My deepest fear is laid out in this room. That everyone I love will move forward, and I’ll tumble back. My business will fail, and I’ll dig myself into inescapable debt, convinced I just need another loan, another investment, another tweak to save it.
I want to laugh at this pathetic scenario, me with my cat, alone and miserable as I slide toward rock bottom. I know I’m more business-savvy than that, and I’ll figure out how to make relationships work despite this curse. But fears aren’t always rational, and this one is mine.
Still, there is a world difference between seeing my worst fear play out and deciding I should end my life to avoid it. I’ve known people in that mental state, where something like this could push them over the edge, adding to all the other voices that whisper they’d be better off exiting stage left. This is only the painting’s first volley, and if I stay near it, the images will get worse, the whispers more insidious.
I knew it was a terrible curse, and now I see just how terrible, how unfathomably cruel.
I march to the doorway. I expect to see the hall empty, me still in that vision, but when I walk out, Connolly is there, where I left him. He’s staring blankly.
Lost in his own vision.
I shiver and gently grip his arm. “Aiden?”
He backpedals so fast I stagger away. Then he snaps out of it, blinking at me.
“Kennedy?” Before I can answer, he runs his hands over his face and gives himself a shake.
“I think the painting is close,” I say.
He gives a low laugh. “I believe you are correct.”
“Are you all right?”
He rolls his shoulders. “Of course.”
“Well, that makes one of us. I’m a bit rattled. Just because a vision doesn’t trigger suicidal thoughts doesn’t mean it isn’t really awful.”
“Agreed. That was . . . unpleasant.”
We stand there a moment. I want to ask what he saw, but if I do, then I have to be willing to share what I saw. I’m sure he’s thinking the same. In the end, he says, carefully, “If you want to talk about it . . .”
“Nope. You?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Then let’s get that painting before it strikes again.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-one
We’re one floor above the apartment where the vision hit. The painting is behind this closed door. I feel it pulsing, an ugly, living thing.
Connolly wrinkles his nose as we pause there. “Do you smell something?”
I inhale. “Garbage and mildew. What do you smell?”
“That, I suppose.”
He takes out his phone to try Athene again. We’d called to let her know we were close, but it seems Rosa also installed a cell-phone blocker. Maybe we should have gone to find Athene, but neither of us cared to spend one moment longer than necessary in this building.
“No signal?” I say.
He shakes his head and pockets the phone. Then he puts out his hand, stopping halfway to the door knob and glancing my way.
I reach for his other hand. “May I?”
“Of course.”
He takes my hand and grips it tight, and I do the same to his, grounding us against the curse. Then he turns the knob and opens the door an inch.
“Better to rush in?” he says. “Or take it slow?”
“My gut says grab the painting and run,” I say. “Which means we should take it slow.”
A smile my way, and he continues pushing open the door until we’re staring down a hallway. The smell hits then. It’s menthol, strong and medicinal, like the rub my grandfather swore by for chest colds.
“Well,” I say. “It’s better than rotting garbage.”
“Is that the curse?”
I shake my head. “They can emit smells, but I don’t see the point of that one. Unless it’s meant to evoke the subject—the girl who died. A smell associated with her?”
He steps through the doorway first, which is awkward while holding hands, but he doesn’t loosen his grip. He walks through with our joined hands behind him. Then I enter and let the door shut as I move up beside him.
I’m glancing back to check on the door when his grip tightens. I turn to see a young woman at the end of the hall. She’s a teenager, maybe eighteen. Now that I know she died during the Renaissance, I can see her outfit better than I could with her younger sister. It’s still semi-transparent and could pass for a dress, but it seems to be a nightgown, long and pale, fluttering about her in a nonexistent breeze.
She staring, her eyes wide with fear. Then she flies straight at me, and I stumble back at the same time as Connolly, our joined hands the only thing that keep me from falling. The apparition smacks into me with a wave of crushing despair that leaves me gasping, panic rocking through me.
The vision downstairs had played on a subconscious but very real and identifiable fear. This is different. It’s formless despair and grief, a sudden sense that everything is wrong and nothing will ever be right again.
“Kennedy?”
Connolly’s voice cuts through, his free hand on my shoulder, tightening. I force myself out of it, rising to the surface to see his face over mine, pale and drawn, the look in his eyes telling me he’d felt the same thing.
I throw my arms around him. I don’t think about it. I just hug him tight, grounding myself with the warmth of him. Then I realize what I’m doing and pull back fast with a mumbled apology.
His arms tighten around me, and I fall against his shoulder, taking deep breaths and feeling his own heart-rate slow until we’re both back to normal.
“So, ‘unpleasant’ is the word of the day,” I say. “Deeply unpleasant. I definitely preferred the little girl’s scares.”
“In retrospect, they do seem rather mild.” He grips my hand. “Shall we continue?”
“Let me get the shield first. I’m starting to think running in there and throwing it over the painting isn’t such a bad idea after all.”
I have the shielding blanket in a backpack. Connolly had offered to carry it, but I’d insisted. It’s light enough, just a little bulky. I take it out, and he extends a hand.
I pass it over. As soon as he has it, he drops my hand and bolts down the hall.
“Connolly!” I say.
Electricity zings through the air. A light burst of luck, a ward against the vision reappearing. He stumbles as he rounds the corner—a bit of balancing bad luck. Then there’s a gasp and a squeak of his loafers that has me sprinting after him.
“Aiden!”
I fly around the corner and bash into him. He drops the shielding blanket, takes me by the shoulders and pushes me back just as I catch it—another smell beneath the menthol.
I break from Connolly’s grasp. When I try to pass him, he blocks me.
“You don’t need to—” he says.
I’m already past. Already striding toward the living room. Already knowing what I’ll see there.
She sits in a straight-backed chair, upright. There’s a moment where I think I was mistaken, Connolly was mistaken, that smell led us to the wrong conclusion. The woman in the chair can’t be dead. She’s sitting upright with her hands gripping the arms. Then I see her face.