Where Darkness Lingers (Revenant Roses #2)

Prologue

The boy clung to the face of the cliff, willing himself not to look down.

Below, the ocean raged, great fists of water pummeling jagged rocks. Pebbles skittered loose as he jammed his fingers and toes into the shifting dirt, sweat slicking his back and dripping along his brow.

Though he had climbed this cliff dozens of times, he had never taken this exact route.

“A race to the top,” he had called to his friend, and as they had both begun the climb, he had chosen the far side of the outcrop that jutted like a blade.

He need not have. He was older by more than a year, and he always won.

But he wanted to win by a wider margin. It was simply who he was.

So, he had taken the steeper, straighter, faster route. And, oh, how he regretted his choice.

Fear was not a familiar thing. He was the eldest son, the heir to all. Pampered. Spoiled. Arrogant. He knew it. But fear was here now, burning bitter on the back of his tongue.

Curling his fingers, he tunneled them into the dirt as he scrambled to find a new handhold. He tried to ease to the right, just a little. Loose earth flowed down, and he slid, heart jerking a frantic rhythm as his descent gathered momentum.

With a cry, he kicked and gouged. There came a sharp pain as two fingernails tore to the quick. Then his hands found a niche and his booted toes encountered something solid. His descent stopped.

Pressing his cheek against the cliff, he hung there, panting and sobbing.

He was fourteen years old, crying like a puling babe, frozen in place.

Too afraid to look up. Too afraid to look down.

And though he willed himself to move, to climb, his limbs refused to obey his command.

He did not know if the rock that had stopped his perilous slide was large or small, if it was secure or about to come loose beneath his foot.

He only knew that terror was ice and fire in his veins and if he moved, it would incinerate him.

“Climb!” his friend called to him from above, having made it to the top first after all. “You can make it. Come on. Bloody well climb.”

“I cannot,” he whispered, thinking the other boy too far away to hear.

But somehow, he did hear, or perhaps he only sensed the situation. “Hang on, then. Just hang on. I’ll get help,” his friend called out, voice tight and high.

No. Don’t go. Don’t leave me. But like his limbs, his voice was frozen. He could do nothing but cling to the cliff knowing that he would not be able to hang on long enough for help to come.

Seconds—months, years, eons—crawled past, the roar of the ocean mixing with the harsh rasp of his breathing.

Then a sound summoned him, a whisper that was neither word nor moan, and yet somehow both.

Ice slithered through his veins. He dared turn his head a fraction and stare out at the water.

Far in the distance was a ship, three-masted, her sails slack though there was wind aplenty to fill them.

He knew that barque, had been seeing her daily for two full weeks. The Lady Jane. Her presence now brought a deep and choking fear. She was a portent he ought to have heeded.

Then he heard his name, faint and distant, and his pulse stuttered.

He pulled his terror back, taming it enough that he could tilt his head and look up at the face that peered over the edge above him. A tiny seedling of hope unfurled. He was not alone; he had not been left all alone.

“We cannot wait for help. You need to climb. Climb! Come on, now. Come on. You’ve done this a hundred times before.” A hand reached down toward him. “Here is my hand. Only a little way and you can reach my hand.”

The confident tone carried past the loud rush of blood in his ears, slid into every corner of his thoughts, and made him believe.

Slowly, so slowly, he reached up and found a fresh fingerhold. He lifted his foot and found a niche for his toes. Again and again, he did the same, moving upward inch by agonizing inch, aiming for that outstretched hand.

Almost there.

A whimper escaped him, half desperation, half hope.

And then, so close to his goal, his options ran out.

He could not find any more finger-holds.

There were only smooth rock and shallow, loose earth.

There was nothing to grasp. Panic choked him as he hung there, his body pressed to the sheer cliff, his heart jerking against his ribs like a trapped bird.

“Reach for my hand. Come on. Just push up with your toes and reach.”

He could not.

“You can. You can. Reach for my hand. That is all you need to do.” There was absolute certainty in those words.

Below him, the waves crashed against serrated teeth of rock. His left foot began to slip. Another few seconds and he would lose even this precarious perch. Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

He forced his free hand up as far as it would go and let out a sob when his fingertips touched those outstretched toward him.

“Push up. Come on, now. Use your toes. I’ll grab you.”

He pushed up. His rescuer caught his wrist as he caught theirs, fingers clamping like a vise.

Their eyes met and held as he used his toes to propel himself upward, the hand that held him tightening its grip.

He was almost at the top. Close, so close.

Blood pounded at his temples. Then, above the roar of the ocean and the pounding of his heart, he heard whispers, rasping and strange, more like touch than sound.

The skin at the back of his neck prickled, and something icy brushed his ear, so cold it burned. Again came the whispers, beckoning him, soft and coaxing, impossibly close.

Let go. Let go.

The whispers became a storm, harsh, demanding. The sound gnawed at him, not with force, quietly sinister, a pull that did not move his limbs but instead made him want to move them.

No. No. He wanted to climb, to cling to the hand that held him, to save himself.

But even as he thought it, his fingers began to loosen their hold, as if someone else was inside him, moving him like a puppet.

Above him, something changed, the grip on his wrist altering. He looked up. The face above him was the face he had known all his life, but something in the eyes was different. Wrong. Alight in a way he had never seen them.

His rescuer smiled, lips twisting unnaturally wide, a smile he had never seen on that face.

And then the hand released.

He clawed at his rescuer’s skin as his own weight pulled him down, down.

As his grasp slid fully free, the hand that had been his last hope made an odd little wave, like shooing away a fly.

The boy screamed as he fell, the sound carried off by the wind. And somewhere above, laughter broke like a wave.