WHEN SPENCER FLEES the attic, something happens. It is like I’m falling apart yet coming together again all at once. I don’t know how long this takes. Minutes or hours or longer. For a moment, I am floating outside the bedroom. When he slams the door, it launches me away like violent wind pushing against a kite.

I am not the fog he walked through, not the weightless spirit fighting against shadows.

I wake at the bottom of the stairs, no longer in that middle realm of torturous ghosts that I was forced into by the male ghost’s brutal hands. I’m staring up at the dusty underneath of the crystal chandelier in the foyer, the magnificent staircase stretched in front of me like Jacob’s Ladder, beckoning me on to heaven to see the angels.

It’s confusing... because this is not where I was a moment ago. No, I was in the bedroom, stood just past the doorway.

But now I am here. God, who knows where I am. Caught between worlds. Never going to be alive again. Never.

I’m stuck in a broken home, trapped with demons that routinely have the freedom to beat me as they will. They’ve caught me a dozen times in the years since I became a part of this house—much sooner this time than ever before.

That must be important. I’m sure of it. Like everything is speeding up, moving swiftly towards some sort of resolution that will see me gone for good or finally thrust back into reality.

Slowly moving my head one way and then the other, I find that there’s no trace of the pair of demons that always comes first. Particularly cruel and vindictive, the children will be the next to join the brutality. They are small, monstrous, masked things that died in a fire long ago. Their touch feels like Greek fire. Flames, floating on water that cannot be extinguished. And then...

But I won’t think of that just now. In almost two hundred years, that terror has only found me once, fueled by the fierce love and pain of a childless couple that reached between them as visible light. They stayed the longest of all the inhabitants. That was what made my curse so very intricate, so very changing and unbreakable. It fed off the humans who lived here; it used their emotions to mold and shape my hauntings.

I shake my head. Spencer must free me before that most feared thing finds me again. I do not think I can survive this time. I fear even if I become the nothingness, it won’t save me.

My hands have paled, and I’ve lost all my coloring this time. No trace of blood on my tattered clothing. I must have succumbed to terror-induced ravings. If a specter can hallucinate.

I’m my mother’s whipping boy. Thrown to her captors, she offered me in her own stead and they set her free. This is my punishment for not joining her in her marriage to violence.

I close my eyes, shake my head hard, dislodge the memories that want to push into my brain.

A groan resonates through the wooden floor, and I hear it as though it’s next to me. Immediately, I recognize the voice.

Spencer. He’s still here. I thought for sure he’d fled the house after going downstairs, never to return. I could see the fear in his face, the denial, the warrior buried beneath the brokenness.

He’d denied me, yet...

As though struck by lightning, I leap to my feet. It is then that I realize the phantom child that had grown unexpectedly in my womb is gone, or at least the proof of it is. My hands touch my stomach lightly, a passing touch to feel the absence of the bump. Yet, something tells me I will experience life within. It is a hope I never thought to have.

Another sound from upstairs sends me moving on fleet feet. I’ll convince him. He must sense the link between us. One hundred and eighty-two years, I’ve waited for my savior.

He saw me. Not a glimpse. Not a reflection. He saw me. Face-to-face. Almost from the beginning.

He must mean my freedom.

Even now, I can hear him moan my name as he reached for his pleasure in me, I felt glorious, primal, beautiful in ways I never had before. The first man I have ever known intimately. I screamed his name.

I don’t know what part of the universe sent him to free me, but I will not let this hope die. Spencer is my savior. There could be no other explanation.

I race up the stairs but stop short on the threshold to the room where he ravished me. He’s seated on the bed, his face cradled in his hands. His wet clothes from the attic are strewn on the floor. He’s wearing only his undergarment and his fake leg. His upper body is bare and beautiful. He groans again and the sound cuts through me like a paring knife, with ease and purpose.

Suddenly shy, I ease into the room, creeping across the floor until I stand next to him. He is fierce, troubled, and entirely consuming. I kneel beside him, allowing my fingers the freedom to trace over his thigh and down to the tattoo on his one remaining calf. One foot in the grave, it reads. Maybe that’s why my knight sees me. I kiss the words.

He snorts as though startled, and I pull away as his hands fall from his face and his head lifts, eyes searching the room. He bites down on a cough, avoiding a deep inhale. He glances around, moving slowly, as though the weight of his skull is too much.

“Spencer,” I whisper, straightening up so that I’m nearly at shoulder level with him. He turns his head and looks directly into my eyes. There’s a hint of recognition, and his gaze narrows, but disbelief and desire war on his face. It is just like the attic.

The resistance.

The denial.

And the feeling in my stomach like I am ‘not.’ That I never was. Never will be.

The muscle in his cheek flexes, and he sets his chin in a hard line. He pushes off the bed, struggling to gain his balance when the prosthesis shifts unexpectedly. I want to help, but I can’t yet reach across the planes of existence at will. Yet...

He felt me in the attic.

He startled awake when he felt my hand on the back of his leg.

He heard me.

I know he did. When I called his name, he looked at me, stared at me.

He saw me.

My heart flutters like Lia, the child trapped in the birdcage in my mother’s attic, when I tried to save her. I snuck upstairs to talk to her, ignoring the stench of her tattered dress, soiled so many times. She’s been there so long her shoulders were beginning to grow crooked. She had been my friend.

My heart pounded then as it does now. I took the key from Mother while she recuperated from an attack of the vapors, brought on by a servant in a low-cut dress showing her breasts to a visitor that asked to see them. If it had been my step-father, maybe I would have cared, but instead I snickered at her affront, crept into her room while she moaned with a damp rag over her face and stole the key to the birdcage.

Her vapors had been a façade of decorum. But they gave me the chance I sought for months.

I set Lia free. On winged heels, my skeleton-framed friend escaped to the roof. I freed her from the cage, and then she leapt from the mortal life that held her, soaring toward an eternity wrapped in arms of love. My mother never hurt her again.

My heart beat then as it does now. Spencer won’t deny me. Our connection is too strong.

Spencer will free me as I freed Lia. My heart swells. It’s my chance. He will scatter my century-old ashes as birds across the unseen ether. He must.

He looks at me then and every hungry moment in every wanton imagining I have ever conjured reaches for him, propelling me toward him. My hand stretches toward him of its own volition, and the closer I am to him, the more my gray, waxen figure turns the shades of life.

My fingernails turn pink, five digits scalloped in white, and my pulse races, tympani in my eardrums. The color seeps up my arm, warmth floods me. Blessed warmth. I know that I am becoming the auburn-haired beauty again, flush with blood and heat.

It’s him. He fills me with life. He burns away the empty.

This pull, this attraction is different than Richard. Richard was a languid pool I wished to slip into, letting days pass. The soldier in front of me is a raging fire of emotions, barely held together by the confines of his skin. Spencer could save me from those vengeful, voodoo sprites in the attic.

His gaze meets mine. “No, I can’t,” he whispers.

Somehow, I know that if he would take my hand, embrace me as his, I would be safe from the ugliness that has been my home for years.

I hear their steps again, trying to find me and pull me back to them. They stomp in the upstairs, rattling chains and bones, reliving the sounds of my mother’s torture rooms, re-playing them for me: the scapegoat sacrifice so that my mother could steal more time among the living.

Hell had been hungry for her, but she had escaped again.

“Please.” The word slips past my lips, a prayer only he can answer.

Standing there, Spencer is as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. Half naked. Robust. His body responds to me despite the way his face twists with pain.

“Spencer,” I say. He turns slightly away, scrubbing a hand over his face.

He stiffens and turns toward an aged hope chest at the foot of the bed. There’s an olive-green duffle bag there and he makes short work of rifling through the clothes, muttering hateful things about himself.

About us.

Each one cuts as a knife.

“Marie.” The noise sounds like wind careening around the corner of an empty house. With his back to me, Spencer mutters on. I don’t think he can hear it as he pulls on jeans and a dark red shirt. I hear them though. The sound roils fear in my heart. Down the long hall, I see them arrive, floating down the narrow staircase.

Through the years, I’ve come to understand that these are the dead my mother made, and as long as I am trapped in this purgatory, they will be drawn to her blood that runs through my veins. And, what’s more, they have been told that I am the key to their release. That I did this to them.

So, they come for me. I don’t understand why they’ve already started so early. Sometimes, it takes years for them to materialize after a new life-force moves in. I’ve always had a respite. I’m sure it’s their wails and my screams that finally drove every tenant away.

Except Spencer. So far.

“Marie.” The woman called me this time, her belly hanging open, the umbilical cord dragging behind her.

“Spencer, please.” Take my hand, beloved. Take my hand. “Save me.”

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t turn around, but he lifts an orange bottle from his bag, as though to show me. “As soon as I have a higher dose, dammit, you’ll be gone,” he says in a voice devoid of emotion. “That’s all I need. Better fucking meds.”

Then they’re on me. I shriek his name, begging him to help me.

As they drag me, Spencer flees the room.

Her fingernails gouge my shoulders. He’s dragging me behind him by my hair. Maggots infest his eyes, his blackened fingertips are as black as the magic that binds me to this ruin. With blackened teeth, he yanks me back against him and bites the back of my neck. The sensation of flesh tearing away explodes in my brain, sending pain coursing through my body, ushering out the last vestiges of pleasure. Hissing, he holds me tight against him while she reaches around him to stab at my lungs with the length of her fingernails.

Liquid drips down my sides. In a different world, it might be sweat, but here...

A bright red puddle develops and two more near my heels. They’re gleeful in their destruction; they will tear me apart bit by bit.

The world around me fluctuates. I’m being pulled into that region between once again.

Hours of this torture await me, and I won’t have any skin left before they’re done. Once the sun rises, I will wake whole again, ready for a new day of this hell.

This is my nightmare. Why is it happening so soon this time? Why?

We are out in the hallway now, close to the top of the stairs. I am powerless to stop our movement, no matter how I fight. I glimpse Spencer at the bottom of the stairs. He is looking down at the floor, his hands fists at his sides. He’s shaking his head. Fighting to continue believing that all of this is not real.

“Spencer,” I wail, not knowing if he will hear me now. I claw at the creature that restrains me, but his grip tightens.

Spencer lifts his gaze to mine as I am pulled backwards from the stairs, his expression shuttered. He mouths only one word.

“No.”

He bolts from the house.

My knight refused me, and as the truth of this settles inside my head, the pain swallows me up.