The Visitor(75)

Devlin said against my ear, “There’s a light on in one of the upstairs windows. This porch may not be as private as it seems.”

He backed me through the door, kissing me deeply as I helped divest him of his clothes. Then we moved as one to the bed. I lay back against the pillows and lifted my hands to the headboard, an artful surrender. Devlin stood at the foot of the bed staring down at me. Then, eyes gleaming in the moonlight, he put a knee on the bed and crawled up between my thighs, trailing the tip of his tongue over my abdomen and up to my breasts.

The medallion glistened as the chain swung with his movements. I wanted to touch it again, feel the coolness of the metal between my fingers, slide inside Devlin’s mind the moment he slid into me.

Instead, I closed my eyes and lifted my hips to him. I could feel him there, pressing against me. His breath was hot against my neck and yet the hand that trailed along the inside of my arm was icy. A guttural moan sounded in my ear as a tongue darted out to lave along my jawline. My eyes flew open on a terrified gasp.

An odor came to me then, a fetid breath that was masked only slightly by the scent of witch hazel. The thing from Rose’s sanctuary was there in the room with us. It had followed me through the maze and back to the guesthouse. I couldn’t see it. But I could feel its presence. In bed beside me. Touching me. Taunting me. Wanting inside me.

My first instinct was to bolt out of the cottage and run screaming into the night, and I might have done exactly that if Devlin’s expression hadn’t stopped me cold. He was still kneeling over me, his gaze riveted on my hair where I could feel those frigid fingers plunging through the lose strands. There was something in Devlin’s eyes beyond the glimmer of moonlight, beyond the dawning horror. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw the reflection of a shadowy form hovering at the top of the headboard before it turned to crawl up the wall.

I tried to scream, tried to reach out to Devlin, but I couldn’t move and neither could he, it seemed. He remained motionless as his gaze moved slowly up the wall as if tracking the entity all the way to the ceiling.





Forty-Three

In the space of a heartbeat, it was gone.

The smell vanished, the cold faded and Devlin seemed to shake off his trance as he leaped from bed and reached for the lamp. Light flooded the room, revealing nothing amiss in that tiny space but the rumpled bedsheets and our discarded clothing.

I scrambled out of bed and into my jeans, hands trembling so badly I couldn’t manage the snap. Drawing on a T-shirt, I curled up in a chair and hugged my knees to my chest as I watched Devlin move about the room, shirtless and barefoot. He’d pulled on his pants, not bothering to buckle the belt as he checked windows and doors in full police-detective mode. I heard him moving around in the bathroom and when he came back out, he even searched under the bed.

“You saw it, didn’t you?” I asked on a shaky breath.

He shot me a glance that I couldn’t decipher as he opened the front door and scanned the porch. “I saw something,” he admitted. “Wait here while I take a look outside.”

I jumped up from the chair. “Don’t go out there!”

He turned with a scowl. “It’s okay. I’ll just be a minute. Where’s your flashlight? All I have is a penlight.”

I unzipped my backpack and fished out the light. “There’s a loose connection. You may have to give it a thump.”

He tapped it on. “Lock the door behind me.”

That won’t do any good! “Maybe I should wait for you on the front porch.”

He looked as if he wanted to argue, but then nodded. I followed him out the door, watching from the top step as he disappeared around the corner of the cottage. My gaze lifted to the back of Nelda’s house where the light in the upstairs window still shone. I wanted to take comfort in that lonely beacon, but instead I found myself wondering who was still awake at this hour and what were they up to.

Devlin came back around the cottage, playing the flashlight beam all along the edge of the porch.

“Did you find anything?” I asked anxiously.

“I saw some fresh footprints in the dirt below the bedroom window. Someone may have been looking for a way in.”

“Someone or something?”

That seemed to give him pause. “Let’s go back inside.”

I turned with trepidation toward the doorway. I could see the bed from where I stood, and my gaze automatically scaled the wall over the headboard.

Devlin came up behind me. “Nothing’s in there. It was only a shadow.”

I tightened my arms around my middle. “It wasn’t a shadow. I felt it on my skin. It was touching my hair.” I remembered the phantom tongue along my jaw and shuddered. “I know you saw it.”

“What I saw was the breeze stirring your hair,” he insisted. “The wind is up because a storm’s moving in. That also explains the static electricity.”

“There was no breeze inside. The doors and windows were closed.”

“The window in the bathroom was open.”

Had I not shut it earlier after my bath? I couldn’t remember, but it hardly mattered because the entity didn’t need an open window or an unlocked door. It could just have easily come up through the cracks in the floorboards.

“What about the smell?” I asked.

“The jasmine?” He flicked the beam down into the garden. “There’s a trellis of it near the patio.”