Into the Darkness

  V.C. ANDREWS PORTRAYS HER MOST ROMANTIC COUPLE SINCE TROY AND HEAVEN IN THE CASTEEL SERIES. . . .

  DESPITE THE BRILLIANT SUNSHINE, I FELT A CHILL SURGE THROUGH ME. I PAUSED AND LOOKED AT THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR. WAS MY CONVERSATION WITH BRAYDEN JUST ANOTHER ONE OF MY FANTASIES?

  As lovely as one of the precious gems at her parents’ jewelry store, Amber Taylor is shy and introspective—qualities misread by others as being stuck up and superior. Facing a long, lonely summer working at the family shop, Amber’s world lights up when the Matthews family suddenly moves in to the house next door, a property that has stood neglected for the longest time. And when she meets Brayden Matthews, an only child just like her, Amber soon becomes infatuated with this handsome, quirky young man who seems to know her innermost feelings almost before she does, who takes her places she never knew existed in her small town. Their connection is electrifying, unlike anything Amber’s felt before. But as quickly as he appears, Brayden vanishes into the darkness. And finding out the truth about him will push Amber Taylor to the edge of madness. . . .

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  “Something frightens you, Amber,” Brayden said. “You’re frightened about revealing too much about yourself.”

  “Like what?”

  “Things you won’t even admit to yourself,” he replied. He nodded at the now dark house. “Gotta go. See you,” he said, and headed toward the front door. “Oh,” he added, pausing to look back. “Thanks for walking with me.”

  “I enjoyed it. I think,” I said. “It was like walking with Socrates or someone.”

  He laughed.

  “Maybe you were. Remember,” he said, “reincarnation.”

  He laughed again, and then I thought I heard his mother calling for him the way she had when I first met him, her voice sounding so far-off and thin.

  Or maybe it was just the breeze strengthening and weaving its way over rain gutters, over wires, and through trees. I looked up and then back toward town.

  When I turned to look back at him, he was gone. I hadn’t even heard him open the front door.

  V.C. Andrews®

  Into the Darkness

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  Following the death of Virginia Andrews, the Andrews family worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Virginia Andrews’ stories and to create additional novels, of which this is one, inspired by her storytelling genius.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by the Vanda General Partnership

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Pocket Star Books paperback edition March 2012

  V. C. ANDREWS® and VIRGINIA ANDREWS® are registered trademarks of the Vanda General Partnership

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  Design by Esther Paradelo

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5086-0

  ISBN 978-1-4516-5095-2 (eBook)

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  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: New Neighbor

  Chapter 2: Psyche

  Chapter 3: Safe

  Chapter 4: Child of Circumstance

  Chapter 5: Prudence Perfect

  Chapter 6: Shayne

  Chapter 7: The Lagoon

  Chapter 8: Birdsong

  Chapter 9: An Unpleasant Evening

  Chapter 10: Eyes Behind the Eyes

  Chapter 11: Portrait

  Chapter 12: Shadows

  Chapter 13: Thoreau

  Chapter 14: A Real Wonderland

  Chapter 15: Spontaneity

  Chapter 16: Too Different

  Chapter 17: Puzzle Pieces

  Chapter 18: Answers

  Epilogue

  'Forbidden Sister' Excerpt

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sp; Prologue

  He was looking at me from between the full evergreen hedges that separated our houses and properties. I don’t know why he thought I wouldn’t see him. Although it was what Mom called a crown jewels day because there were no clouds and the bright sunshine made everything glimmer and glisten, even dull rocks and old cars with faded paint, scratches, nicks and dents. The sun was behind me, so I wasn’t blinded by its brilliance. In fact, it was like a spotlight reflecting off his twenty-four-karat-gold hair.

  Even from where I was standing on our front porch, I could see he had blue-sapphire eyes. He had a very fair complexion, close to South Sea pearl, in fact, so that his face seemed to have a hazy, soft glow, which contrasted dramatically with the rich, deep green leaves of the hedges.

  My first thought was that there must be something mentally wrong with him. Why else would he stand there gaping at someone unashamedly? When someone stares at you and doesn’t care that you see him doing so, you’re certainly ill at ease, even fearful. You might be angry, but nowadays, especially, you don’t go picking fights with strangers. He wasn’t a complete stranger, of course. I knew he was our new neighbor.

  I had no idea whether he had been spying on me from the very first day that his family had moved into their house, but this was the first time I had caught him doing so. Because the hedges were easily five and a half feet high and he was crouching a little, I estimated that he was at least five feet ten inches tall. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved khaki shirt with epaulets, the sort of shirt that you might find in a store selling military paraphernalia and uniforms.

  For a few moments, I pretended not to have noticed him. I looked away and then sat on the wide moonstone blue porch railing and leaned back against the post as if I were posing for a sexy dramatic shot in a film. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath like when the doctor tells you to breathe in and hold it while he moves his stethoscope over your back. My breasts lifted against my thin, light jade-green sweater, and I held the air in my lungs for nearly thirty seconds. Then, as if some film director were telling me to look more relaxed and more seductive for the shot, I released my breath and brought my right hand up to fluff my thick, black-opal shoulder-length hair.

  For as long as I could remember, my family always described most colors in terms of jewels. My parents owned a jewelry store that had been established by my paternal grandparents in Echo Lake, Oregon, more than forty years ago. My grandfather taught my father how to make original jewelry, and most people who saw them said that he created beautiful pieces. My mother ran the business end of our store and was the main salesperson. Dad called her his personal CFO. I helped out from the day I could handle credit-card sales. Rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and pendants found their way into almost any conversation at our dinner table. Nothing was just good in our world; it was as good as gold. Many things had a silver lining, and if something glittered, it glittered like diamonds.

  Mom said my hair was truly opal because it was just as unique as the jewel. The color and the pattern of opals could change with the angle of view, and she claimed that the same was true for my hair.

  “No one that I know has hair that changes color as subtly as yours does, Amber, especially in the sunlight.” She took a deep breath and shook her head softly. “I swear, sweetheart, sometimes when I’m looking for you and see you from behind, I’m not sure it’s you. Just as I am about to call out to you, your name gets caught in my mouth as if my tongue had second thoughts.”

  Dad wasn’t as dramatic about it, but he didn’t disagree. Mom was often histrionic. She had a bit of a Southern drawl and was a beautiful platinum-brown-haired woman who had once gone for a screen test at Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina, when she was still in high school because a young assistant producer had convinced her she could be the next Natalie Wood. She didn’t get hired, but it was her moment in the sun. Dad was proud of her head shots and kept four of them on his desk at home.

  I wondered if the boy next door would notice how my hair color subtly changed when I sat up and then walked slowly off the porch and into the sunlight. No one but my parents had ever mentioned it, although people did compliment me on the richness of my hair. I kept my arms folded just below my breasts and walked with my head down like someone in very deep thought, someone who was oblivious to anything and everything going on around her. I was barefoot and wore an ankle-length light blue cotton skirt and a gold ankle bracelet with tiny rubies. I was taking every step pensively as if the weight of a major decision were wrapped over my shoulders like a shawl full of great and desperate concerns. I guess I was always in some pose or another because I lived so much in my imagination. Dad always said I lived in my own movie.

  “You’re just like all you kids nowadays, always in one sort of performance or another,” he said. “I watch the girls walking home from school. You could see every one is glancing around to see ‘Who is looking at me?’ Those girls with green, blue, and orange hair and rings in their noses drive me nuts.”

  “Don’t knock the nose rings, Gregory Taylor. We sell them,” Mom told him.

  “Whatever happened to the au naturel look, the Ingrid Bergman look?” Dad cried, throwing up his arms. He had an artist’s long, muscular fingers and arms that would have no trouble grabbing the golden ring on a merry-go-round. He was six feet two, slim, with what Mom called a Clark Gable mustache and jet-black hair with thin smoky gray strands leaking along his temples. He was rarely out in the sunlight during the summer to get a tan, but he had a natural dark complexion that brought out the jade blue in his eyes.

  “Ingrid who?” I asked. I knew who she was. Both Mom and I just liked teasing him and suggesting that he was showing his age.

  At that point, he would shake his head and either sit and pout or leave the room, and Mom and I would laugh like two conspirators. He wasn’t really that angry, but it was part of the game we all liked to play. Dad was always claiming to be outnumbered and outvoted in his own home, whether it was a discussion of new furniture, dishes, drapes, or even cars. That comment would bring smiles but inevitably remind us that four years after I was born, Mom had miscarried in her seventh month. I would have had a brother. They seemed to have given up after that.

  It was great having my parents’ full attention, but I would have liked to have had a brother or a sister. I told myself I wouldn’t fight with either or be jealous or be anything like most of the girls I knew when it came to their siblings. Their stories made it sound as if their homes rocked with screams and wails about unfair treatment or one being favored over the other. I could only wail or complain about myself to myself. It was like living in an echo chamber.

  From what I could tell, the boy next door probably was an only child, too. I was certainly not spying on him and his parents, but my bedroom window looked out over the hedges at his house, and I couldn’t help but see the goings-on. Days before, I was in my bedroom reading one of the books on my summer requirement list when I heard the truck arrive and saw the men begin to unload cartons. I had never really been in the house since the last people living there had left, but I recalled Dad saying they had left furniture.

  Seeing new neighbors suddenly move in was a great surprise. My parents had never mentioned the neighboring house being sold or rented. No one had, in fact, and news like that in a community as small as ours usually made headlines. There were just too many busybodies to let a tidbit like that go unrevealed.

  At first, I didn’t even see that the neighbors had a son. His parents appeared along with the truck and the men. I didn’t get that good a look at them, but the woman looked tall and very thin. She kept her opened left hand over the left side of her face, like someone who didn’t want to be recognized, and hurried into the house as if she were caught in a cold downpour of rain and hail. Her husband was about the same height, balding, and I thought a little chubby, with an agate-brown goatee and glasses with frames as thick as silver dollars that caught the sunlight. He walked mo
re slowly, moving like someone in deep thought. I wondered when they had first come around to look at the house. It had to have been a very quick decision.

  After the movers began to bring things into the house, the boy suddenly appeared, as if he had been pouting in the backseat like someone who had been forced to come along. I didn’t get that good a look at him, either. He had his head down and also walked quickly, but my first thought was that he was probably a spoiled only child, pouting, angry about having to leave his school and friends. Of course, he could have an older sister who was either at a college summer session or perhaps studying abroad.

  I watched on and off as the move-in continued, the men carrying in clothing and some small appliances. It didn’t take them very long. I waited to see more of the neighbors. No one emerged, and I didn’t see the boy again until this day. As a matter of fact, I didn’t see any of them. It was as if they had been swallowed up by the house. The moving men came out and drove off only an hour or so later. Immediately, it grew as quiet as it had been. None of the windows was opened, and no lights were turned on. One might think they had gone in the front door and out the back, never to be seen or heard from again.

  Right now, I knelt down on my bright green lawn pretending to look for a four-leaf clover, but out of the corner of my eye, I was watching to see whether he would move away from the hedges or continue to spy on me. He never changed expression or turned his head away for an instant. Finally, I stood up abruptly and, with my heart racing, said, “Can I help you?”

  I remained far enough away that I could quickly retreat to my house and lock the door behind me if need be.

  He smiled. “What did you have in mind?” he replied.

  “I’m not the one peeping,” I said. “Maybe I should say ‘gawking.’”

  “Maybe you’re not at this moment, but I’ve seen you looking for minutes at a time in my direction out your bedroom window between the curtains.”

  “That’s different,” I said, smothering my embarrassment. I had thought I was inconspicuous in my curiosity. And when had he seen me? I never caught sight of him or any of them looking out a window toward our house.

  “And that’s different because?”