81

I woke again with her in my arms. It had been nearly a week since the chandelier had crushed her, had almost crushed us. She had seemed almost comatose in Clay’s arms, wailing and staring out unseeing just before the giant thing collapsed on top of us. I still couldn’t understand how she had managed to find the strength to push us back like that.

We had carried her together up the stairs and to her room, laying her gently on the bed; careful not to jostle the painful shards of crystal that impaled her soft flesh. The dark mist that had leached from the walls eventually dissipated but we all worried about what it could have been. Why it wanted her…

I’d had to force Koen to leave the room and let me tend to his head wound. A big hunk of plaster had fallen from the ceiling and almost knocked him out. There was a split in his temple and it, at the very least, needed glue. He was inconsolable, sure that Florence’s state was his fault.

“I asked her to go for a walk–she would have stayed safe in the library. It’s my fault, this is my fault.” His voice trailed off tightly, so upset with himself.

I opened my mouth to quell his guilt but nothing came out.

“Wes, do you think she’ll be ok?” His round, horrified eyes had bore into mine, pleading for assurance. I gave it to him, of course I did, but really I had no idea if she would be ok. She looked like a voodoo doll with all the sharp crystal shards sticking out of her. She was so pale that the bruises were already visible, dark purple amongst the green and yellow of the ones that had begun healing from her pressing the property line the week before.

Clay had used every bit of medical training he had and then some to fix her up. Removing each crystal spike with excruciating precision to lessen the possibility of anything breaking off inside her and festering; cleaning the wounds and then dressing them. It had taken hours.

Her breathing was steady now. I could feel the sweet exhales against my chest as she nestled into my side with my arm around her, where she had been for the better part of a week. Sinking so deeply into sleep with her pressed against my heart was a strange sensation.

Her hair was messy and stuck to her face, begging me to brush it back, but I couldn’t bear to wake her. She hadn’t had a restful sleep in days. She was constantly bombarded with furious and violent nightmares that caused her to thrash around. It left her sweaty and sore and even more exhausted.

Clay worried they were fever seizures but she wasn’t hot. Her temperature never spiked.

She was ice cold.

I could see the shift. In the small moments of wakefulness she was struggling to keep a hold of reality. She was becoming exactly what she didn’t want to be: hostile, temperamental, and aggressive.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a guilt-ridden urge to give in to her request. It hurt more than I had imagined to witness her suffering. She fought against the house constantly but it never felt enough. She was a dangerous risk; some days it felt strenuous to stay loyal to my decision. Each nightmare was a reason to end her, each act of aggression toward Koen a reason to deem her just monster enough. Every snarl and snap at Clay was enough validation to put that bullet she’d begged for between her eyes.

Wyatt’s memory stayed present in the front of my mind, reminding me with every step how foolish and dangerous it was to reason. If I was going to do something, I was going to do it my way and, for each nightmare, snap, and attack, there were soft moments of love, care, and Florence—little fragments of who she was and reminders that putting a bullet in her would solve nothing.

The risk in question trembled against me as she tried to get comfy in her sleep.

Thoughts stirred and questions arose. Was she worth it? Was any of this? Doubt slipped in and out of my conscious thoughts, tangling with desire and need. I couldn’t separate my emotions from necessity and foolishness, both felt critical and heavy in my chest. We didn’t do this. We rolled into town, hunted the monster, and left.

It had been a few months since we arrived at Orchid Manor.

But it felt like days.

I never thought something or someone so small and delicate could upend our lives in the way she had, but here we were. Here I was, tangled emotionally and physically around her, arguing with myself quietly so as not to disturb her.

Unfortunately I couldn’t stay here forever, no matter how badly I wanted to. So I slid my arm out from beneath her, tucking her under the blanket before leaving the room. The Manor was quiet. It felt uncanny. It didn't feel alive for the first day in weeks. It was a nice reprieve from constantly being on guard but it made me feel uneasy.

“Where’s Koen?” I asked Clay as I wandered by the study, his face in a book. He didn’t look up when he answered with a shrug. “Clay,” I snapped when I realized his eyes were moving so fast he couldn’t possibly be reading.

“She’s sick.” He looked up at me, tears nipping at the corners of his eyes.

“Yeah.” I nodded, knowing that comfort wasn’t what he sought.

“It’s only going to get worse.” Clay ground his teeth together.

Clay's assumption only meant that Koen never told him about Florence’s close call with the gun. He knew how bad she already was. He’d kept it to himself on purpose. Clay couldn’t afford the distraction and Koen wouldn’t admit to how bad a sign it was.

“Bruises, irrational irritation, lashing out. Those are all human identifiers. That has to prove something doesn’t it?” He sighed defeatedly, already anticipating my response.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t,” I argued softly. I wanted to believe that she wasn’t a monster. Deep down to my core, I wanted that, but… “Ghost sickness presents the same as a vengeful spirit, and you and I both know it.”

“You’re still on that?” Clay scowled. “After everything?”

“Someone has to be. It’s fine to play house, Clay, but at the end of the day...” I trailed off.

“I would sympathize with you, Wesley. I know what you’ve gone through but she’s not a vampire, you aren’t Wyatt, and this is getting ridiculous. ”

He was more than right but the fight kept his head in the game.

I let him come down on me before I countered, the argument half-hearted but real enough to spark his emotions. To keep him working. “Monsters are all the same, Clay. They all want, need, something, and if it comes down to her needing something from either of you, I will protect my family above her.” I stared him down, letting the words sink in. “Even if you hate me for it.”

I hoped to myself that the act, the false malice in my voice, was enough to convince myself of what I would have to do. I hoped that maybe it had washed away the weakness for her, leaving only rational survival instincts.

“She’s sick and the house is trying to kill us.” He chewed on the inside of his mouth and stared into the distance.

All Clay ever needed was confirmation and a push. “You got a solution?” I asked.

“No.” He set down the book. “But she’s getting more aggressive.”

“She is,” I confirmed. “I can handle her,” I said, and his eyes shot up to look at me. “—Not like that,” I said, recognizing the fear in his eyes. “I just mean, I can handle her attitude, her violent tantrums…until you figure this out.”

“What if I can’t?” He asked me.

“You can,” I responded without hesitation. “If anyone can, it’s you.”

“I hate when you do that,” he grumbled, running his hands through his dark hair.

“No, you don’t,” I argued. “It makes you feel pressured and you do your best work under pressure, so don’t give me that crap. Get off your arse and figure out how to get her out of this place before she goes full Amityville on us.”

“How are her wounds?” He asked me, ignoring the shot, but I wasn’t joking. The first thing I’d do when I was finished with this conversation would be to hide the knives in the kitchen.

“Healing, slowly, but at a…”

“Human pace?”

“Exactly.” I shrugged. “I’ll change the bandages when she wakes up and try to get her to eat because if she’s not healing her temperature isn’t regulating.”

“She's reverting?” Clay stared into the dark room as his brain started processing the new information. “But why now?”

“She keeps mumbling that the house is punishing her,” I told him. “Whatever that means, if you ask me it’s punishing all of us.”

“After the chandelier fell, you saw what I saw?" He asked.

I had been wholly focused on Florence in that moment but we had all felt the outburst from the house in those moments. It was practically screaming. I paused, "It was like the house hadn't meant to hurt her—" I looked up him and he sighed. "Like it was aware of what it had done."

"I found some information about shape shifting on a grander scale. It could be possible that we’re dealing with a god but I don’t know how to kill that, Wesley. We’re just men.” Clay sighed. “And if she’s right, then maybe it is.”

“We both know she’s right. We're being punished for our invasion of the Manor, but what is she being punished for?” I leaned against the doorframe. Most of the time I could feel the house vibrating through the wood but it was silent and still, which worried me .

“Human connection.” He said, like it was the most obvious answer in the world. “The house is punishing her for finding happiness. Orchid Manor is jealous.”

“Its jealous? It let us in, it trapped us here—” I shook my head. We had dealt with a lot of stupid things in the past, but never something as dumb as a pile of bricks being jealous of a woman. “Do you hear yourself?”

“Since your … incident with her, the violence has only escalated.” Clay raised an eyebrow at me.

He wasn’t wrong, but it was annoying.

“Let me get this straight. Do you believe that the Manor is behaving this way because she was happy? I thought it was because it needed her to survive. You make it sound like…” I paused, knowing that happy wasn’t exactly the right word, but it was all I could wrap my head around now. “The Manor is jealous and lashing out against her?”

“Exactly. Like a scorned lover.”

“Agatha Warren had a husband though, right?” I reminded him.

Clay hesitated, thinking through all the information. It had been a long process, collecting all the evidence and pouring over the lore and collected research, with emotions running high, he needed the perspective of someone who hadn’t burned every piece of it into his brain. He needed to talk it out.

He stood from his chair and I followed him through the Manor to the library, where he started pushing around books and papers piled high on another desk.

“Here.” He pulled out a paper and flicked it over in his fingers, staring at either side. “It’s strange because, much like Florence, there's no family history on Agatha, nothing that predates her existence in the town before she died in 1852.”

I listened intently as Clay started to put together the pieces. He slipped his glasses over his nose and hunched over the desk to read something in a different book. It was crammed with scratchy, practically unreadable handwriting—hundreds of log entries.

“I didn’t think anything of it because marriages like these often happened with women from different counties, so it wasn’t unlikely that Agatha Warren had married into the family that owned the Manor.”

“But?” I settled down against the table.

“But,” Clay cleared his throat. “There’s no record of that family so whoever owned the Manor trapped Agatha here…”

“Or Agatha Warren was here long before her husband,” I finished for him.

“It could be that the same situation that’s happening to Florence, to us, happened to Agatha Warren, but without more information it’s impossible to know for sure.”

“We need to be sure.” My tongue swiped over my bottom lip as I tried to devise a solution to our spiteful little tinderbox, short of burning it down, suddenly hesitating because I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to get Florence out even then. I wasn’t willing to burn the Manor down with her inside it.

Not anymore.

“It could be that Agatha is behind all of this,” I prompted.

“We’ve got three options. Agatha is our monster, Florence is a ghost, or the Manor really is a petty god playing with its food out of boredom,” Clay said .

“And we have no idea how to kill the third option.” I groaned.

“We’ve seen no trace of Agatha, not her clothes or a body. There’s nothing to suggest that her spirit is present in the house and I’m sure if Florence had seen her, she would have told us.”

The laugh that left me was tight with disbelief. “She kept a lot of things a secret.”

“Aside from Agatha being in the Manor. Why would the Manor have killed her if that was the case?” Clay asked. “Florence said she assumed she had aged naturally, and then the Manor refused to let her pass—letting her decay until it finally ‘ate’ her.” He curled his fingers into quotes and shook his head as he said it. “She said Agatha looked well past living age when she died.”

“Maybe the house got sick of her?”

“It would explain the advanced aging, but it seems unlikely.” Clay shook his head. “If I’m correct,” he stopped, and I lifted my brows to keep him talking, “then Florence’s assumption that she’s trapped here isn’t because the house is jealous or bitter; it’s because the house is feeding off her.”

“That could explain the sickness.” I scowled at the suggestion.

“But not why now?” Clay asked. “If that’s true, it’s speeding up the process.”

“So it’s both.” I clicked my teeth together. “The Manor is jealous.”

“If Agatha’s one crime was falling in love,” Clay swallowed tightly.

I sighed, my mind wandering to a sleeping Florence. “Then it’s a cruel punishment to outlive the person you sacrificed it all for.”