The other woman shook her head, wrinkled face crinkling in a knowing smile. “No, I wouldn’t!”
“Hey, this fall, when I have the place up and running, I’ll come and get you. We’ll have a third-floor girls’ reunion! And I’ll be coming back every weekend or so.”
“What? All that way?”
“Gotta see my girls.” Grace winked and hugged Mrs. Yerchenko tightly as her frail frame would stand.
Chapter Two
Nyx stayed in the dark, his natural habitat. These men were not The Stranger. For one thing, The Stranger always came alone. There were three of these men, sometimes four. The Stranger came once a year. These men had come every day for a week. The Stranger was silent and breathed heavily. He smelled like alcohol and blood. These men smelled like coffee, and they talked loudly as they carried clipboards and brown belts full of tools. They moved switches and complained about the squirrel nests and the rotted wires.
Nyx didn’t need to breathe, but he remembered the motions, even all these years later. He held his imaginary breath now as the men went outside and walked through the densely wooded, overgrown property that he was forced to call home. They walked right over the piles of leaves and rotted branches, damp and broken from the winter past. They walked right over the little black plastic bags of bloody clothing that The Stranger had buried in his lawn.
Bastard.
Nyx slammed a door with a swing of his arm. He could touch things—things inside his house, things that belonged to the house. This was his domain, and everything in it he could manipulate and possess. The Stranger mostly stayed outside during his “visits,” but when he had come in (twice in a decade, both times when it was raining), Nyx had done everything he could think of to try to destroy him.
A Shade knows evil when it meets it. He’d had his formal invitation to the Dark Side years ago and hadn’t taken the bait. This living Stranger was rolling in the Darkness, evil wafting from him like the stink of blood and tears.
I broke his fingers and gave him a concussion.Nyx stared out the window and remembered slamming the door into The Stranger’s pudgy but flat face. Then he slammed his hand in the front door for good measure.
Well. I’m no hero. I’m not even “real.” Can’t speak to those outside of my “realm.”
At least, no one hears me when I try...
He watched those men in the woods, trampling along in blissful ignorance as they walked over enough evidence to ease a thousand broken hearts. As he watched, another big vehicle came up the rutted dirt path that led to the house. This one had a blue and white swirling pattern on the paintwork and read “Restoration Water.”
Lights. Power. Water?
Nyx’s dark, shadowy form went gray in shock. For the first time in seventy years—it looked like someone was going to move into Hilltop House.
Who in the world would do something so stupid? This place was a wreck. He prayed (ha, as if someone up there was still listening) that Hilltop would be struck by lightning, washed out in a flood, or even set on fire. If it were razed to the ground or utterly destroyed, maybe he’d be freed.
Not like he couldn’t leave the property for short bursts of time—but he always reappeared the next night, spewing forth from the shadows under the rotting old brass bed upstairs.
“This place hasn’t been used since the forties!”
“I think they tried to turn it into some wounded soldiers’ home. For the guys with PTSD. They called it shellshock back after World War I. My grandpa remembers when it was calledthe Home for Soldiers with Combat Fatigue in the forties for all the guys who’d been in World War II.”
Nyx turned. New interlopers came, with more belts and gray-blue overalls.
“The owners are connecting it to the county system?” one man asked.
The other replied with a shrug. “They have to—and guess what? She got a restoration grant for fifty grand from the State Heritage Preservation Society. So this is county pay.”
