Page 136 of The Midnight Order
Asher looks between us, dropping his hands away from my shoulders. “That can’t be. She’s dead. We helped burn her body.”
“I don’t know how to explain it. I saw her. Well, I saw her hair.”
Ashen white like the first snowfall, Valentina had the most beautiful blonde hair I’d ever seen.
“I chased her through the woods. Her scent was…”—I swallow—“It was her.”
“Family member of hers?” Asher asks Corvin, turning away from me altogether, clearly thinking me deluded.
“Could be. The only way to tell truly would be through testing. But the way Jasper tells it, whoever it was didn’t want to be caught. Unless…”
“Unless what?” I press, knocking Asher out of my way to face Corvin.
“Unless she’s haunting us. With the curse so close to lifting, she might be re-animated somehow?” His theory is more like a question than a conjecture.
“A ghost? That’s your all-knowing opinion?”
“Fuck you. I’m not all-knowing. And ifweexist, why can’t ghosts?”
I scrub my hands over my face as Lowell enters through the front door, looking feral as he heads toward the basement door before spying us and sussing out the energy in the room.
“What’s going on?”
“Why aren’t you standing guard outside Silver’s house?” I stammer, rushing him and grabbing the front of his shirt in a tight grip.
His answering snarl as he tosses me off him echoes through the room. I swear I hear the stone walls crack under its wake.
“You do not order me,child!”
Hissing from the crouch I’d landed in, I bare my fangs. Still, I know he’s right. It would take every ounce of strength I could muster, and some that I can’t, to get off my knees and face him.
He made me.
He owns me.
Lowell stalks nearer. Meanwhile, Asher and Corvin wait in the wings to see how this plays out.
“I wasn’t ordering you,” I finally tell him, my eyes downcast in subservience.
“Were you not? I will not be told what to do. I can no more stand there and scent her through the walls of that house than I can slit my own throat and end this tormented life.”
I swallow. “But I saw Valentina.”
Lowell stops moving and stops breathing. “Excuse me?”
Corvin steps forward and murmurs everything that happened before Lowell arrived home into his ear. All the while, I hope to remain topside long enough to figure out what I saw.
Long enough to feel Silver as her heart patters for me…
“She’s dead, Jasper. I thought we had already gone through this. It was so long ago…”
It isn’t until Asher bursts back through the front door that I realize he was ever gone. “He’s not lying. A distinct trace smell lingers on a few bushes and trees, as if it were placed there intentionally. It smells like… her.”
“It’s impossible!” Lowell snarls, turning on Asher like he’s the reason for his distress. “She’s dead. We watched her burn through the sockets of these fucking masks she cursed us with!” He knocks on the hollow cheekbone of his mask.
“I know. Corvin thinks maybe it’s her ghost?”
I swallow, finally able to stand now that Lowell’s anger is focused elsewhere. “What if it’s part of the curse?”
