by Krista Walsh
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Thanks for Reading
Acknowledgements
Other Works by Krista Walsh
About the Author
Death at
Peony House
By
Krista Walsh
All Rights Reserved
This edition published in 2016 by Raven’s Quill Press
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental.
Cover art: Ravven (www.ravven.com)
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/ her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
To my parents, who kept me alive long enough for me to get this far
and who always told me my dreams were possible
1
The heavy atmosphere around Peony House came down on Daphne Heartstone the moment she turned her beat-up Honda Civic into the crushed gravel driveway. The headlights cut through the moonless night, creating shadowed monsters out of the curved stone steps that slunk toward its wide, ornately carved front doors.
She turned off the engine and remained in her car, staring up at the place through the windshield. The thirteen windows glowering down on her were dark, and her skin crawled under their watchful gaze. She didn’t like hospitals at the best of times, but the energy coming out of Peony House set her teeth on edge.
She grabbed her flashlight out of the glove compartment and eased out of the car. The driver side door required a forcible nudge for the latch to stick, and the resounding slam echoed around the quiet cul-de-sac.
Daphne winced and looked over her shoulder down the street, hoping no one came out to ask her what she was doing.
Fortunately, the families of New Haven’s south end were too busy devouring their dinners and television to care about what went on at some abandoned building. For them, Peony House was just part of the scenery, a two-hundred-year-old art piece at the end of the road.
In the light of day, to someone who couldn’t sense whatever dark energy drifted out of the building, Peony House would likely be viewed as a stunning example of historical architecture. A quick look online before she’d left that evening informed Daphne that the less-than-modest estate had been built in the early eighteen hundreds by the Ancowitz family, who required stone pillars, a porch that stretched the length of the house, and molded shutters around each of the windows to create their perfect family home.
The pale stone was cracked and covered with lichen, but underneath the damage, the estate still stood regal and impressive. Its wide doors sat in the middle of the main house, with two windows on either side. The second floor held six windows, evenly spaced, but only half the shutters remained, cracked and chipped. The third floor took up half the length of the second, boasting three windows under a sloped roof.
The far right of the house stretched seamlessly into a square one-story extension made of the same stone as the original building. The newer part of the house had been built a hundred years later as an operating room when Peony House was converted into a hospital.
Beautiful, but oppressive.
Daphne released a deep breath as she switched her flashlight to her other hand and wiped her sweaty palm on her pant leg.
A phone call from her friend Denise Longbarrow, who lived a few doors down from Peony House, had dragged her away from home in the middle of her own dinner and television time. Denise told her she’d seen lights up on the second floor, and Daphne felt the opportunity was too good to pass up.
Her career at the New Haven Chronicle had hit a slump in recent months, and she was desperate for a lead that would maintain her position near the top of the crime division food chain.
She’d driven to the other end of town with the expectation of walking in on a story she could pitch to her editor, Gerry Franklin. A juicy scandal, maybe, or, failing that, a less thrilling exposé on the rise of squatters in the area. In a city like New Haven, with a population of no more than a hundred thousand — most of them seasonal — hard crimes were few and far between.
Two years ago, she would have crossed her fingers and hoped for something big to give her career a final bump to the top. She’d have hoped for blood, gore, and some local celebrity’s face in the middle of it to really stir things up, then would have broken locks and hacked police files to dig into all the nitty-gritty.
But ten months ago, some bad choices and a near brush with death had opened her eyes and taught her that she would appreciate her achievements more if she was patient and worked for them honestly.
A slower strategy than her old approach, but one that ensured a clearer conscience and fewer people getting hurt.
Her change of ethics had shifted her footing with Gerry, and not entirely for the better. She had been his best reporter, willing to take risks and put the first amendment before any inconveniences such as laws or confidentiality. Since she’d cleaned up her act, his attention drifted more often to the new up-and-comers, and Daphne knew that if she wanted to keep her position, she’d have to come to him with something big.
Tonight, she would have been happy to catch the mayor up against the wall with his neighbor’s wife or even a councilor exchanging a briefcase of money for a mountain of cocaine. Not as exciting, but still enough to appease her boss.
Now that she’d arrived, her nerves were frazzled by the effects of an energy far more malicious. Her magic flared in her blood, an instinctive reaction to the buzz in the air around the house. Her mouth went dry at the tingling sensation under her skin, but although her power urged her to draw on it, she tamped the magic down and kept it wrapped around her core.
“Come on, Daph,” she said to herself. “It can’t be any worse than what you’ve seen before. What are ghosts in the shadows when you’ve wrangled with demons?”
She shook out her hands to rid herself of some of her tension and crunched over the driveway to the front steps.
Although her magic was as familiar as donning a favorite sweater, she was out of practice holding on to it. Years of overuse made her wary about summoning it too quickly, and she fought against her desire to let the magic lapse into her subconscious. Her fingers trembled with the effort of keeping her power in check, and she tapped a steady beat against her thigh to keep them busy.
Part of her personal rehabilitation over the last year had been to pull away from her power. For too long, magic had proved a dangerous addiction.
The strength of her magical heritage had been carried down the female line from the days before King Arthur, becoming duller and more diluted through each generation. Daphne’s father had married her mother, Cheryl, for her ancestry, believing the combined strength of their bloodlines would create a ch
ild as powerful as the original source.
When Daphne was born with no discernible magical boost, he hadn’t been deterred. He’d raised her to believe that with time and training, she could unleash her full potential and become the strongest sorceress in two thousand years. He’d repeated his hope for her so often that it became ingrained in her self-image, an integral part of her development.
How could a child not be influenced by such motivating speeches? Her ambition made her quick to learn, and Daphne had sat patiently through her mother’s and grandmother’s lessons to gain an understanding of the basics. She’d learned that everything in the universe carried a combination of elemental energies, and that she could manipulate those energies by controlling her own. Then she’d put that learning to the test through disciplined practice.
By the time she was eleven, she could create tornadoes in her bedroom and start a fire in her palm just by thinking about it. Her bath time adventures had included creating rain out of bathwater. But it still wasn’t enough.
When she was twelve years old, her father disappeared. Daphne had only become more determined to live up to his expectations, believing he would return if she proved herself worthy. She pushed herself harder, but manipulating elemental energies depleted her magic and drained her too quickly when she tried to cast the stronger spells she craved.
So she’d started studying behind her mother’s back at twenty-one. Necromancy, alchemy, demonology — anything that could get her the results her father had promised her. By twenty-four, her power had grown until she surpassed her mother’s ability. Cheryl and Daphne’s grandmother, Evelyn, had watched her with wary apprehension and had done their best to talk her out of her path. They’d lectured her, grounded her, even threatened to bind her magic, but Daphne’s only response had been to push harder.
She’d applied the same dedication to her career at the Chronicle, taking risks and throwing other people to the wolves if it allowed her to take another step closer to the top. She’d had her eye on the editor-in-chief position as a long-term goal and was determined to boot Gerry out of first place in the crime division before she was thirty.
She’d come so close.
Then life had tripped her into a mud pit and opened her eyes to the damage she’d done to herself and the people around her. A run-in with warlock Jermaine Hershel had increased her strength exponentially, but the crime she’d almost committed to get what she wanted had made her afraid of the power she wielded.
For months afterward she wouldn’t touch her magic at all, but life had surprised her again by showing her she could use it without losing herself as long as she remained in control of the magic and not the other way around.
Now she saw herself as being in Magics Anonymous, unable to go cold turkey, but always watchful for any signs that she was slipping back into old habits.
And something about Peony House made her want to do just that. The energy of the house slid into her veins, testing her.
Daphne found the door ajar and pushed it open to step into the dark lobby. The electricity had been cut decades ago, and the glow of the single streetlight outside barely made it through the dirt-caked windows.
The soles of her scuffed leather shoes scraped through the dust of the derelict lobby. Squeaks and the clacking of tiny claws echoed through the silence. Daphne grimaced at the idea of rats running over her feet. She swung the flashlight beam around the room, over tails that disappeared into cracks in the wall.
Inside, the dark energy of the hospital was stronger, and Daphne pulled her magic closer around her. She closed her eyes and cast her mind through the corridors and up the stairs.
Empty. Whoever Denise had seen was already gone.
Daphne grumbled with disappointment at the lost headline and moved toward the door to leave. If the spirits wanted Peony House, they were welcome to it.
She set her hand on the door handle, but a low hush of voices — like a movie with the volume turned low — made her turn around.
Her grip on her flashlight slipped, and she rushed to grab it before it fell to the floor. What had been an empty lobby except for the dust and the rats was now a space that bustled with the semi-transparent outlines of patients being admitted at the reception desk and doctors running down the hall toward a nurse who stood in a doorway. Her white apron was spattered with dark spots Daphne assumed were blood.
The scene flickered and then vanished.
No current of energy had emanated from the figures, so Daphne knew they weren’t ghosts. Not the dead, but shadows of the dead. Imprints. Memories of the hospital coming back from the past.
She shook her head and stepped away from the door.
Imprints weren’t rare in old buildings, but they almost never showed up so clearly. Usually they were more like a hint of movement out of the corner of your eye or that sensation of someone watching you in an empty room.
She waved her hand through the air to pick up any traces of what had been there, but her fingers caught nothing but drifting dust motes.
Putting together what she’d seen with the unpleasant energy she felt, Daphne ran her hand over the bumps of her braided hair and rested her fingers against the base of her throat.
“Get out of here, Daphne,” she said aloud. “Go to the police station and stalk a patrol car. Go online and piece together a local conspiracy or two. You need a story and there’s nothing for you here. Just walk away and let this house continue on its dusty way.”
Even as she lectured herself, she stepped further into the lobby, away from the door. The flashlight beam glinted over the cracked bare walls and broke apart the shadows in the hallway leading toward the operating room. As she stared at the closed doors, a translucent memory of those doors swung open and a doctor strode toward the offices behind Daphne, the shimmering gray shapes of nurses flocking around him.
They passed through her and goosebumps broke out along her arms.
She pulled up the collar of her spring jacket. “A quick walk around, but that’s it. I have no time or interest in getting involved in some old building’s problems.”
She crossed the lobby toward the wide stairs leading to the second floor, keeping her footsteps slow and soft. Although she’d confirmed she was the only living being in the building, she didn’t like the thought of stirring up whatever was creating the darkness seeping through the walls and into the air around her.
As she crept up the stairs, a shiver ran through her, and her stomach twisted in knots. In reaction, her magic heightened, pouring down her arms as an instinctive defense. She was about to push it back down when a sharp cry from one of the rooms upstairs echoed down the stairwell. Her heartbeat jumped into her throat, and she pressed her hand against her chest.
She quickened her pace to round the last bend on the stairs and reached the second floor. More imprints rushed around up here — nurses in pressed white aprons and white hats carrying basins and surgical trays, patients in outdated wheelchairs moving up and down the hallway. None of them reacted to her, but that didn’t come as a surprise. They existed in a different time.
“But how are you so clear?” Daphne wondered aloud.
The cloying energy had clearly offset the balance of the house, leaving it on shaky magical ground. A murmur in the back of her mind urged her to discover the source of the energy to see if she could put it to good use, but she quashed that voice down. The only magic she would ever use again was her own.
Especially when this other magic left such an oily sensation on her skin. She rubbed at her arms, but felt no cleaner.
She kept her eyes open for any traces of someone who had recently left. She figured if she was doing a tour of the place, she might as well see if she could explain Denise’s lights. But room after room offered nothing but dust-covered scuffs on the hardwood floor and the occasional smashed window.
As she paced the hallway, Daphne thought about everything she’d read about Peony House earlier that evening and wondered why the city council
hadn’t either torn the old place down or restored it with their usual fuss over heritage sites.
The old Ancowitz estate had been converted into a hospital in the early nineteen hundreds, starting as a tuberculosis sanitarium and developing into a general medical facility. For forty years, Peony House had been the only hospital in the south end of New Haven. After the war, a second hospital had opened to care for the influx of returning troops, and a decade after that, a third had arrived. The newer buildings made the old estate obsolete. The patients had petered out and the services had dwindled until the place had shut down altogether.
She recalled some talk about converting the space into doctors’ offices, but the property was deemed too expensive to renovate. After two hundred years serving as the height of architectural fashion and the symbol for one of New Haven’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families, Peony House had been bequeathed to the rats. Daphne grimaced as more tiny claws scratched inside the wall beside her.
She reached the end of the hallway and entered one of the rooms, staring out the window to the street. For a late September evening, the neighborhood was too quiet. Her own neighborhood was always full of children running around after dinner, playing tag with the traffic on the side streets of the downtown core. Here, the inhabitants embodied the peace and quiet of the fields and farmland that stretched out behind Peony House. Lights had turned on upstairs in many of the houses, and she pictured the kids finishing up their homework or getting ready for bed.
The bright warmth from the hospital’s neighbors made the abandoned hallways feel even more empty, and all Daphne wanted was to go home.
She checked her watch, the golden hands ticking the seconds away. If she left now, she’d still make it home in time for her favorite British crime show.
She left the room and headed for the stairs.
As she passed by the staircase leading up to the third floor, she heard someone crying and froze again, her stomach dropping. The hair on her arms rose, and she squeezed her flashlight as she breathed more of her magic into her hands.