Craven Manor(59)

Daniel tried. His head swam, but his muscles were starting to respond to his commands. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth as he pulled his knees close to his chest. “I opened the tower door. I’m sorry.”

“Did she get out? Has she escaped?” When Daniel didn’t immediately respond, Bran snarled, “Answer me!”

For the first time, Bran was showing real anger. No, Daniel corrected himself as his fuzzy vision captured the man’s wide eyes and flared nostrils. Not anger. Terror.

“I washed the salt away. Broke the lock.” Admitting it hurt, but he sensed that hiding anything from Bran would be a mistake. “I don’t know if she’s out. She slammed the door behind us then threw me through the window.”

“Damn it.” Bran grimaced as he ran his hands through his hair. Then he reached towards Daniel. “Show me your hands.”

“What?”

“Let me see your hands!”

Daniel obediently held them out. They were sweaty and still shaking. Bran took them in his own, the touch no more solid than a breeze, and Daniel had to suppress a flinch at the sensation. What he could feel of Bran’s skin was cold and unnervingly spongy. A corpse’s fingers.

Bran turned Daniel’s hands over then exhaled and released them. “You are not infected. That is some small luck, at least.”

“Infected. Like… the people from Flinton?” Daniel thought he knew the answer to his question, and it filled him with sick horror.

Bran’s glance was sharp. “You discovered our lost town, did you?”

He was afraid that Eliza had infected me. Daniel’s mind reeled as he tried to piece together the puzzle. He felt like he might be sick again. “A supernatural plague spread through the town. But you weren’t responsible for it, were you?”

Bran stood and turned away, but not before Daniel glimpsed his mouth twist with grief. “No. Flinton was dead before I even knew it was in danger. Can you stand, Mr. Kane?”

Daniel’s legs may as well have been made of rubber, but he willed them to lift him to his feet. He staggered, and pressed a hand to the mansion’s wall as dizziness crashed through him. “What exactly happened? I saw the corpses and the doors torn off the church. It looked like a monster had run through the streets.”

“That is not far from the truth.” Bran crossed his arms over his chest. His sunken, vein-mapped cheeks looked greyer than normal. Multiple shadows coiled away from where he stood, some snaking into the forest and others climbing the mansion’s stone walls. “Famine struck the town while I was away at school, and the villagers started calling for a witch hunt. It put the idea in my mother’s head that Annalise was filled with demons. She locked my sister in the tower. Partially to hide her from the villagers, and partially to contain her. But months went by without rain. Eventually, Eliza’s mind and will crumbled, and she brought Annalise to the church… to be killed.”

Daniel struggled to reconcile the new information as his head swam. He could sense bruises growing across his back and side where he’d hit the ground, and as the shock-induced numbness faded, he felt the sting of a multitude of small cuts where glass shards had clipped him. “So she was responsible for Annalise’s death, after all?”

“Yes. When we spoke in my study, I told you nearly the whole of the story, but I omitted some details that were especially unpalatable to me.” Bran’s smile was bleak and humourless. “When I arrived home from school, I found all traces of Annalise erased from the manor, as I already told you. I eventually discovered her bones in what had been her room and her prison, the tower. I confronted my mother.”

“You didn’t kill her?”

“Not immediately. I heaped blame on her head. How could she murder her own daughter? If there had been any evil in the house, it was her. I suspect my words… broke some part of her. She changed. Became less than human.” He began pacing, the anxious motion making his hair flow as though it were weightless. “I had not known it, but she had been containing the old-world magic her whole life. She was a shape-shifter who had repressed her nature, terrified it was a curse.”

Small details were starting to make sense. Eliza hadn’t let the doctor examine her. She invited no visitors into her home. She had even sent the maids away. Those were the actions of a woman desperately afraid she might expose her true nature.

Bran continued, his hoarse voice cracking. “A monstrous creature of shadow escaped the house. I did not know where it was going and did not try to follow it. I only found out later that she went to Flinton. Perhaps she was trying to shift the blame for Annalise’s death from herself to the townspeople. Or maybe she was simply lashing out at the nearest habitation. Either way, she spread a terrible plague through the town—a rot that grew from the inside, incurable and with no hope of survival.”

“I found her bones in the garden, though.” Daniel looked behind them. The night seemed unnaturally silent. His instincts said he wasn’t safe now that the tower door was unlocked, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop Bran’s story.

“Yes. After two days, she returned home as a human. I found her stumbling and raving in the gardens. When I tried to touch her, she lashed out at me.” He held up his hands, his fingers tipped with black. “She touched me with the plague. When I saw what was happening, I realised her existence created an unspeakable threat, not just for myself, but for anyone she came in contact with. I killed her to prevent her from spreading the infection further.”