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CHAPTER 41
CLOVER
In the hills at the foot of a plum mountain peak
Lies a sleepy old town where the dead never sleep.
The villagers know to stay out of the wood.
That’s where the spirits are up to no good.
Especially one, they confess with a shiver.
Born with the Devil inside him, they whisper.
Eyes gray as smoke, hair like black flames.
He killed the town priest and died with him that day.
Damned for eternity, refusing to burn,
He waits in the woods for his love to return.
Out where the bluebells grow high as your knee
And the clover and moss blanket every tree
Lies a ring made of stone where no fairies dare tread.
That’s where you’ll find him, the ghost of the glen.
Irecited the epigraph from The Ghost of Glenshire over and over in my mind as I raced up the hill behind Darby and Kellen’s house. My house. It was the only thing keeping me going.
My mother had named me Clover because of that poem. Little did she know that I’d written it myself just a few years before. Or that I was destined to meet and fall in love with the man it was written about. Or that one day, she’d be gone, and I’d be trudging through those very woods alone, in search of that exact same enigma of a man, and that the memory of her voice, reading that poem, would be my only source of comfort in the entire world.
There was just enough daylight left to find my way, but I could hardly see a thing through my incessant stream of tears. The forest was nothing more than a blur of greens and browns, and when I finally crested the top of the hill … purple. Wiping my eyes, I found a sea of bluebells carpeting the woods. Their trumpeted blossoms hung like church bells at noon, swaying back and forth in the summer breeze, but they didn’t make a sound. And why should they? Damien was gone. There was nothing left to celebrate.
There was also no trail left to follow, not anymore, but I knew where to go. It wasn’t a memory; it was a knowing. A download from the very spirit I was going to consult.
Out where the bluebells grow high as your knee,
And the clover and moss blanket every tree …
Following a row of trees with moss-covered trunks, I came across the cottage ruins we’d discovered the night before. I was definitely headed in the right direction.
Lies a ring made of stone where no fairies dare tread.
That’s where you’ll find him, the ghost of the glen.
“No, I won’t,” I whispered to Darby, staring at the crumbling structure where Kellen had always been waiting for her.
But Damien wasn’t Kellen. He didn’t wait for me. Not in this lifetime. Damien came for me.
He came for me when I leaped off a cliff. He came for me when I was captured. He came for me when I was trapped. And now, it was my turn to come for him.
As soon as I figured out where the hell he was.
The mist on the surface of the water ebbed and flowed, as if the lake itself were breathing.
