Chapter 24 The Season of Wolves
Over the next few days, they searched for the red diary relentlessly.
To Leena, the challenge felt insurmountable.
The most difficult part was that they had to participate in every scheduled activity organized to entertain the gathered party while still finding time for their hunt.
Meaning that she, Rami, Mrs. Van, and St. Silas could meet only very early in the morning or very late into the evening.
They only had a week, and it felt to Leena like too little time to search the massive house, not to mention the lands that belonged to Weavingshaw.
It also didn’t take long for Leena to notice that Mr. Martin was having them followed.
She sensed watchful eyes on her with every step she took, from the footmen down to the gardeners and maids, who seemed to be forever moving from one place to another with their pots and pruning shears, mops and brooms. Even the butler made a few unexpected appearances in places he would usually not frequent.
It was an odd feeling for Leena, to be trailed by beings other than ghosts.
Theodore Daye had also made his reappearance, although he looked more faded here.
He took his habitual stance beside her bed—at least Leena had been able to renew her supply of salt, with the aid of Mrs. Van—but he could not answer her questions about the whereabouts of the diary nor lead them to it.
The search began with the obvious places.
On that first day—both after the tour and in the dead of night—they searched the vast library.
It was difficult, the wooden shelves weighed down by hundred-year-old manuscripts and leather-bound books.
It was also the size of a small marketplace in Golborne.
After several hours of dust-infused exploration, all four of them left frustrated and filthy.
It was not there.
Neither was it in the study they were first shown into when they arrived at Weavingshaw.
As Leena and Mrs. Van made their way back from their fruitless search there on the second day, they met Lord Kilworth in the hall.
Leena had been avoiding him, but all throughout the tour of the house and gallery the day before he’d found excuses to linger beside her, to brush her shoulder accidentally, despite Leena’s irritated insistence that His Lordship pay better attention to his surroundings—until Rami had “accidentally” stomped on his foot. That had caused quite a stir.
This time, his gaze was not on Leena but on Mrs. Van.
Revulsion twisted his lips, a white fury flaring his nostrils as he bowed to Leena only, his attention lingering on Mrs. Van’s abnormally long fingers, then her neck, as if desiring to snap it.
Leena felt trickles of fear slide down into her stomach, and she pulled Mrs. Van along as quickly as possible.
“Do you think he knows that you are…?” Leena whispered the moment they were out of sight.
“He must know,” Mrs. Van replied steadily. “And he would like to kill me for it.”
Leena’s heart quaked, her grip tightening on the housekeeper’s arm. “Be careful.”
A touch of a smile graced the older woman’s face before her expression folded into sternness once more. “Where would I be if I allowed myself to fear all the Lord Kilworths of the world?”
—
On that same day, just before dinner was served and while all the ladies were partaking in their afternoon naps, Leena and St. Silas entered a small parlor that held only Lord Hargreaves reading the paper.
Leena watched as His Lordship and St. Silas bowed to each other, muttering polite nothings.
It was a mild greeting between strangers, in such contrast to the raw agony of Lady Hargreaves.
“Have you managed to walk the grounds yet, Mr. St. Silas? Even in the rain they are a sight to behold this time of year,” Lord Hargreaves asked. It seemed a generic inquiry, but Leena did not miss the sudden narrowing of St. Silas’s eyes.
St. Silas looked steadily at Lord Hargreaves for a long, cool moment. “It is the season of wolves. It would be foolish to venture out unattended.”
“Ah yes, the wolves. Such…terrifying creatures.”
“Only to those who have blood on their hands,” St. Silas murmured. “Do you have blood on your hands, my lord?”
Lord Hargreaves’s regard did not waver. “Not nearly enough to be marked.”
“Not yet, at any rate,” St. Silas replied succinctly.
Leena had the unmistakable sense of two vicious animals circling each other, searching for weakness before the kill.
St. Silas did not await a reply. He bowed and exited the room, with Leena at his heels.
Still, Leena could not stop herself from turning back to see Hargreaves staring after them, his face leached of color.
Leena felt as if she were caught in the midst of a different sort of hunting party, where both the imagined and the real predator were at their door.
She could not repress the question that escaped her lips, one that had been circling her mind for several nights as she lay awake listening to the animals’ terrible cries. “Do the wolves ever stop howling?”
St. Silas did not halt his long strides. “Why should they? They have scented blood.”
—
Leena, who had always been a careful observer of people—mostly because she existed on the fringes of their interactions—had begun to silently immerse herself in the lives of the upper-class guests about her.
It was a shocking and liberating discovery to find that, outside the company of St. Silas, the guests did not take any notice of her unless she all but shouted her presence.
It was as if she was one of the many servants working silently to keep every function of the day moving smoothly.
Leena used this to her advantage as she continued the search for the red diary, listening to the guests in part for clues, and in a larger part out of curiosity.
Several times when she was in one of the great parlors, crouched while rifling through a desk drawer or standing just by the fireplace, she’d been able to overhear the guests’ prattle.
She’d been privy to the escalating tension between Lord Deverall and Mr. Cotts, pertaining to the horse the latter had bought from the former, which had once been hailed as the Great Thoroughbred but was now limping from an injury that had been suspiciously sustained just after the transfer of funds.
Then there was Lady Margaret Bishop and her daughter, Miss Cecilia Bishop, who thought everything absolutely drab and undistinguished, called Mr. Martin an embarrassment, but secretly wondered if they would be invited for the Early Spring Soiree; they were clearly petrified that they would not be.
There were also several couples Leena tried to avoid, both old and young, who barely exchanged two words with each other, apart from a clipped “Will you stop making a cake of yourself, you old drunk?” and “You grow more tedious with every passing year, m’dear.”
It should not, therefore, have come as a surprise when she caught snippets of Lady Beywood and two of her friends speaking of St. Silas.
To find that he had immeasurably captivated the female members of the hunting party should not have made Leena feel out of sorts, confused and flushed, but it did.
Yet still she strained her ears to listen as they spoke of his form—tall, athletic, and graceful.
Of the deep timbre of his voice; of his smile and the flash of white teeth; of his dark eyes and the thick hair that was cut too short to be considered fashionable and yet still suited him.
And, most of all, when they spoke of how they felt when he gave them his undivided attention, Leena understood.
It felt as if a new moon had decided to orbit their planet, changing the tides and storms forever.
It was those stormy feelings she was struggling with as they spent another fruitless night combing the second half of the great library.
After several futile hours of battling dust and darkness, Leena turned to St. Silas, trying to hide the defeat in her voice.
“If we do not find the diary before we depart, we will return to Golborne with nothing.” She could not bear the thought of returning to the agony of the confession rooms. Even Golborne, with its stark outline and soot-coated rooftops, seemed like a choked dream from within the splendor of Weavingshaw and its rolling moors. “Where else can we look?”
St. Silas perched on the back of the settee, watching her with an odd look. For one paranoid moment, Leena was frightened he could read her thoughts and all the turmoil she had been combating—especially since Moira’s unexpected possession of her.
His answer was slow, his dark eyes unwavering from hers, scrutinizing her.
“Weavingshaw has several attics filled with old trunks and hidden crates that must be searched. There are also smugglers’ caves inside the black cliffs that have been forgotten for centuries.
We will not leave until we have combed through this entire estate. ”
When Leena did not respond, he crossed his arms. “What are you not saying?”
Leena swallowed. “Nothing.”
“Come, we know each other well enough by now. Out with it.” His look was piercing, and again she had the disquieting feeling that they were speaking about two different things. She remembered their first night here, his hand on her arm, when he had told her not to search for ghosts alone anymore.
She scrambled for an answer to give him—anything to distract him from the truth. “I find it very hard to imagine that a mere guest, who, granted, may have been here once or twice, would have such specific knowledge of the whereabouts of smugglers’ caves and hidden crates.”
There. She dared him to deny this.
He gave her no answer, continuing to watch her from beneath hooded eyes.
“What are you not telling me?” she persisted.
“What are you not telling me, Miss Al-Sayer?” he countered swiftly.
Leena wasn’t sure what he spoke of; there were so many secrets that she was now keeping from him. The secret of being possessed, the secret belonging to Moira, and the secret of Leena’s growing fascination with St. Silas that seemed to be eating her body alive.
Likely, he wanted to know all three. He wanted to know everything.
St. Silas would never be satisfied until he undid her completely. Until she was as transparent as a phantom, and he held mastery of all her secrets.
Not for the first time, Leena promised herself that that would never happen.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Neither was willing to disarm. This was not their first duel—nor likely their last.
“Then we will continue our search, just as we are,” she replied after a moment, shifting backward away from him.
He rose from the settee and took a step forward just as she backed away, narrowing the space between them.
“Just as we are?” The change in his gaze was rapid, his pupils dilating.
Leena felt her throat constrict—an emotion evoked just from that single look. He was standing close enough that she could see the arched shadow of his long lashes on his cheek, could smell the starch of his collar, the fine earthy cologne on his skin.
Leena felt that the lines that had once been so clear to her when it came to St. Silas were beginning to blur painfully. The intimacy with which she knew him—his looks, his scent, his lashes—could not be easily undone from her memory, and her heart responded with a crushing thud.
What was happening to her?
She remembered Moira looking at Percival in the same way, devouring his presence with equal fervor.
Before he had killed her.
For that was how it would always end—at least in Weavingshaw.
After a few heated seconds, she took another firm step back from both St. Silas and her own maddening reaction, her footsteps echoing loudly in the room.
“Yes. Just as we are.”