The Resident Evil at Blackthorn Manor (Kindle Single) (Grayson Sherbrooke's Otherworldly Adventures Book 2) Read online

  Like Belzaria.

  “It is so good to see both of you. It reminds me I haven’t visited my parents in nearly six months. Too long. You both look splendid.”

  Sinjun laughed. “Thank you. It’s all the haggis Colin forces down my gullet. My innards have to stay strong to digest that horr—ah—that is to say that most special of Scottish dishes. Haggis. The very word rolls off your tongue,” and she gave her husband a fat smile. Colin grinned back at her, and Grayson was struck at how the earl was dark as a pirate, and had the look of one—tall and lean, like Grayson’s uncle Douglas, the head of the far-flung Sherbrooke family and the Earl of Northcliffe. Like Aunt Sinjun, there were strands of silver threaded through Colin’s dark hair, and Grayson said aloud, “Time is a very strange thing, don’t you think?”

  Sinjun cocked her head at him. “I never used to think of time, but now I’ve come to realize time is no longer a constant, to be depended upon to behave in a rational manner. I believe time has become fickle—it races faster and faster the older I become. Do you agree, Colin?”

  He looked thoughtful as he took a sip of his wine. “There have been moments in my life when I believed my time had run out, that it was all over for me, and I would swear time slowed to a crawl, maybe to give me time to figure a way out of my difficulties or to ask forgiveness for all the sins I’ve committed. Then when you and I are dallying pleasantly in the afternoon, sweet Sinjun, time flies out the window. Ah, perhaps we’d best speak of that at another time.”

  “You are wicked, sir,” his wife said.

  And Grayson imagined he was indeed. Colin turned to Grayson, leaned toward him. “Grayson, we are not jesting. You are missing a day. Twenty-four hours. What happened? Who is Queen Maeve?”

  Grayson slowly shook his head. “I don’t know. Really, I don’t know.” He tried to shrug it off, but couldn’t. “I saw a flash of her a moment ago—her face. I remember thinking she was scared. Then a pain sliced through my head and her face was gone and with it the memory of what she looked like.” He fanned his hands out in front of him. “I’m not exaggerating. All I know is that I’m missing a day.”

  “If you had a flash of this girl’s face and her name, then it will come back, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know if I want it to, Uncle Colin, I really don’t know.”

  His aunt and uncle said nothing more.

  For the remainder of his first evening at Vere Castle, they spoke of Grayson’s son, Pip, and Grayson’s cousins and their families.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They were treating him gently, Grayson realized with something of a shock as he climbed the stairs to his bedchamber, a lit candle guiding him, like a man who’d been wounded. He appreciated it.

  “Grayson, do you have a moment?”

  He turned to see Aunt Sinjun, her own candle lit and held high. He wasn’t at all surprised to see her. He opened his bedchamber door and waved her in. The room was lit with soft candlelight and a glowing fire in the fireplace. It was warm and cozy, welcoming and familiar. It had always been his room since he’d been a boy.

  He set down their two candles on the table beside the sofa. “Please sit down, Aunt Sinjun, and tell me about this trouble. I gather Uncle Colin believes you’re making too much of whatever is going on with Pearlin’ Jane?”

  Sinjun sat on a schoolboy’s desk chair, smoothed her skirts. “You know Colin. He’s just like your uncle Douglas with the Virgin Bride.”

  “I am not,” came Colin’s voice from the doorway. He strode into the bedchamber. “Listen, I am not stubborn like Douglas. I am a reasonable man in all things. But Pearlin’ Jane in a dither, my dear? Really?”

  She jumped up. “Colin! I thought you were going to your tower room to read romantic poetry to Andrew.”

  He gave her a crooked grin, said to Grayson, “Andrew is one of the cats. I knew you wanted to speak to Grayson about the trouble Pearlin’ Jane communicated to you. I want to hear this myself, but without the drama, if you please.”

  “Drama!” Sinjun looked ready to explode, but she managed to calm herself as she turned to Grayson. “This is why I don’t speak to him about Pearlin’ Jane. He knows she and I are close, just as the Virgin Bride at Northcliffe is the protector of all the ladies in the house. As for Douglas, I know he has communicated with the Virgin Bride over the years, but naturally he won’t admit it, calls it female hysteria. If you can’t see it, touch it, eat a lovely meal with it, then it doesn’t exist. He’s just like my precious husband here, despite his claim to reasonableness. You, not stubborn, Colin? You’re stubborn as a stoat.

  “You know Pearlin’ Jane is alive and happy—I should say she’s dead and happy—and she resides here at Vere Castle.” She said to Grayson, “She saved Vere Castle for Colin—” She broke off, shook her head at herself. “No, forget that. But she’s with me and we are close.”

  Colin said, “What do you mean she saved Vere Castle for me?”

  “It was a slip of the tongue. If you love me, Colin, you will never bring it up again, all right? As I said, you know very well she’s here, yet you refuse to accept it.”

  He frowned at her, opened his mouth.

  “I mean it, Colin.”

  Grayson could tell his uncle didn’t believe she would be able to hold out against him, but Grayson had the feeling it was something she would never speak about, ever. As for the Virgin Bride, a young lady who’d died in the sixteenth century, supposedly before her groom could visit her on their wedding night, he said matter-of-factly, “Since my youngest years, whenever I visit Northcliffe Hall, the Virgin Bride comes for a visit. She simply appears at the foot of my bed and sort of floats there. Sometimes I speak to her of the book I’m currently writing. She looks interested even though her face doesn’t change. Sometimes I swear she’s able to communicate with me when I tell her about a problem I’m having with a plot. She doesn’t speak, but I hear her clearly in my mind. I can also tell you she’s very young, not more than fifteen.” He paused. “Once I asked her if she was at last with her new husband. I’d swear she paled. You’d think that would be impossible since you can practically see through her, but then she told me he didn’t make it to where she was, and she was glad about that. The question obviously upset her, and she was gone in the next instant. When I saw her again, I asked her about the afterlife.”

  “What did she tell you?” Sinjun was sitting so close to the edge of the chair, Grayson was afraid she might fall off onto her face.

  Colin looked the picture of a tolerant parent, the model of patience, with two feeble-brained children. A dark eyebrow went up. “Ah, the afterlife. Did she assure you she was at peace and surrounded by light? Was she surrounded by her loved ones and her pets and everyone was deliriously happy?”

  “Actually, no,” Grayson said before Sinjun could turn her cannon on her husband. “She told me she missed almond candies, her mother, and her doll named Bess, after the queen. Evidently her mother wasn’t where she was either. She said everything smelled like ragweed and she wanted to sneeze all the time, but she couldn’t because she had no body. She didn’t say any more about where she was.”

  “You made that up, Grayson Sherbrooke.”

  “No, that’s exactly what happened, Aunt Sinjun. I’d hardly forget.”

  Colin said, “I’ve read your books, Grayson. You have an incredible imagination and you’re clever. It’s obvious you’re always thinking of all sorts of otherworldly things, including ghosts.”

  Grayson was well used to hearing ghosts couldn’t exist in this modern world. He should introduce them to Alphonse at Wolffe Hall back home. He smiled at his handsome uncle. “I remember one visit to Northcliffe Hall I woke up to see the Virgin Bride floating at the end of my bed. I told her I’d heard about a Spanish treasure ship that had wrecked off the Cornish coast in 1588 in the violent storm that also sent dozens of ships in the Spanish Armada to the bottom of the Channel or crashing into the coastline. I asked her if it was true, and if it was t
rue, then where was the ship.”

  Now Colin was sitting forward, his eyes locked on Grayson’s face. “What did she say?”

  This from Colin, the unbeliever, now fairly bristling with interest.

  “She disappeared, but only for a moment or two. Then she came back and I’d swear she was smiling as she thought to me that the Spanish ship was the Santo Christo De Costello from the sixteen-strong Squadron of Castile. She told me the ship sank in Mullion Cove and its sailors’ bones lay in amongst the gold bars.”

  Colin sat back, crossed his arms over his chest. “You draw people into a world you yourself have fashioned and make them believe what you put in front of them. Admit it, Grayson, you made that up.”

  Grayson shook his head. “I wrote to my cousin, Leo, who, as you know, lives in Cornwall, in Fowey. He mounted a salvage operation. They found the wreck in thirty feet of water at the edge of Mullion Cove.”

  “And the gold?”

  “They found bones and gold. They managed to recover three bars before the ship fell into a deep canyon they couldn’t reach.”

  Sinjun said, “I never heard a word of it, never. When did this happen?”

  “Three years ago,” Grayson said.

  “I didn’t hear anything about it either,” Colin said, “and you know I would have.”

  “After they were duly authenticated, Leo loaned the three bars to the British Museum. He asked they keep it and not give him the credit because he was afraid treasure hunters would invade Fowey. The museum directors weren’t about to attribute the find to a ghost named the Virgin Bride, so they gave the credit to ‘Anonymous,’ a decision Leo hated but understood. A pity we don’t know the Virgin Bride’s real name. She could have gotten the credit.” He paused. “I’ve asked her many times what her name is—was—but she’s never told me.”

  “Somehow she communicates with Pearlin’ Jane,” Sinjun said. “I’ll see if Pearlin’ Jane knows what her name is.”

  This was Colin’s cue. He rolled his eyes. “Tell me, Sinjun, do they perhaps meet for the yearly ghost holiday in the Hebrides? Or maybe the two of them visit a tea shop on Bond Street in London during the ghost Season on All Hallows’ Eve?” Colin topped it off with a snort, but to Grayson’s ears the snort sounded halfhearted.

  Grayson said easily, “Yes, ask her, Aunt Sinjun. It would be nice to call the Virgin Bride by her Christian name. Now, don’t you think it is time to tell me about the trouble Pearlin’ Jane warned you was coming?”

  Sinjun sent a look to her husband that promised retribution if he opened his mouth. “I didn’t want to worry you overly, so that’s why I wrote trouble, and such a tepid word that is. When Pearlin’ Jane warned me she didn’t say trouble was coming—she said evil was coming.”

  Colin remained silent. He didn’t roll his eyes this time. Maybe he was thinking about those three bars of gold.

  Grayson said, “The last time I visited you, Pearlin’ Jane woke me up. She was whistling, a very old song. Like the Virgin Bride, she didn’t actually speak, but I heard her voice clearly in my mind. She’s a flirt, that one, and that pearl necklace looped six times around her neck, it’s amazing. It’s got to weigh more than she does—did. But that’s not important. What’s going on, Aunt Sinjun?”

  Sinjun said, “Actually, Pearlin’ Jane hasn’t spoken to me for two weeks now. I know she’s hiding.”

  “Why?”

  “Two weeks ago I was walking in the apple orchard, and I again asked her to come to me. She didn’t, but she did send two names to me: yours, over and over again, and I knew she believed you were the only one to help, and then another name, something like Belatrix or Bellazana. I don’t know—it simply wasn’t clear. I questioned her, but then she told me over and over, Evil is coming, Grayson, get Grayson. She felt such panic, Grayson, and then she was simply gone, and I haven’t heard from her since. Two weeks now.”

  Belzaria. Yet again it was crystal clear in Grayson’s mind.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Grayson lay on his back, staring up at the beautiful beamed ceiling, lit by the wavering light of a single candle nearly gutted now. A notebook filled with pages of his new novel lay open on the table beside the bed. He felt fatigue pull at him, but he didn’t want to fall asleep just yet. First, he wanted to see Pearlin’ Jane.

  She came like a thief in the night, slowly, quietly, as if she didn’t really want him to see her. As if she was too afraid the other would catch her. Belzaria?

  “Jane,” he said very quietly. “It will be all right. I’m here. Tell me what is happening.”

  The air became warmer than it had been the minute before, but still she didn’t show herself.

  “Jane, whatever evil is coming, I will deal with it. I swear to you.” And wasn’t that a tall order, given he’d lost an entire day on his way to Vere Castle?

  He felt a slight movement in the air, as if a gentle breeze had wafted through the open window.

  “The evil you warned Sinjun about—is her name Belzaria?”

  The air turned icy cold.

  “All right, you’re frightened, but you have to pull yourself together. If I’m to help, you must tell me what to expect. It isn’t fair to leave me helpless.”

  He waited.

  “I lost a day, Jane, an entire day. I have no memory of what happened to me. Three names have popped into my head—Queen Maeve, Belzaria, and Border. I think Border is a place. Is that right?”

  Silence and still air.

  “Who is Belzaria, Jane? That’s the name you told Sinjun, only she didn’t hear you clearly. She’s the one you’re scared of? Tell me why you’re frightened of her.” He smiled into the empty space at the bottom of his bed. “You could choke her with all those pearls looped around your neck.”

  The air shimmered.

  “Aunt Sinjun told me how you showed imagination and determination when you got your revenge on your murdering husband. You won. I saw the victory in your face in your portrait downstairs in the salon. So why are you afraid of this Belzaria? You believe she is stronger than you?”

  A slash of lightning speared through the window. And there she was, her pearls showing first, so many, at least a hundred, he guessed, pure-white pearls, all perfectly matched. And there was her face, like her portrait, but not really. It was as if there were veils, and they were shimmering along with the rest of her. She’d been pretty in life, and young, and her life had ended so badly.

  He heard her voice in his mind, surprisingly strong and deep, and he heard the slick of fear.

  Belzaria is coming, and she will destroy my painting because she knows what I am and that I live here and I protect Sinjun. She is filled with ill will. She is a malicious evil.

  She was filled with hatred and malice? “Who is Queen Maeve?”

  I think she is a young lassie, more a prisoner, doweless, a pawn. She is ruled by Belzaria. She would look bonnie wearing some of my pearls. But I could be wrong about her.

  “What does doweless mean?”

  The air shivered with impatience. Jane looked ready to throw some pearls at him. She’s daftie laddie—she canna do anythin’. Belzaria holds her by her snotterbox.

  Helpless, Grayson thought, doweless meant she was helpless. And snotterbox? Her nose, Grayson realized

  “Jane, where is Border?”

  Only a slight shudder in the air, then Jane’s voice, low, frightened. Border is a place beyond this place. It is a place outside of our time, a place beyond what a mortal can see or imagine or ken. It churns and heaves, but withal, all are doweless. Belzaria holds the power, and she is coorse—cruel. There is sometimes hope, but it wanes quickly.

  “It is a kingdom?”

  A kingdom? Mayhap. It is ruled by monstrous evil.

  “And she is here, in Scotland? Is Belzaria a demon escaped from this Border into our time?”

  The shimmering air seemed to freeze, and the bedchamber plunged into bone-shattering cold. He wouldn’t be surprised to see icicles hanging off the posts
of his bed. All he saw were the loops and loops of luminescent pearls. They seemed to encircle the air itself. Jane wasn’t there.

  His candle went out, as if the flickering flame was pinched between two fingers.

  He lay in the darkness, feeling the air slowly warm again. He knew Jane wouldn’t come back, not tonight. But Grayson was optimistic. He said into the still darkness, “Sleep well, Jane. Don’t be afraid. Together, you and I will deal with Belzaria.”

  Did ghosts sleep? He’d never thought about it before. Since there was no corporeal self that needed rest, surely there was no need. Grayson’s corporeal self was soon asleep. He fell into a place where acres of grass grew tall and thick, and there were paths through the grass, covered with beautifully cut black stones. The sky was blue, but it wasn’t a blue he’d ever seen before. One moment it was turbulent and dark, and then it shifted to a pale blue. Thick billowing white clouds filled the sky. Then, oddly, as he watched, the clouds seemed to move quickly across the sky and disappear. As he watched, the same clouds reappeared on the opposite horizon and began their journey again. How could that be possible? The sky was filled with light, but he saw no sun. There were strange animals milling about in the tall grass, some like unicorns with horns in their foreheads but their faces were long and pointed. Others were like sheep, with thick shaggy hair that grew longer than their legs. In the distance, beneath those journeying clouds, he saw a large city, like London, but not really like London, not exactly. The buildings were taller, and if his eyes weren’t deceiving him, they weren’t straight. Some were curved, others leaned one way or another, but they all glistened in the bright light that came from where he knew not. He saw a flash of a circular stone circle chamber and saw how those walls leaned in a bit. Then the vision was gone. He walked toward the city on the immaculate stone roads, blacker than a sinner’s dreams, and as he drew nearer, he saw stone walkways connected the buildings. The most spectacular building looked a bit like Warwick Castle with its massive walls and its huge stone towers, only he would swear this building was taller, its walls thicker. He saw Saint Paul’s Cathedral, only the round dome was elongated and a glittering silver, not marble.