Ivory feared the little boy, Abigail’s nephew, might be the last to carry the Parsons’ name. People were beginning to have fewer children, sometimes none at all. And, if that were the case, Abigail might be Ivory’s last chance.
Theodore Anderson could not be allowed to stand in her way.
Spying him from where she crouched in a nearby ditch, Ivory knew her only hope lay in him not returning home. If she killed him now, he’d be an assumed victim of war. Waiting until after the war was not an option; these days, one could not kill a man so easily without drawing attention.
After the murder, Ivory raced back to Keota, needing to reach town before word of Theodore’s death. She made it, much to the misfortune of one of the Army’s messengers, whose body now slumped against the crumbling stone of an old well behind her.
Ivory stood in the prairie and stared out over the town. A coyote stalked behind her and growled.
“Oh, come on, you’re all right with me.” She turned to him, smiling at the eerie glow in his cloudy, pale-blue eyes. “You’re one of them? Poor, filthy thing.”
The coyote stepped tentatively forward, a light breeze carrying his honeysuckle aroma ever quicker to Ivory. Only the Strigoi smelled and tasted as sweet as humans.
“Come ‘ere, boy,” she said, drawing him closer with her gentle lilt. He sidled beside her thigh, and she hummed to him. “That a’boy.”
She stroked his dusty grey and white fur. The pollen coating his fur left a chalk-like residue on her hand, and she wiped the grit on her skirts and looked to the Methodist church across the way.
“She’ll be out soon and heading home.”
Ivory grabbed the coyote’s snout and gave it a playful shake. The coyote tensed and growled again.
“I am not your enemy.” She let out a wistful sigh and turned her gaze back toward the town. “I will return tonight with food and clothes. Yours surely ripped while shifting. But you tell others like you to stay away, understand?”
After a long stare, the coyote took off across the dips and patches of the prairie. Tonight, Ivory would feed.
Hand wrapped around that of a small boy’s, Abigail left the church, and Ivory timed enough distance to follow their scent without being seen.
Things had changed over the last couple of centuries. Dirt roads had given way to pavement. The automobile had grown in popularity.
Straight past the cemetery Ivory strode, past women in black dresses, past the general store and post office, and nearer to the heavy shadow of a water tower. She continued until she reached a lonesome house on a large lot of land. Abigail’s scent stopped here.
For nearly an hour, Ivory paced down the road from the house, trying to gather the nerve to approach. Finally, she headed up the walkway and knocked on the flimsy wooden door. When no one answered, she knocked again, louder this time, the door giving way under each distinct tap.
A few moments later, the door opened a crack, and a pair of honey-colored eyes peered through.
“Mrs. Anderson?” Ivory asked, already preparing to use her influence. Keeping Abigail calm would be a necessity.
Abigail opened the door the rest of the way and wiped her hands on her apron. “Yes?”
Straightening her skirts, Ivory felt suddenly outdated at the sight of Abigail in slacks. “My name is Lenore Kinsbury. I’ve brought news from overseas.”
“News?” A crease formed between Abigail’s eyes, and Ivory got lost in the lines of Abigail’s features—features that so closely mirrored the way Ivory remembered Elizabeth. It took her a moment to return to the conversation.
“Your husband,” Ivory replied.
“That can’t be,” Abigail said. “They would send an official.”
Ivory retrieved a document from her purse. “I know this is unusual, but these are unusual times, are they not?” She handed the letter to Abigail, who slowly scanned the page.
Abigail’s trembling hand covered her mouth, and she stepped back. “No,” she whispered. “No, no, no.”
Ivory entered the house and gently clicked the door shut. “My deepest sympathies for your loss.”
She helped Abigail to the couch. Abigail didn’t say anything. She only sat on the very edge of her seat, grief rolling off her like a thick fog. Ivory’s stomach twisted, ill over the pain Abigail was suffering, though not at all regretful for Theodore’s death.
“Let me put on some tea,” Ivory said. “Don’t worry about the child. I’ll tend to him when he wakes from his nap.”
“The child?”
“I . . . saw the baby shoes. By the door.”
Abigail sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Of course. The shoes.” She took a deep breath. “He’s my nephew. My brother passed away.”
“My condolences,” Ivory said softly. She sensed Abigail on the verge of breakdown. “Tea, then?”
Without waiting for a response, Ivory continued into the kitchen. She wasn’t yet used to the smells of a human house. The aroma of recently sautéed onions and the char of an extinguished candle made her stomach lurch.
“Do you have any other family?” Ivory asked, using her influence to send waves of comfort toward Abigail.
“I had only my brother and husband.”
“I see,” Ivory said.
Steam piped from the kettle on the stove; Abigail must have already been preparing tea. Ivory poured and sweetened the tea, the spoon clinking in the ceramic cups as she stirred, then brought the tea into the living room.
“Perhaps you ought to hire some help.”
Abigail chewed at her lip. “I’d never be able to afford it without Theodore. I don’t know what I’ll do with him gone.”
Maintaining Abigail’s calm took much of Ivory’s mental energy, but she kept the influence flowing as she spoke.
“Well”—Ivory handed her the tea, choosing her words cautiously—“I could use a place to stay. I would be of help. That is, if you wouldn’t mind?”
Abigail nodded slowly and sipped her tea. Ivory smiled that her effort to influence Abigail had gone even smoother than she’d hoped. Abigail didn’t have the same block Rachel had exhibited.
Abigail swept her arm to indicate Ivory should sit, but in the same instant, a vase on the mantel across the room tipped and shattered on the ground.
“Oh,” Abigail said, jumping to her feet. “You best leave. Please, go now.”
Ivory froze.
“Go!” Picture frames fell from the walls and the front door rattled fiercely.
Ivory ran to Abigail, placed her hands on her shoulders, and used her influence to send her peace of mind. “It’s okay, Mrs. Anderson. It’s okay.”
They sank down into the couch and Ivory held her as she cried.
“I won’t tell a soul,” Ivory promised.
WITH IVORY’S HELP, Abigail learned to harness her energy. Unlike her ancestors before her, Abigail experienced only noise in place of the whispering voices.
As the years passed, Abigail and her nephew aged, their family still without answers. Ivory waited for just the right moment to reveal the source of Abigail’s gift, while Abigail’s nephew tried to find a cure.
That moment never came.
One day, as they were sitting down for dinner, Abigail spoke the words Ivory had always dreaded she might hear.
“There is something wrong with you. You haven’t aged.”
“Strange, I suppose,” was Ivory’s reply, her posture straight and her hands tucked into her lap as she watched Abigail eat.
Abigail paused, lowering a bite of food back to her plate. “And I don’t believe I’ve seen you eat a single morsel of food in all the time I’ve known you.”
Ivory couldn’t tell her the truth, not with how Abigail felt about her own curse. “You know how I like to bring meals on my hikes.”
“Eat with us tonight,” Abigail said firmly. She pushed her own dish across the table, her gaze cutting toward Ivory. “I’ll make myself another plate.”
“Real
ly,” Ivory said. “I couldn’t. Perhaps another time.”
Abigail rubbed her temples. Ivory reached toward her, but dropped her hand back to her lap when Abigail flinched.
From then on, Abigail looked at Ivory only from lowered lids and with wary sighs. Abigail believed herself to be insane. Ivory longed to free her of her false suspicions, but her explanations would not be accepted and, without them, Ivory wouldn’t be welcome to stay.
Not even a fortnight passed before Ivory packed her things and returned to confront her sire. She confessed to him of where she’d been spending her time over the years.
“I want to turn Abigail,” Ivory told him. “I want to separate from you and go out on my own.”
“Lenore,” he began gently.
“Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it. I’ve tried once before, and if it hadn’t been too late, I’d have succeeded. This may be my last chance, and you will not stand in my way.”
“Why would you want this? Isn’t the life I’ve provided you enough?”
“Abigail is so like Elizabeth,” Ivory said fiercely. She thought of their same delicate wrists, the way they swept their hair away from their neck in the same fashion, and the way they both stepped lightly, while still giving a sense of being grounded. Ivory stared into the fire, watching the flames steal away the bark of the wood. “I think they are connected—Elizabeth and her female descendants.”
“You believe Abigail is a forever girl?” he asked, leaning back and raising his thick, dark eyebrows.
“A forever girl?”
“Reincarnation,” he said. “That is what you are asking?”
“Such a thing is possible, then?” Ivory breathed, her eyes widening and her chest filling with hope.
“They say the spirit elementals—oft thought to be women—would be reincarnated if their life was taken prematurely. They were to contain the unfiltered magic of the elements. They were the only ones who would never die an ultimate death, so long as their efforts in life remained pure and their lineage continued.”
“Do you mean that Abigail might be Elizabeth? That Mary and Rachel were as well?”
“No,” he said solemnly. “This was all hearsay. Myths. Fantasies created by those who grieved the losses of their not-quite-human loved ones.” His eyes, dark as gray coals that had burned out long ago, fell on hers. “It was all hope. Nothing more.”
But Ivory’s sire had confirmed what her heart already knew. These women were Elizabeth.
Ivory stopped by one last time to see Abigail. Watched her through the window of her home. Elizabeth was there. It was in Abigail’s eyes, in the tears she cried, in the smallest nuances of expression that could belong only to one person. That her sire could say otherwise made him unworthy of life.
Three nights later, Ivory decapitated her sire in his slumber, for he refused to release her. For the first time in as long as she could remember, Ivory felt free.
In the years to come, she integrated with the general population. She introduced herself as Ivory, glad to be rid of her sire’s name for her just as she’d been glad to purge herself of the name Sarah. She would start fresh. No more Sarah. No more Lenore.
Next time, she would not fail her lover. She would find her young, bind her in friendship, and convince her life would be safer if she didn’t carry the vulnerabilities of a human.
Ivory kept vigil for two more generations—watched the nephew, the last Parsons boy, as he grew to have sons of his own, and his sons grew to have sons as well, until, one day, another girl was born into the lineage.
Sophia.
But, to Ivory’s heart and eyes, the girl was still Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was . . . me.
{twenty-two}
I’D COMPLETELY MISREAD every moment I’d ever spent with my once-friend. That day Ivory had dropped me off back at home, after I’d been attacked at Club Flesh—she hadn’t been angry with me. She’d been torn.
When she’d told me she knew someone who’d heard voices, the hate in her expression hadn’t been a hatred she felt toward me. It’d been her hatred of herself, of her situation, and of the people who had killed my ancestor. Killed me. She couldn’t tell me, though. Not like that.
She’d sped off down the road not because she wanted to get away from me, but because she wanted to escape the hurt she felt sitting beside me, unable to tell me that I was my ancestor—unable to tell me that I had once been her lover and that she’d followed me all these years. She needed me to want to be turned first—to become a Cruor as well—but it was at that moment she realized her plan for this lifetime had failed.
I hated the very thing she wanted me to become.
When the images bled into the darkness, the air grew still. The fire had borrowed Ivory’s memories and, since I did not return them, they died along with the fire’s embers, lost forever. I wished for someone to steal them from me next.
I dissolved the magic of my circle and dropped my face into my hands and wept. Now I understood why I’d been afraid to open up to Charles about the whispering voices. Now I understood there were deeper parts of me—pieces of my soul—trying to protect me from the possibility of betrayal or death. But through Ivory, I’d still found a way to invite those things into my life. It’d been my soul that resisted Charles but my heart that led me to trust him.
Charles rushed to my side, and I pressed my face to his chest, my tears wetting his shirt. Paloma smoothed my hair. My physical and emotional energy were spent.
Once I wasn’t feeling quite so shaky, we headed upstairs to the kitchen where Paloma and Charles listened intently as I conveyed what the ignisvisum had revealed.
The final set of images had been familiar. They were of me—the real me. The me not altered by a New England 17th century diet or a husband dead in the war. Not Elizabeth or Mary or Rachel or Abigail—though we were all the same—but me, the person I remembered being. Sophia.
After three centuries, Ivory walked among the living like any other human. Ivory watched through the window of our small home in Keota as Mother held me shortly after my birth in 1987.
She watched me on the playground at school. Killed my father when I was six.
He’d recognized her from when he was a boy. She’d been a friend of his great aunt Abigail. But now he was an adult, thirty years older while Ivory hadn’t aged a day. He was unnerved to see her every day—she could tell from the way he looked at her, always shielding his daughter from her gaze—and Ivory knew she’d have no hope of friendship with me if she didn’t get rid of him first.
When we moved to Belle Meadow, Ivory followed. She’d been at the movies on my first date, and our meeting in college hadn’t been an accident.
Ivory had killed Mr. Petrenko to save me from being arrested for stealing. It’d been her thoughts tumbling through my mind at the time of the murder. She needed to ensure I’d go off to college, where she planned for us to meet. That couldn’t happen if I was in jail.
She’d planted Elizabeth Parsons’ court document in with my father’s belongings. Everything had been a lie. Even her Boston accent had been faked, the voice of her thoughts and memories old fashioned, archaic . . . nothing like the modern voice in which she spoke to me. No wonder I’d never recognized her thoughts before.
And Marcus’ interest in me had never extended beyond Ivory asking him to arrange a staged attack. She’d forged the note from him, hoping to spook me, hoping I would turn to her so desperate to protect myself that I’d be willing to become a Cruor myself.
She hadn’t counted on my turning to Charles instead. When Ivory’s plan at Club Flesh backfired, she’d risked that Charles might tell me her secret, maybe even hoped he would, to save her the trouble, so I might come to her with acceptance and understanding.
When she realized I’d moved in with Charles, she’d ransacked my house out of anger. And the more time Charles and I spent together, the more anxious she’d become, until eventually she saw him as nothing more than a threat. That wa
s when she tried to kill him—when she accidentally attacked me instead.
Now everything made sense, but I felt more lost than I ever had before. At least I really had only taken memories of myself. The ignisvisum had only shown the times Ivory spent with Elizabeth’s spirit or thinking of her. I struggled to wrap my head around the idea—that Elizabeth’s spirit was mine, too.
It was nearly seven at night by the time I conveyed everything to Paloma and Charles. They tried to comfort me, but I shrugged them off. I was all cried out and too mentally exhausted to languish any longer in the heartache Ivory’s memories had stabbed through every inch of my soul.
“I’m sorry,” Charles said. From the thoughts floating through his mind, he didn’t know what else to say.
Gripping my hand, Paloma offered all the support I needed with the expression on her face.
I managed a smile. “These ‘forever girls’—have you heard of them?”
Paloma stole a glance at Charles. “As far as the Maltorim is concerned, they never existed.”
“And as far as you’re concerned?”
“There is too much evidence to deny their existence. After today, after seeing you obtain the memories of your ancestor—of your own spirit—I can say there is no doubt in my mind that they exist, and that you are one of them. It’s the only thing that would make sense of everything I’ve seen in you.”
“So what does all this mean?”
“Your previous lives are a part of you, even if you don’t remember them. Any abilities you possessed then should be accessible now that you have knowledge of them.”
I let her words sink in, but my mind was still on my once-friend. “I don’t understand why Ivory thought killing Charles would bring her and me together.”
Paloma rose and started another pot of tea. “She was a hurting woman, Sophia. Sometimes people have unhealthy ways of expressing their love. It’s not always easy for someone to be turned while grieving. It can affect them indefinitely.”
When Darkness Falls - Six Paranormal Novels in One Boxed Set Page 76