37. Premonitions in Reverse
PREMONITIONS IN REVERSE
ASHER
A sher wanted to ride off into the sunset, or at least far enough away from Lev’s pitying sideways glances. He didn’t regret confiding in Lev. Not exactly.
Talking to Lev had reopened old wounds, but it had healed some of them too. He’d forgotten how hard he was on himself until Lev had challenged him the way the men in his support group used to.
Asher couldn’t trust his own interpretation of events. Ben had taught him that his instincts and emotions weren’t to be trusted. The impulse to gaslight himself was still so ingrained.
What if Asher was wrong? What if Lev spoke to Ben and sided with him? What if Lev had lost all respect for him?
Rebecca nudged him with her nose. She’d been a breeze to bridle and demurely accepted the bit, gentle with her teeth.
Asher scratched between her ears. “You’re a very good girl, Rebecca.”
Lev pushed the sleeves of his shirt back to his elbows, baring freckled forearms, dashed with shimmering scars, including Silas’s fingernail marks.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to ride without the phallic handle you cowboys love to hang on to? What’s it called again?”
“A horn.”
“Really? What a missed opportunity.” Worry weathered Lev’s face. “I can’t help but fret. What if you fall?”
“Fret all you want, but it’s a waste of gray hairs. I can ride, with or without a phallic handle.”
“You could always ride with me. Dorian would love the challenge.”
“Climbing onto Dorian with you sounds much more dangerous than riding bareback. How often do you even ride him?”
“Ordinarily, I ride him every day. A local lad mucks the stables and rides him on the days I can’t.” Lev lowered the saddle onto Dorian’s back. “You’re only delaying this further,” Lev chided in a sing-song voice. “He’s quite agreeable after he’s stretched his legs.”
“ Sure. ”
Lev laughed. The muscles in his forearms flexed as he adjusted the stirrups.
“Do you want help?” Asher asked.
“Thank you, but it’s best if you stay out of nipping range. Take Rebecca. I’ll be right out.”
Dorian whinnied and tossed his head, dragging his front hoof against the brick. “Dorian, please be quiet.”
Outside, melting frost steamed from the grass where sunbeams touched. The sheep dog barked a low, gruff. A sheep bleated. Asher hoisted himself onto Rebecca and waited… for approximately three seconds.
Something clattered behind them—maybe rake or broom—and Rebecca bolted across the field, leaving Asher’s stomach back at the stables.
Rebecca wasn’t the first runaway horse he’d ridden. She’d startled him, more than scared him, and keeping a calm head was the best way to calm a spooked horse .
“Whoa.” He pulled back on the reins.
She didn’t stop or slow, or seem to notice him at all.
His second attempt to correct her was equally unsuccessful. He cycled through every trick he knew, but Rebecca was insistent, almost as if she were under a spell, or possessed.
Rebecca leapt over the clear water of a brook frolicking downhill and headed to the forest.
Asher looked over his shoulder. Lev was still inside the stables. Fuck. Dorian’s whinnies carried across the field. Yelling for Lev wasn’t worth the risk of upsetting Rebecca further.
She’d tire out eventually, and hopefully she’d take the blame in some nonverbal way when they returned. After Lev’s fear wore off, he’d be furious.
The forest was too dense for her to venture into, but Rebecca hadn’t slowed. As soon as Asher feared she’d slam into a tree trunk, she squeezed through a gap in the forest onto a leaf-lined path.
Rebecca slowed from a gallop to a canter. Otherwise, she continued to ignore Asher’s attempts to control her speed or direction.
Old-growth trees towered overhead, some already bare, others evergreen. Autumn leaves clung to the understory, setting the forest ablaze. Dewdrops dripped on leaves like the phantom tapping of an impatient finger.
The back of Asher’s neck tingled. Was someone there? He whipped his head toward a figure in his peripheral vision, but it was just another statue pointing toward a wide stream and a stone bridge.
Rebecca’s hooves thundered over a bridge that looked like it hadn’t been assessed for safety in at least two-hundred years. They made it to the other side without it collapsing, and Rebecca picked up speed.
The trees grew closer together, darkening the daylight. Branches snatched at his shoulders and narrowly missed his head. Folding forward over her, Asher hid his face against her neck, and hoped for the best.
The forest abruptly ended at a small clearing basking in sunlight, and Rebecca slowed to a graceful stop.
“What was that all about?” Asher asked, breathing fast.
He hopped down and secured her to an iron gatepost before she took off again, then checked her over. Her ears canted toward him, eyes serene, completely at ease.
“What happened?”
He stroked between her ears and hugged her neck.
“I’ll be right back. Stay here.”
He should have led her straight back to the stable. Lev was probably searching for him by now, but what if… It was stupid. He knew it was stupid.
But what if Rebecca had led him here? What was the harm in taking a quick look?
Statues assembled in an overgrown field—a gargoyle crouched on a pillar, a woman cloaked with leafless vines, an angel with most of his feathers broken off.
The grass was so tall he hadn’t noticed the gravestones at first. Moss covered many of the tombstones, and time had smoothed down the etchings. The tombstones he could read dated back to the eighteen hundreds with names like Mary and John and Margaret.
An angelic statue guarded what had to be a mausoleum, wings folded against her back, the train of her long dress cascading down the steps. Ferns grew in the corners where dirt had gathered, tendrils clutching at the angel like fingers.
A small brass dragon, flaked with turquoise corrosion, served as the bolt of a lock. Asher pulled it to the right, freeing the dragon’s head and neck from the latch. The door opened inward, pushed by a gust of wind.
His footsteps echoed on the polished marble floors, emanating cold.
The crypt was much smaller on the inside.
White limestone lined the walls, a sharp contrast from the dreary gray exterior.
Rainbow light poured through stained glass windows, and walnut beams carved with rose vines arched over the cathedral ceiling.
There were less than twenty crypts, death dates ascending up the wall, as if the Marks family added a new row of crypts when the row below ran out of room.
He found Lev’s mother first.
The next hallowed space belonged to Wendell.
Silas came last.
The epitaph read like a spell, like magic existed, at least at Lichenmoor. Was that why Silas felt too alive to be dead? Would he die a second time when Lev was no longer there to remember him?
Maybe that’s what magic was. What were memories if not premonitions in reverse? Shimmering visions, phantom emotions, ghosts of words already spoken.
He traced his fingers along the path of Silas’s engraved name, the sharp letters and edges in the block script. “Who are you?”
A desiccated wildflower bouquet rested on top of Silas’s crypt, petals disintegrating beneath his touch. Had Lev left them for Silas?
The idea of Lev tending Silas’s grave filled Asher with a strange sort of romantic loneliness, a mix of sympathy for Lev’s solitary grieving, and longing to be loved with such intensity.
“What happened to you?” Asher whispered to Silas’s crypt.
“Blakely!”
Asher gasped and whirled around, so stunned he swept Silas’s flowers to the ground. Leaves blustered around Lev’s boots and slipped between his ankles as he stood in the doorway. His freckled cheeks were ruddy—with cold, or anger?
“I’m sorry.” Asher bent to scoop up the scattered wildflower stems.
“Sod the flowers.” Lev grabbed Asher’s arm and helped him back to standing, then released him.
“What on earth are you doing here? You said you would wait for me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. Rebecca bolted, and I couldn’t stop her. She took me here, and then I saw this building.”
“Forgive me if I’m being obtuse, but what grown adult blames his horse for the direction he’s led?”
Asher deposited the mess of a bouquet back on Silas’s burial chamber. “I’m serious.”
Lev lifted his hand. “The question was rhetorical.”
“ Great . Let me guess. You came up with a whole lecture while you were looking for me, and now I have to listen to it.”
“You can’t go off on your own. You have no internal compass. Don’t you understand? It’s not safe.”
Lev scrubbed a hand over the sharp scruff of his beard. Asher’s neck and ass tingled with the memory of Lev roughing up his skin with those bristles.
“What if you got lost and I never found you?”
“Is that what happened to Silas?”
Lev shoved his hair back from his brow and shook his head. “This isn’t about him. You can’t go mucking about wherever you fancy, trouncing through my family graveyard, crawling over Lichenmoor like a rodent.”
“A rodent?”
“It’s a simile.”
“Don’t talk like a discontinued dictionary.”
“It’s the correct term. Metaphors are entirely different.”
Asher rolled his eyes. “Look, I know I shouldn’t have helped myself inside here, and I’m sorry I scared you. It’s just…”
How could Asher explain the way he’d felt steered toward the forbidden hallway before, the mausoleum now? It was almost like Lichenmoor’s mysteries kept reaching out toward him, curling a finger, drawing him nearer.
“Do you ever feel like there’s something else here?” Asher asked.
Lev stilled. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s stupid.” He shouldn’t have brought it up.
“I doubt you’ve ever had a stupid thought in that gorgeous head of yours.”
Asher exhaled. If Lev was flirting, he wasn’t too upset with him.
“The night you found me in front of the locked door, I felt like the house had herded me toward it. Then, when I tried to leave Lichenmoor, the tide chased me back to the castle. Then today, Rebecca just took off, and wouldn’t stop, not until she reached this clearing. ”
The wind gusted. A branch scratched against a window over the row of crypts.
Lev said nothing. He’d gone still, like he was listening to something far away.
“The first night we met, you said all the blood that fed the gorse and thistle took root and grew magic…”
“I never said it as poetically as that. I was trying to be mysterious, just passing along folklore and superstitions.”
“I told you the truth about Ben…”
Lev sighed. “Oh, alright. I admit that I’ve felt something similar. Have you seen anything though, or heard someone speak?”
“No. Nothing like that. Have you?”
Lev regarded him with blue eyes, dark and troubled. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“You said you were forty-eight percent sure they were real.”
“Which means I mostly don’t believe in ghosts. Now that we’ve settled the matter, let’s?—”
The wind shook the trees and shoved open the door with so much force it slammed against the wall. Silas’s flowers took flight, fluttering like feathers drifting on an air current.
Asher bent to pick them up.
“Leave them,” Lev said.
It felt disrespectful to leave the flowers on the floor like litter.
“Leave them!” Lev shouted over the wind. “His body isn’t there.”