The Woman in Crimson

By Kathryn Meyer Griffith

Willowwind is a lovely Civil War era bed and breakfast that sits on a hill above an ancient cemetery filled with Civil war graves and strange stone sculptures made long ago by a woman once feared to be a witch – perhaps once murdered by the townspeople for being one.
Willowwind is run by a loving couple, Adrian and Caroline Stone, and welcomes guests every weekend.
But since Caroline’s beloved father, Edward Winter, died and was buried in that cemetery, Willowwind is also haunted. Haunted by a long dead Civil War era vampiress, Lilith, who believes the man, Adrian, is her reincarnated soldier/lover and will do anything to have him, body-heart-and soul, for her own again, no matter how many she must kill to have him. But Adrian’s wife, Caroline, along with the help of the ghost of her dead father, will do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kathryn Meyer Griffith
• Release date: Oct 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310331992

Kathryn Meyer Griffith

About Kathryn Meyer Griffith...Since childhood I’ve been an artist and worked as a graphic designer in the corporate world and for newspapers for twenty-three years before I quit to write full time. But I’d already begun writing novels at 21, almost fifty years ago now, and have had thirty-one (romantic horror, horror novels, romantic SF horror, romantic suspense, romantic time travel, historical romance, thrillers, non-fiction short story collection, and murder mysteries) previous novels and thirteen short stories published from various traditional publishers since 1984. But, I’ve gone into self-publishing in a big way since 2012; and upon getting all my previous books’ full rights back for the first time have self-published all of them. My five Dinosaur Lake novels and Spookie Town Murder Mysteries (Scraps of Paper, All Things Slip Away, Ghosts Beneath Us, Witches Among Us, What Lies Beneath the Graves, All Those Who Came Before, When the Fireflies Returned) are my best-sellers.I’ve been married to Russell for over forty-three years; have a son, two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter and I live in a small quaint town in Illinois. We have a quirky cat, Sasha, and the three of us live happily in an old house in the heart of town. Though I’ve been an artist, and a folk/classic rock singer in my youth with my late brother Jim, writing has always been my greatest passion, my butterfly stage, and I’ll probably write stories until the day I die...or until my memory goes.2012 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS *Finalist* for her horror novel The Last Vampire ~ 2014 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS * Finalist * for her thriller novel Dinosaur Lake.*All Kathryn Meyer Griffith’s 31 novels and 13 short storiesare available everywhere in eBooks, paperbacks and audio books.Novels and short stories from Kathryn Meyer Griffith:Evil Stalks the Night, The Heart of the Rose, Blood Forged, Vampire Blood, The Last Vampire (2012 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS*Finalist* in their Horror category), Witches, Witches II: Apocalypse, Witches plus Witches II: Apocalypse, The Nameless One erotic horror short story, The Calling, Scraps of Paper (The First Spookie Town Murder Mystery), All Things Slip Away (The Second Spookie Town Murder Mystery), Ghosts Beneath Us (The Third Spookie Town Murder Mystery), Witches Among Us (The Fourth Spookie Town Murder Mystery), What Lies Beneath the Graves (The Fifth Spookie Town Murder Mystery), All Those Who Came Before (The Sixth Spookie Town Murder Mystery), When the Fireflies Returned (The Seventh Spookie Town Murder Mystery), Egyptian Heart, Winter’s Journey, The Ice Bridge, Don’t Look Back, Agnes, A Time of Demons and Angels, The Woman in Crimson, Human No Longer, Six Spooky Short Stories Collection, Haunted Tales, Forever and Always Romantic Novella, Night Carnival Short Story, Dinosaur Lake (2014 EPIC EBOOK AWARDS*Finalist* in their Thriller/Adventure category), Dinosaur Lake II: Dinosaurs Arising, Dinosaur Lake III: Infestation and Dinosaur Lake IV: Dinosaur Wars, Dinosaur Lake V: Survivors, Dinosaur Lake VI: The Alien Connection, Memories of My Childhood and Christmas Magic 1959.Her Websites:Twitter: https://twitter.com/KathrynG64My Blog: https://kathrynmeyergriffith.wordpress.com/My Facebook author page: https://www.facebook.com/KathrynMeyerGriffith67/Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/kathryn.meyergriffith.7http://www.authorsden.com/kathrynmeyergriffithhttps://www.goodreads.com/author/show/889499.Kathryn_Meyer_Griffithhttp://en.gravatar.com/kathrynmeyergriffithhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/kathryn-meyer-griffith-99a83216/https://www.pinterest.com/kathryn5139/You Tube REVIEW of Dinosaur Lake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDtsOHnIiXQ&pbjreload=101

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Prologue

1863...somewhere in Southern Illinois

THE MEN IN THE BLUE and gray uniforms had been fighting for days without end. Miles around the land was scorched, pitted with holes and littered with bodies in various stages of dying, death and decay.

And for a sultry evening the woman seemed out of place, overdressed in a blood-edged gown that brushed the earth, a billowy cape and a hat with a dark veil. She roamed the battlefield foraying among the remnants of the carnage through a smoky haze, the shroud hiding her face.

Around her feet rose the moans of injured men. The stench that came with battle where men fought and died on bloody ground, as they had so often these last years of the war, and the reek of death were overpowering. Yet both were perfume to her. She could not deny that the strife had created a convenient situation for her...hunting.

And no one questioned a woman combing through the dying, perhaps for a loved one. People averted their eyes and looked away, humbled by her grief.

Carefully the woman searched, kneeling on the burnt grass to turn over a body or murmur softly to a wounded man. She tarried and appeared to aid one or another, but when she moved on, still seeking, there was only death behind her.

A cannon’s boom and a volley of gunshots broke the distant tranquility; shouts and screams echoed and died away into the smoky twilight as the fighting moved on.

The woman paused, lifted her head, and listened. The wolves, ghostly shapes that’d shadowed her from her home, were calling to each other from the fringes of the woods. Great shaggy beasts with sharp fangs, gleaming ruby eyes and fur as luminous as the harvest moon; their howling mingled with the human noises from the field. Since her change, the wolves, her personal guard, accompanied her everywhere. She didn’t know where they’d come from, didn’t know if they were real or ghosts. All she knew was they protected her.

Unaware of the soldier whose eyes were on her, she kept moving.

THE SOLDIER, A SPRINGFIELD rifle in his lap, was propped against a tree because his shrapnel-riddled legs would no longer carry him. His gaze followed the strange woman in the crimson gown. In another life he’d been a mountain man in the hills of Kentucky, but now wore a Union uniform of faded blue and butchered men for reasons he no longer believed in. In and out of consciousness, he watched. She’s an angel, he thought at first.

Then he’d seen the flash of fangs behind the black lace and the blood spurting from the necks of the wounded as she drank. They couldn’t fight back. He saw the men die and slowly it dawned on him what she really was. She’s a ghoul, a creature of the night who has sold her soul to hell for eternal life and drains blood from mortals so she may live on. Night demon. As a child he’d heard of these evil abominations from his mother. This woman is evil.

The wolves howled in the woods, and the soldier trembled. The summer’s day was ending, the light waning, and he knew there was precious little time left.

The ghoul finishing drinking from an unmoving man on the ground and, coming to her feet, made her way to another.

The soldier raised his rifle and took aim at the ghoul in the mist.

The crack of the Springfield shrieked through the air, and the bullet found its target. Without a cry, the woman in crimson crumpled to the earth. Her kind were hard to kill, so he reloaded and prepared to shoot again. But the night demon did not stir. A moment to wipe sweat from his brow and, when he looked again, she was gone.

It was then the real fear began. Had he killed her or was she somewhere out there stalking him? Making the sign of the cross he dragged his broken body away from the tree and kept his rifle close.

If she finds me, I’m dead.

So he hid beneath a pile of corpses and covered his body with human limbs and bloodied torsos. He waited as night fell, the temperature dropping as it often did deep in the woods, and the chill made his body shiver. Wounded and in pain, yet he didn’t want to die. God, please save me. A farm, a wife and five children depended on him to come home alive, and he wasn’t going to let them down.

In the darkness he heard the night demon stumbling through the bodies, seeking him, but he was blessed, and each time she passed him by. Eventually, exhausted, he dozed off. When he awoke in the morning, so weakened he could barely open his eyes, he knew he’d eluded her and thanked God.

A group of soldiers checking through the dead came upon him and marveled he was still breathing. They shoved him onto a dirty stretcher and carried him to a camp where a tired doctor set his arm and amputated one of his legs.

The soldier tried to warn them about the woman in crimson, but no one believed him. The wounded, the doctor explained, see many imagined horrors. It was left at that.

THE LEAD RIPPED THROUGH her body and sent her to the ground. The pain, a searing fire, throbbed through her skin and bones. As her world went black, the largest of the wolves clamped his teeth around her arm and dragged her away.

When she opened her eyes she was on the edge of the woods, a short distance from the battlefield. The wolves sat in a circle on their haunches staring at her through shimmering eyes. The one who’d saved her hunkered above her. She felt shock, then surprise.

Someone had shot her, yet she was alive. There were holes in her chest, and there was blood. As she looked at the wounds they healed in front of her eyes and left only bloodstains on her gown. She’d never felt so strong.

The wolf tugged her to her feet and retreated with its comrades into the shadows.

So it was true. Nothing could harm her. She couldn’t die. Her mother, with her witchcraft, had truly given her the secret to eternal life.

She’d been drinking blood for some years, but it was the first time her mortality had been tested. No one must know what she was if she were to remain safe, so she had to silence the man who’d shot her. People wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t allow her to live.

She looked for him but couldn’t find him, and soon her hunger, fueled by the healing, overpowered her fear of discovery. The night cloaked her, made her invisible, and it was nearly dawn before she remounted her horse and rode home. She didn’t like sunlight, it drained her; she had to be home before the day came.

Home to her sanctuary...the house beneath the willows that stood majestically on the hill overlooking the town and her ancestral cemetery. It was where she could hide from the world; where she created the sculptures that her father and the townspeople despised. The walls of the house were strong, the cellar was deep, and she could get lost in the acres of rambling gardens or in the tombs beneath the graveyard. It was her home.

But her father was waiting in the dimly lit room, his face angry. Since her mother’s death he’d gotten old and weak, as she’d become stronger. He’d never loved, respected or missed her mother, but she grieved more each day for the woman who’d given everything for her.

Where do you go every night, Lilith? her father demanded. And what has happened to your gown? It is torn and stained.

I told you, Father. I ride, walk and think upon things, she lied easily. It helps with my sorrow over mother and gives me time to ponder my art. My torn gown? Her fingers lifted up the ragged edge of her skirt and let it fall. A tree limb caught me as I was riding and ripped the cloth as well as the skin below. Thus the blood. It is nothing.

Speaking of your art, her father said coldly, ignoring the comment about her sadness over her mother’s death the year before. Silas Weatherspoon came to see me again last evening. He informed me that the city council has filed a petition against your sculptures. The townspeople demand you cease making those abominable creations, which they perceive as being...unnatural.

Unnatural? How? She tried not to let her anger show.

They are filled with evil, as they say you are, Lilith. I am ordering you never to make another one. The townsfolk will shun you if you continue. Shun me. I will not allow it!

She would be the first to admit her sculptures were a little strange, but not evil. They portrayed mystical beings in erotic poses that some people might find distasteful. Yet her hands only created what her heart and mind bid them to. The human body was beautiful, so what was wrong with showing that? And the truth was, without her sculptures, her melancholy and nightmares became unbearable. She had no choice but to create them.

They are not evil, and I will not stop making them, Father. I am an artist and sculpt what I feel. She was other things as well, but she could never tell him any of that. He’d turned violently against her mother when he’d caught her dabbling in the black arts, and if he knew what his daughter had become, a night-time blood seeker, he’d hate and want to destroy her, too. Well, she couldn’t be sure he’d harmed her mother, but she had her suspicions. How else could a woman with the great magic her mother had wielded just suddenly end up dead? It seemed unlikely.

Someday she’d learn the truth, and heaven help him if he’d hurt her mother in any way.

Nonsense. I told the townspeople, as a show of good faith, you would stop making those evil creations, daughter. I gave them my word. He paused a moment and added, Besides, I have already destroyed most of them.

You destroyed my work! How dare you! I should―.

He interrupted her without hearing what she’d said, without seeing how angry her eyes had become or how threatening her stance. "And you will cease traipsing around in the dark like some witch. People have seen you wandering in the night and are suspicious. People have fallen ill. Have died. Their eyes turn to you. You are beginning to get an unsavory reputation.

And I will see you dead before I allow you to follow the same path as your mother.

Her body shook. You had no right to destroy my work! she yelled.

I warn you. Ignoring her rage, he glared at her contemptuously. If you do not obey me this time I will give you to the townspeople. He meant what he said. If anyone else dies, they will burn you at the stake...and I will let them.

For the first time she realized how her father actually felt about her. After the hurt passed, anger came. And the last traces of any love she might have ever felt for him died.

I will not let the townspeople dictate how I live, and you cannot make me obey you on anything! Her voice rose as her fists threatened him. I am no longer a malleable child you can push around and beat.

I will do whatever I please. Beat obedience into you, girl, if need be. He raised his arm as if to strike her, walking stick in hand. I am still your father.

She’d gone too far and knew it. Talking back had only enraged him further. She’d suffered too many thrashings at his hands not to know he went insane when she defied him. But she knew in that moment he’d never hurt her like that again. Never.

When he went to hit her, she raised her arm and knocked him across the room. She’d never hurt him as she’d done so many others, but he’d beaten her too often, and her mother before her, and she’d had enough of it. She had grown too strong to tolerate it.

Do not lift your hand to me ever again, she hissed, showing her fangs, as he pulled himself up from the floor.

She’d never seen fear on her father’s face before; it gave her satisfaction.

Wordlessly, he dragged himself out of the room and, before she knew what he was doing, bolted the door behind him―as if a door, no matter how thick the wood, could keep her inside if she chose to leave. She stayed put because she wanted to. Weakened over all that had happened to her that night, she flung herself on the bed, craving darkness and rest.

She’d leave when she was good and ready. This was her home as much as his.

Her father’s hatred had grown with each passing day. She no longer trusted him to care for or protect her. Something would have to be done. But what?

She was completely exhausted. It would have to wait until she’d slept. Then she’d decide what to do.

Chapter One

The Present

THEY BURIED CAROLINE Stone’s father on a day as cold and unforgiving as his poor life had been. The wind was a frozen whip, the sky a sooty gray crowded with threatening clouds and the temperature low enough to turn flesh to ice.

And there was snow. The day before, a blizzard had blown into town and created a crystal lake out of the land. Gravestones and stone sculptures were broken teeth peeking out from under the white blanket, and the trees glimmering ice skeletons praying to the sky.

Nothing, neither cars nor humanity, could move on such a landscape. The people who were her father’s friends huddled in their homes unable to venture out on the ice sheets that had once been roads.

The only people at the cemetery were Caroline’s immediate family; her brothers and sisters had arrived the morning before. They were at the gravesite in triple layers of clothes and dark coats as they crowded together over their father’s grave.

Nothing could keep the bitter winds away. It was as if the world had given Edward Winter and his family one final burden. His life, a series of hardships and obstacles topped off with a merciless illness, had been harsh enough without the day of his funeral being so dreadful.

He would have said, Life is what it is, sweetie, Caroline thought with a sad smile. Good and bad all together. You just deal with it. Be grateful for the joyous times when you’re faced with the bad ones.

As they lowered her father’s casket into the ground, Caroline’s mind was heavy with regrets. Her hands, despite two pair of gloves, were frozen. Her body was shaking from the cold and the grief. Her father had died of lung cancer. He’d been sick a long time.

Her father. A man who’d rarely had much money, but who’d loved and cherished his family all his life. A man who would have given everything he had to anyone who’d needed it. Why a man like that had died such a miserable death was beyond Caroline’s understanding.

But she’d discovered years ago life was often cruel and unfair. A person took what was given them and made the best of it.

Bowing her head to protect her face from the wind, her tears fell; she couldn’t stop trembling, couldn’t stop being angry at the world. Her father had been only seventy-one years old. No great age. His life had just begun to be happy again...with them. So why had he had to die? The universe refused to answer.

She sighed. He’d been such a good man. The kindest, most giving person she’d ever known. Hands down.

When she’d been a child, afraid of the night, her father had been there to soothe her fears with a gentle hug. He’d find her stuffed dog Spotty, which she was always misplacing, and tuck it safely in her arms. She’d slept with that toy animal every night until she’d been twelve years old. Couldn’t sleep without it. Her father had understood and never made fun of her need. He was like that.

He’d come home on balmy summer nights and load her and her siblings in his Buick and drive them into town for ice-cream cones. Caroline would order chocolate. Ice cream was a treat because the family never had much money. Truth was, they’d been dirt poor.

Objects, cars or boats, were outside their house one day and weeks or months later would be gone, sold or hocked for desperately needed cash. Bill collectors would bang on the doors or call on the phone at all hours wanting payment. No one spoke of their financial troubles, but Caroline often heard her mother and father fighting about them late at night. It was one of her most vivid memories―her mother yelling at her father, refusing to make him supper or be civil to him because he hadn’t brought home any money. Again.

Through her tears Caroline studied the snow, her memories an aching tooth. As hard as Edward Winter’s life had been, he’d seen its fragilities through eyes different than most people...true eyes.

He’d believed in helping others more than he’d believed in monetary gain, and so the world hadn’t considered him a success. Yet now it seemed a bleaker and scarier place because he was gone.

Caroline’s hand found her husband Adrian’s and pulled his body closer for warmth. She reached out to her nearest sister with the other hand, that sister reached out to a brother, and on it went until they all linked hands. She looked at her brothers and sisters shivering with her in the wind; Ann, Laurie, Marcy, Stephen and Rich. A shame they lived so far apart and rarely saw each other these days. They had their own lives and got together when they could, mostly holidays and birthdays. Tried to keep in touch; E-mails helped.

The priest finished the service quickly, gave his condolences to the family, and scurried off, his robes a blur of black cloth against the snow.

Come on, Caroline, Adrian coaxed into her ear, tugging at her. The funeral’s over, sweetheart. In a few seconds we’ll all be icicles. His familiar face was washed out with the cold, his blue eyes echoing her sadness. He was also a good man, a devoted husband, and the love of her life for twenty years. As much as they’d longed for them, they had no children. Adrian had stood by her through all the hard times. And he, too, had loved her father. Edward Winter had taken Adrian under his wing and taught him everything he knew about building things―and about life.

Let’s go home, Adrian said.

All right. Yet still she lingered, unable to leave her father.

Home was Willowwind, a rambling Tudor-style brick mansion with five bedrooms, five baths and ten-foot ceilings. They’d converted it into a bed and breakfast, doing all the reconstruction work themselves with her father’s help. The house presided on a parallel hill across from the main section of the cemetery. They’d decorated the interior with loving care and had landscaped the grounds back into fragrant and elaborate gardens; gardens now under a blanket of snow.

For the last few years, her father had lived in the smallest of the five bedrooms on the top floor, ever since his wife, her mother, had divorced him after forty-eight years of marriage. She’d had enough of being poor, she said. Her mother had moved in with Caroline’s grandmother two hundred miles away and nearer to two of her sisters. She hadn’t even come to the funeral.

It’d been great having her father with them, even under such circumstances. And in the last few years he’d been almost happy, until he got sick. She still couldn’t believe he was gone.

Honey, there’s nothing else we can do for him now. Adrian spoke loud enough to be heard over the wind, rocking her in his arms. Just go home and live the rest of our lives. You know that’s what he would have wanted.

She met his eyes and nodded. Turning, she gazed a moment longer at her father’s grave, and then out across the cemetery that overlooked the small town in the distance. Below were miniature snow-covered houses and businesses and string roads and highways stretching along the Mississippi River into St. Louis.

Willowwind sat before her on its hill to the right of the cemetery. A cemetery filled with graves going back to the Civil War and strange statues of frightening creatures fashioned by some long-dead woman.

Caroline wanted to go home.

Twilight would bring healing sunsets, and the view from Willowwind’s wall of windows in the living room would be laced with glittering many-colored lights embedded in the night world. It was a sight that she and her father had loved to sit and gaze at for hours as they lounged before the fireplace.

Her father had asked to be buried at the pinnacle of the cemetery in a long-unused section, so his spirit would forever be able to gaze out over the miles below and witness the world baked by the summer sun or frozen by winter’s breath. But, to Adrian’s dismay, digging the grave had toppled one of the cemetery’s largest sculptures and had collapsed the ground beneath it, uncovering a honeycomb of tunnels.

There are lots of those statues. What’s one less? Caroline had said to her husband. She couldn’t grieve much over the loss of one when she didn’t really care for any of them. Even Adrian knew they gave her the heebie-jeebies. Ugly, that’s what they were. Nude.

A swirl of snow and ice rose up around the burial party and hid Caroline and her family in a sea of ivory. Ice particles filled their lungs and choked their breath as they trudged in a curvy line away from the grave toward the beckoning house where warmth, food and drink awaited them.

The funeral was over.

They spent the afternoon into evening remembering their father and honoring his life as the snow collected outside, and the night turned the windows dark. Gathering around the main hearth in the living room, they drank wine, ate food and enjoyed each other’s company. All took turns complimenting the remodeling work that had been done and saying how lovely everything looked.

There were moments when Caroline almost forgot why they were there. Our father’s dead. Our father’s in his grave. He must be so cold in that freezing ground. He was constantly in her thoughts. When she grew weary at the end of the night, she put off going to bed until she couldn’t keep her eyes open any longer, afraid she’d turn a shadowy corner up on the third floor and walk into her father’s ghost in front of the bedroom she shared with Adrian.

Spirits were supposed to be the most restless right after the person’s death. Since this was the day they’d put her father in the earth, he would be pretty restless about now.

Eventually they all went to bed, and she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.

ADRIAN STOOD FOR A while at the window of their bedroom admiring the night and the snowy gardens stretching out beneath him. The gazebo was a dark speck in the distance. Outside the window the snow looked like a patch of white diamonds glittering across the balcony. The cold made him long for spring when the gardens bloomed into vibrant colors, and the woods around the house would be lush and green, everything alive. The winter had been too long, too depressing. And Ed’s lingering illness had soured it.

He could just about make out the life-size stone figures―part-human, part-mystical creatures―that inhabited the gardens and cemetery. Adrian had been fascinated with them when he’d discovered they’d been sculpted around the Civil War years and by a woman, Lilith Roselle, who’d been an eccentric creature herself. She’d been the only child of a French immigrant, Henry Roselle, who’d built Willowwind, and a lowborn French woman he’d brought there sometime in the 1840’s. But according to personal records, Henry and his wife seemed to vanish before the end of the Civil War. And right after the war, so did Lilith. Willowwind was found abandoned and empty in eighteen sixty-eight. An unsolved mystery.

Not unusual. Lots of people disappeared during the war.

Already an avid Civil War buff, he participated yearly in a nearby reenactment (in authentic uniform) and read everything he could get his hands on about the conflict. Adrian had become obsessed with the house’s history; he wanted to know what had happened to its residents, especially Lilith. He actually liked her stone creations. Thought they were unique. Amazing even, what with the level of skill they must have taken to chisel. Nudes didn’t bother him at all.

So he’d been disappointed when the one of an unclothed woman with empty eyes, sitting upon some sort of bestial wolf with horns and forked tongue, had broken into pieces when they’d dug Ed’s grave. Such a loss.

But his wife hadn’t been unhappy the statue had toppled. She thought most of them looked...demonic...and wouldn’t have cried if all of them somehow self-destructed overnight.

Adrian glanced at the bed where Caroline was sleeping. He was worried about her. She was taking her father’s death extremely hard. When Ed had been ill she’d done double duty, nursing him while still helping to run the bed and breakfast.

She was emotionally and physically depleted, thinner than he’d ever seen her. Heartsick. She needed a break, and Adrian wished they could afford to stay closed for a few months, not just a week. But they had to make a living and pay the bills.

Death in the family, heartsickness or whatever, life went on.

Next weekend the bed and breakfast would reopen for guests. They usually limited occupancy to weekends, Friday through Sundays, so they’d have their own lives. It wasn’t easy running a bed and breakfast, but it was sure interesting. Adrian had a hunger to know people, hear their life stories; their business brought them into contact with many different kinds of visitors. He enjoyed the attending to, caring for, and conversing with new friends in a place he loved. It was a good life.

Caroline was different; she liked people well enough, but needed more solitude than he. So being a bed and breakfast proprietor worked for her, too. They had the weekdays mostly to themselves.

He joined his wife in bed. Tomorrow they’d get up early, share breakfast with everyone, and say their goodbyes. They’d ask all of them to return when the snow and ice were gone, and under happier circumstances― in August―for a family reunion. Then he’d take Caroline’s family to the bus station, or wave goodbye to them as they drove off.

Tomorrow was a new day full of promise, and he was ready for it. Another thing he’d learned from his father-in-law; hopeful optimism. Cherish the good things in life and put the bad quickly behind.

Between Ed’s illness and death, and the little problem he’d been experiencing (the uneasy feeling that someone was stalking him), Adrian felt he was due some serenity. He hadn’t told anyone, but he’d been hearing whispers, seeing shadows out of the corner of his eyes. Flickers of red. Yet no matter how quickly he moved, he couldn’t catch anyone or anything. Even on his daily walks, usually a time of peace and reflection, he’d sensed his stalker, so he’d begun to cut short his strolls. It wasn’t like him to be afraid.

He yawned and considered his thoughts. You’re just being paranoid. That’s all. Ed’s death has made you a little jumpy. Maybe it’s his ghost? Nah, don’t believe in ghosts. Stop it. Go to sleep. You’re going to need your rest. Got to get up early. Big crowd for breakfast.

A few minutes later he was asleep as outside the snow drifted, covering and uncovering Lilith’s statues, the tombstones and Ed Winter’s fresh grave.

THE HOUSE FELL SILENT as the shadows reclaimed the bedroom, and a bloodless face floated in the frozen night outside the window, eyes sad and confused.

She watched the two people sleeping and laid her cheek on the glass, moaning softly along with the wind. So softly no one heard.

What had happened to her? Who were the strangers living in her house? She hadn’t figured any of that out yet. But she would, in time, because memories, now fuzzy and incomplete, were