Emmeline sulked in the backseat beside his duffle bag. She hadn't said more than a word at a time in answer to him during the ride to the estate. It was almost three hours from the city. He had left the highway an hour ago and taken to the dirt road. Strange, that he could be gone for so long but still know the way without checking for directions.
He glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. She didn't look angry, but she was far from her usual self. She studied the trees outside with a strange mix of wonder, terror, and familiarity.
"Em?" he asked.
She hummed softly in reply, still watching the woods. There were deer out there, hidden in the thick of the trees. His sister, Lucy, had frightened him as a boy with stories of wolves—stories that harkened to fairy tales. She had been so gifted in her terrorizing that Benedict had refused to wear red until he was fifteen and, even then, never in the woods.
"How did you end up in my house?"
Her head turned suddenly, and for the first time all day, she met his gaze. "What?"
"The first time I saw you, you were in my room, crying. But our nearest neighbor is more than an hour's drive, and the highway is almost as far…" He wasn't sure how far he intended to go with this inquiry. Had she been killed in the woods somewhere between the highway and his family home? Had she run from her attacker? Had she wandered as a ghost until she found him?
"Oh," she said, sitting stiffly. "I don't remember going to your room. I think I was drawn to you."
He nodded slowly, but he didn't really understand. He had never understood.
"Will all your family be there?" she asked. Was she changing the topic?
"Yeah. We aren't that many, though. No one brings their significant others home. If they have any, they leave them someplace else—someplace away from the estate. No one is family unless they have the Lyon blood." He recalled a heated argument between Lucy and his mother once when she wanted to bring her girlfriend to the house. "So, it was just my mom, her brother, Vernon, and his two kids, and then Elysium, Lucy, Luis, and me."
They drove out of the woods and into a clearing, the Lyon family home far from the reach of branches. He had thought of it as a castle when he was a boy. Three stories of brick with big windows, balconies, and glass doors opening onto stone-laid trails between rose bushes and gnarled, little apple trees.
The front doors opened, and two staff members stepped out, waiting for his arrival. Elysium joined them on the landing at the top of the steps.
"Everything is going to be okay, Em," Benedict promised one more time. "If anyone sees you, or even feels you, we'll leave."
She didn't reply, and he pulled up in front of the house.
The two footmen hurried down the steps, one ready to park the car while the other sought to take his bag. Benedict stopped him before he reached for the trunk and shook his head. "I travel light. It's just the one," he said, pulling his duffle from the backseat. Emmeline looked up at him, a stolen glance now that she was to be unseen. He stepped back, holding the car door open and masking the moment it took her to step out as a chance to stretch his back. Emmeline didn't need him to hold the door—she could pass through walls if she wanted—but it was a habit he would not willingly abandon. It had become his way of acknowledging her even when he interacted with a world that didn't see her. He saw her.
"You made good time," Elysium called from the top of the stairs.
Benedict didn't fight when the footman took the bag from his hand. They both knew he could carry it himself, but Elysium ran a tight ship, and there was no reason for Benedict to rock the boat.
He took the stairs two at a time. "Am I the first to arrive?"
Elysium's small upturn of lips said it was the opposite. "Uncle Vernon moved into the house a year ago. He lives here year-round now. And Luis was here looking after Mother in her last days," he said, mentioning their other brother.
Benedict nodded. Luis had always been trying to get Mother's love. It was a finite resource in the Lyon house, and everyone knew Elysium would get all she could spare. Everyone but Luis, that is, who thought he had a fighting chance for her favoritism. Benedict didn't need to wonder if he had earned it in those last days. Their mother had probably favored Elysium even more for not staying by her side. She had been a practical woman and would not have liked the waste of time on sentiment.
Elysium led the way into the house, the vaulted ceilings dwarfing the tall doors they walked through. It was all as he remembered it: the checkered marble foyer floor, the wide staircase rising up one side and turning into the second floor of bedrooms, and a pair of French doors to the left leading into the parlor. The windows in that room offered so much light that during a summer's day they did not need electricity. The same couches and chairs stood in the same arrangements. A piano occupied one corner with a round table on the other side of the room for séances and readings. The chirping of birds and the occasional flutter of wings stirred in the three cages hanging, one higher than the other, with their brightly colored finches.
His sister, Lucy, sat at the family séance table playing cards with his cousin, Theodore. Somehow it made sense to see those two being friendly. They had both made spectacles of themselves and the family name. Mother and Uncle Vernon had not approved at first, but they eventually turned a blind eye. Lucy had grabbed up their family history of spiritualism and taken it a small step further, into the occult. She wore black velvet and lace, hanging off her dark shoulders. A thin metal crown ringed her head, pressing down her thick curls. Her long, lacquered, purple nails tapped the backs of her cards. She called herself a witch. Their mother had hated that, but her disapproval had only made Lucy enjoy it more. She read tarot cards for royalty and tycoons now. She rented out castles in Transylvania and held séances. She even had a coven, lining her pockets and devouring her perfect blend of true supernatural and sugary lies.
She twisted sideways in her seat when they walked in. She dropped her cards and shot to her feet. The deck was worn, the black backs rubbed of color by fingers. He caught sight of the ones she had abandoned; the royalty cards were all skeletons in collapsing garb and falling crowns and swords. "Benny!" Lucy cried, wrapping her arms around him.
Benedict hugged his sister back. He had seen her in December when she had thrown a particularly large, though macabre, gala for her thirty-fifth birthday.
"Well, damn, I lost the bet," Theodore said, cigarette bouncing on his lip while he swept up the cards from the table. He didn't look quite as glossy and perfect as he had on that documentary Benedict caught a few weeks ago, no makeup smoothing out his sharp cheekbones or hiding the dark circles under his eyes. "I didn't expect you to actually show up."
"I didn't know I had an option," Benedict countered.
"You didn't," Lucy confirmed, patting his cheek before going back to the table. She reached out, and Theodore passed her his cigarette.
"I heard you've got a new TV special coming out," Benedict said, crossing the floor to awkwardly shake hands with Theodore. They had never been particularly close. Benedict was evasive, and Theodore wasn't interested in anyone not interested in him.
Benedict made small talk in a room with the three most powerful spiritualists of their time, his relatives, and then glanced up as Emmeline walked around the room. She considered the furniture, the birds in their cages, the old paintings in gaudy frames with the same arched brow and pressed lips as Benedict had worn when examining the Whittle house. He glanced between his brother, his sister, and his cousin, a part of him waiting for one of them to sense Emmeline—to see her, even. But they didn't.