I felt my pulse quicken. Blood drained from my face, my body felt numb. “The inn?”
He rubbed his dark hair as he paced up and down the length of his office. His gray slacks, the tailored shirt, and black leather belt combined to make this moment even more surreal.
I knew him as my father, the devout Catholic who never missed Sunday Mass and rarely missed praying his daily Rosary. But those things, I was starting to understand, were on the outside. Those were actions he did that others could observe. Who was he when others weren’t there? Who was he on the inside?
“Yet another similarity between the poor dead Thomas and me,” he said, his eyes burning with admission.
I blinked and blinked again, my back heavy against the leather chair, my body sinking, fading into it. Avi said he’d gone there; the demons said so as well. But to hear him say it—to hear him say he was like Thomas ….
I cleared my mind. No, he was not like Thomas. He was different; he was standing in front of me. He was alive.
“How …”—my mouth was so dry, my voice soft—“how did you survive?”
He stopped, his body becoming still. His gaze went to the ceiling, his mind disappeared into the past. He was remembering ….
“She wanted me to,” he said, without returning to the present. “She must have.”
Ten
Dad was sitting in his chair at the oversized mahogany desk, the one his parents used to share when they ran the family empire. He inherited the desk when his mom handed the company over to him. He was sitting there across from me, but his mind remained somewhere in the past, emotions playing across his face. Features changing, darkening, then brightening, then darkening again.
I summoned the strength to speak. “Who is she?” I asked, breaking into his thoughts.
His gaze returned to the present, to me. “My great-grandmother,” he answered. His fingernails rubbed gently across the polished wood grain of the desk.
I did not speak.
His expression remained distant. “She was the one who … who was there. She was the one who was always there.” He swallowed and turned his head away, his body becoming agitated again, his hands rubbing through his hair. “I-I, ah,” he muttered as if fighting with himself. “I spent a lot of time with her. I helped her. … I’m part of whatever this is,” he blurted out, as if forcing the words before they could recede from his lips and return to some secret place deep within.
I stared up at him, my breath so shallow I wondered if I was still breathing, if I was still real. None of this felt real. So maybe it wasn’t. Was I imagining it? Maybe it was all a dream; maybe that was it. A dream. No, a nightmare. Because it’s in nightmares that good people become bad. Yes, this was a nightmare. I squeezed my eyes closed.
“Siena?”
No, I thought again, this is a nightmare, go back to sleep. If you go back to sleep, you can wake up to the happy truth.
I felt his presence near me. I reluctantly opened my eyes. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, watching me.
“You’re not bad,” I said, feeling like I was going to cry.
He hung his head.
He wasn’t bad. He was good. He was strong and steady, never faltering.
“I thought it was a game,” he said, standing, too agitated to remain seated. “She said it was a game.”
He turned, facing the window. The palm of his hand pressed against the dark wood frame that encased the window. He was breathing hard, as if he’d run a long race.
Far beyond where he stood, through the trees, was the site of the inn. He could never have seen it from his office, even during the most barren of winter days. Yet, it was always there. Always behind him as he sat at this desk or prayed on the nearby couch or ate with his family in the kitchen beyond this room. He never escaped it, even when he didn’t remember. It was always there, behind him.
Avi’s words from earlier entered my mind. She said it wasn’t about Thomas. She said it was about me.
“What sort of game?” I asked, with an odd feeling of calm. It was the sort of calm that comes in the middle of a hurricane, a quiet moment that lulls the inexperienced into a feeling of safety, when in truth the wind and waves are preparing to destroy them.
In front of me, my father’s head fell as if his neck had lost the strength needed to hold it up.
“I’m not sure.” His arms pulled tight across his body—hands on his shoulders. He bent his head forward as if he were trying to wrap up into a ball, trying to disappear.
I watched from somewhere outside myself, or not outside but not through the eyes with which I usually saw him. He was different, changed. Young and haggard at the same time. Not like my father at all. Or perhaps I was different.
“Your game killed Thomas.” My voice was robotic, without emotion, without the innocence it normally held. I didn’t know my voice used to be innocent, but I could hear the difference now.
“I didn’t want that.” His eyes were sorely red, but showed no tears.
“It doesn’t matter what you wanted. Thomas is dead,” I said, tears blurring my vision.
He didn’t speak.
What could he say? I stood to leave. Passing the leather couch where I typically sat, I felt the urge to sit—to not leave my father. Not because I wanted to be near him, but because something inside me didn’t want him to be alone.
I fell into the smooth leather. He watched me, expecting me to leave, but I stayed.
Eventually he stood and went to the fireplace. Soon a fire was burning. The flames allowed that something inside me to relax. Like whatever danger was lurking had passed, at least for the moment.
As I watched the orange and yellow flames dance against the darkened stones of the fireplace, he watched me.
“It was a mistake, a horrible mistake.”
He was asking me to forgive him, though what I was being asked to forgive, he never told me.
I moved my head from the side of the couch; it startled him. He stood abruptly and went to the fire. His face, pants—even his gleaming white shirt looked dark compared to the bright fire.
“The demons knew you,” I said, remembering that night with Thomas.
“Yes.” His voice was barely audible, like it was a truth that startled him as much as me.
I sat taller. “They spoke about Mom. You told them about her?”
“No!” he practically shouted. “Never,” he quickly added, his voice not as loud. “I’ve had nothing to do with the demonic since I was a kid. I didn’t … didn’t realize what I was doing was real. She told me it was a game.”
“Imagine that—an evil old woman that your parents told you to stay away from was lying to you,” I said with biting sarcasm.
He turned away and said softly, “It wasn’t as clear back then.”
He was lying, trying to excuse behavior that had no excuse.
“Gigi told you! She told me she did. She said that even before you lived here, she did everything she could to keep you away from her grandmother. She said she was evil. If Gigi told me, she must’ve told you.”
“We didn’t realize she was evil,” he said, pleading. “They didn’t like her, they told me that, but none of us understood what she was. And she was nice to me. Other kids had a grandmother. Why couldn’t I?”
“Because she was living with demons.”
“I didn’t know that,” he said, exasperated.
“It doesn’t matter what you thought or why you did whatever you did. What matters is what you did! Tell me what you did,” I demanded.
“I can’t remember. It’s not an excuse,” he said. “I remember some things, but not all. I remember being in the inn with her. I remember the fireplace, the frayed carpet in front of it. I remember her handing me something.”
“What?”
He shook his head again. “The memory stops there. There were other times I was with her, of course, but most times we were outside. It was only on cold days that I went inside. She’d give me this hot bl
ueberry drink. It was good—thick. She said her mom taught her how to make it.”
I wanted to hate him for whatever unnamed sin he’d committed, but I couldn’t. He wanted to be like every other kid that had a grandmother. I understood what it was like to want to be normal.
I allowed some kind words to be spoken. “It sounds nice.”
“It was nice,” he said, placing his fingers to his mouth, pinching his bottom lip in thought. “She was nice to me. That’s what’s so confusing. She was this awful person—and I get that—but she was nice to me.”
“Life can be confusing sometimes,” I said.
“Yes.” He was still thinking of the past. He sat on the couch across from me.
“Why haven’t you told us this before?”
He watched the fire. “I didn’t remember any of it, not until Thomas and the demons. Not until I heard their voice and felt their evil did I realize … that wasn’t the first time.”
“How could you not remember demons?”
His body slumped against the plush leather couch and he said, “I’m not sure.”
“Do you have any idea?”
He hesitated. “Mom told me about prayers they said over me. She said after that I didn’t remember hardly anything about her grandmother. Not even the little things like the hot blueberry drink.”
“What sort of prayers?” I asked. Something about the way he spoke told me to ask that question.
“Prayers of deliverance … or exorcism,” he said reluctantly.
“Exorcism?” I asked, my eyebrows going up.
“Not a full one. I wasn’t possessed,” he said. “But I … I was obsessed.”
Before Thomas, I understood nothing about demons other than I professed to believe in their existence during prayers at Mass. In truth, I did not. Now I accepted the reality of demons and that there were levels of control they had over us. Thomas, at the end, was possessed. They controlled him; they possessed his physical being. Such things were rare, but I couldn’t pretend any longer that they were merely the sensational fantasies of Hollywood. Obsessions—when demons were actively wreaking havoc in a person’s life—were far more common.
“You invited them into your life?” I asked, unable to hide the disgust I felt for my father.
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember any of it, except their voice. I’d heard it before,” he said.
I had the feeling that if he was a child, his body would be trembling, but since he was a grown man, he remained outwardly calm.
“You said you played games with her. What sort of games?” I asked, certain the answer wasn’t hopscotch or Monopoly.
Dad pushed the palms of his hands together, rubbing them. He was uncomfortable, more uncomfortable with this question than the others. “Games she made up, games where we talked about my children.”
The word “children” made my spine straighten. “Your children?”
“She knew I would have three,” he said with an edge of terror in his voice. “I thought it was a joke. I was twelve. You don’t know anything when you’re twelve. … She told me I should bring my children there to meet her.” He shuddered violently.
“What!” My voice sounded so high-pitched I didn’t think it was mine.
“I asked if she thought she’d still be there. Her face looked strange. I remember it almost changing shape. It scared me and I started to back away. She smiled—her face back to normal. She told me the inn was her home. She’d built it with her two hands and she was never going to leave it.” He cringed at his own words.
“Did she expect to live forever?” I asked.
“I don’t … I think maybe. From what I’ve read … recently, the idea of immortality is appealing to those like her. Those who—”
“Welcome evil,” I said.
He nodded. A sadness in his eyes seemed to say that, even now, it was difficult for him to fully accept how awful she’d been.
“Did you ever do as she asked? Did you ever take us there?”
“No,” he said, repulsed by the thought. “I told you I didn’t remember any of this until … Thomas passed away.”
“If you didn’t remember, then why didn’t you take us there? Why did you always tell us to stay away from it?”
His back relaxed a little against the couch. “After she died, I didn’t have a reason to go there and I became far more interested in what was going on in town. Then I graduated, went to college, and started my life. Years later, when I brought your mom here, we walked to the beach. She immediately noticed the inn and said we shouldn’t go into it.”
“Did you try and take her inside?” I asked, keeping my voice as even as I could.
He leaned forward. “I remember us going toward it and her saying she didn’t want to set foot in that place.”
“She told me never to go into it,” I said, eyes locked on my father. “It’s the reason I didn’t—when Thomas tried to convince me, I mean.”
Dad lowered his head. “She saved both of us.”
His voice sounded like he was about to cry.
“Would it have mattered?” I asked. “Could we have been hurt just by walking into the building?”
This was something Luca and my mom believed. I was not as sure.
“Yes, I think we could’ve. I think that’s part of what my great-grandmother had done, somehow.”
“What do you mean?” I felt fear tingling up my spine.
“I think she did more than welcome evil. I think she locked it there, creating a place that was so dark, so vile, that merely stepping inside would lead to an attack.”
“What sort of attack?” I envisioned dark, formless shapes hovering, waiting in what had been that dilapidated building. The dark entities from my dream swooped again in my imagination.
“A spiritual attack, one that even the holiest of people would struggle to defeat,” he said.
“A trap,” I said.
“Yes.” He rubbed his hands through his hair. His discomfort was increasing.
The palms of my hands were damp; I was sweating though it wasn’t hot. “She asked you to bring your kids to visit her,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, his voice cracking.
I stood, towering over him, hands clenched at my side. “You helped her set a trap for us!”
His head sunk forward.
Avi told me it wasn’t about all of us, it was about me. “I’m your oldest,” I said, somehow aware that it mattered.
His red eyes held mine. “I remember hearing a name. I’d forgotten it. If I hadn’t, I never would have …”
“What?” I asked, the muscles in my legs tight. I needed to run.
“Named you Siena,” he said.
Eleven
I struggled to catch my breath. I’d run hard, away from the stranger who was in my father’s office. The thought of him, of who he’d been, of who he now was … it was too much. I ran farther, pushed harder. As the dirt turned to rocks and sand, I was forced to slow down. Sprinting on rocks caused my ankles to falter. If Jackson were here, he would’ve flopped down in the sand out of sheer exhaustion. He wasn’t with me. I’d left the house so suddenly he didn’t have time to follow. I simply grabbed a coat, slammed the door, and ran. My coat hung open. I placed my hands on my hips, spreading my lungs—creating as much room as I could for air to replenish them.
I went to the water. The beach behind me was strewn with rocks. This was my favorite time: when the tide was as low as it got and I walked not on the rocks but on wet sand, far out into my cove. The waves rolled toward me, but they didn’t reach me; the tide was still receding. I couldn’t be still—I had to move. I walked briskly southward, to the sheer rock wall that marked the edge of our property. I must have been walking faster than I realized; I was there in minutes. My fingers reached for the stone. A smooth layer of ice clung to the rock.
I was cold. I shrugged my shoulders forward to close my coat. With icy fingers, I connected the zipper and pulled it up to my throat. I would
trap the heat in.
I left the wall of ice—this was not the cliff that was calling to me. This was not the cliff I once climbed, but now never did. My feet moved with purpose toward the place that held so many memories. So very many memories, I thought again, as my resolve wavered.
A few flurries of snow fell, instantly melting when they hit the sea or the wet sand. Again, I’d moved faster than I realized. In front of me was what remained of the inn—gray and black ashes dusted with a thin layer of white. Only the stones protruded from the heap. The stones had once supported the weight of the building and the stones of the fireplace. I stood, unmoving. The air smelled of ash. I was in the forest. Another step and I would be within the boundaries of the place that had haunted my family for five generations … the place that had taken Thomas.
It was safe now; Luca and Sam both had said so. The demons were gone. Thomas had done that for us. For that, we must thank him. And for that, he was thrown from the cliff. They had wanted him to retrieve the metal box. It was their decision to use his arms as crowbars, splintering the wood, slicing his arms. They had wanted it taken—not thrown over the cliff.
Why had they wanted to take it? What had Thomas not done for them?
I stepped forward, the remains of ashen wood cracking beneath my feet. The earth was silent except for the gentle ebb and flow of the waves behind me. The birds, the squirrels, all were silent; all were watching me. I continued forward, going to the corner. The stones that marked the boundary of the back walls had been carved out of the mountain. The scars remained of where the inn had been. Beneath my feet was where Luca had been stuffed, left to die. Beneath him, the metal box had been buried. I fought the urge to kneel and touch the earth. It was gone, its secrets gone.
My father had known where it was; the demons told us so. Yet he doesn’t remember. Maybe someday he’d remember not only that he helped bury the box, but what was in it. Perhaps on that day we’d have answers. The wind blew, lifting my thoughts with it. Or perhaps it didn’t matter. Thomas took it, throwing it into the ocean. Whatever was in it, he destroyed it for us. For the first time since his death, I felt gratitude toward Thomas.
Gifted (Awakening Book 2) Page 7