Craven Manor(41)

Daniel swallowed an involuntary gasp. He battled with his fear and won, but only just barely, as he pressed his back against the window.

In some ways, Bran appeared to be a young man—no older than thirty—but in others, he was ancient. Dark shadows underlined his eyes, which were heavy-lidded and dull. His lips were cracked, his cheeks sunken. He had no wrinkles or creases that came with age, but his skin was paper-thin, ashen grey, and mapped entirely with black veins. It gave the impression that his skin was cracked like parchment.

The lips twitched with bleak humour. “I have not aged well, have I?”

“I—no—that’s not—” Daniel bit his tongue before he could say anything stupid. He couldn’t stop from staring, even though he knew it wasn’t polite. It took a moment to drag his scattered thoughts back together. “You said Eliza Myricks was buried by her sole surviving relative. That was you, wasn’t it?”

The head tilted in a graceful nod, and Bran’s hair shifted as though weightless, much like Annalise’s did. “Correct. You have been curious about my family’s history, and I feel the time has come that I must share it with you. Eliza Myricks was my mother, much as I rue the fact. I did not know her well. She sent me to a boarding school when I was eight and refused to take me back between terms. For more than a decade, I was moved from institution to institution—largely based on my mother’s whims, as she decided an establishment was ungodly and would corrupt my mind—and I only saw her twice during my adolescence.”

Bran moved away from the table and started pacing again. It struck Daniel as something like a compulsive habit.

“When I completed my education at age twenty and returned home, I was alarmed to find Annalise, my younger sister, no longer lived in the house. I asked my mother what had happened to her. She insisted I had never had a younger sister.”

He laughed, and the wheezing, gasping noise seemed to struggle out of his throat. “I went through the whole mansion looking for proof that Annalise had lived here. I had only been eight the last time I saw her, but I refused to believe she was a figment of my imaginations. My mother had been scrupulous about removing signs of her life, though. Every picture frame that had once contained a painting of her was barren. Her bedroom had been turned into a washroom. She had been erased, totally and completely.”

Daniel couldn’t bring himself to leave the window. The sun was insipid and filtered through a century of grime caked to the glass, but it felt safe. It protected him from the shadows that seemed to sprout from Bran like a dozen discordant spider legs. As Bran grew angrier, the shadows became darker and longer. Some flitted across the floor, others crawled up the walls, and one dared to creep up towards the fireplace’s grate. When it touched the flames, they began dying with a series of pained hisses.

“It took me weeks to find my sister, and when I did, the discovery was not joyous. Charred bones had been heaped into a pail in the tower. And the final trace of Annalise overlooked it—a portrait Eliza had commissioned just months before the girl’s death. It was too large for her to easily burn alongside Annalise’s clothes and possessions. So Eliza had hung it above my sister’s bones in our tower, the one part of the house she always kept locked.”

He held out his hands, seeming to examine them for flaws, then squeezed them so tightly that the fingers made cracking noises. “I will not conceal the truth from you. I killed my mother that day.”

Daniel was surprised to see a hint of grief in Bran’s eyes. “How?”

“She was in the garden. She was raving; paranoia and grief had made her mad. But her insanity was not pardon, and I did not show her any mercy. I approached from behind, took up a rock, and cracked her skull.” He drew a breath then let it out slowly. “The gardener’s tools were nearby. I dug her a shallow grave beside where she had fallen, pushed her unholy corpse into it, and buried her.”

“But she didn’t stay dead.”

“No.” The grief transformed into a bitter smile. “As I said during our dinner, things that die here have a tendency to linger.”

Daniel tore his eyes away from Bran and fixed them on the fire. The rogue shadow had retreated from it, and the flames were recovering. “So you used the salt to trap her in the tower. But she’s still trying to get out, even two hundred years later?”

“That is correct. She has never rested. I do not know if she ever will. I chose to stay in the manor and do what I could to contain her. I used not just salt, but also bolts that belonged to the church she had once knelt in. They seemed to work.”

Bran crossed to stand beside Daniel and looked out into the garden. His features tightened with weariness. “I soon found I was not alone in the manor. Once I had interred my sister’s bones in the family crypt and carved her name over the door, I began to see her spirit running through the garden at night. I would sit with her and talk for hours. She cannot speak, but she finds ways to make her opinions known.”

Daniel managed a smile as he followed Bran’s gaze towards the crypt. “I know what you mean. She woke me to tell me Kyle was in the house.”

“Hm. And moving closer to the tower door.” His cracked lips tightened. “Above all else, Annalise fears her mother. She watches the tower from the gardens. And Eliza watches the gardens from her tower. Even in death, they cannot be free of each other.”