“Lenore!” I cried out, racing around another corner to watch her descend the main staircase. “What are you saying?”
“Tears,” she repeated, pausing on her tread to look up at me.
I could clearly see the second figure now, standing beside her, their hand gripped tightly around my sister’s.
I blinked hard.
I wasn’t seeing clearly.
In fact, I was seeing double.
But neither of the figures was Lenore.
They stared up at me, concern marring their pale and lusterless faces.
“Sorrow,” my dead sister whispered, and then I began to scream.
When I came to, I was in my bedroom, staring at the canopy above my bed.
Beside me, the mattress was dented in. Someone was sitting on it and for one terrible moment, I couldn’t see who it was. Another scream tore from my throat as I envisioned Rosalie and Ligeia flanking me in sleep, their long dead limbs reaching in to cover me like a shroud.
“Stop that. Stop it this instant.”
That hiss of command, of seething disappointment. It wasn’t my not-so-recently departed sisters.
Only Camille.
“Drink this,” she said, pushing a small glass of amber liquid into my hand.
I sat up, swaying as my head dipped, listing back toward the pillows. Back to the bed and unconscious sleep where I could pretend I’d never seen my two lifeless sisters walking through the corridors of our home.
But Camille’s insistence kept me in check.
The brandy was strong, biting and sharp. My eyes watered as I swallowed the fiery spirits, but oddly it helped. My mind focused on the present, the now. On Camille, sitting at the edge of my bed, a rose-colored robe cinched around her waist.
Rose like Rosalie…
No.
I kept my eyes on Camille as I finished the wretched drink and tried not to notice how the angle of her cheekbones, the curve of her eyes, even the way she held her head now, tilted with unchecked curiosity, were exactly the same as Rosalie’s. As Ligeia’s.
Why did we all have to look so agonizingly similar?
“Who did you see?”
I licked my lips, considering the careful phrasing she used. She’d asked who, not what. “What were they?”
“The triplets, then,” Camille said thoughtfully.
I imagined Lenore joining their ill-fated duo and shuddered. “Sort of.”
“Sort of,” she agreed unhappily.
“Camille…”
Her eyes met mine, dark as the rosin Elodie used on her violin bow. She looked so lost. “I…I’d always hoped that somehow, Pontus willing, we’d never need to have this conversation.”
I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t seem to know how, so I went ahead and said it, said the one word that was guaranteed to crack her silence wide open. “Ghosts.”
She nodded.
“Our house is haunted,” I continued. “With ghosts.”
She shook her head. “Not the house…just you.”
She grabbed my empty tumbler and made a beeline for the little cart of spirits someone had brought in. Hanna, most certainly. I wondered if she’d helped Camille take me downstairs or if it had been Roland who’d carried my listless form down the long halls.
She poured herself a glass, then added another finger into mine. “If we’re going to do this, we should at least be comfortable,” she said, dropping onto the wingback chair and leaving the chaise for me. “Verity?” she prompted, holding out the tumbler.
With reluctance, I left the bed, took the brandy, and sat down, facing her. My stomach heaved as she gestured for me to begin. “I thought it was Lenore at first. I saw her down the hall and went after her. But…but it wasn’t her.”
“I know.”
I straightened with interest. “You’ve seen them then? You’ve seen them too?”
“No.” She sighed. “I guess it would be best to start at the beginning of everything. It’s just…” She pressed her lips together, reluctance clouding her face. “Ever since you were little, you’ve seen them.”
“Rosalie and Ligeia?”
“Not just them. All sorts of them. Of…ghosts.” She visibly shivered and took a large swallow of the brandy. “Annaleigh noticed it first… You had sketchbooks full of our older sisters. Ava and Octavia. Elizabeth. You were too young to remember them but they were drawn with such detail, such painstakingly accurate features…”
“I don’t remember,” I said, pushing against that gray fog of lost memories. “Where are the sketchbooks now?”
“They burned in the fire. There’s so much about that time that you don’t know. It would take more than one night to explain it all but for now, please trust me when I say it’s better that you don’t remember. After the fire, after…everything…you went to Hesperus. Annaleigh said she thought you were better, that everything you’d seen before had just been part of those…nightmares. But then you started telling her about Silas…”
I squinted, dredging up the memories from my time at the lighthouse. There’d been an older man there, with craggy features and soft tufts of hair. “The Keeper of the Light,” I said, remembering. He’d shown me the best ways to polish the curved glass windows of Old Maude. He’d taught me how to tie knots, spot constellations I’d never heard of, and ways to predict the weather. I frowned, my words echoing in my mind. “Only…that can’t be right. Annaleigh is the Keeper…”
Camille nodded. “Silas died the night of the fire…or sometime before. I don’t know exactly how it happened. But he was dead.”
“A ghost.”
Her stare confirmed it.
“But he didn’t…he didn’t look dead.”
“They never do,” she said, fidgeting with the ties of her robe. “Not to you.”
I looked down into the tumbler, studying the way the lines of cut crystal refracted shards of light through the brandy. I could feel Camille staring at me, on the edge of her seat with concern.
When I dared to meet her gaze, I kept myself as still and small as I could, bracing myself for the storm to come. “I don’t believe you.”
Her mouth fell open. She’d not expected that. “Why would I lie about something as grave as this?”
I ignored her poor choice of words. “Because you want to keep me here. Because you’d say anything—do anything—to keep me at Highmoor.” I frowned, trying to remember the pair of girls on the stairs, trying to recall every detail as it had been, not as my tired mind had guessed at in the dark. “Those weren’t ghosts. Those were maids, dressed to look alike, dressed to look like our sisters.” A bitter laugh bubbled up inside me, bursting free like a boil popped. “No. Not maids. I bet you brought them here, hired them just for this. Actresses. To fool me. Oh, Camille.”
Her eyebrows drew together into a single worried line. “You think me capable of something so twisted?”
Slowly, I nodded.
Camille was the oldest.
Camille was the duchess.
And a duchess always got her way.
I’d been challenging her authority for months, slipping off on unsanctioned visits to the other islands, sending away for applications to Arcannia’s best art conservatories, begging to visit Mercy at court. She knew I wanted to leave and had concocted a plan to keep me here.