She did not respond to her name.
“Soleil?” Ben tried again, blinking.
The sobbing grew louder, and then she exploded. Her figure became wisps of smoke; they zipped past him into the hall. He reeled backward, speechless as the split pieces became whole once more.
“Here, Ben...here,” she called from the stairs, and he followed.
The phantom kept walking. The front door swung wide open for her as she approached and she walked out into the night, unaffected by the rain. Curiosity filled him, but the suffocating grief inside of him that yearned for answers pushed him forward.
Are you finally going to show me what happened? He wanted to ask.
Because in all of his dreams, in every nightmare he experienced, not once did Soleil unveil her truth.
But there she was, trailing along the garden path, winding her away around the house. Ben followed her to the moors as he tried to keep his breath from catching in his throat. He blinked away the raindrops, squinting to see her through the sheets of rain. It was dark, but the figures were luminescent enough that he could still make them out. Soleil paused at the edge of the cliff that overlooked the beach, but she was no longer alone. A second phantom, taller and broader, towered over her by two heads.
“Is this it?” Ben shouted, bracing himself against the whipping wind and rain.“Is this what you want to show me?”
Soleil’s voice drifted to him on the wind, shouting broken sentences he could barely make sense of. One phrase did reach him, one sentence repeated over and over in a panic.
“You promised,” she cried. “You promised me!”
Promised what?
The other figure did not answer. In the span of a breath, it grasped Soleil’s shoulders and threw her over the edge. Soleil’s ghost disappeared into the darkness. Her hollow scream echoed as she fell, and the figure, her murderer, watched.
“No!” Ben saw red.
The memory of Soleil’s broken, bloodied face in the sand, marred by the expression of surprise and fear broke through the surface. Ben felt the breath leave his body, the anger in him stronger than the helplessness he’d felt as a boy. The figure turned to leave, but Ben, without thinking, rushed forward. He would have met the shadow man head-on, but fate intervened.
He slammed into the wet ground, pummeled by a fierce-looking Remi.
Her voice was as piercing as her wide blue-green eyes. “Benoît Leone!” she yelled. “You absolute idiot!”
REMI
“Will you tell me why you were running toward the edge of the cliff?” Remi asked impatiently.
They’d retreated to the study. After the hellish vision, cryptic note, and now Ben’s near downward plummet, Remi was barely hanging onto the tatters of her sanity. They were both soaked and caked in mud, sitting in silence for entirely too long.
Even the tea Remi made for them now sat cold in her lap, the cup cradled in her frozen fingers.
“Ben? Did you hear me?”
He nodded vacantly. “Yes.”
“Will you talk to me?” Desperation clawed at her chest. “I think I am owed that much, if not more, for saving your life.”
Ben straightened a little. “Thank you.”
Remi leaned back into the cushion of her chair. Hesitant to broach the subject at all, she tried as gently as she could, “Will you…will you tell me if it was on purpose? Were you intending to end your life tonight?”
Ben’s eyes snapped up from the ground, alert and panicked. “No. No, it wasn’t.”
“That’s a relief,” she sighed. The coil of tension that had gripped her heart dissolved immediately.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” Ben said earnestly. “I’m still trying to understand it all myself. It was like I was walking in my sleep again, somewhere between being lucid and dreaming.”
“Does that happen often? The sleepwalking?”
Ben rubbed his face, pushing his dark hair back. A few wet pieces clung to his cheeks. “Not since I was a boy. It stopped a month or two after I started living with my cousins.”
“They must have been a great comfort to you if you were able to overcome it so quickly.”
Ben scoffed, his jaw tensing. “Not at all. They threatened to leave me at Sainte-Anne if my nightly outings didn’t stop. After that, I locked the door to my room and tied myself to the bed with a sheet.”
Remi covered her trembling lips and bit back her horror. “That’s…that’s unthinkable.”
“That’s family,” Ben muttered.
The haunted expression he wore was concerning. His honesty surprised her, especially since he’d accused her of being a money-hungry harlot earlier—in the same room, no less.
“Could it be a coincidence?”
“It could be…”
Remi frowned, “But?”
“My sister,” he said. “It was my sister tonight and every night before this one. She’s always there, in pain, begging for help. But I wake up somewhere in between, just before she dies again.”
