Chapter Twenty-Eight
EDWARD AND ELIZABETH STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HEADSTONES, waiting for they knew not what. “Stay close,” he cautioned.
“Absolutely.” Elizabeth turned slowly in a circle, scanning for a possible attack. “When do you suppose …?”
“Any moment now,” he whispered.
Almost as if the earth heard them, the ground beneath their feet began to vibrate so violently they barely could maintain their balance, and they jumped to safety.
“They want out,” the colonel gasped as he caught Elizabeth before she fell.
Shrieks of pain, schismatic shouts of resentment, eerie howls of anguish begging to be set free rang from the earth.
“So it begins,” he murmured. “One at a time, Elizabeth,” Edward warned as he reached for a white thorn stave, seesawing on the nearest mound.
They stepped back as a deliciously beautiful young maid, dressed innocently in a white gown, rose from the mist seeping from the center of a grave.
Her features became more defined as the breeze lifted the vapor until she floated alluringly only inches from the ground.
She smiled seductively at Edward and rolled her shoulder, permitting the bodice of her dress to sag, exposing the curve of her breast. “Do you desire company, Sir?” she purred.
The colonel simply nodded and gestured for the spirit to lead the way. He followed her at a healthy distance. Behind him, the shrill drone continued. Meanwhile, Elizabeth paralleled his movement on the other side of the markers.
When the girl reached the back of the site, she paused, swaying to a silent tune.
“Is something amiss?” Edward asked behind her.
The girl did not turn, but she spoke. “Someone blocks my way.” Sadness laced her voice.
Edward expected her attack. “I do.”
“Why?” A man’s deep voice boomed, but it was the girl who threw her head back in frustration.
Elizabeth jumped with the verbal explosion, but the colonel simply waited. Within a split second, she was on him, pushing Edward back with a savage force. Her jaw snapped as she lunged for his throat, but he sent the girl flying through the air and crashing against the side of a mausoleum.
Immediately, she attacked again, climbing on his back while clawing at his arms. Edward struggled to throw her off. Thankfully, Elizabeth appeared. She scooped a handful of millet from that placed about the graveyard and unceremoniously threw it in the girl’s face.
Instantaneously, the girl released her hold and dropped to the ground on all fours. Using her fingertips, she began to separate the seeds, lining them up and organizing the grain in structured piles.
Meanwhile, Edward staggered to his feet, only to see the girl’s spirit groveling in the dirt.
Elizabeth appeared as stunned as he. “What do we do?”
“Put her to rest forever.” Reverently, he bent over the girl and plunged the sword deep within her, aiming for her heart. The vapor rose from the wound, and the girl’s shape disintegrated into the night air.
Elizabeth’s mouth fell open. “Mercy.”
“Amen.”
“No more waiting for them to attack.” Elizabeth moved to the next grave.
The colonel half laughed. “I wished to know what would happen when she reached the salt line.”
“Admit it, Edward.You were enticed by the girl’s beauty.”
He took a fighting stance before Elizabeth reached for the stave. “How could you think so, Elizabeth?” Edward smiled at her mockingly. “You are the most becoming Scottish laddie,” he gestured to her clothing, “I have ever seen.”
Elizabeth removed the stave, and they waited, but nothing happened. “That one is clear,” Edward noted. “Put the stave in the ground like a spear beside the headstone. That will be the mark tomorrow to pass over this one.”
Moving down the row, Elizabeth lifted the next stave.
This time, the mist took on the visage of an old man.
Once he stood before them, Edward struck out with the sword, hitting this one in the side of the neck.
The revenant lashed out at Edward, as Elizabeth, on the other side, swung an arcing stroke of her weapon, also slashing at the man’s neck.
He growled at her and bared his teeth, preparing to strike, but Edward lunged and hit the heart once again.
The man fell backwards across the grave and disappeared into a bloody haze.
“That was better,” Edward commented as they moved to the next mound and the next and the next.
“Look at the size of this graveyard!” Elizabeth peered around them, realizing what they still faced. The vibrations continued, but the corner in which they stood no longer rocked. They had checked twelve graves and fought two apparitions.
The colonel moved around the last headstone of the row. The upright staves marked all those safe from Wickham’s evil. “The next row,” he said ominously.
“Where do you suppose William is?” She glanced towards Wickham’s house.
“My cousin is well, Elizabeth,” he assured her. “Are you prepared for the next one?” She signaled her agreement as he bent again. “We have our occupation, and Darcy has his. It is up to us to ensure that Wickham has no reinforcements. One on one, Darcy will prevail.”
The skeletal hand tightened on Darcy’s arm as Wickham sat up, like Lazarus rising from the dead.
“I knew you would return.” The ominous words ricocheted off the walls, but Darcy did not respond.
He simply stared dumbly at the bony fingers encircling his wrist and the slow, gravity-defying climb of the snake up the length of the sword.
Elizabeth’s voice rose in the silence. Because I did not claim the opportunity to tell my husband I am completely and hopelessly in love with him, it called out, and Darcy reacted.
Jerking his arm vehemently from the force holding it, he spun away, bringing his arms to his sides as he did.
The rotating force sent the serpent flying through the air, carrying it through the open door and out somewhere into the bowels of the house.
Darcy’s power filled the room, pressing Wickham’s coffin against the wall and tilting it on its end.
Incensed, Wickham answered, delivering a show of his own. The cauldron—the antlers—the engraved gold coins—and even the snakes swirled around Darcy’s head, dipping dangerously close in an obvious threat.
Yet Darcy did not falter. He stood proud and strong, beginning to understand how Wickham’s power was a great deal of trickery, depending on fear and intimidation, and as Darcy watched, the violent winds died, and everything came crashing to the floor between them.
With a quick flick of Wickham’s hand, he sent the cauldron cannonballing into Darcy’s midsection, knocking Darcy to the floor and leaving him gasping for air.
Struggling to his knees, Darcy answered with his own display by powering the antlers in Wickham’s direction.
A quick sidestep kept his enemy from being impaled, but not from ripping open several points along Wickham’s left side.
Miraculously, as Elizabeth’s dream had predicted, the wounds oozed with blood, each a different shade of red, as if it did not belong to Wickham.
With his right hand, Wickham pulled the bony points from his shoulder and cast them down to join the debris accumulating on the floor.
“Your accuracy improves, Darcy.” Wickham pivoted to face him, while allowing the distance between them to increase.
“We have crowed like the rooster,” he said with a smirk.
“Shall we now contest each other properly?”
Darcy’s eyes never left Wickham’s face, but he was very aware of every object in the room.
One of the snakes slithered into the discarded cauldron, and another followed the flying one into the darkened hallway.
In his field of vision, Darcy could not observe the other two, but they did not concern him.
Even though he knew little of snakes, he suspected Wickham kept them, like everything else, purely for show.
To instill fear in anyone who might invade his vampiric privacy.
If a person was to die in this house, it would be at Wickham’s hands, not from being bitten by a poisonous snake.
In a mimicking pattern, Darcy also used a grapevine step to adjust to his enemy’s new position. “What now, Wickham?”
“We finish it, Darcy.”
“Wait, Elizabeth!” Edward called from the end of one row of graves as she moved around a particularly tall headstone, which completely blocked her from his sight.
The last specter they encountered had come close to escaping before he threw holy water on it.
The shriek of pure pain still resounded through every bone in his body.
He would not forget the sounds and the smells associated with this night for as long as he lived.
It was worse than the slaughters at Talavera and at Salamanca.
The metallic smell of so much blood sickened him, and the fact that he and Elizabeth were bringing forth the demise of so many ate away at him.
Yet he judiciously carried on, attempting to spare Elizabeth as much of the slaughter as possible.
He understood the destruction of war, but Elizabeth was innocent.
He would not permit her to suffer such nightmares.
Elizabeth’s scream jolted him from his thoughts, and instantly, Edward was at a run to reach her.
A hulk of a man, perhaps twice Elizabeth’s size, pinned her to the side of Lord Thomas’s crypt and pressed her lustfully to the wall, meaning to have her in a primitive coupling.
Enraged, Edward sprang forward, and with a powerful attack of his own, stabbed the creature through the back, perforating his chest with the rapier.
Now the scream came from the demon as he stumbled away from a very shaken Elizabeth.
The mist rose again and was sucked back into the earth as Elizabeth propelled herself into Edward’s waiting arms.