She sat up, and the shape became a woman, faded and translucent as if worn thin by the years. When she’d died, she’d been too young, not far from twenty, with a sweet face and large eyes that showed the shreds of hope and innocence.
“Help them,” she pleaded.
Wind exploded through the house, blew with a shrieking fury. The spirit opened her mouth to scream as the blast blew through her, scattering the motes that formed her until she disappeared. Hanna had to shield her face as papers and bits of detritus flew through the air.
A frightened scream broke over the sound of the wind. Hanna threw the covers off so she could scramble out of bed. “Vivian?”
Heedless of the fact she wore only her nightshirt, Hanna darted for the door and threw it open. A second voice echoed from the other wing, as did running footsteps in the corridors. “Gran!”
“Gregory! Are you all right?”
“Fine! I heard Gran scream.” He appeared at the head of the passage to his wing of the house. “You all right?”
“I’m fine. Get Vivian. I’ll check the house.”
Gregory nodded and ran down the hall. Hanna hadn’t taken two steps out the door before a familiar, small gust blew past her.Stuart. But why–
An amorphous shadow loomed into view as Gregory disappeared into Vivian’s room. At first, it had no more structure than an embodiment of a fear of the dark. Dread and cold radiated from it until frost formed on the molding around the hallway doors, the edges of the carpet. Then the formless shade undulated, began to gather the vaguest outline as Hanna watched it move towards her.
She knew that shape. It had stood over her as she drowned in a bathtub.
Hanna squared her shoulders. “If you want him, you bitch, you’ll have to go through me.”
* * *
Gran sat up in bed,sheet white and trembling. She flinched when Gregory ran into her room but eased as she recognized him. “Greg. It’s you.”
“Who else would it be?” He crossed the room in several long strides to settle on the edge of her bed. “Are you all right? You’re shaking.”
“I thought– I saw– I just had a bad dream,” she said at last. “Then the windows blew open and it startled me.”
He glanced at the window that led to the garden. The vertical glass panel he’d had put in so his grandmother could open the window more easily had been forced open by the wind.That was the strangest gust. It blew all the windows outward. How did we get that kind of wind from inside?
The night was warm enough, so he didn’t bother to close it. Instead, he gathered both his grandmother’s hands into his own. “God. Your hands are freezing.”
“An old woman’s circulation,” she said, though he didn’t believe her. Never before had he felt her hands so icy, and he never hoped to again. They reminded him of how a corpse’s hands must feel, after all the life had left it.
Silence. A closet door banging open. Weight on his hands, warm but cooling–
A squeeze of his grandmother’s hands pulled him out of his thoughts. “Greg?”
“Just worried about you,” he said, and wondered if they’d ever had a conversation so full of lies. “Gran, I need to–”
“Look!” She nodded towards the open window.
A house sparrow had landed on the windowsill, tiny head cocking to one side then the other as it listened. Female, he thought, without the distinctive grey cap and brown eye mask the males sported, patterned instead with brown and black stripes on its wings. She stared at the doorway without paying the pair on the bed any notice.
“Shouldn’t she be asleep?” Gregory murmured to his grandmother.
The sparrow glanced at him and ruffled her feathers, then stared at the doorway again.
Curious, he listened hard. Down the hall, quiet and distant but still there, he heard Hanna’s firm voice. He couldn’t tell to whom she spoke, or even who she would speak to in that manner. Yet hearing her confident cadence, the power in her tone, set him at ease in a way he could not identify.Wonder if she’s giving my mother what-for.
A second sparrow landed on the sill. Then a third, male this time.
“Gran, I should step out and bring Laura here, then go make sure Hanna’s all right.” He chafed her hands gently between his. They already felt warmer. “I think she’s yelling at my mother.”
Gran immediately gripped his hands. “No. Stay with me. I feel better for having you here. Hanna sounds like she’s handling herself just fine.”