style="font-size:15px;"> He shined the light back and forth across the muddy ground, looking for the trail that had to be there—the trail that should indicate how the person arrived or where they’d gone. But the ground held no prints at all. He turned around and shined the light across the ground where he’d walked and saw the outline of his footprints in the mud.
Even with the intensity of the rain, there wasn’t enough time for footprints to have washed away—not in a matter of minutes. He walked to the edge of the woods and shined the flashlight along the perimeter, looking for any sign that someone had entered or exited the courtyard through the woods.
His frustration grew with every step he took. He hadn’t imagined the figure, and he knew he was looking in the right area. But no one could have walked across that ground without leaving a trace.
No one but a ghost.
And that just wasn’t possible. He’d never believed in that sort of thing before, and regardless of what Olivia thought she’d seen when Wheeler held her captive, and the huge amount of respect he had for her, he wasn’t about to start buying in to it now. There was a logical explanation for everything happening at laMalediction.
And he was going to get to the bottom of it.
He entered the woods just behind the area where he’d seen the figure and scanned the ground for any sign of passage. There was some broken foliage along the edge of the woods, but the force of the storm could have caused that as easily as a man. What a storm couldn’t do was leave footprints and there had to be footprints somewhere.
He covered at least a hundred-foot stretch of woods, ten feet deep into the brush, but turned up nothing. Glancing at his watch, he realized he’d been gone from the house for over thirty minutes. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Justine in there alone, especially not at night and during a storm.
He glanced back at the house and his heart began to beat faster. The light from Justine’s room barely showed through the window, when earlier it had been bright. Abandoning his investigation, he ran straight across the courtyard to the house, his mind racing with a multitude of possibilities, none of them good.
No way had she turned off the lamp and gone to bed and he’d made sure it was full of oil when he checked on her earlier. If she was afraid of someone seeing her, she could have drawn the drapes, but he could still make out the dark lines of the heavy fabric drawn to the sides of the window.
He burst through the front door, prepared to dash upstairs, but his foot connected with a solid object in the dark and sent him sprawling across the marble floor of the entry. He directed his flashlight to the floor and a single glance back confirmed his worst fear. He scrambled over to Justine, who lay across the entry.
Leaning in, he watched her chest and saw it rise and fall. A quick check of her pulse showed a somewhat elevated heartbeat, but nothing alarming. “Justine,” he said and patted the sides of her cheeks, trying to wake her. “Justine.”
His pulse quickened as he failed to get any response. He slipped his arms underneath her and carried her into the sitting room where he placed her on the couch. A lantern sat on a table next to the couch, so he lit it to cast more light on the situation. As he placed the lantern on the coffee table closer to Justine, she stirred.
And that’s when he saw blood on the couch pillow.
He froze for a moment, then knelt down and gently lifted her head, trying to see what was causing the bleeding. The gash was immediately visible, and he let out a sigh of relief as he realized that the cut wasn’t deep or large, and was probably made by something with a fairly sharp end, rather than the marble floor, as he’d originally feared. She must have slipped and hit her head on something. But what?
There was nothing in the center of the entry where he’d found her, so the only other logical explanation was that she’d hit it somewhere close by and staggered to the center of the entry where she’d passed out. He stepped through the other side of the sitting room and into the kitchen. He’d noticed clean dishtowels in a drawer earlier, so he grabbed one and soaked it with cold water. Justine still hadn’t wakened when he returned to the sitting room, so he placed the cool cloth across her forehead.
She stirred a bit and her eyes fluttered. Then all of a sudden, she sat bolt upright, her eyes wide with fright. He grabbed her arms as she tried to strike him.
“Justine, it’s Brian. You’re safe. Stop struggling or you may injure yourself.”
Justine locked her gaze on him and he could see the panic in her eyes begin to diminish. She gasped for air, then blew out a huge breath and swung her legs around so she was in a sitting position.
“What happened?” she asked.
Brian shook his head. “I found you passed out on the entry floor. You’ve got a gash on the back of your head. I figure maybe you fell in the dark and hit your head on something.”
Now that the initial crisis had passed, Brian felt irritation begin. “Things like this are exactly why I told you to stay put. You can’t just walk around in the pitch-black in a strange house. You’re going to be lucky if you don’t need stitches.”
“There was a fire,” Justine argued. “I smelled the smoke in my room, and stronger in the hallway.”
Brian frowned. “I don’t smell anything, and if there was a fire we’d see it by now. Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. Do you think I would risk leaving the room with that…that thing outside if I didn’t have a good reason? I know you’re here to protect me, but I didn’t exactly grow up in Mayberry. Survival is something I’m very familiar with.”
Brian sat on the coffee table and sighed. “So what happened after you left the room?”
Justine stared at the wall behind him, her brow scrunched in concentration. “I figured the safest place to go was my car. I checked the bedroom door before opening it. It was cool, but the smell of smoke was stronger in the hall. I hurried downstairs and looked out the entry window to make sure the outside was clear.”
She frowned and Brian could see she was struggling to remember.
“Did you see something outside?” he prompted.
“No…I heard something…inside.” Her eyes widened. “Directly behind me in the entry, but before I could turn around, something hit me on the back of the head and everything went black.”
“Damn it!” Brian jumped up from the coffee table and paced the room. “I should have known better. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
“What should you have known? I don’t understand.”
“It was all a trick to get to you. The person outside to draw me out of the house. The smell of smoke to get you out of the locked room. All so someone could take a shot at you.”
Justine sucked in a breath. “But that’s crazy. Why would someone go to all that trouble just to hit me? If they’d wanted me dead, I would be.”
Brian frowned at Justine’s words because he knew she was right. There had been plenty of time to kill her if that was the intent. “Maybe someone wants to scare you away.”
“But why me? Why not go after you? You’re the strongest.”
Brian
