The Prophet (Graveyard Queen) Read online

  Fremont had been thirty when he died. I’d already known he was close to Devlin’s age because the two had gone through the police academy together. I’d seen a picture of them at graduation, along with a third man named Tom Gerrity, who was now a private detective in Charleston. He and Devlin made no bones about the contempt they held for one another. The bad blood had something to do with Fremont’s death, but I knew none of the details, and the online article mentioned neither of them.

  No witnesses to the shooting had ever come forward, and no information regarding motive or suspects had been released to the press. The case had apparently been kept under close wraps by both the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and the Charleston Police Department.

  Two items from the article and the obituary leaped out at me. One, Fremont had grown up near Hammond, a small town in the coastal plain of South Carolina where Mariama had been raised. And two, the shooting had occurred the day after her accident. Fremont’s time of death had been placed somewhere between two and four in the morning, several hours after Mariama’s car had gone over a guardrail at dusk, trapping her and Shani inside the sinking vehicle.

  I’d seen Robert Fremont’s headstone last spring during the restoration of Coffeeville Cemetery, but I hadn’t known who he was at the time so his date of death hadn’t registered. Now, given what I’d learned of his connection to Devlin and possibly to Mariama, the proximity of their deaths intrigued me.

  Grabbing a notepad and pen, I made a little diagram of names with arrows:

  Devlin > Shani > Mariama > Fremont.

  Then I added

  Clementine > Isabel > Devlin.

  As I stared down at the linked names, I became more and more convinced that nothing about the recent events was coincidental. Not Mariama’s assault, not Shani’s request and certainly not Fremont’s haunting. All three ghosts had come back into my life for a reason, and the timing was important. Everything was connected, and the pieces of the puzzle were already starting to fall into place.

  The stars have finally aligned, Fremont had said. The players have all taken their places.

  I continued to search until the words on the screen blurred and a sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I got up and stretched, telling myself I should turn in early and try to get some rest. I was exhausted, drained, and who knew what the days ahead held for me, let alone the nights. I hardly dared contemplate them.

  But after everything that had happened, I knew I would never be able to sleep. I was too wired, too certain that something dark was headed my way. And Devlin was somehow involved. I could feel it. That was why he’d been reaching out to me, why even now I could sense his irresistible pull.

  The walls of my sanctuary started to close in on me, and not for the first time, I found myself resenting the legacy that kept me pinned to hallowed places. All my life, I’d followed Papa’s rules, kept myself sequestered in loneliness, but now I felt an unaccustomed rebellion welling up inside me. The bloom of an unwise impulse that had very little to do with a noble purpose or a greater calling.

  I wanted to see Devlin.

  Not from afar as I had last evening and certainly not with another woman. I wanted him here with me, in my haven, where his ghosts couldn’t come to us. I craved his touch, his warmth, the sound of my name on his lips.

  Rising abruptly, I walked to the window and pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Why not go to him? I asked myself. Why not throw caution to the wind yet again? The rules had already been broken. The door had been flung wide. I’d seen the worst. What more could possibly happen?

  Famous last words.

  I glanced down at Angus. He was already in his bed and looked to be fast asleep, which reassured me that, despite my terrifying thoughts, all was well inside and outside the house. His ear nubs twitched, and I wondered if he dreamed about his dark past, about his time spent as a bait dog. I hoped with the passage of enough time, we might both leave our nightmares behind us.

  As if sensing my attention, he opened his eyes and gave me a mournful look.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. “I don’t like to be stared at, either, when I’m sleeping.”

  He settled more comfortably into his bed, snout on paws, and drifted off again. I turned back to the windows, my gaze searching the moonlit garden. The wind had picked up. The Spanish moss hanging from the old live oak billowed like gossamer curtains and the wind chimes jangled discordantly.

  A storm brewed where only an hour ago the sky had been clear. For some reason, I thought of Mariama’s wrath. Was this her doing? Just how much power did she wield from the grave?

  I put a hand to my chest where I had felt the force of her anger. I’d experienced the touch of a ghost before, but mostly a chill breath down my back or the occasional trail of icy fingers through my hair. With Mariama, I felt physically threatened. She frightened me in a way that went well beyond my ingrained fear of ghosts.

  She wanted to keep me away from Devlin. That much was obvious. From everything I’d heard about her, she’d been a volatile woman in life. Passionate and tempestuous. I was very much afraid that death had only intensified her anger.

  As I turned away from the window, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. A pale, gaunt creature with wide eyes and sunken cheeks stared back at me. Hardly a match for Devlin’s memory of the lush and exotic Mariama. Or for the mysterious Isabel Perilloux.

  If I peered closely enough at my reflection, I could still see the scars from my time in the mountains, those thin, white lines that crisscrossed my face and arms where dozens of deep scratches had healed. I’d almost died in Asher Falls, but I was back in Charleston now, and like those scratches, the memory of that withering town was already fading.

  My time with Thane Asher seemed like nothing more than a long-ago dream, distant and hazy. There were days when I would think of him suddenly and experience a pang of fleeting regret. I missed him, but I didn’t ache for him the way I ached for Devlin. I didn’t yearn for him in the middle of the night, didn’t awaken to his conjured whisper in my ear, the phantom caress of his fingers along my spine. My time with Devlin haunted me as surely as his ghosts haunted him.

  Doggedly, I went back to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts were too scattered, and the house felt claustrophobic. I told myself it would be foolish to go out after dark when I was already safely sequestered for the night.

  But…maybe the fresh air would do me good, I reasoned. A short drive along the Ashley River might help to relax me so that I could finally sleep.

  A few minutes later, I was still lying to myself as I turned down Devlin’s street.

  Chapter Eight

  In all the months we’d been apart, I’d never once driven by Devlin’s house, never once chanced to arrive at a place where I thought he might be or called his phone only to hang up when he answered. At twenty-seven, I was far too old to resort to such adolescent behavior, and truth be told, such tactics were foreign to me.

  Growing up, I’d had very few friends, let alone boyfriends. My free time had been spent helping Papa groom graves or sequestering myself in the hallowed section of Rosehill Cemetery, away from the ghosts and alone with my books. Left to my own devices, I’d cut my teeth on the romantic classics: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca.

  Little wonder, then, when Devlin had appeared out of the mist that first night, so dark and brooding, so tragically flawed, the pump had been primed, so to speak. I never stood a chance.

  But I’d had no experience in dealing with a real-life Byronic hero. My friend Temple had once pointed out that, until Devlin, I’d only ever been attracted to safe men. Scholars and intellectuals. Milquetoasts, she’d called them, and she’d warned me about getting too close too quickly to a man like John Devlin. Mariama, she’d said, would have known how to use her considerable wiles to control him whereas someone like me would only get her heart broken.

  She’d been right about that, but it wasn’t Devlin’s fault. He couldn�
�t help that he was haunted by his dead wife and daughter. He couldn’t help that he wasn’t ready to let them go.

  So why had I come? What could I possibly hope to accomplish? Nothing about our situation had changed. Devlin’s ghosts were still with him and Mariama’s warning couldn’t have been clearer. Stay away.

  A warning I should have heeded.

  But the adrenaline was already rushing as I pulled to the curb and parked down the street from Devlin’s house. The clouds rolling in from the sea intermittently blocked the moon, and the neighborhood lay in deep shadow.

  Thankfully, I saw no ghosts as I hurried along the sidewalk. It was just after ten, still early enough for the living. Up ahead, bicycle reflectors flashed around the corner and a young couple out for a pre-bedtime stroll murmured a greeting as we passed. It all seemed so normal.

  But nothing about this night was normal. Certainly not my impulsive behavior. I could only imagine what my mother would say if she could see me slipping through the darkness. No woman with a decent upbringing would ever arrive unannounced at a man’s house in the middle of the night. I taught you better than that.

  She had. But here I was, anyway.

  Of course, my mother had more important things to worry about these days. Her battle with cancer had taken a toll, and, though her doctors had assured us that she’d made it through the worst of the treatment, she still had a long road ahead of her.

  On nights like this, when I felt lonely and confused and out of my depth, I wanted more than anything to go to her and rest my cheek on her knee while I poured out my heart to her. I wanted to tell her about Devlin and have her smooth my hair while she murmured reassurances that everything would work out in the end.

  Such comfort had been rare enough even before her diagnosis, even when I was a child. I loved my beautiful mother dearly, but she’d always kept me at arm’s length. The circumstances of my adoption had created a chasm, one that she’d been too frightened to breach. And then there were the ghosts. My mother couldn’t see them. That dark gift belonged only to Papa and me. It was our cross to bear, and the burden of our secret had also kept Mama at arm’s length.

  But I wouldn’t dwell on my mother tonight when my own plate was already so full. Ghosts had invaded my world, phantom songbirds had serenaded me and the pieces of Robert Fremont’s puzzle still swirled in my head. Where once my world had been narrow and ordered, everything now lay in chaos.

  As I hurried along the shadowy street, something very strange happened to me. The night grew darker and colder, but I somehow knew it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Not the nightingale, not the ghosts, not even my ill-advised trip to Devlin’s house. I was home safe and sound in my bed, dreaming. How else to explain the sudden lethargy that gripped me? The shortness of breath and heaviness of limb that afflicted me in nightmares? How else to explain why the street before me now seemed endless, a frigid tunnel that cut through nothing but blackness?

  Fear exploded in my chest, and my footsteps slowed, dragged. I could feel eyes all around me, staring and staring as arms reached out to grab me.

  The sensation lasted for only a heartbeat. Then the arms morphed back into tree branches and the eyes vanished. I let out a slow breath. What had happened? I wondered. Had I just been warned?

  Shivering, I continued down the street. There was a bite in the air that I hadn’t noticed before, but the chill had nothing to do with the temperature. The first two weeks of October had been unseasonably warm, almost balmy in the afternoons, and the nights were mild. The icy draft came from beyond. The spirit world was suddenly very close. As close as I’d ever sensed it.

  I cast a wary glance from side to side. I saw nothing in the darkness now, but I knew entities were all around me, floating down the murky walkways and alleys. Hovering within the walled gardens and historic homes. They sensed my energy just as I felt their coldness.

  A gust of wind rattled the dry leaves in the gutter, and I could see the distant flicker of lightning over the treetops. Devlin’s house was just ahead, a lovely old Queen Anne that he’d bought for Mariama. My steps faltered, and once again I felt spellbound. It was in that house that I’d finally succumbed to my feelings for Devlin. It was in that house that the door to the Others had been opened.

  I told myself to turn back before it was too late, but I couldn’t. Not yet. I was already flashing back to my night with Devlin, to the way he had held me so tightly, kissed me so deeply, and to the way that I’d kissed him. As if I could never get enough of him. I remembered so vividly the primitive rhythm of the African music playing in his bedroom, the heat of his skin as I placed my hand over his heart…sliding my lips downward, downward…and then a glance over my shoulder into a mirror where I’d seen Mariama’s eyes staring back at me.

  I forced the disturbing image from my head as I crossed the street. Thunder rumbled out in the harbor, and I could feel moisture in the air, the bristle of static electricity along my scalp. Clearly, a storm was headed this way. The signs couldn’t have been more portentous.

  But still I didn’t turn back.

  Whether I would have had the nerve to climb the veranda steps and ring the bell, I would never know. As I hovered on the walkway, hair rippling in that eerie draft, the door opened and I heard voices in the foyer.

  I reacted purely on instinct, and, for the second time in as many nights, I ducked for cover in the bushes.

  Chapter Nine

  “Storm’s coming,” I heard Devlin say as I huddled in the bushes like the stalker I’d become.

  “Seems fitting,” another man replied. “Bad weather, bad juju.”

  “If you believe in that sort of thing.”

  “Of course. How could I forget? Nothing exists beyond the five senses, right, John?”

  “I’ve learned to trust my instincts. Does that count?”

  As always, the sound of Devlin’s voice had a profound effect on me. My response was to shrink even deeper into the shadows beside the porch. But I couldn’t resist peeking through the turning leaves to catch a glimpse of him.

  Until last evening, I hadn’t laid eyes on him since our final parting in Chedathy Cemetery months ago. I’d avoided his phone calls and email because I’d known the only way to get over him was to cut him completely from my life. During my short stay in Asher Falls, I’d almost managed to convince myself that I was ready to move on. I’d met a man whom I liked, a man whom I was attracted to, a man whom I might once have been happy with.

  Now I knew better. Devlin was the only one for me, but so long as that door remained open, so long as he remained haunted, there was no hope.

  So why couldn’t I just accept my fate and let him go? I’d managed to keep my distance for months, so why was it getting harder to stay away?

  Because I’d seen him with another woman. Because I was afraid he’d already let me go.

  Maybe that was it. Or maybe Mariama had lured me here yet again for her own purposes. It was far easier to blame a ghost than to accept responsibility for my own questionable behavior.

  Whatever the reason, I was stuck now until Devlin’s guest left and he went back inside the house. I would be mortified if he caught sight of me cowering in the bushes.

  As quietly as I could, I shifted my position so that I could get a better view. He stood on the veranda backlit by the chandelier in the foyer. I couldn’t see his face, but I really didn’t need to. His every feature—those dark eyes, that sensuous mouth—was permanently ingrained in my memory. I could even trace in my mind the line of the indented scar below his lower lip. That one tiny imperfection had always fascinated me.

  The second man’s voice sounded familiar, but he stood with his back to me, and I didn’t recognize him until he turned to scour the shadows where I crouched. Light from the foyer fell across his face, and I drew a quick breath.

  It was Ethan Shaw, a forensic anthropologist I’d worked with a few months ago. I’d first become acquainted with Ethan through his father, Dr. Rupert Shaw, the d
irector of the Charleston Institute for Parapsychology Studies. Dr. Shaw and I had been friends since I’d first moved to the city. He’d been intrigued by a “ghost” video I’d posted on my blog and had emailed to arrange a meeting. He’d even been instrumental in helping to secure my current residence from a former assistant of his who had moved to Europe suddenly.

  I remained frozen as Ethan peered into the darkness. After a moment, he turned back to Devlin. “I thought I heard something.”

  “Probably just the wind.”

  “Or my imagination.”

  “Yes, there is that. Here.” He handed Ethan a beer, and I heard the soft fizz as they each opened their bottles.

  Devlin stepped out on the veranda then and stood with shoulders squared, feet slightly apart, as if bracing for something unpleasant. He was a tall man and lean to the point of gauntness from all his years of being haunted. But there was something very powerful about him just the same. Something almost menacing about the way he scowled into the darkness.

  “I don’t mind admitting I’m still a little jumpy,” Ethan said with an uneasy laugh. He perched on the railing while Devlin leaned a shoulder against the porch wall. “Never in a million years did I expect to look across the street and find Darius Goodwine staring back at me. I’m telling you, John, it was the eeriest feeling. The weirdest coincidence.”

  “You don’t really think it was a coincidence, do you?”

  “I don’t see how it could be anything else. I’m never in that neighborhood. I don’t even have occasion to drive through it. Then today I was called out to an old house on Nassau to examine some bones that were unearthed beneath the porch. When I crawled out, there he was. He had on sunglasses and a hat, so I guess I could have been mistaken—”

  “You weren’t mistaken,” Devlin said. “It was him.”

  “How can you be so sure?”