Death at Peony House: The Invisible Entente, #1

Death at

Peony House

By

Krista Walsh

All Rights Reserved

This edition published in 2016 by Raven’s Quill Press

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental.

Cover art: Ravven (www.ravven.com)

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/ her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

To my parents, who kept me alive long enough for me to get this far

and who always told me my dreams were possible

1

The heavy atmosphere around Peony House came down on Daphne Heartstone the moment she turned her beat-up Honda Civic into the crushed gravel driveway. The headlights cut through the moonless night, creating shadowed monsters out of the curved stone steps that slunk toward its wide, ornately carved front doors.

She turned off the engine and remained in her car, staring up at the place through the windshield. The thirteen windows glowering down on her were dark, and her skin crawled under their watchful gaze. She didn’t like hospitals at the best of times, but the energy coming out of Peony House set her teeth on edge.

She grabbed her flashlight out of the glove compartment and eased out of the car. The driver side door required a forcible nudge for the latch to stick, and the resounding slam echoed around the quiet cul-de-sac.

Daphne winced and looked over her shoulder down the street, hoping no one came out to ask her what she was doing.

Fortunately, the families of New Haven’s south end were too busy devouring their dinners and television to care about what went on at some abandoned building. For them, Peony House was just part of the scenery, a two-hundred-year-old art piece at the end of the road.

In the light of day, to someone who couldn’t sense whatever dark energy drifted out of the building, Peony House would likely be viewed as a stunning example of historical architecture. A quick look online before she’d left that evening informed Daphne that the less-than-modest estate had been built in the early eighteen hundreds by the Ancowitz family, who required stone pillars, a porch that stretched the length of the house, and molded shutters around each of the windows to create their perfect family home.

The pale stone was cracked and covered with lichen, but underneath the damage, the estate still stood regal and impressive. Its wide doors sat in the middle of the main house, with two windows on either side. The second floor held six windows, evenly spaced, but only half the shutters remained, cracked and chipped. The third floor took up half the length of the second, boasting three windows under a sloped roof.

The far right of the house stretched seamlessly into a square one-story extension made of the same stone as the original building. The newer part of the house had been built a hundred years later as an operating room when Peony House was converted into a hospital.

Beautiful, but oppressive.

Daphne released a deep breath as she switched her flashlight to her other hand and wiped her sweaty palm on her pant leg.

A phone call from her friend Denise Longbarrow, who lived a few doors down from Peony House, had dragged her away from home in the middle of her own dinner and television time. Denise told her she’d seen lights up on the second floor, and Daphne felt the opportunity was too good to pass up.

Her career at the New Haven Chronicle had hit a slump in recent months, and she was desperate for a lead that would maintain her position near the top of the crime division food chain.

She’d driven to the other end of town with the expectation of walking in on a story she could pitch to her editor, Gerry Franklin. A juicy scandal, maybe, or, failing that, a less thrilling exposé on the rise of squatters in the area. In a city like New Haven, with a population of no more than a hundred thousand — most of them seasonal — hard crimes were few and far between.

Two years ago, she would have crossed her fingers and hoped for something big to give her career a final bump to the top. She’d have hoped for blood, gore, and some local celebrity’s face in the middle of it to really stir things up, then would have broken locks and hacked police files to dig into all the nitty-gritty.

But ten months ago, some bad choices and a near brush with death had opened her eyes and taught her that she would appreciate her achievements more if she was patient and worked for them honestly.

A slower strategy than her old approach, but one that ensured a clearer conscience and fewer people getting hurt.

Her change of ethics had shifted her footing with Gerry, and not entirely for the better. She had been his best reporter, willing to take risks and put the first amendment before any inconveniences such as laws or confidentiality. Since she’d cleaned up her act, his attention drifted more often to the new up-and-comers, and Daphne knew that if she wanted to keep her position, she’d have to come to him with something big.

Tonight, she would have been happy to catch the mayor up against the wall with his neighbor’s wife or even a councilor exchanging a briefcase of money for a mountain of cocaine. Not as exciting, but still enough to appease her boss.

Now that she’d arrived, her nerves were frazzled by the effects of an energy far more malicious. Her magic flared in her blood, an instinctive reaction to the buzz in the air around the house. Her mouth went dry at the tingling sensation under her skin, but although her power urged her to draw on it, she tamped the magic down and kept it wrapped around her core.

Come on, Daph, she said to herself. It can’t be any worse than what you’ve seen before. What are ghosts in the shadows when you’ve wrangled with demons?

She shook out her hands to rid herself of some of her tension and crunched over the driveway to the front steps.

Although her magic was as familiar as donning a favorite sweater, she was out of practice holding on to it. Years of overuse made her wary about summoning it too quickly, and she fought against her desire to let the magic lapse into her subconscious. Her fingers trembled with the effort of keeping her power in check, and she tapped a steady beat against her thigh to keep them busy.

Part of her personal rehabilitation over the last year had been to pull away from her power. For too long, magic had proved a dangerous addiction.

The strength of her magical heritage had been carried down the female line from the days before King Arthur, becoming duller and more diluted through each generation. Daphne’s father had married her mother, Cheryl, for her ancestry, believing the combined strength of their bloodlines would create a child as powerful as the original source.

When Daphne was born with no discernible magical boost, he hadn’t been deterred. He’d raised her to believe that with time and training, she could unleash her full potential and become the strongest sorceress in two thousand years. He’d repeated his hope for her so often that it became ingrained in her self-image, an integral part of her development.

How could a child not be influenced by such motivating speeches? Her ambition made her quick to learn, and Daphne had sat patiently through her mother’s and grandmother’s lessons to gain an understanding of the basics. She’d learned that everything in the universe carried a combination of elemental energies, and that she could manipulate those energies by controlling her own. Then she’d put that learning to the test through disciplined practice.

By the time she was eleven, she could create tornadoes in her bedroom and start a fire in her palm just by thinking about it. Her bath time adventures had included creating rain out of bathwater. But it still wasn’t enough.

When she was twelve years old, her father disappeared. Daphne had only become more determined to live up to his expectations, believing he would return if she proved herself worthy. She pushed herself harder, but manipulating elemental energies depleted her magic and drained her too quickly when she tried to cast the stronger spells she craved.

So she’d started studying behind her mother’s back at twenty-one. Necromancy, alchemy, demonology — anything that could get her the results her father had promised her. By twenty-four, her power had grown until she surpassed her mother’s ability. Cheryl and Daphne’s grandmother, Evelyn, had watched her with wary apprehension and had done their best to talk her out of her path. They’d lectured her, grounded her, even threatened to bind her magic, but Daphne’s only response had been to push harder.

She’d applied the same dedication to her career at the Chronicle, taking risks and throwing other people to the wolves if it allowed her to take another step closer to the top. She’d had her eye on the editor-in-chief position as a long-term goal and was determined to boot Gerry out of first place in the crime division before she was thirty.

She’d come so close.

Then life had tripped her into a mud pit and opened her eyes to the damage she’d done to herself and the people around her. A run-in with warlock Jermaine Hershel had increased her strength exponentially, but the crime she’d almost committed to get what she wanted had made her afraid of the power she wielded.

For months afterward she wouldn’t touch her magic at all, but life had surprised her again by showing her she could use it without losing herself as long as she remained in control of the magic and not the other way around.

Now she saw herself as being in Magics Anonymous, unable to go cold turkey, but always watchful for any signs that she was slipping back into old habits.

And something about Peony House made her want to do just that. The energy of the house slid into her veins, testing her.

Daphne found the door ajar and pushed it open to step into the dark lobby. The electricity had been cut decades ago, and the glow of the single streetlight outside barely made it through the dirt-caked windows.

The soles of her scuffed leather shoes scraped through the dust of the derelict lobby. Squeaks and the clacking of tiny claws echoed through the silence. Daphne grimaced at the idea of rats running over her feet. She swung the flashlight beam around the room, over tails that disappeared into cracks in the wall.

Inside, the dark energy of the hospital was stronger, and Daphne pulled her magic closer around her. She closed her eyes and cast her mind through the corridors and up the stairs.

Empty. Whoever Denise had seen was already gone.

Daphne grumbled with disappointment at the lost headline and moved toward the door to leave. If the spirits wanted Peony House, they were welcome to it.

She set her hand on the door handle, but a low hush of voices — like a movie with the volume turned low — made her turn around.

Her grip on her flashlight slipped, and she rushed to grab it before it fell to the floor. What had been an empty lobby except for the dust and the rats was now a space that bustled with the semi-transparent outlines of patients being admitted at the reception desk and doctors running down the hall toward a nurse who stood in a doorway. Her white apron was spattered with dark spots Daphne assumed were blood.

The scene flickered and then vanished.

No current of energy had emanated from the figures, so Daphne knew they weren’t ghosts. Not the dead, but shadows of the dead. Imprints. Memories of the hospital coming back from the past.

She shook her head and stepped away from the door.

Imprints weren’t rare in old buildings, but they almost never showed up so clearly. Usually they were more like a hint of movement out of the corner of your eye or that sensation of someone watching you in an empty room.

She waved her hand through the air to pick up any traces of what had been there, but her fingers caught nothing but drifting dust motes.

Putting together what she’d seen with the unpleasant energy she felt, Daphne ran her hand over the bumps of her braided hair and rested her fingers against the base of her throat.

Get out of here, Daphne, she said aloud. Go to the police station and stalk a patrol car. Go online and piece together a local conspiracy or two. You need a story and there’s nothing for you here. Just walk away and let this house continue on its dusty way.

Even as she lectured herself, she stepped further into the lobby, away from the door. The flashlight beam glinted over the cracked bare walls and broke apart the shadows in the hallway leading toward the operating room. As she stared at the closed doors, a translucent memory of those doors swung open and a doctor strode toward the offices behind Daphne, the shimmering gray shapes of nurses flocking around him.

They passed through her and goosebumps broke out along her arms.

She pulled up the collar of her spring jacket. A quick walk around, but that’s it. I have no time or interest in getting involved in some old building’s problems.

She crossed the lobby toward the wide stairs leading to the second floor, keeping her footsteps slow and soft. Although she’d confirmed she was the only living being in the building, she didn’t like the thought of stirring up whatever was creating the darkness seeping through the walls and into the air around her.

As she crept up the stairs, a shiver ran through her, and her stomach twisted in knots. In reaction, her magic heightened, pouring down her arms as an instinctive defense. She was about to push it back down when a sharp cry from one of the rooms upstairs echoed down the stairwell. Her heartbeat jumped into her throat, and she pressed her hand against her chest.

She quickened her pace to round the last bend on the stairs and reached the second floor. More imprints rushed around up here — nurses in pressed white aprons and white hats carrying basins and surgical trays, patients in outdated wheelchairs moving up and down the hallway. None of them reacted to her, but that didn’t come as a surprise. They existed in a different time.

But how are you so clear? Daphne wondered aloud.

The cloying energy had clearly offset the balance of the house, leaving it on shaky magical ground. A murmur in the back of her mind urged her to discover the source of the energy to see if she could put it to good use, but she quashed that voice down. The only magic she would ever use again was her own.

Especially when this other magic left such an oily sensation on her skin. She rubbed at her arms, but felt no cleaner.

She kept her eyes open for any traces of someone who had recently left. She figured if she was doing a tour of the place, she might as well see if she could explain Denise’s lights. But room after room offered nothing but dust-covered scuffs on the hardwood floor and the occasional smashed window.

As she paced the hallway, Daphne thought about everything she’d read about Peony House earlier that evening and wondered why the city council hadn’t either torn the old place down or restored it with their usual fuss over heritage sites.

The old Ancowitz estate had been converted into a hospital in the early nineteen hundreds, starting as a tuberculosis sanitarium and developing into a general medical facility. For forty years, Peony House had been the only hospital in the south end of New Haven. After the war, a second hospital had opened to care for the influx of returning troops, and a decade after that, a third had arrived. The newer buildings made the old estate obsolete. The patients had petered out and the services had dwindled until the place had shut down altogether.

She recalled some talk about converting the space into doctors’ offices, but the property was deemed too expensive to renovate. After two hundred years serving as the height of architectural fashion and the symbol for one of New Haven’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families, Peony House had been bequeathed to the rats. Daphne grimaced as more tiny claws scratched inside the wall beside her.

She reached the end of the hallway and entered one of the rooms, staring out the window to the street. For a late September evening, the neighborhood was too quiet. Her own neighborhood was always full of children running around after dinner, playing tag with the traffic on the side streets of the downtown core. Here, the inhabitants embodied the peace and quiet of the fields and farmland that stretched out behind Peony House. Lights had turned on upstairs in many of the houses, and she pictured the kids finishing up their homework or getting ready for bed.

The bright warmth from the hospital’s neighbors made the abandoned hallways feel even more empty, and all Daphne wanted was to go home.

She checked her watch, the golden hands ticking the seconds away. If she left now, she’d still make it home in time for her favorite British crime show.

She left the room and headed for the stairs.

As she passed by the staircase leading up to the third floor, she heard someone crying and froze again, her stomach dropping. The hair on her arms rose, and she squeezed her flashlight as she breathed more of her magic into her hands.

Dammit, Daphne. You just can’t let anything go, she whispered, and started up the stairs.

Switching off her flashlight to avoid announcing her presence to whatever was on the third floor, she slid her foot toward the base of the bottom step and glided her hand along the wall until it reached the banister.

Slow step after slow step, she padded up the stairs, allowing the curve of the banister to guide her direction. The sobbing grew louder the higher she climbed, but still she sensed no other living person in the building.

Daphne pressed herself against the wall once she hit the final three steps to keep out of sight of anyone or anything that might be around the corner. She preferred to be the one doing the catching rather than the one being caught.

She peered around the wall. The dim light of the streetlight spilled into the hallway from the west-facing rooms, the glow revealing nothing but shadows and cracks in the walls.

The sobs became lost in a flurry of rising whispers that carried notes of curiosity and fear. The faint voices held a trace of emptiness, a sense of time and distance she had come to associate with the speech of the dead.

Her heart hammering in her chest, Daphne pushed open the door to the first room. Nothing except for a cracked and dust-covered end table.

Now that she was here, she sensed the trail of someone else’s magic — a green power she didn’t recognize. It was faint, nearly undetectable, but she wasn’t the only life form wandering the hospital’s hallways tonight.

She stretched her empty hand toward the ground and twitched her fingers. Drawing from one of the most basic spells she’d learned as a child, she lifted the dust and dirt from the unwashed floor. It swirled in the air in front of her, dipping in and out of the pale beam from the streetlight.

With one eye on the dirt and the other on the still-empty hallway, she raised her hand and flicked her fingers at the wall. The moisture in the plaster from the leaking pipes and cracked windows drew close to her and rounded into droplets. The water mingled with the dirt, turning it into thick, wet clay. Another twist of her fingers and the end of the clay flattened and elongated, the edge narrowing into a sharp point.

After shaping the blade, Daphne drew the excess water out of the clay until it hardened. The makeshift knife wouldn’t be strong enough to cut through anything too dense, but could still drive deep into any creature that tried to attack her.

Her magic flared in her veins, but she held it steady, refusing to let it take over. A soft ache thudded behind her right eye with the strain of holding her power back.

She crept down the hallway with her back to the wall, the knife hovering over her left shoulder.

The whispers grew to such a pitch that the ache behind her right eye became a demanding throb.

More imprints passed by her before fading into the dust in the air. The water-stained walls stretched on either side of her, interrupted at regular intervals by dark wooden doors, some open and others sealed shut on rusted hinges.

Seeing no purpose now in keeping her presence hidden, she switched her flashlight back on and cast the beam over the walls. As the light passed over the floor, it revealed two sets of footprints, one large and one small, cutting through the thick layer of dust on the hardwood planks.

She wondered if they’d been created by Denise’s trespassers, but found her interest in that mundane mystery had waned in the face of the much more intriguing question of what power had caused the imprints to show so strongly.

Hello? Is there anyone here?

The whispers hushed, and Daphne released a breath.

Her mother and grandmother had been horrified by her interest in necromancy when they’d walked in on her practicing with the corpse of a stray cat. They believed it to be a dangerous path toward the darker arts. Daphne agreed — that had been her purpose in learning — but now those skills would come in handy for a more positive mission.

Can I help you?

As the last syllable faded on the air, the sound of smashing glass echoed from a room at the end of the hallway. Daphne jumped and swung her beam of light toward the sound. The door to the room blew open and slammed against the wall as a draft gusted into the hallway. The wind brushed against Daphne’s cheek and played with her hair so it tickled the skin on her neck.

Her heart bounced against her ribs, and she tightened her grip around the flashlight as she strengthened her mental hold on the clay blade.

The energy of the house weighed on her with sudden anger. She edged forward, her senses on alert for more sounds or movement.

Just outside the doorway, she paused and drew in a deep breath. Her blood raced in her ears, and she waited until her breathing fell into a rhythm with her steadily pulsing magic before mustering her courage to step inside.

Empty.

She released a sharp exhale and approached the window. The view stretched out over the yard where the shadows of black trees loomed over long black grass. Glass shards crunched beneath her shoes as she turned back to the center of the room. She ran her flashlight beam over the walls and the door, looking for whatever the whispering ghosts had wanted her to find.

Her beam of light froze in the far right corner of the room. The spell around the knife crumbled, and Daphne vaguely noticed the loose dirt spilling onto her shoulder and sliding into a heap at her feet.

The young man looked to be no more than eighteen years old, with shaggy brown hair and piercings along his ears and on either side of his eyebrows. His ragged hoodie was bunched around his ears, as though he’d drawn it close to warm his neck. He lay on his side, his arms tucked up beside him.

Daphne swallowed and stepped closer. She cast her mind around the room to discover whatever presence she sensed was watching her. Nothing.

She took another step as she returned the light to the young man. Her stomach turned, and she clenched her teeth to keep her dinner down.

For years she’d worked to master the dark side of her magic, trying to gain the power she believed she deserved. A year ago, that plan had come crashing down over her head because she couldn’t accept the idea of killing anyone.

She hated the thought of being the reason someone would never see another morning.

She hated the thought of death even when she didn’t have a hand in it.

And this young man was definitely dead.

Dead with his eyes wide open and his mouth sewn shut.

2

Daphne leaned against the wall across from the room where the body lay. She caught herself chewing the side of her thumb and told herself to stop fidgeting. She repeated the process twice more before giving up and returning her thumb to her teeth. After all, no one was there to judge her for it.

As she waited for the police to talk to her, her mind raced to answer the questions she knew they wouldn’t ask. Why had a ghost been sobbing? What were the whispers saying? Why had they wanted her to find this body?

Before calling the police, she’d done just enough poking around to answer her one burning question: the young man’s death had been far from natural. The actual cause of death remained to be seen, but what she’d thought to be white thread sewing his mouth shut had, on closer inspection, turned out to be something like glue. It glistened under her flashlight beam, and even an hour later, her stomach churned at the thought of it.

She’d debated waiting to report the murder until she completed her own investigation around the rest of the hospital in search of whatever had given off that hint of green-hued magic, but knew that would have ended badly. She’d been working hard to improve her reputation with the New Haven Police Department, so she would have to wait for another time to dig deeper.

Uniformed officers had cordoned off the hospital already, and the crime scene search team was working under the floodlights they’d brought in, analyzing the building room by room to ensure not a single trace of evidence was missed. The two detective sergeants at the crime scene across from her were evaluating what they could find before the medical examiner arrived to provide a more in-depth look.

They were all focused on the victim.

Daphne, from her place against the wall, focused on Peony House.

I should have driven away when I saw the lights were gone, she scolded herself. I promised myself I wouldn’t get involved in these situations anymore.

She knew it would only take a couple of slips for her to end up back where she’d been: out summoning demons and absorbing their power until her veins burned with the heat of it.

Her skin flushed, and she wiped her palms on her pant legs. The old desire slammed against her determination to put that life behind her.

Even as she wished she’d walked away, her ambition couldn’t help but send up a prayer of thanks that she’d stumbled on exactly the kind of story she needed to catch Gerry’s interest.

And how could she walk away from the other story, the one no one else would be able to tell? Some power at Peony House had thinned the barrier between the mundane world and the supernatural one. As she watched, the technicians walked through shimmering imprints as they exited one room and went into another. One of the techs shivered and looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing.

I shouldn’t be able to see them so well, either, she thought. So