Blackthorne, Fiona - Moonstruck [Blue Moon 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (6 page)

“Because of whom?” Ava asked, looking confused.

“
Them
,” Declan repeated.

“Them?”

“Yes.”

“What are…they, er,
Them
?” she asked suspiciously.

“Well…” Declan hesitated, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “No one is quite sure. The general consensus is that we’re talking about demons.”

Ava stared at him for a minute, then broke into hysterical laughter.

Robert grabbed her by her shoulders and turned her to him, and his gesture startled her out of her laughing fit.

“This is real, Ava,” he snapped, overwhelming, gut-churning fear for her making him gruff. “Whatever they are, they have hurt people. They have
killed
people. This isn’t just some delusion we’re talking about. Everyone in this town knows about
Them
. Everyone has experienced something, and you can’t tell me a whole town can be full of paranoid schizophrenics!”

“Salem, 1692,” Ava shot back, lifting her chin. “Check your bread for mold, boys, or check your heads for xenophobia, isolationism, or mass hysteria. This shit isn’t real!”

“Yesterday, you said you reserved judgment on whether it was real or not,” Sean said, coming to kneel down by her chair and tenderly take her hand in his, tightening his grip on it when she tried to pull it away. “Why are you so open to being a skeptic and so close-minded about the possibility that this is real?”

“Touché, Mr. Molineaux,” she said icily. “But let’s talk probabilities here. It’s far more probable that the root cause of all this is something based in science rather than some hocus-pocus, especially given that historically, the majority of hocus-pocus has proven to have a clear, factual, empirical explanation.”

“I’m not saying it doesn’t,” Sean replied. “But, just because we can’t explain it now doesn’t mean it’s not real right here, right now.”

Ava fell silent, looking suspiciously at the three of them.

“So, what if this is all real?” she asked finally. “What does any of that have to do with me?”

Declan leaned in and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek, causing all kinds of ripples and shivers to run deep in her belly.

“Because, honey,” he said, “the center of all of it is right here on White Farm.”

Chapter 6

Except for the fact she knew she was absolutely awake, Ava could have sworn that this was a nightmare. The events of the last eighteen hours seemed impossible, that she would get lost in the woods, meet three men, have
sex
with them, and then sit at her kitchen table listening to them tell her that ghosts and demons existed. She felt so much, thought so much—too much. She didn’t know where one feeling ended and another thought began.

She rubbed her face with her hands and took a deep breath.

“So,” she said as evenly as she could, “White Farm is haunted?”

“Yes,” Declan replied. He stood up and lifted her up from her chair, sliding onto it and settling her on his lap.

She knew she should want to get off him, to sit by herself, but she also couldn’t deny that some part of the tug on her heart eased when he wrapped his arms around her and gently pulled her to his chest. Robert took her hands, and Sean dragged a chair over, plopping down next to her and keeping a reassuring hand on her knee. Their closeness was comforting in a way that she couldn’t explain, filling an emptiness inside her she had refused to acknowledge existed. It was probably just the aftershock of what she had done that made her feel this way, and hopefully, it would go away as soon as they left.

“Haunted by demons,” she confirmed, unable to keep the sarcasm wholly out of her voice.

“And a ghost,” Sean added seriously.

“Just one ghost?” She half laughed.

“This one is quite enough to deal with,” Robert replied.

If only she could wake up, or rewind time. All of this would go away. She’d go back to editing chapter six of her dissertation and working her way through a particularly sticky discussion of gender construction based on social deviation.

“So,” she said, fighting back the edge of mild hysteria, “this ghost, are we talking the clear, luminous figure that shows up in photographs, or a good, old-fashioned white sheet with clanking chains?”

“Goody Barrows,” Robert said. “Born 1672, disappeared 1696.”

“You mean died?”

“No,” Robert said. “I mean disappeared.”

“Now, that’s silly,” Ava replied, slipping into the refuge of practical analysis discussion. “There’s no such thing as disappeared. She could have run off, gone to sea, died in the woods, been eaten by a bear or a wolf or something.”

“The wolves here would never have touched her,” Sean shot back, curling his lips in distaste.

Ava ignored his blatantly silly remark, though she was surprised by the ferocity of his conviction.

“Goody Barrows walked into the woods on November 21, 1696,” Robert conceded. “She never returned.”

“Then her death should be marked as circa November 22, 1696,” Ava replied coolly. “That’s just faulty genealogical record keeping, not uncommon in early New England.”

“No,” Declan said. “The records are very precise that she disappeared.”

“Really?” Ava said, curious despite herself. “Why is that?”

“Because Eve Barrows was a witch,” Sean said.

“Ohhh.” She exhaled, feeling on much steadier ground now. This was easy. Hell, this was her dissertation. “Then it’s quite simple. She ran off with another man. To save the family, which was probably quite prominent or wealthy, from public embarrassment, they labeled her a witch and said she ‘disappeared.’”

“No,” Robert said firmly, and there was something odd about the way he said it that made her stiffen and involuntarily accept his word as truth. Ava had noticed that he had that effect on her yesterday, but she had written it off as her own nerves. Now, she was a bundle of nerves, but she was pretty sure that she was in control enough to be able to observe that something about Robert’s voice made her react in a way that was almost…submissive. “No,” he repeated, normally now. “Eve Barrows was a witch, and she disappeared. Those are facts.”

“Bullshit,” Ava snapped, beginning to lose her patience with the three of them, though for some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to want to move from their arms and their touch. “There has not been one truly empirical, scientific study that absolutely proves the existence of so-called magical abilities. Even parapsychology can’t agree on the definitive existence of extrasensory perception in the brain. Besides, people simply do not disappear. That’s a fact for you.”

“You are being obtuse.” Robert growled, and there was no mistaking it. There was an actual growl behind his voice. What the hell? Even the other brothers seemed to notice it, and Sean even put his hand on Robert’s shoulder as if to restrain him.

“You are being willfully deceived into believing something is probable when it isn’t even possible!” Ava barked back.

Robert jumped up from his chair, his tall frame filling the space to the brim. He ran his fingers through his thick, black hair and grunted in frustration.

“Listen to the rest of the story, Ava,” Sean said as Declan stroked her back as if to calm her down. “Think about it as a story if you need to, but just hear it out. After all, you’d be a shitty historian if you didn’t want to get all the pieces of the story before judging it, right?”

Ava decided right then and there that she hated Sean Molineaux’s ability to turn her words on her, but she was big enough to admit that he was right. She didn’t have to be happy about it, though. She pressed her lips together tightly and nodded.

“Okay,” Sean said, relief in his voice. “So, Eve Barrows was a witch. The townsfolk didn’t know it at first. She came up from Salem as a child with her parents and younger sister Eliza, and she had grown up here in Blue Moon. Everything about her seemed normal. She married Ezra Barrows when she was twenty-two. He built White Farm for her. The house you see now has been expanded on quite a bit, but the main living room and the attic bedroom above it form the original building. When she was twenty-four, Ezra died.”

Ava nodded silently. So far, so normal.

“Ezra Barrows was buried, but not in the church graveyard,” Sean continued. “He was buried somewhere here on the property.”

“Why?” Ava asked, startled.

“Because he was murdered.”

“Wait!” she exclaimed. “How do you know that?”

“It’s a fact,” Sean replied grimly. “Eve Barrows held no funeral for him, no church service, no viewing of the body, vigil or anything. She didn’t even have a coffin made. She claimed to have buried him herself. A week later, she walked into the woods, never to return.”

“That’s bizarre,” Ava murmured, her mind spinning with the analysis of the story. “But, not impossible. She could have dug the grave and dragged his body to it, dumping it in there without a coffin.”

“That’s probably what she did, though, no one knows for sure. However, Ezra’s shade appeared to Aristide Molineaux, a French immigrant from Quebec who had recently settled in the area, in fact, who owned the neighboring property to White Farm. They had been good friends in life, despite the barriers of Aristide’s broken English and Ezra’s nonexistent French, and despite the fact that the Molineaux were wealthy French nobility and the Barrows were plain Blue Moon farm folk.”

Okay, so far, as a story, this didn’t seem too off base. It followed the lines of other New England ghost stories with elements of the immigrant French Canadian culture and Puritan fear of witchcraft. Ava was more intrigued and less freaked out than she thought she’d be.

“Ezra’s shade appeared to Aristide, telling him that Eve had summoned dark things to serve her, that they had taken possession of her, that darkness now threatened to destroy every soul in Blue Moon.” Sean’s voice grew rough, almost a…a growl? “Ezra told Aristide that he placed a death bequest upon him, charging him and his three sons to live as protectors of the town from now until the moment a Barrows should return to undo the evil done, to return ashes to ashes and dust to dust.”

Pinpricks of resonance ricocheted through Ava’s brain, points that she knew she needed to be aware of, but that were too fleeting to hold on to, slipping through her fingers to dance around in darting, distracting patterns.

Sean stopped speaking, and the silence fell heavily on all of them. Ava looked blankly out the big picture window of the front room, down the grassy slope to the rocks by the water’s edge. The sky hung gray and pregnant with rain.

Awareness exploded inside her.

“Molineaux brothers?” she exclaimed. “You’re descended from Aristide Molineaux?”

“Yes, sweetheart,” Declan said, smiling almost sadly.

“Well, that’s quite a family story,” she said, trying to pull her scattered mind together and force logical patterns. “The legend must feel especially real to you, especially since you all live in Blue Moon and are three brothers, just like the original Molineaux sons.”

“We are the first generation since then that has three Molineaux sons,” Robert said gruffly, standing stiffly at the window, looking out at the ocean.

“Huh,” Ava said, smiling a little. It was a fascinating old legend, and she wouldn’t mind learning more about it, maybe a little side project from her dissertation. She could probably get a paper out of it and publish in time for next fall’s “Colonial American Historians Association Conference” in San Diego.

Now, the brothers’ seemingly odd sense of conviction about all of this made sense. Even their house…their house!

“How old is the house you live in?” she asked.