by J. K. Coi
“Tell me what I want to know, or I swear I’ll throw you outside with those things,” he snarled, dragging her arm high behind her back until she groaned. He shoved her around between him and the barrel of her son’s weapon.
“Mother!” Charles yelled. The gun at the end of his outstretched arms shook.
“Let her go, Graham.” Anna’s hand was on his arm.
He blinked and glanced over his shoulder at her.
“You have to let her go,” she repeated. “Please. We’re going to need their help to get through this.”
Anna was right, but he couldn’t afford to let Charles keep the gun. “I’ll let her go as soon as you put the revolver on the floor and slide it over to me.” The anger and frustration vibrating off the boy was palpable. “Carefully,” he warned. “No surprises.”
Charles’ gaze shifted to his mother before he did as he’d been told.
His fingers were stiff, but he forced them to uncurl from the woman’s wrist and shoved her away from him with a sigh before he bent forward. He picked up the weapon, hoping his distaste for the thing didn’t show. “I want answers.”
“I didn’t kill him. Your father,” Lillian finally answered, rubbing her wrist. “Charles and I tracked the tinderbox here months ago. Little did I know the witch hadn’t wasted any time finding her next victim. The thing was already in your father’s possession when I met him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I was sitting alone at the inn having tea one morning when he introduced himself. We talked for no more than a quarter hour…and were married that afternoon.”
“What?” He shook his head in disbelief.
“I knew it wasn’t right, even as I was getting ready for my wedding, waiting for the special license, walking down the aisle, saying the words that would bind me to a stranger. But I couldn’t seem to decide why and I couldn’t stop it from happening.”
“He made a wish,” Anna said quietly.
“What? Why? What could my father possibly have wished for? The man needed nothing.”
“It didn’t matter whether he truly wanted for anything or not. The tinderbox’s power guarantees something will come to mind that its carrier will be unable to resist wishing for.” Lillian’s lips pressed together in a thin line as she watched him. “But as it happened, your father wished not to be alone anymore.”
Graham’s chest hurt. Could he truly have been so lonely? If Graham hadn’t left to go to war, could all of this have been avoided?
“I knew what had happened even before we came under attack that night.”
The estate had suffered through an assault such as this before tonight? Maybe that’s why all the servants seemed to have deserted Hill House?
“Together we fought them off, but…” She stopped and bit her lip. “One of the walking dead…it was your mother.”
Chapter Seven
Lillian’s brute of a footman rushed into the kitchen, a fierce look on his face. “They’re comin’ fer the house!” he cried.
There was a heavy thud against the back door, startling a shriek from Anna.
Then came another. And another.
Soon the pounding and scratching at the door was thunderous, joined by the clamoring of countless incoherent voices.
He didn’t know how much of Lillian’s story he believed, but Hill House was his father’s legacy and Graham’s home—no matter that this woman and her son had gone to great lengths to hijack it and ruin it with their horrible taste. It needed his protection at the moment, and he desperately needed to protect Anna as well.
He could only hope the threat didn’t spread to the people living in the village, who had relied on his family for generations. He didn’t want to think what could happen should these things decide to wander off his property.
He would need help, and these people seemed to know what it was they were dealing with.
He held Charles’ revolver out to him, hating the cold, heavy weight of it in his hand. “Take it back, but if you point it at me or Anna again, I swear you won’t be able to shoot fast enough to escape what I’ll do to you.”
Charles took it. “Looks like I’ll have more than enough things to point it at in any case.” He paused. “What about you?”
“I don’t want that.” On leaving the battlefield for the last time, he’d sworn to never take up another firearm against his fellow man. Granted, he didn’t think the things out there were men, not exactly. But even without a gun, Graham wasn’t useless.
A loud crack at the back door and they all spun around. He swallowed when he saw that the thick wood was already starting to split from the pressure. It wouldn’t hold for long.
“There’ll be time for more explanations in the morning,” Lillian said before drawing her long, slim blade from its sheath at her waist and a pistol from a holster at her back. She carried more weapons on her person than the armory in his old unit. “If we survive the night, that is.”
That sounded ominous, but the kitchen door was shaking badly. It had proved to be a strong barrier, but was starting to weaken.
Graham peered through a crack in the wood that hadn’t been there before. “It’s a good thing you two let my property fall to ruin, or I might be upset by what they’re doing to the gardens.”
Lillian didn’t rise to the bait, but Charles bristled. “It wasn’t our choice to be here, but we cleaned up the mess your father made with his wish all the same,” he said, nostrils flaring. “Just like we’re doing now with you.”
“And where would you be otherwise? How did you come to discover the tinderbox in the first place?” he asked.
Anna looked at Lillian, compassion shining in her eyes. “You lost someone to its curse, didn’t you?”
“I suffered a fall while I was pregnant with Charles. It was too early. After many hours of agonizing labor, the babe was stillborn and I had lost too much blood.”
Although her voice rang out coolly and she turned back to the window to hack at the dead limbs fighting to reach through, he saw the pain in her face. “My husband left me to fetch the doctor, refusing to accept that I was dying even though I knew it was true. Along the way, he came across the witch and retrieved her tinderbox from a well.”
She paused, glancing back at them briefly. “Even if Thomas had refused to go into the well, he could not have escaped her spells.” Hearing the thin plea in her voice, Graham wondered how often she’d told herself that very same thing. “That’s always how it works. She asks men to fetch the thing for her. Those who refuse to help a poor, little old lady, she punishes—”
“The hounds,” he said. As if on cue, three deep howls pierced the night. Beside him, Anna shivered.
Lillian nodded. “They used to be men, and now they’re under her spell.”
“But if they help her…”
“Those who agree to her challenge and lay hands on the tinderbox suffer an entirely different curse as each wish raises more of the dead, whose dark hunger for flesh and blood is never satisfied. Either way she wins.”
“What happened to your husband after he returned with the box?” Anna asked.
“He’d already made his wish, and as I cradled my suddenly healthy baby in my arms and marveled at how well I was feeling…the zombies swarmed our village. We were lucky that he only made the one wish, but those ten monsters massacred more than half our friends and neighbors before the rest of us were able to send them back into the ground.”
“When we both realized what his wish had wrought, I blamed myself. I couldn’t bear the burden of so many deaths in exchange for my life.” She closed her eyes for a brief moment. “But I took my guilt and horror out on him. I screamed at him and barred him from our home.”
Her voice was tight with emotion even though she was fighting very hard not to show it. She raised her chin, two spots of color filling her cheeks.
Charles stood at her side, all signs of emotion wiped from his face. It must hurt to know you owed your life to an evil
curse…and that your mother wished it had never occurred.
“What happened to your husband?”
She cleared her throat and continued in a hard voice. “He killed himself.”
“And you’ve been moving from place to place since then, searching for the tinderbox and seeking your revenge against the witch?”
“The bitch is responsible for my father’s death and countless others,” Charles interjected. The vehemence in his tone implied that was reason enough.
The tinderbox was responsible for Graham’s father’s death as well. But he couldn’t imagine devoting his entire life to the pursuit of hate or raising a child to value only revenge. He’d seen enough of what hate did to men.
Lillian must have recognized the pity in his face, because her hot glare could have melted steel. “If it weren’t for my pursuit of vengeance, you would not have lasted even this long.”
Perhaps that was true. And yet…
He cleared his throat, and took Anna’s hand. “Anna needs something to wear. We’ll be right back.”
Lillian nodded. “Hurry,” she said. “I think we can hold them off here for a little while longer, but if they break down the door, we’ll have to evacuate the house.”
Chapter Eight
He quickly pulled Anna upstairs into the Blue Room. Stalking to the storage chest at the foot of the bed, he lifted the lid. This had been his mother’s sitting room, and after her death Graham’s father hadn’t been able to part with any of her things, so a lot of them had been put in here, including some clothing. Thankfully, Lillian hadn’t gotten around to redecorating in here yet.
“Hopefully, you’ll be able to find something to wear in here besides a nightdress.” He stood and pointed at the chest. “After ten years, it all smells like mothballs, and I don’t know how close in size you are compared to my…my mother, but I assume you would rather not face possible apocalypse in nothing but your nightdress.”
She clasped her hands in front of her. “If it hurts you to—”
“Not at all,” he promised with a shrug.
She nodded. “All right, then. I’m certain I’ll find something appropriate. Thank you for your hospitality.”
Both of them had reverted to extreme civility, almost as bad as polite social acquaintances who greeted each other in passing on the street. Perhaps as a way of coping with the extraordinary circumstances they found themselves in. Perhaps because being alone together in the privacy of a bedchamber—with the large bed nearby—felt very different than being alone out of doors.
He stuffed both hands into his pockets, knuckles grazing metal. The tinderbox. As much as it fascinated him, it also frightened him now too.
While she rummaged through the chest, he carefully placed the box on the dresser. Looking at it, his mouth felt chalky and dry.
“Graham?”
He turned. Anna stood with a change of clothing in hand, the pale blue cotton damask looking only slightly faded from the years of storage. “I’ll stand just outside the door while you change,” he said.
“Graham, wait. Please stay.” Her cheeks turned a telling shade of pink and she bit her lip, but continued on. “I’ll…ah…may need some help with the buttons.”
His mouth was suddenly bone dry for another reason entirely, but he nodded.
“You should be able to find a pair of stockings in the dresser.” He bent back over the open chest. “I’ll see if there is a pair of slippers in here too, so you don’t have to go barefoot.”
When he stood again, she held the tinderbox in her hand and was rubbing it. His heart leaped into his throat.
“It’s so hard to believe this old thing is so dangerous. Where did you get it?” she asked. “It’s so tarnished and dirty.”
His hand shook as he motioned for her to return the tinderbox, but she wasn’t paying him any attention. Her intense focus was on the item in her hands. “Oddly enough—” He forced out a chuckle. “An old woman bade me climb into a tree—you know that massive oak at the other side of town—to fetch it for her. But when I came back down, she’d already left.”
“This afternoon, you mean?” She was talking to him as if everything were normal. As if she wasn’t scrubbing the tin like she wanted to see her face looking back at her in it. “Do you know, when I first saw you today on the street corner I thought for certain I was seeing a ghost. You scared me showing up out of the blue like that.”
She was scaring him now. She hadn’t glanced up at him even once. She sounded calm and rational but distant, and he imagined that’s what it would be like to have a conversation with someone who talked in their sleep.
“Anna love, give me the box.” He gave up on asking and simply reached for it, but she pulled it close to her body and danced away from him like a bunny.
“I feel as if I’ve wasted so much time,” she continued. “Time wasted sitting around waiting for you. Time wasted mourning you.” She paused in her rubbing to squint down at the inscription.
“I don’t want to waste any more of our lives together,” she said with a faraway look in her eyes. “I wish—”
“Anna, no!” He didn’t know for certain if Lillian and Charles were right about the box and what it did, but he didn’t want to take the chance. He lunged forward. His hand closed over hers but it was too late, the words were tumbling out of her.
“I wish we had all the time we wanted to spend loving one another, and that nothing would get in our way.”
Outside, thunder crashed. So hard, the bedroom windows rattled in their frames. She cried out. He grabbed the tinderbox out of her grasp. It was so hot he dropped it back onto the dresser with a hiss.
Wild howling split the night, even though the windows were shut. The witch’s hounds? Was she coming for her keepsake? How close were they, he wondered?
“What was that?” she asked. Then, shaking her head as if awaking from a spell, she said, “Graham, do you feel it?”
He turned to see her smiling at him. “What?”
“It’s almost as if a weight has been lifted. I feel like all the worries I’ve been carrying around are gone. As if this night is ours and we can do anything with it.”
It wasn’t, he knew that. But he couldn’t quite remember why, and found himself nodding in agreement.
Anna pulled apart the ribbon at her neck. Pausing, she lifted her gaze and he felt the strength of it all the way down his body. A heat that was already simmering between them three years ago, but now raged practically out of control.
He wasn’t a gentleman. He didn’t want to turn away and face the door. Maybe three years ago he would have, but three years was a lifetime ago. Tonight might be all they had left and he wanted to watch, needed to see her.
Her eyes widened as she realized his intentions. She bit her lip. Would she stop now? Would she ask him to look away? He wasn’t that much of a bastard. If she was uncomfortable, he would…
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps I should—”
“No, don’t turn away.” She shrugged the thin white lawn from her shoulders. It slipped over her arms and drooped down her back, revealing her body to him slowly.
The lace neckline caught on the tight points of her breasts and he held his breath until she let go of it and the gauzy white material cascaded like a cloud all the way to the floor.
Perhaps they really could remain in this room together for as long as they wanted. He felt almost as if this were one of his dreams. His imagination had brought them to this private room and separated them from reality, protected them from it.
This was a world of possibilities, where love would always win and his father might be alive. This was a world where Graham’s soul wasn’t scarred even worse than his body and there was nothing to stand in the way of him giving Anna the happy life she deserved.
Maybe he’d stood there too long just looking at her because she suddenly crossed her arms over her chest and turned away.
“Anna, don’t.” He crossed the room and stopped in fro
nt of her. She ducked her head shyly. Her braid had relaxed to the point of falling apart entirely, curling tendrils of hair slipping free to kiss her neck and shoulders.
He tugged at the end of the ribbon holding the rest together and dropped it to the floor, running his hands through the silky length and separating her hair until it spread like a sheet and fell to the middle of her back.
His hands drifted, caressing her shoulders and arms, down her back. He crested the curve of her buttocks and hovered there.
“You haven’t asked me to stop,” he murmured softly, examining the contrast of his big, calloused hands against her delicate white skin. “You should tell me to stop.”
She gulped and looked up at him. Her eyes were wide, her soft lips parted gently. “What if I don’t want you to stop?”
He breathed deeply. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
She bit her lip. “I can’t bear to waste any more of our time together, Graham. Somehow, we have a second chance, and nothing—not Charles or Lillian, or anything else—should keep us from seizing it if we can.”
She was right. She was also naked and so very beautiful. He wanted to count every one of her freckles, caress and lick every inch of her creamy skin, and point out all the hundreds of things that made her special.
But now it would be enough just to claim her for his own. This wasn’t quite the way he’d wanted it. In the back of his mind, it seemed there was a reason why they shouldn’t do this now. But then again, he felt certain they had all the time in the world, that nothing could interrupt them tonight. And he’d waited so long, wanted for so long.
He put his arms around her. She felt soft and sexy, but slightly chilled. “Are you cold?”
“A little.” She nodded. “Warm me?”
Swooping her up, he walked with her to the bed and laid her down. She gazed up at him, eyes so clouded by emotion they’d changed from deep jade green to a slate gray. She crossed her arms under her breasts to hug her waist. She couldn’t be unaware of the bounty she presented by doing so, and he was glad that she’d made no move to hide from him under the coverlet.