Page 5 of Tomb of Ancients
She winked at her guardian, who snapped open her own fan and turned away, gliding like a ghost toward the lemon ices. I was not sorry to see her go, though the forcefulness of Justine’s company knocked me off-balance. It was welcoming, of course, but a shock. Before I could say even one word, she had taken both Mary and me by the arm and jerked us in the opposite direction of her guardian, plunging us back into the swelter of giggling, flirting guests.
“That was a joke for her benefit, you see, as I am always perfectly behaved, but I do so hope thereissome truth to what I said. From your letters, it sounds like you lead such aninteresting life. So much excitement! I feel I do nothing but work at my samplers and go to tea.” She heaved a dramatic sigh. I thought of all the cruel things my father had said about his human daughters. How they were unimportant. How their lives were petty and brief. My heart throbbed at that memory, for nothing could be further from the truth—Justine was kind and vibrant, everything her neglectful father was not.
“Yorkshire was certainly eventful,” Mary said wryly.
“I like the sound of that. You must tell me exactly how you discovered our connection, Louisa. I have a keen eye for deception, you know. There is something you aren’t telling me about this whole thing, about our father...”
At first I felt certain it was just the heat in the room making my head spin. Everyone around us seemed to be clad in such brilliant white silk that it amplified the brightness in the room, making my head hurt. But it was only getting worse, a buzz at the base of my skull growing until I could hardly hear what Justine was saying. We drew up to the edge of the crowd again, this time on the wall farthest from the desserts. The room spun, the floor going soft, and I stumbled a few steps.
Mary was there in front of me in an instant, holding me steady. I blinked hard, her brown hair blurring until it bled into the floor.
Well done, child, you have brought me to one of my daughters.
That was what the buzzing had been about—my father’s voice, his influence, growing until it blotted out my ownthoughts. It was like all the rage of a thunderstorm concentrated just in my brain, and it took my breath away.
Consume her. You can. You must. We will.
“No,” I heard myself say. My knees buckled. The pain was too much—I ripped my eyes open only to find I could see nothing at all, just a wall of crimson. Red red hatred. I felt my fingers curl as if to turn into claws, sharp and aching to tear.
Chapter Three
Sleep came upon me suddenly, unexpectedly, as if descending all at once to keep me from behaving like a monster. How could I be waking and then so swiftly asleep? But there I was, standing once more in a great glass hall, the walls turning black as the red of my vision faded away, like a scarlet sunset giving way to night. And the stars came out, the same stars I had seen in this vision before. They dazzled. The ball and its overwhelming heat seemed a thousand miles away, below me, as if I really did float in the sky.
My head tilted back, I wandered down the black and shining path, watching as the twinkling lights above me began to move and dance. They remade themselves into shapes, constellations, four distinct patterns of stars arcing above me. The first shape resembled a stag, the second a serpent, and the third a ram; the fourth and final constellation was unmistakably a spider. Their forms complete, they began a battle of a sort, the stag rearing up before colliding into the others, obliterating the serpent and the ram, scattering the stars like beads plucked from a gown. Only the spider remained, and it looked as if the stag, growing larger, would trample it, too. Yet just before impact, the spider’s shape changed, and it became a human figure. A woman.
The woman held up one hand, and the stag was halted, thendestroyed, and another dozen stars were thrown back into the heavens.
The sky lit up, blazing like a hearth, hundreds of different constellations pulsing with silvery light. It was impossible to count them all or remember the figures, and just as quickly as they had appeared, they were gone, and the sky turned flat, glassy black.
Then a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. My stomach crumbled.
I turned with a gasp, finding myself face-to-face with the thin, pale, skull-like face of my father. Father. His eyes blazed red with pinpoints of ebony, his shoulders draped in a cloak of tattered leaves that seethed and shivered as if full of whispers. Mist shrouded his neck and torso, and all of him smelled of rot.
“That was not for you to see.” The thunder of his voice returned, filling my head to bursting. I winced and tried to fall back, but he held me fast. “That was not for you to take. You will remove yourself, child,you will remove yourself from my head.”
It was too loud—my skull was going to split. It burned where his hand touched my shoulder. I screamed out, flailed, and then in a twist of red and silver smoke, he was gone.
“No! You get out of mine!”
I came awake with a shout, lashing out with my arms, sitting up and finding myself nose-to-nose with a wide-eyed Mary.Khent paced next to the small fainting sofa I had been laid upon. We were far from the ball and alone, isolated in a library somewhere in the mansion. A thin shawl had been draped over my waist, and a cold cloth fell with a dampsplatfrom my forehead and into my lap.
“How long was I asleep?” I whispered.
“Not long,” Khent answered. A bit of jam stained his shirt sleeve. Lines of worry eased from his brow as he came toward me, kneeling. “Moments. Are you well?”
“Obviously not,” I said.
He and Mary shared a look of alarm, but I waved them off, taking the cloth and pressing it lightly to my feverish head.
“I have not been... completely upfront about what is happening to me.” I dodged their prying eyes, concentrating on the embroidered shawl on my legs, trying to trace one of the paisley patterns with my fingertip. “The spirit inside me is banging on the door, so to speak, and the hinges are beginning to creak.”
“Oh Lord,” Mary breathed, crossing herself out of habit. “I thought it might be something like that. So you hear his voice, then?”
I nodded and pulled at one of the threads in the shawl; it came loose, and I slowly wound it around my finger. “More than that. I sense his will. I sense his need to... control me. Just now, I think he wanted me to suck the life out of Justine, inthe same way he did to Amelia.”
Khent swore under his breath in his native tongue.
“Where is she?” I asked, suddenly frantic. I reached for their hands, squeezing. “Good God, don’t tell me—”
