cold skin, but somehow, I felt them. No one faulted her for weeping. We were going to marry in the spring.
I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t go on, so I followed my Amelia home. And since the Almighty didn’t seem to want me, I did the best I could, watching over my girl. I had nowhere else to be. She plaited my hair into a memorial wreath, and she wore it on a chain around her neck. And if, when she touched it, she thought she imagined my presence, I was closer than she knew.
Abruptly, I was Cassidy again. I saw time flow by like an old movie.The scene changed, years passed. Amelia died, still grieving her lost love. The hair wreath went into the velvet box that had once held a gift that gave great joy. The young man’s ghost remained, too afraid to move on. And then, the shadows came.
This time, I didn’t enter the ghost’s thoughts as fully as before, except to feel terror in every cell and sinew of my body. After a hundred years of quiet darkness, not exactly heaven but far removed from hell, something appeared in the everlasting night. It was not the Father Almighty.
Like watching a movie with the sound turned off, something I could see but not influence, I saw the wraith stalk the young man’s ghost. Tad. His name had been Tad. Thaddeus, maybe, but no one called him that. Just Tad.Lonely, afraid, desperate for company, he had gotten too close the first time, only to lose part of what little he had left to the wraith’s hunger. After that, there was terror. Hiding. Fear of being found, of having the last little bit of self destroyed after all these long years. The darkness was so vast. Suddenly, the everlasting night that had seemed to be the enemy became an ally, a place to play a deadly game of hide-and-seek. And finally, the young man’s spirit got the answer it had been seeking. There are some things worse than death. Being consumed is one of them.
When I came back to myself, I was screaming. Teag held me by the shoulders, shaking me gently, calling my name. We’ve done this a lot, unfortunately.
“Come back, Cassidy!” His eyes were worried. I guessed that I’d been pretty far gone. I’ve never gone so deep into a vision that I haven’t been able to find my way back, but there’s always a first time. And if there was a first time, it was likely to be the last time.
I nodded groggily, like a drunk sobering up on coffee. The terror and loss of the young man from the vision stayed with me, frightening and sad. “I’m okay,” I managed. Teag’s look told me that he sincerely doubted that.
Instead of arguing, he pushed another glass of sweet tea into my hand, and waited while I gulped it down. The icy cold liquid shocked me back to myself, and the sugar rushed through my veins like elixir. Only then did I realize I was shaking and sobbing, grieving for two lovers who had been dead for more than a hundred and fifty years.
I dragged the back of my hand over my eyes and took a deep breath to steady myself. Teag waited patiently. “I saw the story behind the memorial jewelry,” I said, carefully laying the velvet box aside. “Young lovers. Civil War.” Unfortunately, that story was a common refrain with the pieces we often saw at Trifles and Folly, although rarely had the past made such an impact. “I’d expect a piece like that to have a lot of mojo,” I added, trying to get my voice to stop quailing. “But there’s a ghost attached to it, and the thing we fought off tried to destroy him.”
Teag frowned, alarmed. “That monster attacks ghosts?”
I nodded. “Yeah. It took a bite out of him. And I have the feeling that whatever that thing was, it went away, but it’s not really gone.”
“Then we’ve got a big problem,” Teag said. “Because Charleston is a spookfest, and that monster is going to have an all-you-can-eat buffet if we don’t do something about it.”
THE NEXT MORNING, I woke up feeling more refreshed than usual, something I attributed to the magic in the salve and bandage. The cuts on my shoulder were healing well, and they hurt a lot less than I would have expected. I fed my little Maltese dog, Baxter, grabbed some peanut butter toast for breakfast, and