Craven Manor(43)

“That was only a couple of days before Kyle found me,” he remembered.

“When I had arranged your accommodation and returned with your letter, you were gone. I travelled into town often, searching for you, but time does not behave for me the way it used to. It blurs together now. It must have been several weeks before I found you again.”

“Six months.” Daniel gave an awkward shrug. “You found me in the end, though, right?”

“Yes.” Bran paused by the window for a second before resuming his track around the desk. “There have been… mistakes, but your intentions are sound. You have cared for Annalise, though she is no longer alive. I am more shadow than human, but you do not fear me. And you complete the tasks I request of you. I am once again able to sit with my sister in her crypt.”

Daniel felt uncomfortable saying it, but he forced the words out. “I like it here. I like the job. I think I’d be happy if I got to do it for a while longer.”

“That suits me, as well, Mr. Kane.”

“You can call me Daniel. If you want.”

Bran didn’t respond, and Daniel looked up from the flames to see he was, once again, alone in the room.





Chapter Nineteen





Daniel blew out his candle then thrust his hands into his pockets as he left Bran’s study. The hallway still seemed to dwarf him, its myriad of identical doors robbing his sense of space and time. Reaching the stairs was a relief.

As he descended to the foyer, he spotted the cat sitting beside what was left of the fire he’d kindled earlier that day. A sense of surrealism washed over him. He knew the cat was Bran, but to his eyes, it was still a regular cat—one he wanted to pet and feed and chatter to. Addressing it formally felt ridiculous, but he managed a stiff nod. “Bran.”

The cat blinked once. Bran had said he appreciated the fires, so Daniel shuffled up to the embers. “I’ll, uh, get that for you.” He ground a new log into the coals and waited as it heated and caught. The cat sat beside him, silent and detached, as the flames lit its amber eyes. Daniel cleared his throat. “I should get back to work, I suppose.”

He waited for Bran to shift into his human form to say goodbye, but he didn’t. Maybe being a cat was less tiring, or maybe Bran had gone so long without human contact that social norms no longer bothered him. The situation was too surreal for Daniel, though, and he hurried into the garden.

This is going to take some effort to get used to. Once he’d ventured far enough to be away from the crows’ watchful eyes, a hysterical laugh slipped out of him. If he hadn’t seen Bran change form with his own eyes, he would have thought it was some elaborate prank. He didn’t even know what to call what he’d seen. Shape-shifter. Skinwalker. Were-cat?

It didn’t take long to reach Annalise’s crypt. The ground around the lilies had started to dry out and wilt the plants, so he followed the trail towards the cottage to fetch some water.

How must it feel to live for decades past your expiration but fade a little more with every year? Daniel thought, in some ways, it might actually be worse than death. Bran had been trapped in the aging, decaying building, with only a mute ghost for company and a dead woman he hated scrabbling at her door. It was a recipe for insanity.

Daniel didn’t have a watering can, so he filled up a pot with water from the tap. He’d told Bran he would be happy to continue on in the job, and that was the honest truth. A small kernel of worry continued to dig at him—worry that Bran had been lying when he’d said he hadn’t intended to hurt Kyle—but Daniel was mostly successful in repressing it. He wanted to trust his unusual host.

Lost in thought, he completed the trek back to the lilies and gently sloshed water around the plants. His mind was still tangled around Kyle. Without a phone, Daniel had no way of checking up on his cousin’s condition or talking to him.

How much did he see?

He hadn’t considered that question before, and it created knots in his stomach. He let the last of the water fall out of the pot as he straightened and turned towards the tower.

Is Kyle going to remember what happened, or will it be lost in the haze of drunkenness? He hadn’t been at blackout levels, and the fall would be hard to forget…

Kyle’s personality made him a wild card. He would either forget everything or lock on to the memory with the same level of obsession he showed when playing videogames.

Will it be a problem if he does remember? There was no light inside the tower, but Daniel thought he could see the woman inside, pressed close to the glass. He turned away and marched towards his cottage. Will Kyle go to the police? Would anyone believe him if he told them a man made out of shadow tossed him through a window? Even describing the house—an ancient, crumbling manor forgotten in the forest—would cause scepticism. And the doctors were already concerned about what the fall might have done to his mind.

Daniel dropped the empty pot onto the crypt’s bench. Intense tiredness suddenly hit him, and he sagged onto the seat.

Kyle might never have full use of his brain again… because of me. Daniel had told him about the house and showed him the gold. He should have known Kyle would want some for himself. And what if he tells people about Bran and the house and they really do think he’s having delusions? Will he be put into a mental institute, his freedom stripped away, and kept on heavy sedation?