Categories
Tags
Co-authors
Life had contracted into a handful of warm rooms while winter pressed its full weight against the walls. The rest of the Hall had been surrendered without ceremony. Doors latched. Curtains drawn tight. Whole corridors abandoned to the cold. Yet within the kitchen, the study, and the narrow bed they now shared, something like steadiness had taken shape.
Thomas had expected the closeness to unsettle him. Instead, the days fell into a rhythm so effortless he barely noticed the moment habit gave way to comfort. Clint brushed past him when they cooked. Clint’s hand found his without asking when they read in the evenings. At night Thomas slept with a warm shoulder pressed against his back and woke to the steady rise and fall of Clint’s breath in the quiet.
He had not grown accustomed to many things in his life. This, however, was becoming dangerously easy.
Dawn filtered weakly across the frost-lined window. The hearth still glowed from the banked coals Clint tended so carefully. In that muted light Thomas allowed himself a rare indulgence. He watched Clint breathe, watched the steady rise of his chest and the faint looseness that softened him in sleep.
“You make this house bearable,” Thomas said softly. “And I am not sure how to live with the fact that I have begun to rely upon you.”
Clint did not wake, but his fingers twitched toward the space where Thomas had been lying. The motion drew something sharp and aching through Thomas’s chest.
“Stay in bed,” he murmured. “I will make the toast and the tea and put more coal on the fire.”
He rose, tucked the blankets around Clint, and stepped into the small adjoining room. The air hit him at once, sharp and cold. He crouched at the hearth and lifted the poker, stirring the coals until sparks curled upward.
That was when he heard it: A faint patter behind him. Not loud. Not heavy. Like grains of dirt spilling onto stone. He straightened slowly and turned his head. On the floor beside the bed, scattered across the boards, lay a thin trail of red clay. Fresh. Damp. Leading from the far corner of the room toward Clint’s sleeping form, as if something had stood watching him in the night before retreating when Thomas rose.
Cold tightened across Thomas’s spine. He stepped forward at once, but the air near the foot of the bed dropped in temperature so sharply that his breath clouded in front of him. The frost on the window thickened in a single instant, and a pale outline flared across the glass. Not a handprint. The shape of a lamp, held aloft. Lucille’s signal.
Her summons.
Her warning.
Thomas’s breath thinned. “Lucille, stop,” he whispered. “No more. Not this one.”
The frost image faded. The temperature lifted a fraction. The clay did not disappear.
He crossed to Clint and tugged the blankets closer around him, keeping his movements quiet so he would not wake the man he was suddenly terrified to lose. Thomas swallowed hard and forced himself back toward the fire, though his hands shook as he set the kettle on the hook.
The house was awake, and Lucille was not pleased.