The Prophet

Chapter Eleven

As soon as I got home, I let Angus out into the backyard. Then I poured myself a glass of wine and gulped it. Poured another and gulped it, wishing I had something stronger. The third glass I carried out to the garden and sipped while I waited for Angus to get on with his business. He took his sweet time as he always did, and as impatient as I was to get to my computer, I didn’t have the heart to rush him. He’d spent most of his life cooped up in cages and kennels, suffering horrors that I could barely comprehend. The least I could do was indulge his curiosity.

A mild breeze stirred the wind chimes, but I felt no ghostly presence in the garden. Thankfully, Shani hadn’t followed me home tonight.

Shivering, I zipped my jacket all the way up to my neck. The night had turned chilly, but at least the storm seemed to have passed us by. Or maybe the clouds had only gathered over Devlin’s house. Here, a few blocks away, the moon was out and the thunder had faded. I even saw a few stars peeking out.

I wondered if the hazy ring around the moon was an omen. Fishing for the talisman I wore around my neck, I rubbed my thumb across the smooth surface. The polished stone had come from the hallowed hills of Rosehill Cemetery, my childhood playground. How many afternoons had I spent curled up in the shade of an old, drooping live oak or with my back pressed against the warm granite of a weeping angel, devouring the pages of my favorite Gothic novels, fueling an imagination already primed by the ghosts? Back then, I’d dreamed of someone like Devlin. A darkly charismatic man with even darker secrets. As a lonely teenager, nothing had seemed more romantic than doomed love, nothing more beautifully melancholy than unrequited passion.

How stupidly naive I’d been. There was nothing remotely beautiful or desirable about being denied the love of one’s life, as I had been so cruelly reminded tonight. Even without the threat of the Others, Mariama would always find a way to keep Devlin and me apart.

The wine was going straight to my head, making me slightly hysterical and borderline maudlin. Hovering just outside the door, I watched Angus amble around the yard as my thoughts raced and images flashed in my brain—the almost kiss…the falling painting…Mariama in all her dead glory.

Shani clutching my hand.

In some ways, the ghost child’s attachment to me was the most disturbing development of all. Not because I was actually scared of her—at least, not the way I feared Mariama—but because it seemed a direct manifestation of Papa’s broken rules, a terrifying reminder that I had inadvertently crossed a threshold from which there would be no return.

I’d brought all of this on myself, of course. How many times had Papa warned me? By allowing a haunted man into my life, I’d made myself susceptible to his ghosts. And those ghosts had drawn other ghosts. By letting down my defenses, I’d opened myself up to an invasion. Not just from Shani and Mariama and Robert Fremont, but possibly from spirits that had yet to make their way to me.

It was all well and good to contemplate a higher purpose, but when delusions of grandeur became stark reality, I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea what would be expected of me, what lay in wait for me. I didn’t have an inkling of where all this would lead me, but I thought perhaps it was a very good thing that Clementine Perilloux hadn’t been able to tell my fortune. More than ever, I had no wish to see my future.

With another fortifying sip of wine, I tried to shepherd my thoughts from ghosts to the overheard conversation between Devlin and Ethan. Robert Fremont’s murder investigation had taken an unexpected turn tonight and Devlin’s involvement was an added complication. Suddenly, something Fremont had said came rushing back to me. We follow the clues no matter where they lead. Understood?

Even if those clues led to Devlin? Had that been his implication?

I played that conversation over and over in my head because it was easier to dwell on what I’d learned from my eavesdropping than to delve more deeply into what had happened in Devlin’s house.

Finally, Angus finished his business, and we went back inside. He prowled through the rooms for a while before settling down in his bed. I took a shower and changed into my pajamas before returning to my desk.

Wineglass within easy reach, I ignored all those dark windows and opened my laptop. I typed in Darius Goodwine, almost expecting the same sparse results yielded by my previous search. But instead, a dozen or more links popped up. Excited by the prospect of immersing myself in a project, I began to click through the pages.

Whatever I expected to learn about Darius Goodwine certainly wasn’t what I found. The way the two men had spoken of him earlier had spawned images of a dangerous criminal living on the fringes. But Darius Goodwine had quite the impressive résumé. For starters, he had a doctorate from the University of Miami in molecular biology with an emphasis on ethnobotany. I only had a vague idea of what that entailed so I looked up the Wikipedia definition—the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous plants.

Dr. Goodwine had done most of his fieldwork in the Gabonese Republic where he spent years studying as an apprentice to a Bwiti shaman. His sojourn to West Africa had inspired several books that delved into the complex relationship between certain cultures and plants, specifically those used in divination. Having resigned both his professorship at North Carolina State and a seat on the board of a large pharmaceutical company headquartered in Atlanta, Dr. Goodwine now spent most of his time in West Africa, writing and researching.

He, too, had grown up in Beaufort County, in a tiny Gullah community near Hammond, which made me all the more certain that he was related to Mariama. She and a male cousin had been raised together by their grandmother.

Darius was in his late thirties, so he was only a few years older. Strangely, the only photograph I could find was one blurry snapshot taken in Gabon. He appeared extremely tall, but I couldn’t be certain he was the same man I’d seen watching Devlin’s house.

I moved on to gray dust. Here, I did run into a wall. One link led to a Cornell University piece about quasar environments and another to an online fantasy game. Nothing at all about a powerful hallucinogen that stopped the heart and caused people to die.

Gray dust exhausted, I returned to Darius Goodwine, clicking through the rest of the articles in the hopes of turning up a clearer photograph. As I scanned the information, I copied and pasted and made copious notes on my legal pad as my chart evolved:

Devlin > Shani > Mariama > Fremont

Darius > Mariama > Devlin > Ethan

Clementine > Isabel > Devlin

Devlin was clearly connected to all the players, but it was hard for me to imagine that he’d ever been involved in drugs or the occult. He’d never made a secret of his disdain for Dr. Shaw’s work and had gone so far as to advise against an association with the man or the Institute.

Yet, he had once been Dr. Shaw’s protégé. A gifted paranormal investigator according to Ethan. Devlin had married a woman with strong ties to her Gullah heritage, and he appeared to have some sort of relationship with Isabel Perilloux, a palmist. Which only served to remind me of how very little I knew of the real John Devlin. In so many ways, he was still a stranger to me, but rather than discouraging my affection, his secrecy only intensified my unrealistic fantasies.

The office had grown cold as I sat there absorbed in my research. I’d cut off the air-conditioning when the temperature began to drop at night, and I wasn’t yet ready to turn on the heat. It was only a slight chill. Something on my arms was all I needed.

I got up to grab a sweater, and as I walked down the hallway to my bedroom, I became aware of a subtle, yet unsettling background noise. I stopped in midstride to listen. The house was very quiet at night without the coming and going of my upstairs neighbor. I wondered briefly if he might have returned, but the dripping—as I had now identified the sound—was definitely coming from my own apartment. Despite the age of the house, I’d never had a problem with leaky pipes or faulty plumbing, so a dripping faucet caught my attention.

Tracing the sound to the bathroom, I turned on the light and glanced around. The scent of rosemary lingered from my bath as I walked over to check the faucets in the shower and then at the sink. The beveled mirror was fogged over, and without thinking, I reached up to clear it. My hand froze.

A pattern had formed in the mist. The barest trace of a heart.

Shani. The ghost child’s basket name meant “my heart.”

She’d chosen to communicate with me this way once before. She’d traced a heart on my office window to let me know she was there. To let me know who she was.

I stared at that heart now as a dark dread descended. Never before had I seen evidence of a manifestation inside my house, inside my sanctuary. Hallowed ground had always been my safe haven.

Was she still there?

I resisted the urge to whirl and scour the shadowy spaces behind me as I warned myself to remain calm. That was always the key to dealing with ghosts. When I was little, my father had taken me to the cemetery every Sunday afternoon so that I could become accustomed to the specters that floated through the veil at dusk. He’d always stressed the importance of controlling my reaction. Show no fear, child, even when they manifest near you. Never acknowledge the dead even when they touch you.

I’d developed quite the poker face over the years even when apparitions suddenly appeared before me. Even when they ran their icy fingers through my hair or down my spine. I knew how to suppress shudders and shivers and how to look through ghosts without looking at them.

But this was different. Never had one invaded the sanctity of my protected space.

I dropped my hand casually to my side and turned, bracing inwardly for what I might see. Nothing was there. No Shani. No aura. Not even a lingering shimmer.

But as I moved back into the hallway, I couldn’t shake the notion that something trailed me. I went from room to room, making sure doors and windows were secure. Not that locks would keep out phantoms. I had to do something, though, because if my sanctuary had truly been violated…

Mentally, I shook myself. I couldn’t allow myself to think about that. The heart traced on the mirror might have been there for ages and was only now showing up in the frost. I hadn’t noticed it before, but the outline was very faint. Of course, I’d cleaned that mirror any number of times since moving into the house… .

Resisting the temptation to glance over my shoulder, I went back to my office. Angus had risen from his bed and stood growling at one of the windows. I’d heard him make that guttural sound once before when he’d been in the presence of a ghost. And in the presence of evil.

The glass was so fogged, I couldn’t see outside, couldn’t see the entity that lurked in the garden, but just like Angus, I sensed an unnatural presence.

He growled again and eased himself over to my side. I reached down and put my hand on his back, stroking his ruffled fur as I took comfort in his warmth.

The scent of jasmine came to me then, so strong I might have opened a window. But this time of year, the starry blooms had long since faded. The perfume came not from my garden, but from Shani’s ghost. She wanted me to know she was there.

“You’re here,” I whispered. “Now what do you want?”

The computer screen cast an eerie glow on the frosted windows, and for one split second, I thought I saw something outside, a featureless face peering into my office. It was there one moment, gone the next as another scent drifted in, almost masked by the jasmine. Sulfur.

The knock of my heart was so painful at this point I could scarcely breathe. My hand stilled on Angus’s back as a terrible revelation came to me.

Shani wasn’t alone. Something had followed her to my house. Something dark and malevolent. I could feel it out there in the garden even now.

I heard a whimper as Angus pressed himself against me. I wanted to cry, too, but I didn’t make a sound. Instead, I just stood there clutching the polished stone at my throat, my thumb working frantically over the smooth surface. My gaze was riveted to the windows where a message began to appear. Not a heart this time. Not a request or a plea, but a bold, angry demand that repeated over and over in the frost:

HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME