She is not well. I've not the talent to know if her illness comes from some disease eating away at her, or if it's merely too many years of grief and worry having taken their toll. She places her own hands on the tabletop, the tips of her fingers sliding along the carved edge, her rings catching the lamplight.

  An image comes to me then, of a frail boy, a stunted figure resting amidst swathes of bed clothes and pillows. Her Simon, with his lips almost always parted, as if he can never draw enough breath to fill his lungs. The picture slips away the moment Rachel removes her hands from the table, the connection severed with an abruptness that sends me tilting forward, as if in chase of another elusive glimpse.

  "Are we ready then?" Ryall asks.

  Marta begins to move about the room, turning down the lights and ensuring that every drape and shade is properly secured. A scrape of chair legs announces Ryall's appearance at my right, and then Marta slips in beside me on the left; though the latter is unable to take her seat without a terrific maneuvering of chair and skirt and an adjustment to the table that makes me fear it might be tipped onto its side before she's finished.

  "I don't want to do this," I say, leaning towards Marta, my voice lowered until it's nothing but a push of air gliding towards her ear.

  She sniffs and turns her head to prevent the others from overhearing. "It's a bit late for that now, don't you think?"

  "Marta." I pause, giving myself a chance to think of the proper words to make her understand the reason for my trepidation. "I don't want it to happen again. I don't want anyone to suffer an injury, to lose their life, because of me."

  A click of her tongue and I know I've lost her. "No worries, now. Your Lord Ryall and I, we're here to put a stop to it if things progress too far."

  And that is all before three pairs of hands find their way to the table's surface. Rachel reaches out towards Ryall, then Marta adds to the circuit. My own fingers are still tangled in my lap, my fingernails digging into whatever flesh they can reach. It is my head, of all things, I wish I could place down on the tabletop in front of me. The polished wood is cool, I'm sure, and would help to relieve the aching inside my skull. But Ryall's fingers finally seek out mine, tucked as they are in the folds of my skirt.

  He smiles at me, the touch of his thumb against my palm like an invitation into his thoughts. A place I have no desire to enter into, and yet something about the day, or the weather, or the eagerness of those around me tears at the barriers I've so carefully put in place throughout the evening. In his mind, the kiss from before extends into a caress, into an embrace, the curve of a shoulder, the flare of a hip, fingers sliding downwards, a breath as quick as a gasp…

  "A prayer," Marta whispers harshly. Her breath is warm against my ear, her words carrying the scent of the alcohol she's so recently imbibed. And there's a note in her voice that tells me this is at least the second time she's sought my attention.

  "Yes, yes. Right." I reach out with my other hand, and Marta takes it, squeezing firmly. As easily as that, the connection is made, the four of us circling the small table. At once, the nausea claws its way up the back of my throat while the pain centers itself behind my eyes, forcing me to squeeze them shut for fear they'll burst from their sockets in order to escape the terrible pressure that assaults them. "Dear God," I say. A whimper, really, because the realization strikes me that something has sunk its claws into me and I cannot break free.

  I'm attuned to all of them now, their every fear and desire laid bare. I know Marta's and Ryall's well enough to skim over them, leaving them behind like stripped carcasses in my wake. But it is towards Rachel's thoughts the voices lead me, beckoning me even; and weak, foolish creature that I am, already caught in their clutches, I can do nothing else but follow.

  Marta's grip on my hand tightens, but it's not until the edge of the table digs into my ribcage do I realize I've nearly slid off the edge of my chair, the soles of my shoes dragging over the carpet as I lurch forwards. The breath knocked out of my lungs, I raise my head, open my eyes, and match my gaze with Rachel's.

  The color has seeped out of her irises, the striations of blues and greens and gold faded to a pale grey, like the image of a photograph left for too long in the sun. Her lower lip trembles, or perhaps all of her is trembling and it's only her mouth on which I focus, a mouth that opens wide in a silent scream.

  "You…" My knee strikes the table as I clamber across its surface, my skirts tangling around my ankles until I kick my feet free. Ryall holds onto me the longest, his grip strong enough to break the stitches that connect the sleeve of my gown to the shoulder. But I wrench away from him, my own strength increased, all of my rage and venom directed at the woman across from me, the one whom all the voices scream at me is my murderer.

  "I gave you everything," I say, my voice no longer my own, but deeper, scraping upwards along the back of my throat, carried out on a cadence that makes me sound as if I've just arrived here from Falmouth. But despite the unfamiliarity of the accent to my own ears, the sound of it only causes Rachel to shove herself backwards and away from me, her chair tumbling aside, anything and everything clattering out of her way as she escapes from my advance. "And you took it all. My life, my son…"

  She shakes her head, those colorless eyes staring at me, her mouth still gaping in a rictus of horror or pain, or some combination of the two. "David," is all she says, before a faint keening begins, and a glimmer of drool collects at the corner of her lips.

  I stumble over the other side of the table, falling onto my left knee with such force that I again bite the inside of my cheek and immediately taste blood as it pours across my tongue. And still I continue forward, my focus on nothing other than the woman before me, this Mrs. Rachel Trask, husband of David, mother of Simon, her voice silenced as I wrap my fingers around her throat and press her head back against the papered wall.

  "Thea. Thea!" Marta grabs my left shoulder, pulling at me with all her might. She says my name again and again, and yet my head pounds with the thoughts of too many people, and I cannot sort through them all to give an answer. "Thea, let go of her. She's done nothing. You need to—"

  "She killed me," I say, the words still not my own. But in the back of my mind, where my thoughts hunker like frightened children, I know this is not the voice of her husband coming out of my mouth. That man is gone, dead and buried, and whoever is posing as him, this demon who has taken such thorough control of my limbs, will not rest until it sees Rachel dead. And so, unable to stop myself, I press my thumb into the hollow space beneath her jaw, my nail grinding into the skin until a scarlet line of blood appears. "This woman who said she loved me, who poisoned me as our only child grew well."

  I slam her head back, and the sickening sound that answers ignites a small kernel of pleasure within some part of me, a part I can no longer attribute to myself. I release her then, and her body crumples, a mass of limbs and silk and lace shuddering into a pile on the floor.

  Ryall is the one who drags me away, one of his arms wrapped around the front of my chest as he pins my own arms to my sides. Marta rushes towards Rachel, the latter hidden from my view behind a curtain of voluminous skirts and the former's frantic ministrations.

  "What did you do?" Ryall says, his mouth so near to my ear that I wince at the accusation in his tone. Because it wasn't me, not really. But I doubt he'll understand that, even should I have the power to siphon every vision from my head and display them before him in the full light of day. And so I slump against him, the chaos dissipating from my thoughts, the barriers returning as if they had never crumbled to dust. In front of us, Marta moves, a slight shift sideways that allows me a view of Rachel, her face turned towards me, one arm thrown back and resting on the floor behind her head.

  "I'm not finished." The whisper slides out of her, though her eyes are still closed and Marta's fingers are checking her battered throat for a pulse. And there is the accent, the voice, the one that came out of my own mouth only moments ago. It's trickled back to her, and when she blinks, I see the return of the color to her eyes, those variegated shades shining at me beneath the dim light of the lamps.

  Her eyelids flutter closed as her head lolls back on the carpet, but it is her throat I watch, the small flicker of life that skips beneath the skin. It will stop, I think, before I draw another breath. And another. I dare not blink, and there—There!—the slightest of pauses stretches into something longer, and I take to counting out the seconds, my own measure accompanied by the tick of the clock on the mantelpiece.

  Ryall's hold on me lessens, but he doesn't step away. A servant will need to be fetched, and someone will need to be called. A doctor, perhaps? I've no idea what the protocol should be in such a situation, but surely there is nothing more that we can do. Indeed, I have already done far, far too much.

  A breath, a single inhalation is all that I can manage. And then a change in the air, so subtle that I could easily attribute it to my imagination. But, no. It is warmer now, despite the cold and the mixture of sleet and rain still striking the outside of the drawing room windows. Before I can glance at Marta to see if she also notices it, the atmosphere around us becomes so heated, so sultry, that I can hardly follow my first breath with another.

  It's always cold, they say, when the spirits are present, when they're at their most volatile. Marta says it, as well, though I suspect she may simply be looking for a way to profit off the drafts that whistle through our quarters on Drury Lane. And yet it's always of a chill across the tabletop, one hears. Or the slide of icy fingers down one's back.. But the warmth around us only increases, and I'm already perspiring, the sweat creating an itch across my shoulders and under my arms. Behind me, Ryall's breath comes in short, heated gasps. Marta, too, appears to be glancing towards the lamps and the grate, as if a raging fire may have caught the drapes up in flames without any of us realizing.

  And there they are, searching their surroundings in dumbfounded silence when I look again at Rachel's body, and I see her eyes snap open, her gaze fixed on mine.

  "What did you do?" The question is an echo of Ryall's, the words now spoken in a strange mingling of Rachel's breathless tones with the deeper, more masculine accent of before. I look at her, wondering for how long the spirit has resided within her, if it found its way into her before the deaths of her husband and son, or if it's merely a passenger she picked up along the way. "You thought you could draw me out," she continues, the mimicry of her husband's voice falling away as it takes on a more gutteral sound, one that sends the voices in my head screaming at a shrill pitch. "Did you think you would control me, hmm? That this is nothing more than a game?"

  I cannot move. My eyes… My eyes will not close, and so I'm forced to bear witness as she rises from the floor, pulled upwards on the invisible strings of a puppet, her head tilted to one side as she appraises me.

  "I am not to be ordered about," she tells me, in the voice that is not her voice, her lips pulled back to display her teeth and gums. "Especially by one such as you."

  She is closer now. I catch a hint of her perfume, cloying in the heat, while her fingers still sparkle with their jewels.

  "This is what happens," she says, so softly, such a promise held in her words. "You're as foolish as she was. Both of you should have known better than to pretend you could play with monsters."

  A gasp, I think. That is the only sound I make before she lunges forward, faster than either Ryall or Marta can move, and then her fingers wrap around my throat, in the same way I had held her before, but the pain that licks out from her touch is as all-consuming as fire.

  She hoists me up until the tips of my toes barely graze the floor. I claw at her wrists, scraping at her sleeves, at her flesh, at anything on which I can find purchase. There's nothing to tell me where Ryall and Marta are, whether they are making any motions to aid in my release or if they're too stunned to do anything but gawk as Rachel's fingers tighten their grip.

  Please…

  I'm incapable of speaking, and yet that single word is at the forefront of my every thought. My only thought. I shut my eyes, the pounding ache in my head too much, the expression of unbridled pleasure on my assailant's face a thing I have no desire to see. And when I think I will die, when even the fear of my own demise trails away from me and beyond my reach, the pressure releases and I tumble down, my elbow and then the side of my head hitting the edge of the table as I fall.

  "Hold her!" I hear Marta say.

  My cheek is on the floor, the carpet rough on my skin. I crack my eyes open enough to see Marta standing over a prone figure, a wrought-iron tool from the fireplace clenched between her hands. I could speak, I think. Say a word to let her know that I'm still alive, but instead I drift away again, one of my hands twitching with the urge to wipe at something wet on my forehead.

  Strong fingers slapping my face force me to open my eyes again. I find myself with my head cradled in Marta's lap, a cloth in her hand as she wipes roughly at my cheek and chin.

  "I thought we'd gone and lost you, too," is all she says before her fingers make a search of my scalp, prodding the bump above my right ear where I hit the table on my way down.

  I blink as my vision clears, though a fuzziness remains at the edges of my right eye. The lamps in the drawing room have been turned up to their full brightness, and I try to turn my head, to locate Ryall and—I must admit—to satisfy my curiosity as to the fate of Mrs. Rachel Trask; but something in Marta's tone has done enough to apprise me of that woman's fate.

  "It wasn't…" My throat revolts at my attempt at speech, and when the coughing begins, the pain from before returns to me.

  "Don't worry about all that now." Marta finishes her wiping and gives the handkerchief a snap before tucking it away again. Her hand trembles as her fingers touch my chin, and I marvel at the fact that even the redoubtable Marta Summerson is shaken by the evening's events.

  But I turn my head away. I want her to understand, even as tears stream from my eyes, though I have no way of knowing how much of my crying is a result of the coughing or an acknowledgement of what occurred here tonight. "It… wasn't me. I didn't—" The coughing takes over before I can finish, while Marta sweeps her hand back from my face, pushing my lank hair off my forehead.

  "I know, Thea. I saw what happened. I heard," she stresses, and taps a finger to her ear and then to my bottom lip. "But I'm not sure anyone else is going to believe you."

  I nod, blinking again to erase the spots that keep floating around in front of my eyes. I try to focus on Marta's face, on the tiny droplets of blood spattered across one of her cheeks, but my gaze keeps shifting out of my control, my eyelids drooping closed against my wishes.

  "Rest while you can," Marta says, as she takes her hand away from me, as a cushion is placed beneath my head in place of her legs. "We'll sort this out when I'm sure you can stand on your own two legs again."

  Rest, I think. I stretch out my fingers, my skin tight in places where Marta failed to wipe away the spray of blood. Rest, only a few paces away from where Rachel's cooling body still lies, from where her blood still soaks the carpet, marking where she fell. Rest, she tells me. A simple enough thing, to close my eyes and sleep, as if I had not attempted murder with my own two hands, as if there's not a faint vestige of the demon's presence still twitching in my muscles, roiling through my veins. And I wonder… I wonder if I've succeeded in putting a stop to it, if I've somehow managed to save the lives of future victims, or if—through me—it's unleashed itself upon our world.

  But, for now, I rest. And all while the voices, the ones that will never leave me, whisper their taunts and their vile words, weaving them so skillfully into my dreams.

  Acknowledgements

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  I have a number of wonderful people responsible for bringing even a short story like this one to life. To Ash Navarre and K.S. Villoso for beta reading and editing, to Jessica Cale for giving it another round of editing, thank you times infinity. And to my husband and children for putting up with me while I’m in crazy writer mode, you have no idea how blessed I am to have you

  Also from World Tree Publishing and Quenby Olson:

  The Half Killed

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  Dorothea Hawes has no wish to renew contact with what lies beyond the veil. After an attempt to take her own life, she has retired into seclusion, but as the wounds on her body heal, she is drawn back into a world she wants nothing more than to avoid.

  She is sought out by Julian Chissick, a former man of God who wants her help in discovering who is behind the gruesome murder of a young woman. But the manner of death is all too familiar to Dorothea, and she begins to fear that something even more terrible is about to unleash itself on London.

  And so Dorothea risks her life and her sanity in order to save people who are oblivious to the threat that hovers over them. It is a task that forces her into a confrontation with her own lurid past, and tests her ability to shape events frighteningly beyond her control.

  February 2018 RRAWR Book of the Month!

  Available now on Amazon

  Coming soon from World Tree Publishing and Quenby Olson:

  The Family Blood

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  Young Dorothea Hawes finds herself bereft and alone, her parents buried amidst whispers of devilry and scandal. The voices that had plagued her had gone silent, and she hopes it will mean an end to the darkness that took her family. But the cold comfort of her new guardians soon takes on a dangerous edge, and Dorothea fears those entrusted with her safety have instead succumbed to a familiar horror.