50. Tempest
TEMPEST
LEV
L ev woke to an almighty crash, followed by ricochets of shattering glass, and a cacophonous squall. Dazed, dusting the cobwebs from his dreams, he reached for Asher. The poor lad would be freezing. The bed was empty.
Lev bolted upright and pulled the string of the bedside lamp, blinking like a nocturnal animal forced into daylight.
A frigid gale wailed across the moor, a sound far from foreign, yet this time it carried an ominous warning.
Fistfuls of hail hurtled at the windows, so loud it was like a firecracker in a kettle. A different storm was coming.
Surely Asher was in the bathroom. He hated high tide on full moon nights when the gravitational pull dragged the ocean even closer to the castle. He wouldn’t have gone far. But Asher wasn’t there. Or in the room next door.
With rising worry, Lev rushed back to their room, dragged the bedside table away from the wall with a groan of wood against wood, and pressed one of the dozens of roses carved into the points of each square of wood paneling. The false wood panel fell into his waiting hand .
Reaching past the bag of photographs, the silver jewelry box, and a handful of spare skeleton keys, Lev pulled out the GPS tracker that paired with the wristwatch he’d made Asher promise to wear.
Asher would disapprove if he knew Lev was tracking him like a pet with a microchip, but he wasn’t meant to know. The last thing Lev wanted was Asher to leave it behind before going off on his own and running afoul of the tide or falling off a cliff, or the multitude of other ways he could die.
The map on the screen wasn’t accurate enough to narrow down his location to a position in a room or floor level, but it had given Lev a good estimate of where he was in the castle. The pin on the map was right on top of the transmitter.
Good. Lev exhaled. Maybe Asher was out in the hall or on his way back from the kitchen.
He plucked a down parka from the back of his closet and slung it on in case Asher was cold when he found him, stepped into his boots, and stopped.
The watch in question, the one Lev had leveraged his father’s death to ensure Asher would wear, rested on top of the eternally boring and niche art history book he’d read before bed.
That obstinate, insolent, beloved lad was going to be in so much trouble when Lev found him. He grabbed a torch from the drawer beside his bed, and hurried out into the hallway.
“Asher!” he roared, words stolen by the storm.
It was even louder in the hall. Fear roared in Lev’s ears at the realization that Asher stood no chance of hearing him. Nor would Lev be able to hear him in turn.
Lev’s hair stood on end. Electricity itched across his skin, and the metallic taste of ozone bloomed on his tongue.
The sky lit up like an atomic bomb, dispatching rainbow shards through the stained glass windows, terrifying and beautiful, as he dove to the ground, flattened his front on the floor, and guarded his head with his hands.
Thunder cracked with an otherworldly, guttural growl that could only have come from the depths of hell. He hadn’t heard the windows explode over the storm, but the blast of glass shrapnel pelting his body was all he needed to know.
Lev leapt to his feet and ran down the hall.
What if Asher had been struck by the lightning?
What if he’d been standing by a window? What if a fallen tree had caved in Asher’s head, or suffocated him with the weight on his chest?
What if Asher was on the moor? What if he’d gotten lost in the fog? What if he was already dead?
Lev took a deep breath. He needed to remain calm. He couldn’t let fear tangle his thoughts. Asher needed him. He chanted their mantra like a spell inside his head.
Only now. Only Asher. Only him.
“ASHER!” Lev called again, straining to listen over the storm.
He ran down the hall toward the staircase. Silas waited at the landing, scowling with hands pressed on his hips, saying something Lev couldn’t hear, punctuating it with a frustrated shake of his head.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Silas yelled, too loud, too clear, unaffected by the storm, almost as if he was coming from inside Lev’s head. Was he?
Intent on charging around Silas, ignoring his advice and existence, Lev took a few steps forward and stopped. What if Silas was more than a monster inside Lev’s head, a monster born from guilt and armed with sharp claws of regret? What if Silas had led Asher somewhere?
Lev spun around. The secret door at the end of the hall was open.
Lev’s suspicion multiplied. Why would Asher have gone down the claustrophobia-inducing secret corridor in the middle of a storm?
He barreled back the way he came, running in slow motion like he was locked in a nightmare, shackled by sleep paralysis, trying to save Asher as he drowned.
The lights flickered, dimmed, and went out. Chills cascaded down Lev’s spine, squinting in the darkness as he charged toward the even darker rectangle of the door, skidding on the scattered glass and nearly slipping on the wet hardwood.
The open door at the other end shunted wind down the hall with the force of a hurricane trapped in a jar. Dust showered down from the rafters with each gust. This wasn’t just a storm. It was the storm of the century, an apocalyptic cataclysm that would have any atheist doubting their convictions.
Wendell had written of Lichenmoor during a storm much like this. Lev had been seven or eight and the storm was too loud for him to sleep. He’d knocked on the secret door connecting his room with the one Wendell stayed in while Mum was sick, and found him writing in bed.
“Let me finish this page,” Wendell had said, then pulled the covers back without stopping his pen.
Consoled by the weight of Wendell’s hand on his head, Lev’s vision had blurred on Wendell’s words as the scratch of pen against paper lulled him to sleep.
Wendell had never published the piece, and Lev could only remember a few paragraphs, incomplete and unsatisfying, like a page torn out of a banned book before it was tossed in a bonfire.
A blood-red harvest moon hung in perigee, and a hornet’s nest of a tempest summoned a beast that slithered over jagged rock and sloping moors, and devoured the land around Lichenmoor, then opened its mouth and unhinged its jaw.
Silence fell over Lichenmoor, but it was nothing more than a false retreat while a monstrous wave crested, crescendoed, then began to fall, crashing into Lichenmoor Hall and feasting on every soul.
Once the ocean was finally sated, it left behind a curse dooming anyone unfortunate enough to die at Lichenmoor to an eternity walking through fog.
Grief washed over Lev like the sea, unexpected and yet inevitable, slamming into his stomach and punching the wind from his lungs, as strong as when Wendell had died.
Lev’s grief wasn’t a spectrum, a road that led from denial to acceptance, a journey some completed in one go while others took a few wrong turns before finding their path.
His grief was a car with no brakes smashing through a barricade at the top of a cliff tumbling into a free fall that never ended.
Sometimes he could almost forget he was falling, but he could never forget what he’d lost to death, and then he’d start back at the top of the cliff, drive straight off, and fall again.
He couldn’t lose Asher in a moment of violence the way he’d lost Silas, or the protracted way cancer had claimed Wendell and his mother. He couldn’t lose Asher. Full stop.
Lev emerged from the passageway and nearly slammed into Silas.
“I wonder where Asher is,” Silas said in a way that had the hair rising on the back of Lev’s neck.
Lev strode toward Silas’s door and unlocked it. Asher wasn’t there. But Silas was.
“You shouldn’t have let him keep the skeleton key,” Silas said, leaning against the statue of himself. “Our little Sherlock simply couldn’t resist.”
“Mine. Not ours.”
Silas wasn’t wrong, though. Lev suspected Asher had stolen the skeleton key when it went missing, but he hadn’t asked Asher about it, or searched for it. Trusting Asher to use it wisely and stay out of the east wing had been a grave error in judgment. Hopefully not a fatal one.
Lev turned on his heel with increasing fear. He needed to hurry downstairs and out into the storm before the tide surged over the seawall.
“Perhaps you should finish carving me below,” Silas called after him with a cackle that scratched at Lev’s ears drums. “Give Asher something nice to look at instead of an old man.”
Lev’s dread mounted. Silas was too smug. What had he done?
“Be sure to confiscate the key when you find him. If you find him.” Silas blocked the top of the corkscrew staircase that wound around the outside of the tower on the precipice of the cliff, the quickest shortcut to the ground.
“Move,” Lev growled.
“But what if he’s not down there, Levvy? What if I killed him with a candlestick in the attic?”
“If you had something to do with this… If you’ve hurt him?—”
Silas snorted. “You can’t even vanquish me from your thoughts, let alone punish me for whatever I have or haven’t done. Not to mention, I have an eternity to wait for you to hurt him all by yourself.”
“Tell me where he is or get out of my way.”
When Silas didn’t move from the first step, Lev pushed past him—and slammed his shoulder into something hard. Silas teetered on his heels. His powder blue eyes flew wide, his mouth a perfect ‘O’ of shock.
“What the fuck?” Lev reached a shaking hand out and recoiled when it didn’t sink through the dead man’s sternum, and instead met resistance. A shiver scuttled across his body.
“What the fuck, indeed,” Silas said with a sinister grin.