Chapter Twenty
CHAPTER
Twenty
Following a day of uneasy quiet, everyone seemingly too apprehensive to speak on what just transpired the night before, Terence insisted that he stay in the cellar as evening began to fall upon the Drowning House.
As much as Jane wished to plead with him to stay with her upstairs and to join her in her hopes that she, somehow, slain the beast, banished Claunek, and freed him of whatever curse that had been put upon him, she let him go down to the cellar with a heavy heart and bated breath.
She then went up to the washroom, locking it behind her.
Instead of going to bed, Jane huddled herself in the tub stuffed with quilts and a throw pillow.
She hugged her knees to her chest and held her breath as she waited.
She listened for any sort of screams or roars or the clanking of chains.
But as none of those came, the creeping silence made her afraid.
Perhaps something worse had come to happen.
What if Claunek had clawed its way up from Hell to possess Terence itself? Would it find a way to turn perhaps a Wolf’s Run villager into another one of its beasts to hunt them down out of revenge?
She shuddered and resisted the urge to vomit. She’d lost the knife in the marsh, and the Winchester, likely now clogged with mud, still rested in the stone angel’s arms. She’d no defenses left.
A week ago, Jane wouldn’t ever have entertained the idea of such a thing happening, for demons weren’t real to her and subjects of the occult were merely party tricks.
She firmly believed in science, not magic!
But now, the idea made her feel sick. Magic, in some form, did exist. And she would be content if she never even heard a murmuring of it ever again.
She didn’t know how much time passed before the silence became unbearable and she hauled herself from the tub.
She tiptoed down the stairs, each step as tentative as the last; she feared that a sound as simple as a creaking floorboard could trigger some sort of horrific event.
But as she reached the bottom of the steps, she paused to listen, and, upon hearing no disconcerting sounds nor encountering any beast or demon, she hesitantly released a breath through her lips.
But when she stepped into the sitting room and saw Terence looming at the windows, she practically leaped out of her skin with a yelp. Her cry startled him as well and he whirled around to meet her.
He stared at her with that dazed expression again, as if he were looking upon a dream rather than something of flesh and blood.
He wore only a robe, the front of which opened to expose a triangle of bare chest and the pink slant of his throat’s scar.
His hair came to possess some semblance of grooming, his face clean, his form silhouetted by a hazy silver light filtering in through the windows.
Shadows deepened the hollows of his face, his cheeks, his eyes, and starlight highlighted the silver at his temples.
Jane couldn’t help but find the scene utterly attractive, nearly romantic, in its own sort of way—though she couldn’t decide if it was because of how… lasciviously he was dressed or if it was the fact she was seeing him standing here rather than a beast ready to pounce on her to tear her to shreds.
His mouth nearly toyed into a smile, eyes glittering briefly, but then a worried pinch creased their corners as his lips fell slack.
“What time of day is it, Jane?” He whispered, hoarse. “Is it still nighttime?”
“Yes,” she said. “Shouldn’t be any later than nine, I reckon.”
Too eagerly, she joined him by the open window. A gust of cool air—as well as her own nerves and selfish cravings—pressed her against him.
The sky was utterly clear. No clouds, no rain. Jane wanted to cry.
Stars speckled the velvet dark that caressed a low-hanging crescent moon, beaming down at them with a gentle smile. The smell of rain permeated the room, and Jane’s nose scrunched slightly when she could still smell the acrid stank of the beast’s discarded pelt.
“Stars, Jane…” she jumped when his breath disturbed the hair beside her ear.
When she looked up at him, she saw him staring into the night sky, eyes twinkling with tears—starlight of their own.
When one of those tears slipped down his cheek, she reached up to catch it with her fingertip.
“I’ve never seen stars before… Have they always been this wonderful? ”
Jane didn’t look at the stars. She had seen them all her life, and no longer did they hold whimsy for her.
Instead, she was captivated by his wonder, enthralled by a man denied a pleasure as simple as looking into the night sky, and her pride coaxed her to smile.
It was a sad, soft grin, but a smile nonetheless.
She was the one who had given him the stars and the moon.
She sighed and rested her head against his shoulder as she looked out the window, deep into the marsh’s still waters reflecting the moonlight. She wondered if the beast lavished under such moonlight, so that Terence could have tasted some kind of nightly beauty in some way.
“No,” she said at last.
She turned to cup his face. His eyes—his blessed, human eyes—continued their glittering as her thumbs ran the lengths of his cheeks. A gentle sigh rushed from his nose as he closed those eyes and pressed into her touch.
Such a good boy…
She craned her neck to kiss his human mouth where she whispered against human skin, “They’ve only become wonderful since you’ve looked at them.”