Blood Moon (Book Three - The Ravenscliff Series) (2 page)

With the ball of light held aloft, Devon started up the stairs.

He was inside the walls of Ravenscliff.

That was what he realized as he continued climbing the stairs. Narrow, twisting passageways, the space so small that he couldn’t extend his arms fully in either direction. Looking around, he saw that the woman could have gone any which way. The stairs frequently veered off in different directions, leading all through the great house. By now Devon was certain that he must be on the second floor, as he’d been climbing for at least five minutes. His quarry could have taken a dozen routes different than he had. She might have been anywhere within these passageways. How would he ever find her?

He would use his sorcery, that was how.

He closed his eyes and visualized the house as it stood on the top of the hill, overlooking the sea on one side and the village of Misery Point on the other. It was a creepy old place, to be sure, but pretty majestic, too: floors made of marble, shiny black wood inset with stained glass and crystal. When Devon had first arrived at Ravenscliff, he had been awed by all the ornamentation, what Mrs. Crandall called the family’s “trinkets.” Suits of armor, crystal balls, carvings of shrunken heads—Devon would later learn that these were the souvenirs from the Muir family’s many years of sorcery.

But most wondrous of all were the ravens—those black-eyed familiars of the Nightwing, which had long roosted all over the house, but which had disappeared when the Muirs had renounced their sorcery. That renunciation had come after a terrible event—a tragedy the Muirs called the “Cataclysm”—in which Mrs. Crandall’s father had died in the Hell Hole that existed under the great house. The decision was made at that point to end the family’s long association with the Nightwing. Accordingly, the ravens had flown off into the darkening skies that very night, with the belief that they would never return.

Yet they had. The ravens had come back. They had settled all over the house, taking up their former places of honor, when Devon March, his Nightwing powers intact, had come to Ravenscliff to live.

And Mrs. Crandall had been none too happy about it. More than once Devon had seen the lady of the house angrily shooing the birds away from the terrace. But she knew that so long as a Sorcerer of the Nightwing lived at Ravenscliff, the ravens would remain.

Good thing, too: the ravens had saved Devon from a demon attack not long ago. He’d come to feel a great fondness for the black birds with their shining dark eyes. They were his; they were part of who he was and where he came from.

If only they could talk.

For despite all that he had learned during these past several months at Ravenscliff, Devon still did not know the answer to the central mystery. If Ted March hadn’t been his real father, then who was? And his mother—who was she? Had they both been Nightwing? What had happened to them? Why had they sent Devon away to be raised by Ted March? And why had Dad, on his deathbed, sent him here to Ravenscliff? What was the connection between this house and Devon’s past?

She knows
, his Nightwing intuition told him.
The woman I’m pursuing now … she knows. She knows who I am.

Devon paused to listen. He thought he heard a sound, a footstep. He couldn’t be sure. He listened intently, as Sargon the Great might have—using not just his ears but all his other senses as well. A Nightwing could track someone through the slightest scent. Could he find her that way? If not by sight, then by scent?

But all he kept getting was Cecily’s perfume.

Cecily—the girl he was in love with. Devon tried to block out Cecily’s scent but found he could not. It was getting in the way of tracking down his quarry. And he knew why. As stupid as it sometimes made him feel, Cecily intoxicated him. She fascinated him. Sometimes he couldn’t think of anything but her. Cecily was not only pretty but strong, too—and smart, and crafty. She was also Mrs. Crandall’s daughter.

The mistress of the house wasn’t pleased by Cecily’s budding romance with Devon. Maybe that was because she didn’t want her daughter trying to reclaim the Nightwing heritage she had renounced for her before she was born. In fact, if Mrs. Crandall had her way, Devon would be forced to give up his powers, too—so terrified was she that, by using them, he’d bring back the Madman.

The Madman who had killed her father in the Hell Hole.

Devon admitted her fear was not without reason. The Madman had already come back once; who was to say he couldn’t come back again? But Devon had defeated him—he, Devon, just a novice sorcerer, had kicked Jackson Muir’s butt straight back to his Hell Hole. And he could do it again, too, he thought cockily to himself—but he’d really rather not
have
to, just the same.

He would never forget what it was like descending into the darkness of the Hell Hole. The feeling of utter misery and despair—not to mention the stink of death. The demons had attacked him, eaten parts of his flesh, infiltrated his mind. But he’d
had
to go down there; the Madman had taken little Alexander, and Devon was the only one—the only Sorcerer of the Nightwing left—who could save the boy.

Since then, Alexander, who’d just turned nine years old, had become Devon’s pal. Despite all the horrors he’d had to face at Ravenscliff, Devon had still found a home here. There was Cecily, Alexander, and his friends from school: D.J., Marcus, Natalie. And of course, there was Rolfe Montaigne, who was the key to helping Devon unlock the secrets of his past.

But finding Crazy Lady might prove to be even more effective than Rolfe’s research.

Blocking Cecily’s perfume as best he could from his nostrils, Devon tried to concentrate. Where was she? Where was Crazy Lady? He stood on the dark, stuffy, cobwebby staircase and trained all of his sorcerer’s senses on finding the woman.

He heard something. Definitely a footstep this time.

He turned, and behind him he made out a figure ascending the stairs. He held up his ball of light to get a better look.

And what he saw made him gasp.

It was not a woman climbing the steps at all. But a man.

A transparent man—with Devon’s light shining right through him.

“Who are you?” Devon asked.

The ghost didn’t answer. Devon knew the figure was a ghost because he had seen enough of them in this house to recognize them. But just whose ghost this was he couldn’t be sure. It was some Muir ancestor, perhaps, but the face was unfamiliar from the portraits that hung on the walls of the parlor. This man was quite young, only a few years older than Devon, perhaps: eighteen or nineteen, possibly, certainly no older than twenty. He was dressed in jeans and a shirt.

“Who are you?” Devon asked again.

Ghosts didn’t frighten him. He’d seen things way more frightening than ghosts in this house. Still, this one made Devon uneasy. The way the apparition just stood there on the steps, looking up at him. He reminded the teenaged sorcerer of someone, but he couldn’t quite figure out who.

“Why don’t you speak?” Devon was growing impatient. “Are you just wandering through walls or did you appear to me for a reason?”

“The moon is full,” the ghost finally intoned. He sounded English.

“Um, yeah, I think it was.” Devon stopped to think. It had been storming earlier, but he remembered looking out his window before the storm began. “Yeah,” he said. “It was definitely a full moon. Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

The ghost suddenly raised his right hand and moved it up, then down, then up and down again in front of Devon’s face. It was like he was making a sign of some kind.

“What are you doing?” Devon asked. “Do it again. It’s dark, I can’t see …”

But the ghost had faded away.

What was the sign he had made in the air? What did the moon have to do with anything?

That was when Devon felt the hand on his shoulder.

He turned—and screamed into the decomposing face of a long-dead corpse.

It took Devon too long to recover from his shock—too many seconds wasted to get his heart under control, to stop its racing. He knew how disappointed Sargon the Great would be in his reaction. Sargon had tested Devon once before, and he had expected better from his one-hundredth generation descendant. No matter that Devon had just seen a ghost and hadn’t flinched. A Nightwing sorcerer could never permit his opponent the element of surprise. But still, he was a fifteen-year-old kid, and rotting corpses were his weakness. He’d take a ghost or a demon over a zombie any day.

But after about thirty seconds (twenty-nine longer than he should have allowed himself) he managed to concentrate on what he had just seen, and he realized it was no corpse at all. It was the woman, the one he sought. She had played some kind of trick on him. She was standing a few feet away from him now, laughing hysterically over the fright she’d caused him.

“Devon!” Her laughter was crazy, the sound of a disturbed mind. “I scared Devon!”

“Yeah,” he grumbled, “and you won’t get that chance again!”

“Scare
me
now!” the woman cried, her eyes wild, her hands waving in the air.

“How did you do that? How did you make yourself look like a corpse?”

She just giggled insanely.

“What is your name?” Devon asked. “You know mine, so tell me yours.”

“Only if you can catch me!” Crazy Lady said, still laughing, bolting off once more down the corridor into the darkness.

Devon ran in pursuit of her. He thought about using a burst of sorcery to catch her. Maybe he could reach out his hand and cause his arm to stretch long enough to grasp the back of her neck. Or maybe he could turn his hand into a kind of magnet that would just draw her back to him. Could he do it? Should he try?

He was still mastering this stuff, after all. He’d learned how to do some things just by willing them to happen: making himself invisible, for example, or disappearing and then reappearing somewhere else. This would be a new trick. He concentrated on the magnet idea—but as soon as he did he felt the heat. The heat—which was the sign that either demons or another sorcerer was near.

He paused in his pursuit. If the demons were loose again—

But his intuition reassured him that was not the case. The heat that pressed against his cheeks must have indicated instead that some sorcery other than his own was present. It must have been that the woman whose laughter echoed through the dark was a sorceress herself!

“Show yourself!” Devon suddenly demanded.

And all at once, ahead of him in the darkness, the figure of the woman emerged. In her hands she held the same kind of glowing ball of light that Devon held.

“So many years,” Crazy Lady said, looking at Devon and not sounding so crazy any more. “So many years … I had forgotten the allure of sorcery …”

“Who are you?”

She smiled at Devon. “You really do not know, do you?”

“No, but you know me. You know about my past.”

Her eyes danced in the reflected glow. “Your past … is that what you have come to Ravenscliff to find, Devon?”

He took a few steps toward her but she backed up, skittish, like a cat. He didn’t want her to flee again, so he stayed in place, keeping a distance between them.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to know the secret of my past. Who my father was. My mother.”

She smiled again, almost kindly. “Is that so important to you?”

“Of course it is. I deserve to know!”

The woman seemed almost sane as she approached him. Long white hair framed her face, but of her age Devon still couldn’t be sure. Twenty? Forty? Eighty? Her eyes were dark but her skin was pale, pale white—smooth as a baby’s while as brittle as ancient parchment.

“And you have learned nothing, nothing at all, while you have been at Ravenscliff?” Crazy Lady asked, only a few inches now from Devon’s face. He did not move, not wishing to startle her.

“I have learned some stuff, but not all,” he said, holding her gaze. “I have not learned the names of my parents, or what connection they had to Ravenscliff.”

“Your parents?” She seemed to consider the idea. “Do you seek the names of your parents?”

“Yes.” He was growing impatient. “How many times do I have to tell you? I want to know my father, my mother.”