Dark Secrets: A Paranormal Romance Anthology

by Colleen Gleason

  “In nomine sancte et qui te audiunt mea decedere terra hac,” he yelled. “Go back where you came from, you freakish son of a bitch!”

  With that, he extended his fingers and threw a ball of energy at the creature that sent it staggering back. It was enough of a distraction for Alix to lunge at her girls, grabbing them and falling over backwards with them both clutched against her. With panicked grunts, she rose to her knees and began to scramble away, trying to get her girls out of the line of fire, but she didn’t get very far before something grabbed hold of her ankle. She didn’t even look to see what it was; she screamed at Sean.

  “Sean!” she cried. “Take the girls! Get them out of here!”

  Sean, Cole, and Kyle came running. Chris extended his hands again, casting another force of energy at the creature to distract it. It was enough to cause the creature to falter as Sean grabbed Kitty and Cole grabbed Rose. Kyle grabbed hold of Alix, pulling her away from whatever had her, but it was a losing battle. Something was dragging her back towards that dark hole in the ground where the creature was lurking. Chris tried to hit it again with another spell but he was quickly growing exhausted. As Cole and Sean raced up the basement steps, a figure suddenly appeared at the top.

  Cord stood there, flabbergasted by the sight of his sons running up the steps with the girls in their arms. Before he could say a word, Sean burst forth.

  “Mom’s in trouble!” he yelled. “You have to help her!”

  Cord barreled down the steps with Quirt on his heels. Mary was standing at the top of the stairs, urging the boys to come to her. They made it to the top and she took the infant, practically shoving the boys out into the kitchen. As Mary took the little girls out of the house and ran them out to the car, Cole and Sean raced back inside and headed back to the basement. This was their fight, too, and they were going to see it through.

  Meanwhile, Cord hit the basement floor running. He could see Chris with his hands up in front of him and Kyle with a hold on Alix, who was being dragged by her feet across the basement floor. The problem was that there wasn’t anything visible holding her. Something wicked and transparent had hold of his wife and as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a flashlight beam from Chris’ flashlight fell against the dark hole on the southeast side of the house.

  It was then that he saw the ghoul from the hole, clinging to the disarray of stones around it as if trying to pull itself out. Shocked, and terrified for Alix, he ran to his wife and grabbed her by the arms to stop her momentum.

  “Cord,” Alix gasped, holding on to him. “The girls….”

  “They’re safe,” he said, grunting as he yanked on her. “My mom has them. They’re safe.”

  Alix groaned as Cord pulled and the force that held her pulled even harder. Kyle was still pulling on her but he was getting dragged, like some macabre tug-of-war. Cord could see that they were fighting a losing battle and his panic took over; lifting a hand to the ghastly creature in the well, he threw out the most potent spell he could think of.

  “Auctoritate patrum nostrorum ab hac pelle duco in terra virtutem eorum,” he said, holding out a big fist in the direction of the creature. “Omnia in nomine sancti huius et ad te absolvo te ab inferno. Et revertetur ad terram hanc vultis abire gravem!”

  Quirt was slightly more composed than his son, but he could see a life or death battle in front of him. Whatever that horrific thing was emerging from the hole, he was going to deal with it. He couldn’t even think of the fact that it was something not of this world; all he could think of was saving his grandsons and son and daughter-in-law. He, too, extended a fist at the gruesome creature and began to cast.

  “Vade malignis,” he said. “Et vade in nomine Christ!”

  With all of the casting being thrown at it, the creature began to weaken. It hissed and writhed, trying to climb out of the well but being thrown back by Cord and Quirt. The drag on Alix had lessened and with one big yank, Cord was able to pull her free of whatever force was holding her. She fell back behind him, crawling away across the dirt floor, as Cord rose to his feet and jabbed a finger at the ghoul.

  “You can’t have my family,” he boomed. “I’m sorry your life was ended unfairly and I’m sorry you lost everything, but you can’t have my family to replace yours. Abigail placed a curse on you but what you really want is peace. It’s what we all want. For whatever curse is keeping you and your daughters here, I will lift it. Do you hear me? I’ll lift it. I don’t want to live this way any longer. The time for vengeance is over. In nomine Christi, ait finitur. Vade in pace. Dad, do you have the vellum?”

  Quirt pulled out the yellowed piece of vellum that had the curse written with Sarah Good’s name on it. He had brought it with him, although at the time he hadn’t a particular purpose with it. All he knew was that something told him to bring it and he had. Now, he knew why. Pulling out his Bic lighter from his pocket, the one he used to light his pipe, he lit the vellum on fire, holding the end of it as it burned.

  “Vade in pace,” Quirt repeated softly. “In nomine Christi, ait finitur. Vade in pace.”

  As the vellum burned and Quirt dropped it into the dirt, watching it turn to ash, the creature shrank back and the horrible hissing noise it had been making faded away. In the beam of Chris’ flashlight, the ghoulish monster suddenly diminished, eased, and changed colors from a sickly gray to a pure white. As Alix, Cord, Quirt, Chris, Kyle, Cole, and Sean watched, the creature, in all of its horrific glory, simply faded away.

  The sudden silence was uneasy. Cord took Chris’ flashlight and timidly made his way over to the hole with the scattered stones around it. He shined the flashlight down the shaft.

  “It’s a well,” he said after a moment. “There’s a lot of rubble down there, but it looks like the original well.”

  “That’s where Dorothy cast the baby,” Alix said, sitting on her bum with her hair in her face. She was breathless and weak. “She was trying to force Rose to cast Kitty in there.”

  Cord looked down the shaft filled with rocks and debris. “Maybe she figured an eye for an eye,” he muttered. “Who knows? Maybe she figured since she had lost her baby, she wanted one that had descended from Abigail.”

  “The woman who ruined her life in the first place,” Alix murmured. She ran a shaking hand over her forehead in a weary gesture. “Do you really think it’s over? What about Dorothy? Where is she? If that was Sarah Good in the well, where is Dorothy?”

  Cord shook his head as he picked up one of the scattered stones. “I have no idea,” he muttered. “Maybe we’ll never know.”

  With that, he tossed the stone aside and it crashed into the brick foundation wall a few feet from the well. It shifted one of the old bricks and broke the mortar seal, causing part of the wall to give way. Cord jumped back so he wouldn’t get caught in the tumbled of bricks, waving his hands in front of his face to dissipate the big cloud of brick dust that billowed up.

  As the dust began to settle, he shined the flashlight into the broken part of the wall, seeing that there was a gap behind the wall that had been bricked over. Beyond the dust that was still floating in his flashlight beam, he could see something tucked back in the darkness of the gap. Moving closer, he could see a moldered-over skeleton was gazing back at him, chained up to the wall.

  Dorothy Good had finally been found.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “She had all sorts of stuff in her car,” the police sergeant was saying. “All kinds of things from the Salem witch trials and stuff about curses and witchcraft. Turns out that woman, Mrs. Mowbray, is a descendent of Sarah Good. Maybe she thinks she’s a witch, too. In any case, she’s in the back of the police unit spilling her guts right now. She wanted to drive your family out of the house so she’s been laying curses down now for a while. Did you two go and see her at the Historical Society some time back?”

  Alix, wrapped up in a heavy coat, was standing with Cord in the driveway of Evenshade. She nodded to the sergeant’s question. “We did about eight
months ago. I had just purchased the house and wanted more information about it.”

  The sergeant glanced over at the woman in the police car. “She said that,” he replied. “That’s how she found out that your husband was a descendent of Abigail Williams. Did you know that today, three hundred and twenty-one years ago, Sarah Good was hanged?”

  “We did.”

  He pointed at the police car with his pen. “That’s why she had come over here today,” he said. “To exact some kind of curse on the anniversary of Sarah’s death, so she says.”

  It was the early evening and the storm that had rocked the area all afternoon had passed, leaving wet land and a cloudy sky in its wake. There were four police cars in various positions around the driveway and a supervisor’s unit. Mrs. Mowbray sat in the back of one of the cars, weeping loudly and confessing her sins. Alix couldn’t even look at the woman; after what had happened that afternoon, she was shaken to the bone.

  “That’s why she seemed so interested in Evenshade,” she said. “That woman has been around here for her entire life. She knew everything about it. She even knew my husband’s great-aunt who used to live here.”

  The police sergeant wriggled his eyebrows as he continued to jot notes in his binder. “Is your aunt still alive?”

  Unlike his wife, Cord had been staring at the police car. “She is, in fact. She’s ninety-seven years old and in great health.”

  The sergeant looked up from his notes. “I’ll bet if you ask her, Christina Mowbray might have even tried to bring her down as well.”

  Cord nodded his head, pulling Alix closer. He hadn’t let her out of his sight since the incident in the basement an hour earlier. He wasn’t entirely sure he would ever let her, or his children, out of his sight ever again.

  “Maybe I will,” he said. “So what happens to Mrs. Mowbray now?”

  The cop shrugged. “She tried to kill you and your family,” he said. “I’d say she’s in a lot of trouble, even at her age. Our detectives will be contacting you tomorrow to get the full story. At least you can all sleep peacefully tonight knowing that woman is in jail where she can’t get to you.”

  Alix looked up at Cord, who gazed down at her. Silent words passed between them. They hadn’t told the police the full story for obvious reasons. Nothing about ghouls from the grave or witchcraft; after Chris had told them what happened in the living room with Mrs. Mowbray, they had called the police and told them that the woman had tried to harm their children, which wasn’t far from the truth.

  Whatever curse had been going on at Evenshade, Mrs. Mowbray had clearly exacerbated it with the continued cursing she had evidently been doing. Moreover, the amulet she had given Alix was evidently full of cyanide which, when it seeped through the amulet and rubbed off on the fingers, could have been slowly ingested. At least, that’s what Mrs. Mowbray had confessed to the arresting officer. In any case, the woman was going away for the rest of her natural life. It was a bizarre end to an even more bizarre story.

  “Well,” Cord said, giving his wife a squeeze as he faced the sergeant. “Thank you for coming. It’s been a busy afternoon.”

  “It sounds like it,” the sergeant said. “And as for the skeleton in the wall down in the basement, I’ve put in a call the Massachusetts Department of Archaeology. I’m sure they’ll be all over you in the morning; with the historical significances of this house, that’s something they’re going to love to investigate. Those people are kind of strange.”

  He was grinning as he said it and Cord smiled weakly. “I’m curious to see what they can find out,” he said. “It might be nice to have an identity.”

  The sergeant glanced at him. “On a two hundred-year-old corpse? Good luck with that.”

  “It’s probably even older than that given the age of the house.”

  “That’s certainly possible.”

  The sergeant closed up his binder and said his goodbyes, heading back to his unit. Alix and Cord stood there, watching the Danvers police units pull out of the driveway one by one, heading back to the station through the dark and wet night. When the last unit pulled out, Cord turned to Alix.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked. “Maybe we should take a trip over to North Shore and have you checked out.”

  Alix shook her head emphatically. “I’m fine,” she said as they turned and headed back to the house. “My girls are safe, the boys are safe, and I’m totally fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded as they entered the kitchen from the driveway and shut the door. Alix removed her coat and laid it over the chair.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to stay here tonight?” she asked.

  Cord went to the coffee pot where a fresh pot await. He grabbed a cup. “If I didn’t think so, we’d be over at the Marriott,” he said, pouring. “But the girls are sleeping with us tonight… just in case.”

  Alix sat down as he brought over two cups of steaming coffee. “You know,” she said softly as she took the cup from him, “every time I think about everything that happened today, it just seems like a dream. I swear I saw all of this in a movie once.”

  He smiled as he reached out, taking her hand as he sipped his coffee. “I don’t think you could make this stuff up,” he said. “Even in a movie, who would believe it?”

  Alix laughed. “Me,” she said, giggling. “It happened to me! A ghost tried to kill me! My husband is a witch! Oh, my God!”

  She was rather dramatic about it and he laughed, glad she had at least retained her humor in spite of the dark situation. “I’ll bet you never banked on this when you moved here,” he said. “I wanted to add a little excitement to your life, but not like this.”

  She leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his neck and rubbing noses with him. “You’ve done more than add excitement to my life,” she murmured. “You’ve given me the most wonderful life possible. The best thing that ever happened to me was when that dresser fell on me out there in the driveway.”

  He snuggled with her, feeling her warmth and life and love. “And Batman came to the rescue.”

  “My own personal hero.”

  He grinned, kissing her sweetly. “You better believe it.”

  She looked him in the eye, a knowing twinkle in her gaze. “After what I’ve seen today, I’m inclined to believe anything about you.”

  The State of Massachusetts Department of Archaeology invaded the next day and spent the next six months excavating the skeleton behind the wall and the basement in general, including the well. Indeed, they found the bones of two infants buried deep in the rubble, lending truth to the legend of Mercy Good but they had no idea who the second child was. Perhaps they would never know. When the excavations were complete, Cord petitioned to have the bones of all three corpses buried near Sarah Good and the State complied. Dorothy and Mercy were buried together with the unknown infant in sight of their mother’s grave.

  After that, Evenshade became a nice, normal home without ghosts or curses or terror. The Hendry and Trevor children grew up there, happy and healthy, and Cord and Alix went on with their lives and careers, more in love than they ever were. Life was never better, and when Carolina Alexandria Hendry-Trevor was born eighteen months after her older sister, Kitty, Alix and Cord considered their lives, and their family, complete.

  Still, the bassinet would end up on Cord’s side of the bed even when Alix rolled it on to her side. Given the history of the house, Dad was very protective of his little girls.

  It was in his blood.

  THE END

  The American Heroes Series contains the following novels:

  Resurrection

  Fires of Autumn

  Evenshade

  Sea of Dreams

  Purgatory

  For more information on other series and family groups, as well as a list of all of Kathryn’s novels, please visit her website at www.kathrynleveque.com.

  Kathryn Le Veque Novels

  Medieval Romance:

  T
he de Russe Legacy:

  The White Lord of Wellesbourne

  The Dark One: Dark Knight

  Beast

  Lord of War: Black Angel

  The Falls of Erith

  The de Lohr Dynasty:

  While Angels Slept (Lords of East Anglia)

  Rise of the Defender

  Steelheart

  Spectre of the Sword

  Archangel

  Unending Love

  Shadowmoor

  Silversword

  Great Lords of le Bec:

  Great Protector

  To the Lady Born (House of de Royans)

  Lords of Eire:

  The Darkland (Master Knights of Connaught)

  Black Sword

  Echoes of Ancient Dreams (time travel)

  De Wolfe Pack Series:

  The Wolfe

  Serpent

  Scorpion (Saxon Lords of Hage – Also related to The Questing)

  Walls of Babylon

  The Lion of the North

  Dark Destroyer

  Ancient Kings of Anglecynn:

  The Whispering Night

  Netherworld

  Battle Lords of de Velt:

  The Dark Lord

  Devil’s Dominion

  Reign of the House of de Winter:

  Lespada

  Swords and Shields (also related to The Questing, While Angels Slept)

  De Reyne Domination:

  Guardian of Darkness

  The Fallen One (part of Dragonblade Series)

  Unrelated characters or family groups:

  The Gorgon (Also related to Lords of Thunder)

  The Warrior Poet (St. John and de Gare)

  Tender is the Knight (House of d’Vant)

  Lord of Light

  The Questing (related to The Dark Lord, Scorpion)

  The Legend (House of Summerlin)

  The Dragonblade Series: (Great Marcher Lords of de Lara)