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Suddenly she clasped a hand over my mouth.
"Be quiet, you stupid girl. You don't want him to come down here."
I still didn't understand what was going on.
"Please!" I begged her. "Please go get Reverend Darcy. Surely he will help?"
She stopped trying to clean me up, and looked at me with a sad expression filled with pity.
"Who exactly do you think brought you here Eva?" she asked softly.
Suddenly understanding the situation, I wretched again, nothing really coming up this time but stomach bile, as I hadn't eaten in probably a day. I remembered his frequent visits to the house after the fateful lunch when I had found my acceptance letter, and the frustration and desperation he seemed to have on the night I had escaped. I had been so preoccupied with trying to escape that I hadn't put much thought into his visits besides thinking they were strange.
The sick feeling of dread in my stomach increased. I wondered if the Anderson's had a role in this. I was such an idiot. I had been so caught up in the excitement of the world that the boys were offering me, I had totally forgotten to take into account the publicity I had been getting. Of course, someone from my past was going to find me. Why in the world had I thought that the Andersons and the Reverend wouldn't get wind of where I was just because they lived in a small town? There had been pictures of me everywhere after the media got wind that Mason or Damon (they didn't know about Beckham yet) might be dating me. I stopped struggling and laid my head down on the concrete, feeling defeated. Anna must have been satisfied with the job she had done wiping off my face, because she stood up and dusted herself off.
"Do you want to stay on the ground or do you want me to help pull the chair up?" she asked.
"Just leave me here," I responded despondently. I'm sure anger would come eventually, but right now all I was feeling was fear and hopelessness. I didn't know how I was going to find my way out of this one.
"Reverend Darcy is finishing a sermon, and will be down later," she said, weirdly referring to her husband by his church title. "This will go better for you if you try and cooperate," she said stiffly, like she was trying to convince herself as well as me.
I closed my eyes, and decided to ignore her. I could feel the weight of her stare on me for a moment more before I heard her walk away, the creak of the stairs signaling she had left the room. She further ensured I would hate her for the rest of my life when she flipped the light switch, the room immediately going pitch black.
Chapter 24
The hours seemed to last forever as I laid there feeling sorry for myself. At this point I felt truly disgusting. Anna may have wiped the vomit off my face, but I had needed to use the restroom hours ago, and thus had wet myself at some point. All of a sudden I felt the temperature drop even more. I groaned. Now was not the time for the "specters" to appear. An icy cold finger trailed down my face. I couldn't see the black shadow due to the gloom of the basement, but I could sense its presence.
"I obviously can't help you right now," I said angrily, immediately wincing from the pain still in my head. I waited for a vision to appear. This one took a while as the shadow continued to stroke my face with its icy fingertip. "I'm already freaking cold enough without you touching me," I yelled out.
"Oh dear," the old woman muttered to herself as she prepared the Princess's morning tea. "I need to start thinking of her as the Queen," she admonished herself. After all, if the rumors were true, the crown would pass any day now as the Queen's health continued to decline. The woman mourned the Queen already. She had always been exceptionally kind to the woman, finding her a place in the kitchens as a young orphaned child, despite the fact that she was a human, and would only have a limited time when she would be useful to the palace.
The woman had spent her whole life in the palace walls. Her status as human meant that she was frequently ignored by the other residents. This meant that she often saw things that she shouldn't be seeing. Like the King dallying with one of the maids while the Queen lay dying in her chambers. Or how that Lord Tiberius fellow was always watching the Princess. She had seen him stalking her in the shadows, the Princess blissfully unaware as she laughed with that beau of hers. The woman could understand him watching the Princess in those times, after all the Princess was the most beautiful being in the realm, but Lord Tiberius was also always watching the Princess as she mourned the Queen. It was those moments that had worried the woman the most. After forty years around the palace, she still didn't understand why the creatures who lived here acted as they did. The malicious smile the Lord displayed when the Princess was sorrowful didn't seem right though.
"There's monsters lurking underneath that handsome face, mark my words," the woman muttered to herself as she finished making the tea, and began to trudge towards the Queen's chambers to see if she could cajole her into drinking some of it.
Walking through a back passage she had discovered after a few years in the palace, the woman decided that she would say something to the Princess next time she saw her. "She'll know what to do about such a thing," the woman told herself.
She had just turned a corner and was passing one of the many dusty rooms that lay empty in this long-abandoned passageway, when she heard a grunt from nearby. She noticed that one of the doors to the rooms was partly closed. Walking as silently as an elderly woman with a bum leg could, she approached the door, peeking into the room.
She couldn't help but let out a small gasp at what she saw. A being in a black cloak was bent over one of the maidservants, the poor girl's eyes were staring out lifelessly as she lay strewn on the floor. The cloaked creature had a long, sharp, ebony knife in his gloved hand, and was making a deep cut into the girl's arm. The blood was dripping into a bowl on the ground. The woman's stomach rolled, the bowl was already half-filled.
"I have to go tell someone," the woman thought to herself, panicking at the task. She began to back away as softly as she could when the hooded creature began to sniff the air.
"Little human…I know you're out there. Come out, come out, wherever you are," the familiar voice taunted.
The woman couldn't believe the cloaked monster was him. She turned to run, but a strong hand caught her arm before she could take two steps. The monster inhaled her scent deeply, before dragging her into the room she had just been peering into, this time closing the door behind them.
He threw her beside the maidservant, some of the sticky blood from the bowl, splattering her as she hit it.
"You'll be the perfect final ingredient," he said, as she struggled to sit up.
"I should have told the Princess," was the woman's last thought, before the ebony knife came slashing down on her.
I came back from the vision shaking from its gruesomeness, the light from the basement had clicked on, and I squinted my eyes from the sudden brightness after being in the dark for so long. When my eyes finally adjusted, I couldn't help but start to shake. Reverend Darcy was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring at me with a terrifying, manic glint in his eyes. The specter from before was nowhere to be found.
Reverend Darcy had lost weight. He no longer resembled the man I had first met at that lunch at the Anderson's a few months ago. He skin was sallow and grey tinted, like he hadn't eaten or seen the sun in years. He walked towards me, and knelt down in front of me. His eyes were bright and feverish, flicking all over me with some kind of sick hunger that shriveled my stomach.
"Eva," he said reverently, starting to softly stroke the side of my cheek.
