Nathanial felt his mind slipping again into blackness. Memories of his late wife loomed in his mind. Her stark white face fell upon him, her dark vacant eyes staring into his soul. He gasped wanting to scream, but his body felt too weak to utter the cry. All he could muster was a feeble “No…”
Mona shushed him and continued to murmur her chant. In his mind, the teeth of the beast descended on him. Long canine fangs snapped at him, biting into his forearm as he protected his face. The feeling of confusion and betrayal sank into his core. Loneliness gripped him.
The vision shifted. His wife’s body lay lifeless in the bathtub, her blood soaking into the cold water. A thin white gown clung to her body, showing her naked flesh underneath. He fell to her, holding her in his arms, the wounds on her wrists still fresh.
Nathanial shot up from the bed, tears falling down his face; his chest soaked in sweat.
“She’s gone,” he wailed, clenching his fists as the blankets fell away.
Mona’s voice rose in volume, the rhythm of her chanting accelerated. She clapped her hands together to the beat of the chant. Each clap felt as if it pounded on his chest. Nathanial wept.
“It’s my fault,” he moaned. “I should have been stronger. I should have helped her.”
“You could do nothing Nathanial. Your wife took the coward’s way out. Now she is trapped between worlds. Your ranch is haunted. Many souls hang in the ether there. You must let them go. Let them move on.”
An image of Jane flashed through his mind. He saw her soft smile and red hair flowing down her back. He saw her curvaceous figure moving through the pasture toward the settler’s cabin. Something about her made him feel the undercurrent of change coming. It gripped his stomach. He was unsure if it would be for better or for worse.
“The girl must help you,” said Mona, “She has a purpose there.”
“I can feel it,” said Nathanial, settling back into the bed. He pulled a blanket over his shoulder and slept.
When he woke, it was dark, and he was alone in the cabin. His entire body ached. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. He felt weak, and his stomach felt empty and twisted. His head pounded at his temples. From the corners of his eyes, he saw blackness and stars. He bent over his knees and took several deep breaths, trying to alleviate the dizziness that swam through his head.
The dizziness subsided, and he lifted his head to look around the room. It was cold. He pulled a red wool blanket over his shoulders and stood on bare feet. The chill of the wood floor crept up through his skin. He stepped to the window, looking out on the compound.
He saw the flicker of warm light through the windows of the other buildings. The sound of an infant crying echoed over the compound, and Nathanial felt a sting of loneliness. He had been so wrapped up in his problems since the death of his wife, that he had left Morgan to her own devices. She was as haunted as he was, perhaps more, but he could barely look at her.
Everything about Morgan reminded him of his wife. It reminded him of his failure to her. It reminded him of his own weakness and the curse that hung over their lives now. He told himself that if Mona’s cures worked, he would make every effort to be a better father. He would take Morgan on a long vacation, perhaps they would go to Europe. Perhaps he would move them somewhere warmer, maybe New Mexico or Florida.
The girl deserved to go to school, to play with other children, to have a normal life. On his trips back east, he witnessed the experiences of the upper-class children of his business associates. They had active lives full of lessons and friends and shopping. Morgan had none of these things. He hung his head in shame and wrapped the blanket tighter around his chest.
He pulled away from the window and noticed his boots sitting by the bed. He slipped his feet inside, not bothering to tie them, and trudged over to the small kitchen. The room was lit by a single naked bulb that hung from the ceiling in the tiny kitchen. He found a teakettle and a handful of tea bags sitting on the counter.
He filled the kettle with water from the sink and put it on the countertop electric range. The sputter of burning water rose from the kettle. Nathanial walked back to the single bed and sat down. It was the only furniture in the room besides a small square table shoved in the corner under the window with a rickety chair. He had been in this cabin before.
Mona’s ritual had been more intense this time than in the past. Perhaps she sensed his desperation. Perhaps she felt it was time to up the ante. The events of the last twenty-four hours were a haze, but he vaguely remembered Mona mentioning Jane. The thought of the girl made his body react. He coughed, and the kettle sang out.
He rose to pull the kettle off the hot eye and poured boiling water over a tea bag inside a deep mug. The scent of chamomile wafted to his nostrils as he dipped the bag into the hot water.
Who was this girl Jane anyway? Why did he feel so drawn to her, yet so repulsed? He wanted to grab her and kiss her, but he also wanted to push her away and never see her again.
He took the hot cup of tea and sat on his bed, pulling the blanket tight around his shoulders. He looked around the room for his overnight bag but didn’t see it. The bandages around his wrists looked like they already needed to be changed, and the bandage over the burn mark on his chest chafed the sensitive skin underneath.
He grimaced and took a careful sip of tea. If this cure worked, he could have his normal life back. A normal life without his wife. The thought of it just seemed wrong. Part of him felt he deserved to be cursed, as long as he lived without her. But that was ridiculous. She had made her choice. She had left him and their child. Why should he feel guilty to live out the remainder of his life without her, without the shadow of her parting hanging over his shoulders?
The tea slid down his throat, and he sighed. He could hear the sound of someone trudging to the house through the gravel outside. He looked up as the door opened to reveal Joseph. He looked irritated. He held bandages in his hands.
“Granny said to come check you.”
“Thanks.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like Hell. But I’ll live.”
“She bled you a lot. It will take a few days to get your full strength back,” said Joseph as he pulled the chair toward Nathanial. He sat and put the bandages in his lap. He took a pair of scissors from his pocket and placed Nathanial’s arm on his knee. Joseph cut into the bandages to show the long razor lines that cut down to Nathanial’s veins. Nathanial winced when he saw them.
“Granny cut pretty deep,” Joseph said with a humorous tone in his voice.
Nathanial said nothing. He thought about what he would tell his daughter if she happened to see these wounds. It was the first time Mona had bled him. In the past, her rituals included a long sweat and a great deal of chanting. The bleeding, branding, and near poisoning with the wolfsbane were all new additions to her cure.
Joseph swabbed the cuts with hydrogen peroxide and wrapped fresh bandages over the wounds. The cuts had stopped bleeding, but the deep purple gash looked like it might begin bleeding again at any moment. Joseph taped off the bandages on Nathanial’s wrists and reached out to inspect the one on Nathanial’s chest. When he peeled back the bandage, he looked at it with surprise. Joseph’s eyes grew wide.
“Granny needs to see this,” he said standing.
“What? What’s wrong?”
Nathanial looked down to see a series of concentric rings radiating out from the brand that looked like a red full moon. He pressed his finger into his chest to stretch the skin and get a better look.
“What is this?”
“Looks like an infection. Wait. I’ll get Granny.”
Joseph left and came back moments later with Mona. She approached Nathanial squinting, then stood, placing her hand on her chin.
“What? Do I need antibiotics?”
“This isn’t that kind of infection. It’s the beast inside you. It’s fighting my cures. These rings are the curse showing up on the surface. That means we’ve stirre
d it up. We’re pushing it out, but it’s fighting back.”
“What should we do?” asked Nathanial.
“Nothing we can do until next month.”
Nathanial sank back in the bed and set the teacup down on the table. He felt defeated. Mona sat down in the chair while Joseph stood behind her.
“You can go Joseph,” she said. The young man walked through the door, and shut it behind him.
“I can see there is a dark cloud over you. No matter how hard I fight the curse, something anchors it to you. Do you know where it originated?”
“How it came into my house? No.”
“There has to have been an originator.”
“I told you. My wife turned for the first time and bit me. The next day, I found her bled out in the bathtub dead. The next month I turned. I’ve been turning ever since. I have no idea where she got the curse. She hadn’t left the ranch. Nothing out of the ordinary happened to her. It remains a mystery.”
“I can see the curse is anchored to the ranch. There is much sadness there. The dead walk unburied. You must put them to rest. Until then, the source of your curse will remain unclear. The beast wants the young girl. She has a gift. She can see into the dream world. She can find a way to fulfill the beast and let it pass through. She can cure you where my cures cannot. Look to the girl. Bring her into you. Love her.”
“Love her? I don’t even know her. She just arrived two days ago.”
“Nevertheless, the girl is the key to your freedom. She is the key to the freedom of the lost spirits who hang around you and your ranch.”
Mona’s eyes fluttered and she stared back at Nathanial. He gave her a weak, half-smile and shrugged his shoulders. How was he supposed to get close to the girl when he had been so gruff with her?
He could tell the beast inside him wanted her. It wanted to mate with her, perhaps. Mona seemed to think giving it what it wanted would somehow help.
Mona stood shakily and turned to go. Nathanial picked up his tea and sipped it. It had become lukewarm, and he thought wistfully of his servants back home. Mona eyed him as she stood in the open door.
“Follow my advice Nathanial Ellis, or this curse will destroy everything you love.” With that, she left, letting the door slam behind her.
Chapter 8
I bumped along the winding trail up into the mountains. Dense forest expanded all around under the soft, yellow, northern light. Daisy sang an old Dixie Chicks song behind me as she rode. Daisy’s voice rose over the pines in a broken, out-of-tune rhythm that put my nerves on edge. I wanted her to stop, but I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t hurt her feelings.
Morgan rode silently. Every so often, she pointed out a plant to tell me what it was. “That is a huckleberry bush; that is a pine cone full of pine nuts.” She pointed out medicinal plants and told me the best way to trap a squirrel. I got the feeling I was being tutored in wilderness survival by a seven-year-old.
My legs and butt already felt sore, and we had only been riding for about half an hour. According to Daisy, we would ride up the ridge to where we could see the entire ranch.
I wished I had brought my cell phone with ear buds, so I could shove them in my ears and drown out the sound of Daisy’s voice. She was such a sweet girl, but her singing was terrible.
Morgan pointed out a woodpecker thumping on a tree and explained how they hid acorns for winter. She went on to tell me about how to leach the tannic acid from the acorns to make them palatable. I interrupted her in the middle of her speech.
“How do you know all this Morgan?” I asked. Even Daisy stopped singing to listen. Morgan turned around in her saddle, placing her hand on her horse’s rear. She glanced at Daisy and sighed.
“Mommy taught me,” she said before she turned back to face the trail.
I let it drop. We rode in silence up a rocky outcropping. Morgan kicked her horse’s sides to encourage it up the hill. My horse balked. It didn’t want to go. I tried to kick my horse as Morgan had, gently at first, and then harder. The horse still didn’t budge. I flushed; heat pricked my neck. Daisy’s horse pushed up behind me, and my horse dipped its head down and whinnied. I could see Morgan already up the ridge, waiting patiently for me to join her. She stared down at me, her face dark and blank.
“Something’s the matter,” said Daisy, “Get down and walk her.”
I started to lift my foot out of the stirrup when the horse reared and flew up the rocky trail. Stones tumbled down below the horse’s feet as it jutted up the hill. I gripped the reins while trying to push my foot back into the stirrup. As the horse flew past Morgan, I realized I had no control.
Dread sunk down my throat as a cold panic pierced my skin. Daisy shouted behind me about the wolf’s scent, but I could barely hear her over the pounding in my ears. The horse charged up the trail to the top of the ridgeline. I could see the sheer drop-off approaching. The expanse of the valley below lay before me.
Everything seemed to go in slow motion, like being deep underwater. I went numb as the horse charged toward the cliff. Somewhere deep in the fog of my brain, I knew I should throw myself from the horse and take my chances with a short fall to the ground. However much I tried to throw myself down, I couldn’t pry my hands from the reins.
The horse pushed forward, the cliff coming ever closer. Blackness filled my eyes as I nearly passed out from fear. Just as Tannin reached the cliff’s edge, she reared up on her hind legs. I gripped the reins, but I slid from the saddle. My weight pulled the horse’s head back as I fell. My head cracked down on a rock as the horse stumbled backward onto my stomach.
Everything went black. In the distance, Morgan screamed. But it didn't matter. I was sinking.
I found myself in the garden. But the cherry blossoms had turned gray, and Owen looked drawn and sad. His face matched the gray of the once bright garden. I ran to him and threw my arms around his waist.
“Owen, I missed you so much.”
“You shouldn’t have come Melody. It isn’t safe here.”
“What isn’t safe? What’s happening? What’s happened to our special place?”
“Our time is short my beloved. Evil wants to keep us apart. The same evil that always seeks to keep us apart. You must come with me now.”
He took my hand, and we ran through the gray mist. I felt my head throbbing, and my feet scraped as if we were running over glass. I panted hard as he pulled me.
“I can’t keep up, Owen. Please stop.”
He stopped and turned to me, taking me in his arms. His embrace felt warm, and I buried myself in the deep rich scent of his skin. He leaned down to press his lips against mine, his hands caressing my hair.
“We can’t stay. My brother will find us. We must go.”
“What do you mean your brother?”
“He loves you. He doesn’t want us to be together. He’ll do anything to prevent it.”
“How could your brother possibly prevent us from being together?”
“He can, and he will. Come!”
He pulled me into the thick fog. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted water and tasted the metallic tang of blood in my mouth. My memory slipped. What was happening? What was I doing? Was this a dream? Owen seemed strange. Not like the last time. He seemed changed somehow. The garden was all but gone and all I could see in every direction was a thick, gray mist.
Finally, he pulled me into a small clapboard house at the edge of the mist. Inside, was a single bed with a patchwork quilt. A wood stove already warmed the small room. On a table in the corner sat a pitcher and bowl of water for washing, and a small table was set for tea.
I went quickly to the table with tea and sat myself down in front of the simple antique china. I poured tea in a cup and sipped. I needed to wash the taste of blood from my mouth. Owen shut the door and sat beside me. I poured him tea and suddenly everything seemed completely normal.
He put his hand on mine as he sipped his tea. I smiled up at him, and he brushed a stray lock of hair from my face.
I leaned my mouth into his hand and pressed my lips into his palm. All my confusion melted away, leaving me in that simple moment. I felt safe and warm in his little house. It felt as if I knew the place, and I had been there a hundred times.
I looked down at myself and found I was wearing a brown gingham dress over a tight corset. Owen wore a work shirt with his suspenders holding up dusty black slacks. I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wasn’t supposed to come. My daddy wanted me courting with the older brother, not the younger. I just couldn’t make up my mind which one I wanted more.
Owen’s hands encircled my cinched waist, and he pulled me to his lap. I could feel his manhood below my skirts. It sent hot prickles of excitement down my legs and up between them. Moisture seeped into my drawers. I felt a flush of embarrassment as his hand glided up my side and over my chest. He buried his head in my breasts and inhaled the scent of my body. All I could do was stroke his hair. I was torn between my attraction for Owen, my love for Nathanial, and fear of being caught by my father.
He squeezed me tight and ran his hand from my ankle all the way up my leg, finding the moist place in my drawers. I gasped down at his head, still buried in my breasts. His fingers stroked the delicate flesh between my legs as he held me tight. I clung to his neck, not knowing what to do. Not caring what happened.
He picked me up and flung me down on the bed. His hands moved like a whirlwind, plucking at the buttons on my dress, pulling at the fastenings on my corset. My breast fell out of my chemise. My dress was hiked up my legs, revealing the bare flesh above my stockings.
Owen knelt in front of me, his face primal, his eyes dark. He stared at me for a long moment before moving. His hand glided over my erect nipple. The contact sent a wave of pleasure through my body. He fell to me, his mouth hot against mine. I felt his hungry desire, yearning to know me. His thick member pressed mercilessly against my soft womanhood. I gasped under the force of his touch. His tongue sought my mouth. I allowed my lips to part, and I took him inside.
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