Sorcerers of the Nightwing (Book One - The Ravenscliff Series) (9 page)

Devon had taken a few tentative steps through the wild golden grass that nearly obscured the stones. “Is Jackson buried here? And Emily?”

“Yes,” Cecily said, pointing to the largest stone, the one in the middle with the broken angel on top. Devon approached it, observing
the monument with a strange fascination. On one side of the stone was etched:

JACKSON MUIR

MASTER OF RAVENSCLIFF

Cecily came up beside Devon and scoffed. “Mother always bristles when she sees that. Jackson was never master of the house. His brother—my grandfather—was. But Jackson always felt that he was the rightful heir. I don’t know why Grandfather allowed him to carve that
on his stone.”

Devon walked around the marble structure. This side faced the sea and was coated with a crusty white brine, but he could still make out the words engraved there:

EMILY MUIR

LOST TO THE SEA

Devon looked over at Cecily. “So her body was never recovered?”

Cecily shook her head.

Devon looked again at Emily’s name. “Just like the girl in Rolfe’s car …”

Cecily
let out a sigh. “So old Jackson is all alone under that big marble stone. Bitter old man. Deserves to be alone.”

Behind them they could hear the sea crashing on the rocks below.

With just the slightest hesitation, Devon placed his hand against the marble. Immediately he pulled his hand back, shouting out in pain. It was burning hot. He looked down at his palm. The skin was bright red.

“What happened?” Cecily asked.

“I guess … the stone was hot from facing the sun all day.”

Cecily gave him a look, but she didn’t pursue the matter, thankfully. Devon hoped she didn’t ask to see his hand.

The girl had started wandering off through the tall grass, heading toward what looked to Devon to be a staircase built into the side of the cliff.

“Come on,” she was calling. “We
need to get down to the village before the town hall closes.”

But something else had now caught Devon’s eye. A large brownstone marker off to the side of the cemetery, an obelisk set upon an octagonal base. Even from where he was standing, Devon could make out the name engraved there.

“Cecily,” he said, pointing. “Look.”

She turned, and saw what he meant.

DEVON

That was all
that was engraved on the stone. They both walked all the way around it. No other names, nothing. Just Devon.

“I never made the connection,” Cecily said. “I mean, I’ve seen this stone all my life, but I didn’t remember it until just now.”

“What could this mean?” Devon asked, feeling the letters carved into the stone, which were cool, not the least bit hot or foreboding. “Might this be—”

“A clue?” Cecily echoed, wide-eyed.

“A clue to what?”

It was a new voice, a rough, gravelly bark that came from the woods behind them. Devon made a small gasp, certain that when he turned, he’d see a corpse, muddy with maggots after decades in the ground, sitting up in the tall grass and pointing a long, accusatory, bony finger at him.

But Cecily calmed him. “It’s only Simon,” she said.

The Muir caretaker limped through the grass. He was no corpse, but he was frightening enough, Devon thought. Small and bent, his face was drawn inwards, his eyes most of all, deep and black. Even from across the graveyard they bore into the boy.

“Simon,” Cecily called. “Who’s buried here?”

“Whatchu doin’ in the cemet’ry, Miss Cecily?” he growled.

“Oh! You haven’t met Devon, have you?”
She giggled a little. “Devon March, this is Simon Gooch, our caretaker. And gardener. And chauffeur. And cook.” She laughed. “Our everything!”

Simon had reached them. He stood only to Devon’s shoulders; surely this was not the man he had seen on the tower last night. That man had been taller and more broad-shouldered. Devon did his best not to recoil from the caretaker. Simon’s breath was foul,
and his hands were small and scarred with short stubs of fingers. Devon noticed one was missing: the ring finger of his right hand.

Doing his best to be polite, Devon extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Simon,” he said.

The caretaker did not accept it. He just kept looking up into the boy’s eyes. “So you’ve come to live at Ravenscliff, eh?”

“Yes.”

Simon’s face was deeply lined;
Devon couldn’t make out whether he was forty or seventy. His hair was thick and black, cut unevenly around his face.

“Simon,” Cecily said, her voice reproving. “Don’t be snarly now.”

He grinned up at her, exposing perfectly shaped white teeth. They startled Devon. “Never for you, Miss Cecily. Never for you.”

“Then tell us who’s buried here,” she insisted.

“Don’t know. That ain’t a
Muir grave.”

“But look. It said Devon. And Devon here thinks he was born around here. He doesn’t know who his parents were.”

Simon looked back at Devon, but uttered nothing more.

“It just seems such a coincidence,” Devon said.

“We’re going to the town hall,” Cecily told Simon. “To search for a birth record of a boy named Devon born fifteen years ago. Now we know to look under first
and last names!”

Simon remained silent, his black eyes intent on Devon’s face.

“Well, we’ve got to get going,” Cecily said, taking Devon’s hand and leading him toward the cliffs. “Simon, tell Mother we’ll be back in time for dinner.”

They hurried through the grass. Devon turned around once: Simon still stood there, waist deep in the yellow grass, staring after him. He was several yards
away by now, but Devon could still see something burning in his eyes. Fury. No—fear. But why?

Cecily took her first step onto the steep staircase cut into the side of the cliff. Devon looked back again, drawn by this terrible little man. But this time it wasn’t Simon he saw standing in the grass. Whoever stood there now was much taller, for the grass had nearly obliterated the caretaker. Now
it didn’t even reach the man’s knees.

Devon felt the heat rush at him, like exhaust from a truck, as intense now as it had been last night when the creature had come through his window.

There, in the full, bright sunshine, Devon recognized the man as the same he had seen the night before on the tower: a tall man with dark eyes, dressed entirely in black, as if in mourning. And Devon now
understood who he was.

The man was Jackson Muir.

“Devon!”

Cecily stood on the edge of the cliff, her long red hair caught in a sudden wind. “Devon, are you all right?”

Devon turned to look at her, tearing his eyes from the thing standing only a few yards away in the swaying grass. His face was white.

“Gosh, I didn’t know you were so afraid of heights,”
Cecily quipped.

Devon couldn’t speak. He just pointed behind him.

“What?” Cecily asked. “What is it, Devon?”

“Him,” he managed to say.

He turned back to where he had seen the ghost—but nothing remained in the spot except for the grass, now pummeled by a wind that surprised both of them in its ferocity.

“Who? Devon, who are you talking about?”

Devon looked across the graveyard.
The trees now bent in the harsh wind; crows in the trees swooped out from the branches, calling out warnings of another impending storm. But there was no man. Jackson Muir’s monument stood solemnly amid the waving grass. Whatever had been there was gone.

“Nothing,” Devon managed to say. “It was nothing.”

“I think a storm’s rolling in,” Cecily said, looking up at the sky. “We should hurry.”

Overhead, deep purple rainclouds spread like watercolors across the pale blue sky. The wind bit at their cheeks; the bitter dampness of the sea crept down the back of Devon’s shirt like a dead hand.

He decided not to tell Cecily about the ghost. He looked up into the sky and figured they had enough time to make it into town. Seagulls circled overhead, calling out their melancholy warnings.
Devon and Cecily descended the staircase along the cliff, looking over the roofs of the village. It was the first glimpse Devon had had of Misery Point in the daylight. It was a charming place, really: neat, colorful shops and boutiques lined a center street and a long, narrow, sandy beach stretched lazily beyond. At the end of the main drag the land rose sharply again into new cliffs, and there,
about halfway up, Cecily pointed out one of the Muir family restaurants.

At the far end of town, a white square building sat very close to shore. “That’s the Muir cannery,” Cecily told him. “Keeps folks employed year-round. Total gross-out stink, though. Imagine spending your day filling cans with tuna fish and crab meat.”

The sky remained pregnant with rain. The day grew dark with clouds,
and the wind added a chill. They emerged into the village behind a t-shirt and souvenir shop. A sign hanging from its front door proclaimed:

THANKS FOR ANOTHER GREAT SEASON—SEE YA IN MAY!

Down the street, Devon recognized Stormy Harbor. Across the way were more shops, most of them boarded up except for Adams Pharmacy and a True Value hardware store. A few old Victorian homes, all painted
white, graced well-manicured lawns. Beyond them, stretching out toward the beach, summer cottages were built up on stilts, all evenly aligned and shuttered down for the winter.

Close to the pier, Cecily gestured toward a restaurant. “That’s Fibber McGee’s,” she said. “Rolfe’s place.” It was a sprawling, California-style eatery perched at the very edge of the land, a silver and spun-glass resort
with an incredible deck overlooking the water, pink and green umbrellas dotting the veranda. Devon recognized Rolfe’s silver Porsche parked out in front.

The town hall was at the end of the road: an old brownstone structure with a clock tower. Inside, the footsteps of the two teens echoed down a high-ceilinged hall, and Devon felt his hopes rise. When the bespectacled woman in the clerk’s office
plunked a large, dusty volume down on the counter in front of him, he could barely open it.
Is this it?
he thought.
Is this the first step on my road to the truth?

But his high hopes faded to disappointment when the only Devon in the index was a Miranda Devon, who died unmarried at the age of seventeen almost fifty years earlier—way too long ago to have any obvious connection to Devon. And
there was nothing entered about where she was buried.

“So we’ll look up your birth chronologically,” Cecily offered, flipping the yellowed pages to March 15—Devon’s birthday—exactly fifteen years earlier. But the only male birth registered between January and May in that year in the town of Misery Point was one Joseph Yoo, whose race was listed as Asian.

“I think we can safely rule that
one out,” Devon sighed.

So the search revealed nothing. The severity of Devon’s disappointment was only matched by the sudden reappearance of the rain, coming down finally as they headed back up the steep cliffside stairway. They were drenched by the time they got back to Ravenscliff, but ironically the downpour had the effect of brightening Devon’s spirits rather than dampening them. He and
Cecily chased each other across the yard, their clothes sticking to their bodies. They laughed and carried on for three quarters of an hour as if no ghosts intruded into their lives, no secrets hung over their heads. For that brief time, getting wild in the rain, slipping in the mud and taking Cecily down with him, both of them dissolving in hysterics, Devon could actually believe that he was just
like any other boy.

It stormed again that night, giant flashes of lightning and horrible cracks of thunder. But Devon slept well nonetheless, exhausted
from the night before and worn out from the travel and the adventures of the day. No sounds disturbed his rest, and in his dreams he saw Dad sitting on a gravestone in that windswept cemetery out on the cliff, telling him that his destiny was here.

In the morning, Cecily greeted him at the breakfast table. It was Saturday, and Simon was taking her into the village to go shopping. She asked
Devon if he wanted to come, but he declined, saying he wanted to spend some time exploring the estate. There was no sign of Mrs. Crandall; he hadn’t seen her since yesterday morning, in fact. When he and Cecily had returned from town yesterday, she’d already retired. Cecily explained that her mother did that often: either spending time with Grandmama or retreating into her own private suite of rooms,
where sometimes she’d remain for days. Simon would bring her meals up to her.

“It’s hard to imagine someone as creepy as Simon being this good of a cook,” Devon said, forking a piece of Canadian bacon into his mouth.

“Oh, he’s really very good,” Cecily said. “He’s a master chef.”

Still, Devon thought, the idea of Simon’s blunt, scarred little hands touching his food was just a little
revolting.

He watched as Cecily waltzed off, Simon appearing almost from nowhere to trail behind her, car keys jangling from his belt. Devon pulled back a velvet curtain in the foyer to spy on the Jaguar as it glided down the driveway and disappeared down the hill.

Upstairs in his room, he checked Facebook and was disappointed to see that no one had commented on his status from yesterday.
Nobody had wished him good luck, nobody had said they missed them. There was still no message from Suze, though Tommy had sent him a one-liner that said Max was doing really well and seemed quite happy in his new home.

While Devon was glad to know his beloved dog was happy, he felt bad that Max didn’t seem to miss him. No one seemed to, in fact.

It didn’t matter, Devon tried to tell himself.
He had come here to find his destiny. The dream of Dad had only confirmed it.

Devon knew he needed to try the door to the East Wing again. He wasn’t sure what secrets this house held—but he felt quite certain that if they were anywhere, they were in the East Wing. That was where he’d seen the man on top of the tower the night he arrived, a man he was now convinced was Jackson Muir. Seeing Jackson’s
specter again yesterday in the cemetery made Devon suspect that the nefarious warlock of Ravenscliff held some clue into his past. Mrs. Crandall, he was quite certain, hadn’t simply closed off the wing because there were so few people in the house. She’d closed it off because she didn’t want anyone discovering what was in there.

Of course, when he tried the door, it was still locked. Devon
tried willing it open—he could do that sometimes, like the time he’d gotten locked out of the house when Dad was still at work—but nothing happened. The knob still failed to turn. Devon sighed. He figured there must be another way into the wing from the second floor of the house. He roamed up and down the corridor outside his bedroom once again; from the playroom he could hear Alexander’s television
set, but everything else was as quiet as a tomb.

He considered talking with the boy again in the hopes of finding some clues. Alexander knew a way into the East Wing; Mrs. Crandall had said locked doors did not stop Alexander Muir. But Devon didn’t trust Alexander. Not after their first meeting. He had to find the way in on his own.

After careful consideration, he deduced which part of the
corridor seemed to be directly over the East Wing entrance downstairs. But all he found there was a linen closet—the doorknob of which burned in his hand.

“Yow!” he called out, then bit down on his lip to keep from making any more noise.

So this is it
, he thought.

He nudged the door open with his foot. Inside were deep shelves of towels and sheets, pillowcases and tablecloths. A little
balsam-smelling star hung from the center rod to scare away moths. Devon peered into the darkness of the closet.
There must be a door through here,
he thought. This was likely once the upstairs entry into the East Wing, refashioned into a closet when the wing was closed down.

He decided to give up the search for the time being. He could have started taking down the towels and sheets and feeling
along the shelves, but Alexander could have come out of the playroom at any time, or Mrs. Crandall might have shown up behind him. It was too risky right now. But he’d be back. That was for sure.

Heading back down the stairs, Devon was surprised to see Mrs. Crandall sitting in her chair in the parlor, sipping a cup of tea with a few crackers on a plate. A fire roared within the hearth, which
felt good even out in the foyer, as the day was damp and overcast.

“Oh, Devon,” Mrs. Crandall called to him. “Please join me.”

He sat on the sofa opposite the fireplace. “The fire feels great,” he said.

“Doesn’t it? I’ve always been partial to fires. Oil heat alone always feels so unsatisfying.” She smiled. “Are you warm enough at night?”

“Yes,” he told her. “My room is very comfortable.”

“That’s good,” she replied. “I want you to like living here.”

“So far, so good,” Devon said, pointedly looking at her.

“Is it?” Her response seemed equally pointed, as if she knew something, or suspected he meant more than he was saying.

Devon smiled. “I’ve encountered a few ghosts, but they haven’t scared me away.”

Mrs. Crandall lifted the dainty cup of tea to her lips. It looked
fragile and ancient. Devon imagined Emily Muir drinking from that same cup, in that same chair. “Well,” Mrs. Crandall said, after a moment’s consideration, “if everyone ran from the sight of a ghost in this house, there would be no one left.”

He eyed her. “You’ve seen your share?”

“How could I not? I’ve spent all my life here.”

“Mrs. Crandall,” Devon ventured suddenly.

“Yes?”

“Who
is buried in the cemetery out on the cliffs under the monument marked ‘Devon’?”

Her blue eyes looked at him over her teacup. She seemed to hesitate, with the cup not touching her lips, just hovering there in her hand. Then she carefully settled it back into the saucer.

“I don’t believe I know,” she said at last. “That’s the center stone, isn’t it?”

At least she wasn’t denying she knew
it. “Yes,” Devon said. “The obelisk.”

“Curious, isn’t it?” she asked. “Whoever it is must have been a trusted friend or servant of my father or grandfather.”

“The only Devon listed in the registers for Misery Point is a Miranda Devon, who died forty-six years ago,” he reported. “Did you know her?”

She looked at him with a tight smile. “How old do you think I am, Devon March?”

He blushed.
“I’m sorry. But I thought maybe you would have heard of her.”

Mrs. Crandall was still smiling. “Two days here and you’ve already been busy conducting your own little investigation.”

“Could it be Miranda Devon who’s buried in that grave?”

“I have no idea. All the records on the Muir family cemetery were destroyed a few years ago when a pipe burst in the basement. But why does all this
interest you so much?”

“I’m determined to find out who I am and where I come from.”

“Do you think your father would want that, Devon? After all, he raised you as his own. He never told you about your birth parents. Perhaps there was a reason for that.”

Devon considered this. “My father wanted me to know,” he said after a moment’s pause. “I truly believe that. He could have gone to his
death without telling me the truth, and I’d have never known. But he did tell me, Mrs. Crandall, and he told me I needed to know my destiny.”

Her lips tightened. She stood, walking with her teacup toward the fire.

“Not only that, Mrs. Crandall. He sent me here. He could’ve found another guardian. But he sent me here.”