Silent Song (Ghostly Rhapsody) (24 page)

The bolt turned with an ominous crack, and I winced and listened for a long minute. No lights came up. I didn’t hear movement upstairs.

Good.

Letting out the breath I didn’t know I had been holding, I opened the door, closed it behind me and started running.

I was still wearing my school clothes, since the whole moping around hadn’t left me time to change. It was a tight skinny jeans and tight wool sweater ensemble, complete with dipping neckline and super long sleeves, and it wasn’t the best outfit to be racing around in at one in the morning. I couldn’t care less. I bolted ahead anyway, out of the best part of the neighborhood and onto Keith’s street.

By the time I reached his driveway, a knife twisted in my side and my breath came in short, ragged breaths. His window was dark, but what did I expect?

After knocking a few times on his windowpane without getting an answer, I tried to compose myself and put together some excuse for my presence as I mounted the stairs to the porch.

His father is so going to hate me. Everything started after Keith began to see me.

“Meow.”

I jumped when I heard the mewl right beside me. Sparrow sat comfortably in front of the door and fixed me with his huge eyes. The cat’s voice was matter-of-fact, if that were even possible.

“Hey there, kitty,” I whispered, swallowing thickly.

The cat didn’t say anything. He just moved the tip of his tail, tapping it lazily against the floor, and kept sitting there, as if he were standing guard.

And I must have been more freaked out than I cared to admit, because I could have sworn that there was a certain disapproval in the tilt of those whiskers.

“Why are you outside? Keith’s playing again?” I knew I was being ridiculous, but I couldn’t reach out to ring the bell with Sparrow in my path. Not without standing way too close to him. So I talked in hushed tones and hoped that he’d move.

Or that I’d work up the courage to ring anyway.

“Meow.” He held my nervous stare with an unimpressed, cool one and I felt a knot tightening in my stomach.

“He’s not here, is he?”

The huge black cat thumped its tail. It felt eerily similar to a “finally you get it!” statement. And then, mission accomplished, he licked his paw and started washing his face.

I turned around, took a deep breath, and broke into a run once more. I never stopped to consider that I was following directions given by a cat.

Cutting through some alleys that, in normal circumstances, I’d have gone through great pains to avoid, I managed to reach the sumptuous, rich neighborhood. The muscles in my legs were killing me and my lungs felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air anymore, but I was there.

I collapsed on hands and knees on the driveway to the Nightray’s mansion, heaving great gulps of air and trying to hear something, anything, over the ringing in my ears.

There it is.

Faint, yes, but Keith’s guitar playing was impossible to mistake. I knew him too well.

With effort, I made my way beyond the weed-infested lawn. The front door stood open just a crack. Just enough to make me brave the treacherous steps of the porch. I pushed the door and it gave smoothly, as if it had been waiting for me.

Well, I guess it was waiting for someone all right.

Keith hadn’t gone upstairs, thank God. I didn’t think the stairs would have held his weight if he’d tried. Instead, I found him in an empty room on the main floor. I figured it was right under the study room that we had moved and turned into our decor for
Lady Windermere’s Fan
. The idea sat sickly in the pit of my stomach, even as the vision of him sent a shiver down my spine.

There was a flashlight planted on the floor, giving the whole scene a surreal tinge. He stood in the middle of the room, the guitar plugged to his red rack, which was in turn, plugged into a set of portable computer-style speakers. The sound wasn’t as loud as it would be with an amp, but it was loud enough for whatever was happening there to happen.

The air was thick with the frantic music, and it flooded me with fear and sorrow and regret as soon as I entered the improvised concert hall. Something beyond the notes nagged at the back of my mind, telling me to turn around and leave this little bit of Hell, to forget that I ever saw it.

I took a step into the room.

“Keith?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge my presence. His head was bent, his eyes closed, and his fingers danced up and down the guitar’s neck with lightning speed. His shoulders hunched over from the tension, and his mouth was set in a rigid line that had nothing to do with the serene look that always shined through when he played his other music. His real music.

“Keith, what are you doing? You have to stop… Listen to me, you have to stop!”

I crossed the room to stand in front of him, to try to get his attention, but he was lost in his melody. It was as if the playing was the only thing that kept him going. I reached out to forcefully stop his hand, as I had done before.

He took a step back, avoiding me.

I barely had time to register that he was aware of my presence before I felt
hers
.

Keith and I were alone in the abandoned house, but I could feel Beatrice as if she stood right in front of me, right by his side. Her hate pressed in on me from all angles, mixed with a dark sense of glee, so intense that I took a step back before I could check myself.

The song evolved into a new movement, frantic and broken, the darkness that belonged to the ghost creeping in the shape of discordant notes here and there as it slowly conquered the whole song. Keith fell to his knees, depleted.

But he kept playing.

In spite of the sheen of sweat glistening on his skin and the grimace of pain in his lips, his fingers moved as deftly as they ever had and even faster.

Beatrice’s presence grew in intensity, making my hair stand on end and my breath hitch in my throat. I got a gloating feeling from her.

Understanding hit me like a wall of bricks, and I found myself screaming at thin air.

“Bitch! Let him go!”

She wasn’t just enjoying Keith’s torment. She was feeding off him, each note strengthening her soul and draining his.

She saw me connect the dots and laughter appeared in added layers below the frantic notes.

That was about as much as I could put up with.

I shattered.

Fear stopped being a factor as I charged forward. That time, Keith couldn’t dodge me. She screamed bloody murder when I closed my hand over his wrist, but I gritted my teeth and wrenched his hand away from the guitar.

At least, I tried.

Keith was stronger than I gave him credit for. He only faltered for a heartbeat before he resumed playing, playing, playing that cursed song.

And I was powerless to struggle with him, because the moment I touched his skin, fever-hot, clammy and papery thin, I saw her.

She hovered over us, her fine features and rich gown nearly swallowed in a maelstrom of emptiness and malice. Her mouth was still open in an ungodly screech and her hands, fingers curved into bony talons, shook with the desire to tear, to sunder, to destroy.

She hated me, and the violence of her feelings overflowed her writhing form, expanding and eating away at the song.

It wasn’t the petty, childish hate of Lena, but something brutal and murderous. Beatrice didn’t want to make me unhappy. She wanted to rip me to shreds, limb from limb, and to keep me alive while she did it to relish in my pain.

It was because of Keith. His soul—his heart—shone with the radiance of the sun through his music, and she thrived on his talent. He breathed life into her song in a way she’d not felt in a century, and she craved it—his spirit and his heart and his music. But he had given himself recklessly to me, and in doing so had brought my very existence to Beatrice’s attention.

I had kept him from playing, broken him out of her trance, and for that she would kill me if given half a chance.

A sob escaped my throat.

That’s what he had seen. That’s why he came here tonight. To keep her away from me
.

Following Keith into her family manor, unprepared and not knowing the first thing about ghosts, I had given her the perfect opening to claim him and take her rage out on me in one fell swoop. Her shadowy body twitched and dove, swirling around us like death itself, and I fell to my knees at Keith’s side.

But she didn’t take the plunge. She howled in anger and didn’t attack.

There was one thing standing between us, and it was the one thing she craved more than my blood: Keith’s soul.

And it was being shredded to pieces in her fury, even as he was freely giving it up.

The truth glared at me from his fluttering pulse at the base of his neck, from his shaky breathing, from the cold of the grave that started to spread through his translucent skin. It screamed at me in his music, the notes from the cursed minuet faster and darker than ever, but tinged with undertones of tenderness that couldn’t possibly belong to Beatrice, with whispers of resignation and love and pleas for forgiveness.

It was a part of the song no one had played yet, I realized as I shut out the blood-curdling form of Beatrice and focused on his face, on his tense features, his pressed lips.

No one had played her song this long before she claimed them, and the delight she found in the fact kept her at bay, the lighter nuances inside her melody of death and despair acting as a shield for me. She writhed in bliss while she absorbed the sound, taking chunk after chunk of Keith’s very essence with every note.

“Don’t leave.” I found the words spilling from my lips of their own accord, my voice cracking with tears I hadn’t realized I was spilling.

Keith struggled to lift his head when he heard my voice. I caught a glimpse of his vibrant blue eyes behind the black and silver strands of his hair. His lips tugged into a smile, so tense that they twisted into a grimace of determination and pain.

I can’t let him go
.

Beatrice’s presence flared behind us, furious, as if she had sensed my determination.

I ignored her as I took Keith’s face in my hands, holding him steady as I bent down to kiss him.

Pain wrecked through me. I hadn’t felt anything remotely like it before. I burned and shivered and drowned and exploded all at once, and the mansion and my awareness of it washed off my brain.

It felt like Beatrice’s clawed hands were strumming the strings that made up my being, and I could only begin to understand the torture Keith was undergoing while he played his own elegy to save my life.

I was being plucked, but he was being torn.

I knew because I was there, with him, being part of him. I could see the minuet as a luminous trail wound through with vile darkness.

Suddenly, I could also see the man who had written it. His name had been Andrew, and he had been the ghost’s first victim. He had unwittingly given her the way to claim countless souls over the years. He had let her take his life with a few simple, soft-spoken words.

If you don’t love me, I’ll die,
she had said.

Beatrice had been shrouded in darkness even while she was alive. She had wanted Andrew, his passion and his talent and his heart, just as she wanted Keith now, many decades later. She had manipulated him, played master puppeteer with everyone around him, coaxed him and tempted him. And through every scene, unfolding in front of my eyes as if through silver mist, I saw Andrew escape her traps, fly ever higher, free and unbound as he was meant to be.

Then she had died a tragic death. It had not been a murder, or an accident, or anything unjust that made her stay around for vengeance.

It had been the last plot, hatched to obtain the one thing her money, position, and power had failed to deliver.

If you don’t love me, I’ll die.

And she had. She’d died in a gruesome way, tingeing the water of the lake standing between their manors with the pink and russet shades of her final game.

Andrew, poor Andrew, had been ensnared. The stakes had been too high and his hand not good enough. The guilt had eaten away at his gentle heart, and in the end, he’d given her what she wanted—everything she’d pursued in life, poured into a minuet written for her death.

At first, it had been plagued with the sweetness of youth and the lament that it had gone to waste, and her ghost had watched intently as more and more notes were added, as rage and despair and hope and fear slowly broke the artist’s mind as the song changed, transcended any definition of movements and pieces and music, and became part of Beatrice herself.

The piece was never finished. Andrew’s mind lost, his soul departed not long afterwards. But the damage was done. As Beatrice pursued new whims, those who had her attention would hear it again and again, until they met the same end as its creator.

In some cases, her new victims were weak and shallow and could barely play a few notes before losing their spark. Others were like radiant suns, burning bright and adding whole new bars to her cursed melody before they sputtered and died. Like Keith.