Michael reached up to take the portrait down, but his movement was punctuated by tinkling glass. We both looked up. There was nothing where the chandelier had been, but we still heard crystals softly brushing against each other as if stirred by a breeze.
I noticed the ocean. It was a perpetual sound at Stonebridge, but a distant one. It had become part of the rhythm of my life. But this was too close. Too loud. It wasn’t coming from outside.
It came from the painting on the wall.
But worse than the sound of the surf was the sound beneath that sound…a baby’s soft cry, weak and afraid. I’d thought I’d heard the cry before. Now, I was sure of it.
Michael faced me. In the flashlight’s glow, his face had gone pale. My own cheeks were cold and numb. They must be white, too. There was nothing we could do for Octavia’s baby except continue with our plans. A mother’s blood had been worked into the portrait by a father gone mad. We had to destroy it to set the spirits free.
Michael turned back to his task. He meant to rip the canvas from the frame. I helped him hold it. I helped him pull. This time, he only needed his tool to slice a few stubborn edges that wouldn’t come free. This time, while Michael placed his tool back in his pocket, we let the portrait fall rather than touch it.
It wasn’t until we had the painting removed from the frame and on the floor that I felt the wind and salt stinging my skin. The missing chandelier now rattled incessantly. Keys on the piano began to plink. First one. Then another. Then another. And then a discordant tune from clumsy fingers.
Not Chopin.
That had been Octavia helping us. Helping my mother. Keeping Jericho at bay. This was “The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto” stolen from me in a mockery of the forever I’d feared would haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Come on,” Michael shouted above the impossible wind and rain. He was no longer concerned about the sleeping guests who might have caused this whole phenomenon to be stronger with all of the grief that drove them to peer into the dark. Me. Hannah and her grandmother. The Metaphysical Society. We had come together in a perfect storm for Jericho’s needs.
I held the rolled portrait and Michael took the flashlight and my other hand. He pulled me to the door. Our plan had never been to burn Jericho. Michael wasn’t as religious as the rest of his family, but he imagined Jericho would be comfortable in the fire, well used to its burn. Instead, we hurried to the cliff and beyond to the bridge over the churning saltwater cove. Far below and around the curvature of the land was the jetty of rocks where Octavia had drowned.
I couldn’t believe it when Mr. Abernathy was on the bridge. The storm we’d experienced in the parlor was magnified outside. The ocean had whipped into a frenzy even though the sky was clear. Wind pressed against our legs. Mr. Abernathy’s coat flapped and swirled. He leaned against the rail as if he was fishing at midnight.
We hurried onto the bridge. We carried the rolled portrait out to the center of the span where we would be able to throw it into the stormy water below. I called out to Mr. Abernathy to tell him what we were trying to do.
But when he turned at our approach I knew the truth: Poor Mr. Abernathy had been too old and too weak to resist the possession we fought. I don’t know how long a monster had been in his place. There were so many times he hadn’t waved or spoken after being so friendly the first time we’d met. The day the rowboat had overturned and I thought I’d seen pale hands reaching for me underwater, Mr. Abernathy had disappeared from the bridge. It hadn’t been Jericho’s reanimated corpse in the attic room. It had been Mr. Abernathy, completely inhabited by an evil entity determined to walk again. He came at us, manifested in Mr. Abernathy’s body, a horrible deteriorated thing more bone and skin than man or ghost.
The price of Jericho’s eternal life had been high.
I could only imagine the agony he must have felt as an animate collection of rotted skin and bones. Mr. Abernathy’s body was a ruin. If Jericho had possessed me, would I have eventually become little more than a walking corpse? Would my youth have caused my suffering to drag on and on?
I screamed, an angry protest against everything I’d handled quietly for months and months. Tristan’s body had never been found. Somewhere he lay beneath the waves cold and alone and gone. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t been going to grow old together anyway. It didn’t matter that we weren’t Zhu and Shanbo. It only mattered that he was no more. He would never quote Shakespeare or play the violin like a storm or row or learn not to be a violent, jealous ass. Ever.
Jericho had stolen my memories of Tristan. All the dark and light. And he’d twisted them for his own ends. He’d also hurt my mother at a tragic time. Feeding on her pain. Greedily trying to take what was left of her heart and mine.
Death was horrible.
It was also natural.
Alexander Jericho’s obsession with controlling life and death was not.
As I fought a corrupt thing for the portrait in my hands, Michael was there, too. He had told me he would be, and I’d been afraid to believe it. But he was.
Rain and wind had plastered his clothes to his body revealing every flex, every strain. My own body was buffeted from within as well as without. I shivered, uncontrollably, and it wasn’t only from the strangely frigid rain. It was rage and fear, physical exhaustion, and pain.
Jericho knew.
He must know.
I was close to the limit of how much fight I had left.
I saw his eyes in Mr. Abernathy’s face narrowing on me as we struggled. As we wrestled for the portrait, he looked at Michael. Those terrible, burning eyes met Michael’s and his straining, flexing muscles relaxed. His hold on the portrait loosened. Jericho let go of the portrait and moved Abernathy’s decayed fingers to touch Michael’s face.
“No!” I shouted. My voice rang out because the storm had eased. If Jericho influenced the weather, it no longer had his full focus. Some of it was now trained on Michael. Mr. Abernathy’s dry fingers skittered over his cheek to cup it, to hold Michael’s gaze in place.
“Close your eyes. Fight. Don’t let him take you,” I said in an urgent, choked whisper. Horror had robbed my voice of strength.
Michael didn’t close his eyes. He met Jericho’s stare, impossible and inhuman, gleaming from Abernathy’s skull. I held tighter to the portrait as Michael’s hands fell away. They dropped to his sides and Jericho laughed, a sick sound coming up, robust, from Abernathy’s ruined chest.
“I’ll have you yet, Zhu. I’ll have you,” Jericho said.
I might have stood a chance against him in Abernathy’s pitiful body with Michael’s help, but if he took Michael, if Michael’s amber eyes turned to blazing green, I was lost. My legs trembled. My hands shook. I’d been fighting for weeks with little sleep, and my strength was depleted from hundreds of hours I’d given to Tristan’s hungry violin. I was done. So done. I remembered the girl who had gone to a recital in the purple dress with bruises hidden beneath her sleeves.
But I reached for Michael’s other cheek anyway. I placed my shaking, icy fingers on his smooth skin. It was hot. As if he expended a tremendous amount of energy on the inside where a fight was happening I couldn’t see. I touched him and I looked into his eyes lit only by the occasional gleam of lightning on the water and the dispersed beam of the dropped flashlight.
“We’re at the edge again. But I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall,” I said. I didn’t shout, but he heard me. His eyelids fluttered. And Jericho grabbed my hand to pull it away from Michael’s face. It was too late. He had closed his eyes. His body had stiffened.
And his hands came back up to grip the painting.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. He opened his eyes again and looked at Jericho.
A surge of adrenaline refreshed me because I knew Michael Malone, and he was here with me as he’d promised he would be.
But Jericho was infuriated by Michael’s resistance. He lashed out with Abernathy’s hand, gripped into a hard, boney fis
t. Michael wasn’t prepared for the blow. I watched as his head whipped back, and his feet slipped on the wet stones beneath his shoes. He worried too much about holding the painting and not enough about the precariousness of his stance. He went down before I could help him. It wasn’t until he was on the ground with blood washing over his face in the rain that I knew his forehead had glanced the stone rail as he fell.
Jericho growled and dropped Abernathy’s hands back to the portrait to try again to take it, but I hadn’t let go. Even as Michael fell, I’d held on with all I had.
I pushed to get Jericho away from Michael, injured, at our feet. Abernathy’s body shuffled backward, as he was surprised to suddenly be moving in the direction he’d been pulling. His surprise helped me to get the portrait and Jericho to the rail. Inch by inch. Foot by foot. The moon chose that moment to illuminate the horror that had been Mr. Abernathy’s face, now so gruesome that the moonlight in the saggy crags and crannies and rotten hollows made me scream again. His kind old eyes were definitely gone. Now emerald mad coals glowed in sunken pits where they’d been.
Jericho must have seen the truth in my face. He stopped. All those mirrors that had been destroyed in Stonebridge. At that moment, I must have been the very mirror he’d tried so hard to avoid. He paused, and in that moment I didn’t hesitate. Michael was bleeding in the rain several feet away. My parents were on the other side of the country. Poor Mrs. Brighton was oblivious, asleep in the inn. I shoved. Against everything that had ever been violent or unfair or frightening or unexpected. I shoved with my whole body. Jericho shrieked an inhuman howl that sounded more like the stormy wind that swallowed it. Abernathy’s body hung on the edge of the bridge, but only for seconds before the gravity he’d tried to use against me sucked him down instead. I let the portrait go with him. He clutched it to his exposed ribs as he fell, every inch taking an eternity away from him, until he plunged, mortal, into the salty waves below.
Michael had gotten to his feet. He came to the edge with me now, the retrieved flashlight in his hand. He pointed it at Jericho’s writhing, but it was the painting that caught my attention. In the moonlight, it unfurled. The image began to dissolve as if it had been freshly painted. A slick of paint and unimaginable things rode the top of the churning waves. Abernathy was no longer moving. As the paint began to dissipate so did his remains. Bones collapsed. Fabric dissolved. A sodden mass of nothing sank beneath the waves. Poor Mr. Abernathy. I only hoped he would be the last victim Alexander Jericho ever claimed.
It was my imagination. I’m sure of it. Tristan was long gone. Lost to me long before he’d been lost at sea. But the paint from Jericho’s portrait seemed to slow and swirl and take the soft shape of a butterfly before it washed away.
Chapter Twenty
“Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree.
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.”
(Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 5)
Exhaustion ate deep into my bones. It was almost as if I were an animated corpse held together loosely by more will than sinew. Michael walked with me back to my room, slowly but surely, insisting that he was fine. The blood had matted in his hair, but other than that he was only a little pale. I offered to bandage his head or call for help, but he only nudged me inside with a whispered suggestion that I get some sleep.
I made it to the bed, illuminated only by the moon’s glow streaming through the casement window. I collapsed on the edge of the beckoning mattress. I bent down to unlace my muddy shoes, but I paused. I listened to the surf in the distance for a long time before the absence of rain truly penetrated my senses.
The storm had ended.
I breathed in deeply, filling my lungs for what seemed to be the first time at Stonebridge. I stood and went to the window. Brave, now that Jericho was gone. But I had breathed deeply too soon.
Far down below, beneath my turret, a familiar figure moved into sight. Michael. Still up, still out, lit only by moonlight. He glanced up and back, directly at my window. I stepped back. I hadn’t turned on the lamp. I stood in dark shadows, unseen.
He paused a beat, still seeming as if he looked for me, then he turned and moved again. I watched him all the way to the cliff’s edge. He skirted the drop until he came to the path that led down to the sea. He disappeared down it, and though I watched the place where Octavia had waded out to die for a long time, he never appeared again on the part of the beach I could see from my position.
Why had Michael gone out into the night alone?
I pressed my face against the cool glass the same way I had my first night at Stonebridge. The chill soothed my flushed cheeks but did nothing for the flutter of suspicion in my stomach.
Was he still under some kind of unnatural influence?
We had exorcised the spirits of Jericho and Octavia. Or had we only hoped?
A sudden buzzing hum startled me, and I jumped back from the glass, my heart pounding hurtfully in my chest. A glow from across the room on my bedside table mocked my fear.
It was only my cellphone on its charger and set to vibrate. It burred several more times before it was silent once more. I hurried across the room. The face of the phone said 2:00 a.m. A different sort of fear claimed me because casual calls rarely came at this hour. Worry for my parents made my fingers fumble, but I finally tabbed the right place on the screen so that texts would display.
It was a number I didn’t recognize, but instead of the faceless silhouette that usually accompanied wrong numbers or unprogrammed contacts, the avatar was a richly stylized rose. One very like the illustrator of The Butterfly Lovers would have painted. Colorful and luxurious, the flower was taken from my own heart and my own thoughts.
I didn’t want to tab the envelope. My pulse raced. My fingers had gone numb. I did it anyway.
Letters popped up on my screen.
“It’s not over. He’s going to the cave.”
Hannah or her grandmother?
More text appeared as if it was just now being typed instead of having arrived moments before.
“Thecavethecavethecavethecavethecavethecavethecave…”
The cave. I’d seen a cave in my nightmare. A horrible, rank place filled with death.
I couldn’t imagine Hannah typing the same words over and over again in a frenzy of flying fingers. Goose bumps rose on my skin as the words continued to be typed by a woman who had died years ago.
Grandmother Shreve.
Communicating to me from across some inconceivable chasm.
I’d seen the cave and the horrible rituals performed there. I’d told Michael about the burning, the ashes, and the blood. But why would he go looking for it now when we’d already defeated Jericho, when Octavia had already been freed to rest in peace?
Something niggled at the back of my mind. Some warning I couldn’t fully see.
But I was already retying my shoes.
My phone was fully charged. The flashlight application sent out a strong beam. I used it to guide my steps through the house. I made my way down to the kitchen. I’d faced Jericho with nothing but Michael and my bare hands. My body still felt the painful, bruising results.
The kitchen was dark. The blinds pulled on the windows. The door to Della’s apartment was closed.
My phone lit the way to the counter where I’d chopped vegetables for the sea stew. My fingers shook, but I reached for the butcher knife imbedded in the wooden block knife holder. It slid out in my hand, easily. The light from my phone glinted on the blade before I tucked it in the back pocket of my jeans.
I wouldn’t follow Michael into the night and down to the cave without having some way to defend myself. I couldn’t imagine cutting him even if he wasn’t himself, even if he was under some malevolent spirit’s control. But I wouldn’t embrace helplessness, either. I was a different girl than I’
d been months before—stronger, harder, determined not to find myself, undefended, in a dangerous position.
The night was muggy when I stepped into it. The rain had passed, but its humidity still hung, thick, in the air. I pressed through it the same way Michael had jogged earlier. I even paused to look back at my window. Just as I’d supposed, the moonlight glinted on the glass so the room behind it was dark, shrouded in mystery.
He hadn’t seen me.
But maybe he’d felt the weight of my gaze. Maybe he’d sensed my racing pulse.
I turned back and picked up my pace, jogging to the cliff and along its edge. The wind blew my hair back from my face. Dark surf crashed almost unseen far below. Only the curl of white foam as each wave crested and broke up to roll in churning water to the shore showed in the moonlight. All else was black, barely registering as a pitching, rolling entity pounding the sand.
Even with the flashlight on my phone, the path down to the beach was hard to navigate at night. Michael hadn’t had a light. But I didn’t find him lying at the bottom in a heap of broken arms and legs. It took every ounce of concentration and care I could muster not to slip and fall.
Finally, I reached the sand. Flashes of ghostly crabs skittered away from my light as I ran down the hard-packed beach. The tide was going out. I’d seen Jericho and his valet make their way to the cave in my dream. I followed the route they’d taken now, praying it was accurate. When I came upon recent footprints in the sand, it seemed like Jericho might be just ahead of me, that it might be him I followed instead of Michael. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t gone.
I braced myself against the sudden appearance of Mr. Abernathy’s gruesome corpse even though I’d seen it dissolve beneath the bridge.
After Always Page 17