Phantom Bride

by Cach, Lisa

  Somehow, though, that didn’t explain why the very thought of lying next to him on his bed made her want to touch herself between her thighs. She flushed with embarrassment at even admitting the thought to herself.

  Stupid man. She would be wise to avoid him.

  “You can turn around now.”

  She immediately did so, and climbed onto the foot of the bed, finding her accustomed place leaning against the post. As he blew out the oil lamp and pulled shut the curtains, her eyes ran along the muscled contours of his arm and up to the pocket of black hair in his armpit. She wondered if it would be soft, if she touched it. The thought of his reaction if she were to do such a thing made her giggle inaudibly.

  He looked at her suspiciously, then said, “Good night, Serena.”

  “Good night, Woding,” she said, using his name like a taunting caress.

  He frowned, his expression easily visible to her in the dark. She wondered if he knew she could see it.

  He settled down to sleep, and she held to her position, distracting her mind by gazing at what little she could see of him. She felt safe here within the confines of the bed curtains with him, as if they were in their own little world, and the very fact of Woding’s existence would somehow keep le Gayne—or whatever that shadow had been—away.

  Funny, but a month ago the thought that she could feel safe in the presence of a man would have been unbelievable. More than that, it would have been repulsive. She had grown up thinking of males as the ones competing with her for whatever it was she wanted, be it attention or the last piece of cake. They were to be dealt with and outsmarted, but never to be gone to in search of aid, except as a last resort. Help was something they gave her only when it suited their own purposes.

  Perhaps Woding had purposes of his own, of which she was unaware. His thinking often confounded her, his logic convoluted and indirect compared to her own. It would be wise to expect the unexpected where he was concerned.

  His breathing deepened, and soon she was certain he was asleep. She drifted up off the bed, her hair flowing out around her as if she were suspended in water. She stretched out above him, matching the length of her body to his, and let herself drift down until she was only inches above him.

  He shifted, rolling onto his back, the covers coming down to just below his collarbone. Ah, lovely bone, so gently curved and strong. She bent her head down, daring to let her lips run above it, only a breath of air away from touching. She followed his neck to his ear, his face close beside hers, his stubbled cheek nearly touching.

  She brought her face back above his. What would it be like to kiss him? To have him kiss her? What was it like between a man and woman who did not despise each other? She had heard there was pleasure, had seen it with the fornicating servants, but still had trouble believing it was enjoyable for the woman.

  Could Woding, who already seemed to be showing her that a man could be good, also show her the good that was possible between a man and a woman?

  Her eyes went to the streak of white in the dark hair at his temple. That had been his first reaction to seeing her: utter horror.

  She drifted upward, away, until her back was against the tester, and looked down at Woding with the new sting of tears in her eyes. He would never show her anything about the physical love between men and women. Even if she had not been a ghost, he would never feel any desire for such a great, lumbering ox of a woman as she, with a scar more suited to a soldier than to a maiden.

  Shadow of le Gayne or no, the confines of the curtained bed were no longer a comfort, and Woding no longer a source of reassurance. She did not belong with one such as he, with his gentle speaking ways and his handsome face. He was meant for a softer sort of woman, one with grace and a sweet temper.

  She drifted through the curtains and stood upright on the floor outside the bed. The room felt colder than it was inside the bed curtains, although she knew that was just her imagination: she was long beyond sensing warmth. She searched the shadows of the room for any hint of movement, or of a darkness darker than it should be, impenetrable to her vision, but the room was as inert as it ever was. At least for the moment, there was no shadow waiting to take its revenge on her.

  The appearance of nothing amiss did little to allay her fears, but she’d had a lifetime and more of mastering her innate cowardice, and would manage to do so again. Bravery was not found in the fearless: it was in those who went on regardless of their fears.

  Where she needed to go right now was to talk to Madame Zousa.

  This would likely be her only chance to speak to the woman alone, before she was in the company of others or she left the castle entirely. Serena still thought it likely Woding had something in his books on stars that would help her, but obviously the best source of information would be the woman who had opened the path for le Gayne in the first place.

  She would have realized that sooner, if she hadn’t been sidetracked by fantasies of Woding’s bathing body.

  She squared her jaw, crossed herself, and headed out to find the gypsy.

  He was dreaming.

  He stood at the entrance to the castle garden, the walls only partially ruined, the grounds covered in a meadow of sweet wildflowers and grasses. At the end of the garden, the cherry tree stood in full bloom, its trunk slender with youth, its branches long and limber. Beneath the tree, in dappled sunlight, sat Serena.

  He walked through the grasses toward her, blue butterflies flitting around him, bees humming in the yellow and pink flowers. As he approached, he saw that she wept.

  He went down on one knee beside her and reached out, brushing back one of her tangled locks and tucking it behind her ear. She turned her face away, but he placed his fingertips on her chin and turned it back. Her skin was warm to his touch, supple, alive. Her lovely face was blotched from crying, her eyelids red and swollen.

  “Serena, what is it? What has happened?” he asked.

  “Dead, all dead,” she said.

  “Who is dead?”

  She wept, shaking her head.

  “Who is dead?” he repeated.

  “We all are,” she said at last, her eyes meeting his. They were black again from lid to lid, leaking diamond tears. She held up her hands, and when he looked at them they were coated in crimson blood. “I killed us all.”

  He woke with a start, his eyes coming open to the darkness of his curtained bed. It took him a moment to realize what was amiss: Serena. The familiar sense of her and the softly illuminated glow of her presence were gone.

  Her worries about the shadow conjured by Madame Zousa leaped immediately to mind, and fear for her ran like lightning through his body. He yanked back the bed curtains and leaped out of bed, throwing on his dressing gown as he ran across the room to the hall door. He had to find her.

  Madame Zousa, Serena said in her ghost voice, hoping the Gypsy woman had the spiritual ears to hear it. Madame Zousa! Wake up!

  She was in the bedroom allotted to the woman, one of the nicer servants’ rooms on the top floor. There was a fireplace and a desk, in addition to the wardrobe. The iron bedstead was not overly large, but the housemaid Marcy shared it with the Gypsy woman regardless. Apparently Madame Zousa, too, had been unwilling to sleep alone.

  Madame Zousa! She did not want to wake Marcy. Despite her earthy cheerfulness, the maid would likely not be amused to find a ghost in the room in the dead of night. Serena didn’t want her screaming and bringing the whole house upon them.

  The gypsy woman showed no signs of having heard her. How could she sleep like that after what she’d been through?

  There was no helping it. Serena drew on her precious energy and manifested a hand with which to shake the gypsy’s shoulder.

  “Mmmmuhh,” Madame Zousa grunted, and rolled over, her back to Serena.

  Serena gave her another shake, and added in an audible, exasperated voice, “Madame Zousa, wake yourself! God’s heart, woman, what type of seer are you?”

  “Who is it?” Marcy asked bl
earily from her side of the bed, raising her head. After a moment with no answer she dropped back again and fell back asleep, never having been fully awake. The disturbance did at least stir Madame Zousa, and she rolled back over, opening her eyes.

  Serena, after a moment’s indecision, let just her face show to the woman.

  “Jesus Christ preserve me!” The gypsy gasped.

  “Shhh!” Serena hissed, and let her hands show, flagging the woman to be silent. “I won’t hurt you. Do you remember me? From this evening?”

  Recognition finally came. “It’s you!” the gypsy whispered, and sucked in her breath, her eyes widening.

  “Yes, ’tis I. I need to speak with you,” Serena said urgently, quietly. “Come out into the hall.”

  Fear flickered in the woman’s eyes, and she gripped the covers tight in her hands, tucking them close under her chin. “No.”

  “I must speak with you!”

  “You sent that thing to take me! I will go nowhere with you!” she declared, her voice dangerously close to breaking a whisper.

  “I did not! I didn’t send it; you summoned it yourself.”

  “I’ve never seen such a thing before, and it left when you told it to. Do not think you can trick me!”

  Serena frowned. “By Our Lady, I did not call it,” she tried again. “If my presence somehow made it come, that was not my wish.”

  The distrust in the woman’s eyes was still there, but the fear lessened a hair. “Mayhap you tell the truth,” she said doubtfully. “You may speak to me here, if you must, but I will go nowhere with you.”

  Serena held back her exasperation, drawing on the techniques of Woding. He would not shake the woman by the shoulders, or drag her out into the hall by her hair. He would not slap or pinch her until he got what he wanted. No, he would flatter and cajole and play the gentleman. And in the end he would get what he came for.

  “It is clear that you have a talent that others lack,” Serena said, the words as sour to her tongue as vinegar. “You have the true gift of vision.” And walked right by me while I stood on the staircase. Aii! How does Woding stand it? “You are a woman of great knowledge and power, and I come seeking your help.” It was a miracle Woding did not make himself ill with such tactics.

  The woman’s hands on the blankets loosened under the sycophantic words. “You need my help?”

  “I want you to tell me what you know of conjuring spirits, and of sending them back to the place from whence they came. I need to know what charms or spells you use to protect yourself from them.”

  “You are a spirit yourself. Why would I tell you? You may use it against me.”

  “I swear before God, I would not do so.”

  Madame Zousa’s mouth pinched, as if by doing so she could hold in the precious information.

  “I pray thee, please?” Serena tried, making her expression as meek and helpless as she could.

  “Well…” Madame Zousa relented.

  Apparently those pleading words did have a certain magical effect. She would have to remember that, nauseating as it might be to beg. The ploy opened all kinds of doors.

  “I cannot tell you the secrets of my trade,” the woman went on, bringing up short Serena’s celebration. “But perhaps I can give you a charm to ward off evil. Step back,” she said, shooing her away with her hand.

  Serena obeyed, and the woman got out of bed, careful not to disturb her sleeping companion. She went to her bag, sitting open on a chair, and rummaged through it in the moonlight coming through the window.

  “Ah, here we are,” she said, coming up with a small silver medallion on a fine chain.

  Serena stepped closer, reaching out to touch it. The moonlight reflected off the medallion’s surface, limning the contours of a woman’s profile. A narrow band of some sort held the woman’s curls close to her head and off her neck, a crescent rising above her forehead. “Is it a coin?” Serena asked.

  “A sacred coin, forged in the fires of time,” Madame Zousa said. She turned the medallion over, revealing the image of a woman seated on a throne. “This is the goddess Diana, known by the Greeks as Artemis. She is ruler of the moon and of the hunt. She will protect you.”

  “ ’Tis a heathenish thing,” Serena said doubtfully. No priest would have approved. “ ’Twas calling upon the Virgin Mary that sent the shade back to whence he came.”

  Madame Zousa let the medallion twirl in the moonlight. “Diana is from a time before time, before Christ’s name was even known. Her power reaches beyond the realms of Christianity to touch every man, woman, and child, whether they believe in her or no. She is a warrior, a goddess.” Then Madame Zousa shrugged. “But if you do not want it…”

  “She is a warrior, you say?”

  “And a huntress. See here?” Madame Zousa said, holding the profile of the woman close for Serena to see. “Do you see the crescent moon above her forehead? It is her symbol. The moon holds a woman’s power, and Diana holds the moon.”

  “Give it to me,” Serena said.

  “Gladly,” the gypsy said, holding it up, a full moon tethered to a chain. “Only one thing. There is the matter of the price.”

  “Price? What price? I have no coins to give you. I have nothing even to trade with you!” Hadn’t the woman noticed she was a ghost?

  “You have information.”

  Serena frowned at her. “What type of information are you seeking?” She would not help this woman to steal from Woding, if that was what she had in mind. Neither would she allow her to blackmail or otherwise cause harm.

  “Tell me your name, and tell me something about yourself that no one knows,” Madame Zousa said.

  “Why?”

  “I fear I will not be paid for my time if you do not!” Madame Zousa said frankly. “Things did not go as I had planned this evening. No one wants a gypsy who tells them nothing, or worse, who has a fit and collapses in the middle of the drawing room. Give me the information that I ask, and perhaps I shall be paid well enough to feed myself for a few weeks.”

  That was a plea that Serena could understand, and there was something she would like everyone to know. She told that fact to Madame Zousa, along with her name.

  The gypsy laid the chain across her outstretched hand.

  Marcy screamed.

  Serena and Madame Zousa both jumped, startled. Serena went invisible, still holding the chain with the medallion, and Madame Zousa rushed back to the bed, trying to shush Marcy. The maid continued to scream.

  The door opened and Serena ran for it, intending to pass right by whoever was there, her body solid now so she could hold the chain in her hand.

  It was Woding, his hair mussed, his dressing gown barely closed. “Serena!” he said, and stepped toward her as she was trying to pass through the doorway. Too late to stop herself from colliding, she went formless and passed through him.

  The medallion dropped to the floor, and her body filled with stars. It was the only thought that would come to her as she drifted, stunned, in the hall just past him. He looked equally stunned, leaning against the doorjamb with a vacant expression on his face.

  It was nothing like passing through others had always been. Instead of cold nausea, warmth was what she felt, warmth and a tingling sense of life glittering up and down every fiber of her being. Mixed impressions of Woding himself flitted through her mind: memories of people she did not know, circumstances she had never experienced, sensations she had never felt. For a brief moment she saw herself from his perspective, drifting stunned and pale in the dark of the hall, her hair a weeping willow about her.

  Alex was dimly aware of hysterical sobs coming from the room, and distant-sounding voices. “The head! I saw the floating head!” one cried, while the other soothed and hushed in crooning tones. It was as if someone else, not him, were hearing those sounds. His whole body was too busy trying to make sense of what had just happened.

  The closest thing to it in his experience was that moment immediately after reaching sexual satisf
action, when the pleasure was still filling one’s senses, but the physical efforts have ceased. It was not the climax itself, but the languorous bliss that followed. Coupled with it was a sense of sharing—of having blended souls with a person—in a way that was not humanly possible.

  Wild emotions not his own flamed and died in fireworks throughout his awareness. Fear, anger, determination, lust. He sensed a will that was stronger than steel, tempered by soul-searing hardships. He saw visions of green pastures, and the valley below Maiden Castle in a lonelier time. He saw a smallish keep that was cold, stark, and unyielding. There were men who were equally so, as well as a brief glimpse of a worn woman with love and softness in her eyes. Death. Corruption. Flames and blood and the clash of swords.

  He heard a woman’s voice singing in his head:

  “There were three ravens sat on a tree,

  Down a down, hay down, hay down,

  There were three ravens sat on a tree,

  With a down.”

  The sensations and images began to fade, and he pushed himself upright against the doorjamb, his head still feeling drunk with the essence of Serena’s soul. He saw her a few feet away, floating just above the floor, her hair a wild waterfall around her. She had been, for a moment, part of him, and her thoughts had been his.

  He saw her begin to take notice of where she was, and for an instant saw himself as if through her eyes, leaning against the jamb like a man who’d been punched in the gut.

  She bent down and picked something silvery up off the floor, but before he could tell what it was, she had regained her senses and was away like a deer, her pale form disappearing around a corner.

  He took a step to follow, then realized the futility of it. If she had needed his help against the shadow, she would have stayed and asked him for it. She could be anywhere in the castle—or out of it—by now. He pulled his dressing gown more securely closed, and turned his attention to the two women in the room.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was, Alex thought, like a group of judges convening to discover and decide the fate of an accused criminal. Sophie and Blandamour, the nurse Miss Silverlock, Beth and Rhys, Marcy, Dickie, Underhill, Sommer, and even Otto were sitting spread around the blue drawing room, looking variously curious, frightened, affectedly bored, or self-righteously angry, depending upon their individual character and purpose. It had seemed only right to include the servants, as they’d had their own ghostly experiences, and if left out of the convocation they would most likely have come up with something worse in their own imaginations.