Chapter 21 The Metal Box #3
“Do not—” His voice was uneven, but St. Silas broke off before he finished the sentence.
Although Leena took pride in her hair, it was not currently in fashion, nor had it ever been. Never had she received even a half compliment for her wealth of curls before. For an odd, unfiltered moment, she wondered how his fingers would feel brushing through her hair.
Why had he not finished his sentence? She was sure he had been going to say, Do not cut it. Did that mean he had noticed her hair and liked it?
No matter how much she told herself that it did not matter what he thought of her features, her hand still smoothed over the tresses again as if he had touched her, her mind feverishly turning over St. Silas’s incomplete sentence.
She knew that a part of her would remember it every time she released her hair before bed, and another part of her hated that he had the power to seep into her recollections so easily—with just two single words.
The scent of salty air reached them. A gull screamed overhead. The trees began to thin, the path now descending a steep slope, the piney forest floor transforming into sand.
Leena halted when she caught her first sight of the ocean. Black cliffs crowded the coast, making her breath catch with their magnitude. Lights shone from Weavingshaw’s single menacing tower, watching them from afar like a still vulture.
She had seen the ocean before, of course, but never like this. She’d been to the docks multiple times, but that was only a mess of seamen hauling crates and fishermen weaving nets.
This northern ocean was not beautiful; it was terrible and wild.
One wave could engulf a person whole—burst their lungs and bash their head upon the rocks like a monster bent on destruction.
Jagged boulders separated the sand from the waves, as if to imprison the sea-beasts that waited in wretched hunger just beyond the shore.
The ghost lingered on the edge of this feral sea. Finally, for the first time since starting this journey, she turned back to look at Leena.
Then Lady Hargreaves’s gaze slid to St. Silas standing beside Leena, and her entire body seemed to shudder, her eyes turning ashen.
All at once, her outline started to dim, great ripples of emotion flowing off her.
What that emotion was, Leena could not say, only that it seemed to distress the phantom past the point of fading.
“Stay.” Leena lurched forward, toward Lady Hargreaves. There was a history here; she was certain of this now. She would not lose this one opportunity to uncover it. “I will follow where you go.”
Lady Hargreaves turned away from St. Silas, as if looking at him was a punishment worse than purgatory. She pointed fervently at a weeping willow that grew between the jagged rocks, its leaves dipping into the ocean as if it could not decide if it wanted to be alive in sea or on land.
Leena squinted, catching within the moonlight a small metallic box nailed to the bark of the tree.
Leena turned quickly to see St. Silas watching the landscape and then gazing at her with a frozen expression. Sudden understanding dawned in his eyes. “Whose ghost are you following?” he snarled.
She saw him mark the spot where her stare had landed moments before, and her breath hitched.
Without answering, she sprang down the sandy beach toward the tree, desperate to reach the box first.
She heard him drop the lantern and give chase instantly, engulfing them in darkness save for the light of the moon. Her lengthy skirts and thick petticoats impeded her progress, and his far longer legs narrowed the distance between them rapidly.
It was seconds before he grasped her arm, pulling her back.
Rather than fighting his hold, she let herself fall against him, pushing him backward toward the ground.
Leena landed on top of him with a thud, and, even in the frenzy of their movements, she could not unfeel the hard expanse of his chest and the power of his coiled muscles, making her already pounding heart beat impossibly faster.
There was no sense in fighting St. Silas’s brutal strength; she knew her only escape must be through other means.
Leena lurched from him, grabbed a fistful of sand, and threw it directly into his face.
Then she ran.
“Bravo!” She heard his voice not far behind her, but she knew she was still holding the lead.
Her hemline was now drenched in salt water as she scampered over the rocks and slippery seaweed, until she reached the weeping willow.
She’d been right: There was a small tin attached to the bark.
It looked like a postbox but Leena couldn’t imagine what one would be doing here in the middle of the isolated wilderness.
She opened the lid and reached inside, withdrawing the object held within.
A miniature glass bottle. With two pieces of parchment inside.
She gasped when she saw the preserved parchment, hearing St. Silas’s sure footsteps over the rocks just behind her. How many years had this been here, waiting to be found?
Moments before he could reach her, she smashed the bottle against the nearest rock and swiftly slid the small parchments deep into her bodice.
There was an instant when both panting parties were staring at the concealed notes in her bosom. St. Silas was the last to look away. “I am not above retrieving that. And it would not be a hardship to do so, Leena. So be a good girl and hand it over now.”
For a wild moment, the vision that started with her picturing him running his hands through her hair shifted into something far more potent—St. Silas finding his way through her clothing, St. Silas’s calloused hands on her sensitive skin as he pulled the parchments out…
Leena shut her eyes tightly and then opened them, as if to ward away the treachery of her own mind when what she really needed was absolute focus to navigate her way back.
St. Silas’s stalking gaze did not miss her reaction, momentary though it was. His growing smile was slow and sure, as if he was seeing the same vision flash through his mind as well.
The freezing water beat against her now-soaked shoes, but rather than feeling the chill, her entire body was suffused with warmth.
“You would not dare.” Careful not to slip on the rocks, she made to walk past him, trying to collect as much dignity as possible.
For the second time that night he halted her with his hand on her arm. His gaze, made darker by the filtering light of the moon, burned into her. She could not bring herself to jerk her arm away. His touch seared her, and she knew she would carry the remnants of St. Silas all night on her skin.
“Dare me,” he challenged softly.
Before Leena could reply, Lady Hargreaves reappeared before her. She began mouthing hurried, anguished words—and when she saw Leena was not reacting accordingly, made a strike for her.
Leena reared back, almost pulling St. Silas toward the jagged rocks with her. His firm hands righted them just in time.
“What do you want me to do with this?” Leena asked the ghost frantically, trying to make sense of the violent gesticulations.
“Do you want me to deliver it to someone?” The lady didn’t make another attempt to approach, wary of St. Silas’s foreboding figure hovering close to Leena.
She continued to shake violently. “Is there a name on the letter?”
The ghost’s face crumpled in waterless tears, nodding and pointing toward Leena’s bodice, then toward St. Silas, and lastly at the stark, distant presence of Weavingshaw, thumping her heart three forceful times.
Then, as if she’d finished a great and grim task, Lady Hargreaves shuddered before fading into nothing.
Leena stood very still, the salty droplets beating against her cheeks like small painful kisses.
Lady Hargreaves had been her first ghost—her first introduction into the world of the departed, her first realization that she would never find true peace among the living.
And now she was gone, and Leena was not sure if she would ever see her again.
Had Lady Hargreaves’s phantom finally been released?
St. Silas took her by the arm and led her steadily up the cracked rocky path onto firmer ground. Leena kept turning back toward the sea, as if searching its depth for answers she could never have.
“It was Lady Hargreaves you just saw, wasn’t it?” St. Silas’s voice when he spoke next was slightly rough, like he too was battling emotions he was trying to bury.
It was a peculiar sensation to have St. Silas a witness beside her in the presence of phantoms, watching her as she wrestled over secrets with beings that he could not see. To him, there was only nothingness.
“Willing to make a deal?” She walked toward the fallen lamp, seeing if she could revive it for the journey back.
“You want to know about the Wake?” His impatient voice carried easily above the waves.
“Yes.” She turned, only to find him nearly at her back, his voice sounding far more distant than his presence.
“The Wake was created by Lord Avon.” He took the lamp from her hand, shaking the sand from its surface and reigniting the flame. “He traded prisoners to restore his fortune.”
“I know that. I want to know who runs it now.”
St. Silas’s expression blackened. “So that you can offer yourself in exchange for your father?”
She kept quiet, masking her surprise at his astuteness by continuing to stare back at him with bright, defiant eyes. It was none of his business what she wanted to do with her future. Once she found his ghost, she would be free to pursue any life she chose.
His jaw worked. Then he turned away from her abruptly and began climbing up the path toward the forest in long strides, the lamp still clenched in his hand.
“So you will not tell me anything about the Wake, then?” She ran after him, the wind carrying tendrils of her hair into her face.
“No, madam.” His tone held a warning.
She was taken aback by this. She had gambled on the fact that St. Silas had a very vested interest in the ghost of Lady Hargreaves. She’d seen the despairing way the ghost had reacted to him. That St. Silas would waste such an opportunity, when he wasted very little, was unfathomable to her.
In the silvery light cast by the moon, Leena angled her body toward the sea to retrieve the parchments from her bodice, in case St. Silas turned and saw her efforts.
The first parchment had bonded to the second one and protected it from the elements, leaving the first one ruined and entirely illegible, and the other preserved. Leena had to rip them apart to separate them, and mourned the words lost on that first letter.
She tore into the second one.
It was addressed to someone, but the ensuing years had stripped and faded the name. She broke the seal and unfolded it with frozen fingers, relieved to see that the inky scrawls inside were still legible.
I know what you’ve done and I know the evils you have dallied with—and that poor boy, what has he ever done to you?
You have brought me to visit this cursed estate for months on end, and I’ve begun to believe that we’re all cursed. All those who set foot on these marbled floors, all who breathe this moorish air, all who have eaten its food—we are all cursed.
Weavingshaw has fed on us, and I curse your eyes for having brought me here.
That was all.
A dam of guilt burst in Leena’s throat. She’d taken the last words of a dead woman, reading them like a voyeur peeping through a curtain. She felt numb all over. Was this letter intended for Lord Hargreaves? And what had he done to deserve such a bitter parting note?
Her brows furrowed further. And who was the boy? What had been done to him?
She looked up to see St. Silas standing under the awning of a tree, waiting for her. She was too far away to read his expression, but his silence had teeth. Leena made her way toward him slowly, calculating what she had to do.
“If you won’t tell me about the Wake, then tell me about Mrs. Van. The truth this time.”
She waited, her face raised toward him. The lamplight bathed both of them in a yellow glow, giving her the feeling that, beyond this sphere of light, the world was locked in eternal sleep.
His glance fell to the letter in her hands, and he didn’t start walking away again as she expected him to. “Mrs. Van is as preternatural as your phantoms.”
Leena held her breath. “What is she?”
“I trust her with my life.”
“Yes.” Leena accepted this, but still persisted. “What is she?”
“A demon.”
With blood pulsing wildly in her ears, Leena tried to hold his gaze as her sleep-deprived brain worked rapidly. Was he lying? No, she could not forget Mrs. Van’s appearance in her nightmare: the expanding eyes, the long fingers, and, most important, the years of life that Mrs. Van had accumulated.
To most people, Leena would be considered utterly mad for seeing ghosts, although they were her daily truth. So why shouldn’t other supernatural creatures also exist?
But demons?
If she had not been standing by St. Silas, she could’ve sworn the ground was shifting beneath her, a formidable crack forming underneath, dragging her down to an unknown abyss where nothing was what it seemed.
“Is Mr. Orley a demon as well?”
Another nod.
“How did you get involved with demons?” she whispered.
His mouth turned, and she noticed that his breathing was as harsh as hers. He put out a demanding hand. “The letters.”
She gave both to him mutely and watched as he read the second one, her eyes quickening to any subtle changes to his face. When he’d finished, he wordlessly folded it and slipped both into his pocket.
“Are you the boy the letter was referring to?” Leena asked softly. “Lady Hargreaves pointed at you, then thumped her heart three times, as if…as if in apology. Is that why you’re involved with demons? Are you cursed, Mr. St. Silas?”
He didn’t respond, his dark eyes as cold as the mist surrounding the forest. As they began to make their way back through the woods, St. Silas took the lead. She could see nothing of him except the rigid contours of his hard shoulders and the faint glow of the lantern.
It was only a while later, when sleep was as distant as ever for her, that Leena realized—in spite of his steady pace—the hand that held the lantern had shaken slightly all the way back to the inn.