Chapter 3

Jane had no time to reacther breath caught in her throat as the woman's eyes widened. Jane struggled to move, but her body wouldn't obey. Every muscle was tensed and yet frozen like stone. The woman opened her mouth, a silent scream ricocheting off the insides of Jane's skull. Then the thorny roots pulled her off the edge of the cliffs and into the sea.

"No!" A gasp escaped Jane's lips, barely above a whisper. Her skin broke out in goose bumps, and she shook her head, trying to clear it of what she'd just seen. Her hand shot to clutch her necklace, a pendant gifted to her by her grandmother.

Before she could even run to the edge, a voice cut through her shock. "She isn't real. Just a phantom." The quiet voice intruded on her terror.

She glanced over her shoulder. A handsome man in his mid-thirties dressed as a gardener approached, carrying a pair of huge shears. The sight was so unexpected after what she'd just witnessed that she wasn't quite sure how to react. Brown eyes studied her with a mixture of pity and concern.

"What did you say?"

The man sighed, set his shears down, leaning them against his knee while he rubbed his palms on his brown work pants. "What you saw there, was the lady in white. She's haunted these cliffs since her death."

Her death? The woman she'd just seen was aghost?

"You believe in ghosts?" Jane turned her face once more to the cliffs.

The gardener turned his head toward the sea, his eyes focusing on something from the past. "I believe that evil leaves its mark on a place. Burns itself in the stones so deep that only something truly pure and good can get it out. These old stones have so much evil buried in them, I doubt the castle will ever rest. It isn't safe here, not for you." The gardener bent to pick up his shears again. "You should go, return to wherever you've come from, and forget this place."

She swallowed, a metallic taste still thick in her throat, focusing back on the gardener. "How often have you seen her? The lady in white?" Even as she spoke, the image of the woman's face flashed across her mind, and a chill swept through her entire body. She rubbed her hands over her arms.

He shrugged, eyes facing the cliffs as he answered, "She appears there on the cliffs whenever her kin return home."

She looked toward the hall, trying to bury the memory of sorrow and fear on the ghost's face. Anyone else might have been panicking after having just seen what she'd seen. But the nightly visions plaguing her had slowly forced her to accept that there were things beyond her explanation. Like ghosts.

"So the earl is here?" The earl was in residence. This was good news. She had been a little worried that he might be monitoring the estate from London.

"Yes. Arrived a seven months ago. Been trying to restore the place. Not much good will it do. The ghosts are stirring again. He's upset the balance."

"The balance?" A sense of warning niggled at the back of her head, but she forced herself to ignore itand to ignore the sense that she was losing her mind.

The gardener appeared to really see her for the first time. "The balance. Between the evil and the good. Evil rules the castle. Stalks the halls and torments those who dare to live inside."

Icy fingers raked down Jane's back.

"Is Lord Weymouth in danger? Being in the house?" It only occurred to her after she asked that the gardener might be right, and she might be in danger, too.

The gardener looked out to sea, his eyes dark. "I don't know. But if you plan to stay here, watch yourself, miss. Evil isn't always what you'd expect. It can take many forms." His voice dropped. "Many forms."

He turned and walked away. The momentary comfort his presence provided her vanished as she gazed upon his retreating form.

She wanted to know what he meant, but she doubted she'd get much more from him. She turned her attention back to the castle. The high windows reflected the sunlight as it started to peek out from the clouds.

The image of the lady in white flashed through her mind again, blinding her to the present for a brief instant. Her heart clenched in sadness, and fear rippled through her in tiny little waves, enough to keep her on edge. Had she witnessed a true apparition, or had her own imagination run away with her? She'd half hoped her dreams of being pushed from the cliffs had been only nightmares, yet that woman looked so familiar.

She had always believed in supernatural things. She was no longer a practicing Catholic in the churchgoing sense, but her faith was strong enough that she respected the truth that there were things in this world she couldn't understand. Like ghosts. And now she was going to enter a place bleeding with evil. She reached up to clutch the medallion of the archangel Michael that hung around her neck. The metal was warm from lying against her skin. It was a small comfort in the face of the looming castle and the fears of what might lurk in its shadows.