Amanda Stevens - The Prophet

I’d seen Robert Fremont’s headstone last spring during the restoration of Coffeeville Cemetery, but I hadn’t known who he was at the time so his date of death hadn’t registered. Now, given what I’d learned of his connection to Devlin and possibly to Mariama, the proximity of their deaths intrigued me.

Grabbing a notepad and pen, I made a little diagram of names with arrows:

Devlin > Shani > Mariama > Fremont.

Then I added

Clementine > Isabel > Devlin.

As I stared down at the linked names, I became more and more convinced that nothing about the recent events was coincidental. Not Mariama’s assault, not Shani’s request and certainly not Fremont’s haunting. All three ghosts had come back into my life for a reason, and the timing was important. Everything was connected, and the pieces of the puzzle were already starting to fall into place.

The stars have finally aligned, Fremont had said. The players have all taken their places.

I continued to search until the words on the screen blurred and a sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I got up and stretched, telling myself I should turn in early and try to get some rest. I was exhausted, drained, and who knew what the days ahead held for me, let alone the nights. I hardly dared contemplate them.

But after everything that had happened, I knew I would never be able to sleep. I was too wired, too certain that something dark was headed my way. And Devlin was somehow involved. I could feel it. That was why he’d been reaching out to me, why even now I could sense his irresistible pull.

The walls of my sanctuary started to close in on me, and not for the first time, I found myself resenting the legacy that kept me pinned to hallowed places. All my life, I’d followed Papa’s rules, kept myself sequestered in loneliness, but now I felt an unaccustomed rebellion welling up inside me. The bloom of an unwise impulse that had very little to do with a noble purpose or a greater calling.

I wanted to see Devlin.

Not from afar as I had last evening and certainly not with another woman. I wanted him here with me, in my haven, where his ghosts couldn’t come to us. I craved his touch, his warmth, the sound of my name on his lips.

Rising abruptly, I walked to the window and pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Why not go to him? I asked myself. Why not throw caution to the wind yet again? The rules had already been broken. The door had been flung wide. I’d seen the worst. What more could possibly happen?

Famous last words.

I glanced down at Angus. He was already in his bed and looked to be fast asleep, which reassured me that, despite my terrifying thoughts, all was well inside and outside the house. His ear nubs twitched, and I wondered if he dreamed about his dark past, about his time spent as a bait dog. I hoped with the passage of enough time, we might both leave our nightmares behind us.

As if sensing my attention, he opened his eyes and gave me a mournful look.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I don’t like to be stared at, either, when I’m sleeping.”

He settled more comfortably into his bed, snout on paws, and drifted off again. I turned back to the windows, my gaze searching the moonlit garden. The wind had picked up. The Spanish moss hanging from the old live oak billowed like gossamer curtains and the wind chimes jangled discordantly.

A storm brewed where only an hour ago the sky had been clear. For some reason, I thought of Mariama’s wrath. Was this her doing? Just how much power did she wield from the grave?

I put a hand to my chest where I had felt the force of her anger. I’d experienced the touch of a ghost before, but mostly a chill breath down my back or the occasional trail of icy fingers through my hair. With Mariama, I felt physically threatened. She frightened me in a way that went well beyond my ingrained fear of ghosts.

She wanted to keep me away from Devlin. That much was obvious. From everything I’d heard about her, she’d been a volatile woman in life. Passionate and tempestuous. I was very much afraid that death had only intensified her anger.

As I turned away from the window, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. A pale, gaunt creature with wide eyes and sunken cheeks stared back at me. Hardly a match for Devlin’s memory of the lush and exotic Mariama. Or for the mysterious Isabel Perilloux.

If I peered closely enough at my reflection, I could still see the scars from my time in the mountains, those thin, white lines that crisscrossed my face and arms where dozens of deep scratches had healed. I’d almost died in Asher Falls, but I was back in Charleston now, and like those scratches, the memory of that withering town was already fading.

My time with Thane Asher seemed like nothing more than a long-ago dream, distant and hazy. There were days when I would think of him suddenly and experience a pang of fleeting regret. I missed him, but I didn’t ache for him the way I ached for Devlin. I didn’t yearn for him in the middle of the night, didn’t awaken to his conjured whisper in my ear, the phantom caress of his fingers along my spine. My time with Devlin haunted me as surely as his ghosts haunted him.

Doggedly, I went back to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts were too scattered, and the house felt claustrophobic. I told myself it would be foolish to go out after dark when I was already safely sequestered for the night.

But…maybe the fresh air would do me good, I reasoned. A short drive along the Ashley River might help to relax me so that I could finally sleep.

A few minutes later, I was still lying to myself as I turned down Devlin’s street.

In all the months we’d been apart, I’d never once driven by Devlin’s house, never once chanced to arrive at a place where I thought he might be or called his phone only to hang up when he answered. At twenty-seven, I was far too old to resort to such adolescent behavior, and truth be told, such tactics were foreign to me.

Growing up, I’d had very few friends, let alone boyfriends. My free time had been spent helping Papa groom graves or sequestering myself in the hallowed section of Rosehill Cemetery, away from the ghosts and alone with my books. Left to my own devices, I’d cut my teeth on the romantic classics: Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca.

Little wonder, then, when Devlin had appeared out of the mist that first night, so dark and brooding, so tragically flawed, the pump had been primed, so to speak. I never stood a chance.

But I’d had no experience in dealing with a real-life Byronic hero. My friend Temple had once pointed out that, until Devlin, I’d only ever been attracted to safe men. Scholars and intellectuals. Milquetoasts, she’d called them, and she’d warned me about getting too close too quickly to a man like John Devlin. Mariama, she’d said, would have known how to use her considerable wiles to control him whereas someone like me would only get her heart broken.

She’d been right about that, but it wasn’t Devlin’s fault. He couldn’t help that he was haunted by his dead wife and daughter. He couldn’t help that he wasn’t ready to let them go.

So why had I come? What could I possibly hope to accomplish? Nothing about our situation had changed. Devlin’s ghosts were still with him and Mariama’s warning couldn’t have been clearer. Stay away.

A warning I should have heeded.

But the adrenaline was already rushing as I pulled to the curb and parked down the street from Devlin’s house. The clouds rolling in from the sea intermittently blocked the moon, and the neighborhood lay in deep shadow.