on the computer.” She suspected he was talking about more than Internet search engines. Some of the news articles about him that he hated so much claimed that he’d been quite the hacker when he was younger, that even now the FBI and CIA often sought his advice. He’d denied the claims as exaggeration, but she didn’t doubt his expertise. Her heart sinking even more, she realized it was only a matter of time before he learned everything about her.
She knew he hadn’t checked her out as Margaret had suspected, or she wouldn’t be wearing his ring. Why hadn’t he? Guilt churned in her stomach when she realized it was because he trusted her.
She couldn’t worry herself now. Finding her sisters was more important. “You can get into sealed adoption records?”
His broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “I can try.”
He would break laws for her, and she couldn’t even be completely honest with him. “David…”
“What, honey?”
“Thank you.” She couldn’t say anything more. “Don’t worry about the arrangements, though. The deputy said someone would take care of things for Marie Cooper.” The woman who’d been hanged.
“But he wouldn’t tell you who.”
Because he hadn’t completely believed her. He didn’t remember Myra Cooper having children; of course she’d been young when she’d left Armaya. He might have told David about any next of kin Marie had if David had asked, but he’d been curiously withdrawn back at the farmhouse. Ariel pushed aside her frustration. She’d find out if there were any other Coopers left in Armaya when she attended her aunt’s funeral.
“Do you want to stop in town?” David asked as he steered the van down the cobblestone street running through the little village of Armaya.
Ariel considered it. But she suspected the townspeople might be less open with her than the deputy had been. Or worse, they might be more open, telling things to David that she needed to tell him herself.
She would do that. Soon. Then she would come back to Armaya. Alone.
He couldn’t breathe again. The smoke was too thick, surrounding him. His eyes burned, nearly blinding him. But still he could see them with the hoods covering their hair and most of their faces except for their smiling mouths, their lips red and rounded as they laughed. At him.
This was no dream. He was wide-awake, sitting at his desk, the glowing banker’s lamp dispelling the darkness of the room but not of that inside his soul. The vision taunted him, forever teasing at his consciousness, warning him of what was to come if he took no action, what still might come even though he had.
He’d killed two women but only one witch. With her death, by fire, her memories had become his, living as vividly in his mind as his own. He’d seen her visions. The same had happened for his ancestor, the man whose handwritten words called from the open pages of the journal, reminding him of his purpose.
The second woman had sworn she had no special abilities, that not all Durikken women were witches. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t run like her sister—because she’d thought she was safe. But he hadn’t believed her…until he’d hanged her. Then, instead of feeling more powerful, he’d felt less. He wasn’t a killer, just taking lives for sport. He had a mission, as he’d told those he recruited, those over whom he had power. He could make them do whatever he wanted. He could probably make them do the killing if there came a time when he couldn’t.
A flash of pride in his brilliance warmed the coldness of his heart. He’d formed an alliance to combat witchcraft. He had found others who abhorred it, who’d been bilked by fortunetellers or psychics and wanted revenge. He’d manipulated them to take up his agenda as theirs.
Despite what the doctors told him, he was getting stronger. Not weaker. But in his head, the women’s laughter echoed. He might have power over his followers but not over them, not the witches. He wouldn’t have power over them until they were all dead and he had the charms back where they belonged.
In his possession.
Ariel jerked awake, blinking to clear the mist from her vision. But it remained, thick like smoke and scented with sandalwood and lavender instead of burning wood.
“Mama…”
She squinted against the orange glow but could make out no image of her mother. Still, she knew she was there or somewhere close. “I will find my sisters,” she vowed again.
Since she hadn’t seen them yet, they had to be alive. Didn’t they? If Ariel could see the ghosts of strangers, certainly she’d see her sisters once they passed. Yet for the strangers, she happened upon them at hospitals or cemeteries. They didn’t seek her out. After all these years, her sisters were strangers to her. Since they hadn’t sought her while they were alive, why would they after death?
As the light faded, she opened her eyes wider. She lay in the middle of a king-size bed with a black leather headboard and black satin sheets. A chandelier hung above her, glittering in the faint light seeping beneath the door from the hall. Ariel flung back the sheets, finding herself fully clothed in her jeans and long-sleeved peasant blouse. Her sweater lay over a chair beside the bed.
David’s bed. She’d only ever lain in it naked and never alone. Face flushing at hot memories, she reached up to brush her tangled hair back from her face, wincing as something sharp scraped her cheek. Glancing down, she saw that the diamond ring had twisted on her finger. A droplet of blood clung to the sharp stone before falling into her palm. Her blood, the sight of which usually made her woozy. Maybe because it always felt prophetic…that her blood would be shed someday.
Even though she’d occasionally tried to convince herself that the curse was a fairy tale, she’d never really accepted her own assurances. All she’d had to do was see the mist, the light and someone’s ghost and she’d known that her mother had spoken the truth.
Too anxious to be woozy, she wiped the blood on her jeans and opened the door to the hall. Along the sides of an Oriental runner, polished mahogany flooring gleamed in the light cast by several mini chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling. Ariel never felt entirely comfortable in David’s penthouse due to its size and elegance; it was more showplace than home. Today she was even more uneasy, like someone locked in a museum after closing. Her footsteps echoed eerily in the cavernous space. She felt too alone, too vulnerable.
Mist swirled down the wide corridor, then thickened to smoke. “Mama?” she whispered, but no ghost appeared. Was she losing her ability somehow?
When she was younger, when foster families had rejected her over her curse, she’d hated it and tried to no avail to blind herself to the light and the mist. But without her ability, she was denying who she was. Maybe not being a witch would save her life, but what kind of life would it be if she couldn’t do what she’d always done? If she lost such an important part of her identity?
As much as it sometimes overwhelmed her, the way it had when she’d first seen Haylee’s ghost and her mother’s, she couldn’t imagine being without it. She couldn’t imagine losing that connection to another world. And after the weeks she’d been away, she couldn’t imagine her life without David. She called out his name, her voice echoing. “David? Where are you?”
She poked her head into open doors, finding only empty guest rooms. He was probably downstairs, either in the living room or the offices of his business. He also had a study somewhere on this floor. She kept checking rooms until she came to a closed door. Her fingers gripped the knob, turning it. The door rattled in the jamb but didn’t open. “David?” She rapped her knuckles against the mahogany two-panel door. “David?”
