Grim Shadows (Roaring Twenties #2)(59)

“You aren’t the only one.” She knelt next to the chair. Her eyes darted to his nipples and the dusting of honey hair ringing them. Best to get this over with, and fast. “Take a deep breath.”

As he followed her instruction, she swabbed the ointment over the top of his burn. He jumped, then stilled himself and spoke through gritted teeth. “Your furniture is bolted to the floor.”

She flinched and reached for more ointment. “Yes.”

“Mirror’s bracketed to the wall.”

“Yes.”

“No chandeliers.”

“Mmm.” She gouged out another measure of ointment. Felt the scotch’s pleasant warmth in her belly. Then she sighed and let the words come.

TWENTY

“MY FATHER CALLS THEM Mori specters,” she said. “Shades of death. I suppose they look a bit like ghosts made of smoke and shadow. I don’t know if they are actual ghosts or demons or something else entirely.” The ointment was cool on her fingers. She gently spread it over the rest of Lowe’s burn. “I inherited them from my mother.”

“That was the curse she spoke of when Aida channeled her spirit?”

Hadley nodded. “Once she died, they started showing up. Whenever I’d have temper tantrums, they’d float up from floorboards and attack the cause of my anger. They like to use nearby objects to inflict damage. Glass, wood, metal—whatever they can manipulate. When I called them up to attack the griffin, that was the first time I’d seen them attack something directly.”

“I knew it,” he whispered.

She kept her eyes down and cut a square of gauze with a pair of scissors. “My father says my mother never knew anything about their origins. They just started appearing to her one day after a trip my parents made to Egypt, apparently. He said it must’ve been some bizarre mummy’s curse. I never saw them until they started appearing to me. They’re fueled by negative emotions. When I’m very angry, they are difficult to control. It’s hard to explain. They . . .”

She sat back on her heels, reaching for the right words.

“They don’t speak or communicate with me in any way,” she finally said. “But it’s as though they can pick out my thoughts and act on that information. And I can feel their energy. They’re hungry, I guess you’d say. To be blunt, they want to hurt people. And if I loosened their leash and let them go wild, they wouldn’t stop until they’d killed.”

He didn’t ask her how she’d tested this theory, and she was grateful for that. “So you have some control over them? Oww.” He flinched and hissed as she covered the ointment with gauze.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “And yes, a little. I didn’t send them out specifically to pull that chandelier down, if that’s what you’re thinking. They are, well, I like to think of them as bounty hunters. My mind gives them the target name, and they do whatever they must to bring down the target.”

“Are they here now?”

She shook her head. “Remember how Aida told us she had to summon my mother across the veil? I don’t know for certain, but I feel like they live in another place, and they only come here when they catch scent of my emotional state.”

“And these specters are the reason for your touching phobia.”

Her hand stilled. “When I was thirteen, a family named Price lived next door to my father. Mrs. Price’s cousin moved in with them. The man wasn’t right in the head. He’d been arrested for crimes related to the molestation of children, but beat the charges on a technicality.”

Lowe watched her without comment, so she continued.

“My father was having our downstairs floors polished. The doors were open for ventilation. Mr. Price’s cousin walked into the house without anyone noticing, right as I was getting out of the bathtub upstairs.” She took a deep breath and plunged through the rest of the story before she lost her nerve. “He pinned me to the floor. I was terrified. The Mori came so fast. He was horrible and crazy and I was frightened. Before I knew what was happening, the Mori caused his footing to slip on the wet tile as he was struggling to hold me down. His head smashed against the porcelain tub. He died almost instantly.”

“Oh, Hadley,” he whispered, his face twisting up in sympathy.

“To be clear, he never managed to do anything but hold me down. Had I been a normal girl, I suppose it would’ve played out differently. But it didn’t, and the death was ruled accidental. My father wasn’t angry, nor the Prices.”

“And they damn well shouldn’t have been,” he snapped. The strength of his anger took her aback. “If a man like that lived next door to us, while Astrid was living in the house?” He shook his head. “I guarantee you it wouldn’t be for long. And neither Winter nor I would be feeling any sort of remorse. Neither should you.”

She tried to explain. “I’m not sorry I did it. It’s just that my brain mixed up the fear I felt at the time with the guilt that came later. And I logically understand why, I suppose. But understanding something and changing it are two different things.”

“Asking for help isn’t weakness.”

“It’s more a matter of trust. Not just trust in someone else, but in myself.”

“Maybe fixing one also repairs the other,” he said with a soft smile.