Spiritus, a Paranormal Romance (Spiritus Series Book#1) by Dana Michelle Burnett
Spiritus
Spiritus Series Book One
Dana Michelle Burnett
Copyright © 2011 by Dana Michelle Burnett
This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real accounts. Any resemblance to a person, living or dead is completely coincidental.
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Praise for the Spiritus Series
“With a spoon full of romance and a dash of suspense, Spiritus is a wonderful treat.”-Jaskirat, See It or Read It
“If you like romantic and haunting novels, with characters and a plot that completely draws you in, then I would definitely recommend that you pick up Spiritus.” ~ Ink Puddle
“The romantic tension, the tenderness, the bittersweet moments...These are all the things that really caught my attention.” ~ Alexa Loves Books
“The writing is beautiful, the scenery is gorgeous. The emotions in the book...They are heartfelt and sometimes just heart wrenching.” ~ Fictional Candy
“This is such a twisted love story!” ~ Rather Barefoot Than Bookless
“If you are a lover of creepy tales with swoon worthy characters, you must read the Spiritus Series because frankly, you will be thanking me later.” ~ Mother Gamer Writer
With love for my family for their constant and never ending support, none of this would be possible without your constant encouragement.
Preface
Death. It always seemed such a strange and far off event I never thought about what it would be like to actually die. That was something for the distant future, but as I heard the window shatter behind me, I knew my time had come.
What was I was dying for? The sins of the past? The wrongs of the present? Did it even matter?
I looked up at him one last time, staring into his sad and familiar eyes. I took one last breath and prepared to die.
Chapter 1
I hoisted my suitcase up and into the back of my dad’s Suburban. I winced as the hot tearing pain ripped through my lower back, but I ignored the pain and adjusted my suitcase among the last of the moving boxes.
The back of the Suburban held all the treasures I didn’t trust to survive in the moving van and the things I couldn’t bear to have out of my sight even for one day.
Slamming the rear door, I took one last glance at our Indianapolis town house. We were not even gone yet and already the familiar brick building was a stranger to me with dead curtain-free eyes staring back at me. It wasn’t my home anymore.
Two hours away, in the small town of Corydon, a pre-Civil War mansion waited. My Dad’s ancestral home. I had heard about it all my life, but it always seemed unreal and far away.
It was to that remote small town that we were moving to now. When Dad announced we were moving, I tried to pretend that it wasn’t true, even as all of our things were packed and taken away. By the time I had to face what was happening, I just couldn’t make myself care.
“Becca,” my Dad said to me as he tossed his own small duffel bag into the back seat. “You know this is going to be great for us, right?”
I couldn’t let my Dad guess how much I hated this, so I smiled up at him. I liked the way his blue eyes crinkled around the edges as he smiled back. I hated to lie, but…
“I know,” I said with another humoring smile. If my mother was still alive, she and I would have exchanged knowing glances as conspirators in pacifying my father.
To think of my mother made my eyes smart with unshed tears. She died in a car accident two years ago and it was from her memory we were running. No matter how much stuff we crammed into our townhouse, the rooms still echoed with emptiness left behind with my mother’s passing.
I glanced back one last time at the house we all shared and then got in on the passenger side. There was really no point in looking back again.
“And we’re off,” Dad said with a happy smile as he got behind the wheel and snapped his seatbelt in place.
Rather than respond, I turned so I could lean against the door and stare out the window. I said nothing else as the familiar structures of the city gave way to long expanses of trees on both sides of the highway, peppered now and then by an open field.
Once I got bored looking at trees and cornfields, I took out my notebook and started doodling. I could have been creative and wrote a poem or something to capture the moment, but I refused to compare the highway to the journey of life or the path of fate in my life. That omission severely limited what I felt like writing about at the moment.
By the time we started veering toward the west; the cornfields disappeared and were replaced by rocky hills that were cut in half by the interstate. We seemed to be going uphill, causing my ears to pop.
As we drove on, rugged trucks replaced sleek sedans. I didn’t have much hope for urban entertainment when the exits off the interstate led to places with names like Greenville and Edwardsville.
“Are you taking us to the middle of nowhere?” I asked, more to break the silence than any real interest.
“Hardly,” Dad said with a chuckle as he flipped back some wayward strands of his salt and pepper hair. “But it will be very different from what you are used to.”
I glanced out the window again at the dull view, “I’ll bet you’re right.”
He shifted his eyes my way, letting worry and concern take the shine from his face, “Different isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
I squirmed with guilt and changed the subject, “So if this house is your family’s original home, why didn’t you grow up there?”
The happy light came back to his eyes, “The house belonged to my ancestors back when Corydon was the capitol of Indiana. Sometime after the Civil War my family lost the house.”
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” He replied as he changed lanes with a quick glance over his shoulder. Since my mother’s death, he was an overly cautious driver anytime I was in the vehicle. “I used to walk by it and tell myself that one day I’d own it.”
I glanced over at him, picturing him as a dirty faced kid looking up at some Gone with the Wind style house. “Seriously?”
“I always wanted to buy it, I even promised your Mom on our honeymoon,” his mouth twitched a little at the corners talking about her.
I forced excitement I didn’t feel and made myself smile, “She would have loved it.”
He cleared his throat and nodded, setting his jaw and looking straight forward. I went back to looking out the window and tried not to think about how much I missed my mom.
It was nearing sunset when we took the Corydon exit. It seemed like nothing more than a series of truck stops and restaurants lining the four lane highway. I couldn’t believe people would move here by choice.
Dad drove past the gas stations and the one shopping center, the first sign of life in the last thirty minutes, to where there were no street lights and Victorian mansions crowded the oak lined street.
It all looked l
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, not believing the time warp I was seeing out the window.
Dad looked around with a goofy grin that made me embarrassed for him even though there was no one else around, “Isn’t it great?”
I didn’t have to answer; we pulled into the narrow gravel drive of one of the mansions. I gazed up at the monstrous structure and tried to wrap my head around the fact that this was my new home.
The house was large, wider than most of the others. It seemed to almost squat on the lot. The multiple porches were all shaded by the tall oaks surrounding the house. The white wood siding was colored a greenish gray along the edges that made me think of the greeny growth on tombstones. When I looked at it, only two things came to mind, damp and mossy.
Getting out of the car, I saw the green gardens filled with hostas and felt the early dew already clinging to the lawn, a deep earthy scent hung in the air choking me.
“Uh! What is that smell?”
Dad came around the sedan to open my door, “It’s fresh air. What do you think about that?”
“I think it stinks,” I said with forced gaiety. I was used to clean lawns manicured by unseen people the apartment manager hired. There was something imposing about the lush permanence of this place.
“Come on Becca,” my Dad said with a teasing smile. “You have to admit, it’s beautiful. They don’t make them like this anymore.”
I let my eyes travel up the large columns of the porch and up to the red peaked roof. I wanted to shrink back from this ancient goliath.
“No, they sure don’t.” I whispered, thinking that maybe that was a good thing.
Dad opened the back of the Suburban and started pulling out my suitcase and boxes, “I got this. Why don’t you go on in and have a look around?”
Inside was no different. Where our townhouse smelled of whatever scented candles we were burning, this massive place smelled of wood, leather, and some attic-library-like scent that I couldn’t name.
Standing in the foyer, I inhaled the musty air with a chocking cough as I looked up at the grand staircase. If that wasn’t imposing enough, far above my head hung a dusty crystal chandelier so high against the dark ceiling it seemed misty and far away.
I took a few more steps forward, not feeling that this was my home at all. Through an arched doorway to my right stood the grand piano my Dad ordered a few weeks back, looking too shiny and new for its surroundings. A glance to the left and through another arched opening showed a flat screen television and a contemporary sofa set that looked just as out of place as the piano.
A door under the staircase revealed a tiny bathroom with a sloping ceiling tucked away like an afterthought. I rationalized by the advent of indoor plumbing, it was the only available area on the first floor that wouldn’t compromise the original layout.
Shutting the bathroom door, I turned my attention to the wide hall behind me. It was large enough to park a car in and at the end was a set of heavy double doors. Walking down it, to my left was a curved doorway to the dining room and to the right another opening to the room with the piano.
The double doors at the end were heavy, paneled in rich wood, and almost reached the tall ceiling. The black metal knobs almost seemed too weak to open them, but one good pull and the doors opened to an empty library twinkling with dust particles catching the light.
The room glowed orange with the light of the setting sun coming through the windows as I stepped inside. The arched empty shelves cried out to be filled with books, looking abandoned and forgotten. I inhaled deeply; noting the rich scent of cigars seemed to cling to the freshly painted walls.
I stepped around the boxes from Dad’s little home office at the townhouse and went across the room to the windows where the garden trees and shrubs fluttered in the breeze. The wind tore random leaves loose to blow over the patio just outside the French doors.
As I was leaving, a large area of the floor caught my eye where the wood floor had faded nearly white. The splotchy pattern at first made me think a careless worker had spilled paint, but when I got down on my knees to examine it closer, I could see it was in the wood trapped under the varnish.
What would cause that? I reached out to touch the peculiar stain. As my finger touched the slick surface of the wood, a vibrating electric shock traveled up my hand and into my arm. My eyes instantly began to water and my ears rang.
I pulled my hand back and clutched it to me. I was too shocked to even cry out. What was that?
Jumping to my feet, I looked down at the spot on the floor and backed away. A chill ran up my spine and I broke out in a clammy sweat. Even though it was silly, I backed out of the library and closed the doors.
I heard Dad outside on the porch talking to some random neighbor about the sturdiness of the foundation as I sneaked back around and went up the staircase. Each riser gave a loud creak and pop as I went up to the second floor.
When I got to the top of the staircase I turned to the left and walked back toward the front of the house where my room looked out into one of the oak trees in the front yard. My bed sat under that window with its new mattress a glaring bare white.
All the boxes from our townhouse with my name on them were stacked near my dresser by the door, but I hesitated to unpack anything.
I went over to the window that looked out over the sprawling yard and narrow drive. Through the leafy screen, in the parallel universe of Corydon, traffic was already thinning as if it were the middle of the night. It was the perfect example of how life moved at a different pace here.
It might be nice to visit a place so charmingly out of step with the rest of the world, but it just wasn’t normal to live in such a parody.
I turned away from the window and took in my new surroundings. There was nothing familiar about this room. It held other people’s memories in its plastered walls. How long would it take for this room to seem like it really belonged to me?
Downstairs my Dad came in, the sound of the front door opening and closing vibrated up the walls to the second floor, I listened for the sound of his steps on the staircase, but it never came. He went to the left where the flat screen waited, no doubt much more tempting than a conversation with his pouting daughter.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I loved my Dad and knew that he thought he was doing what was best for us, but I just wasn’t in the mood to pretend anymore. With him downstairs and occupied with CNN, I could sit on the edge of my bed and let a few tears escape from the corners of my eyes.
I sat there, listening to the distant chatter of the television and the house creaking, trying not to think about school tomorrow. Each time it crossed my mind, I got a hollow and sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Deep down I just knew it was going to be awful.
Even though it was the start of the new school year and tomorrow would be everyone’s first day, I felt at a definite disadvantage. I almost regretted that I didn’t come here with Dad at least a few times over the summer to where maybe I could have met at least one or two people before starting school.
Corydon Central High School was the one and only high school in the Corydon area. There would be no second chances, no alternatives. I would either fit in and make it or I wouldn’t, and the odds were stacked against me. The other students had known each other since grade school; everyone would know everyone, except me.
In my school back in Indianapolis, I saw how everyone treated new students. They were a curiosity for about a week and then the decision was made as to if they were worthy to be with the popular crowd or doomed to obscurity. I didn’t hold out much hope for myself.
At seventeen, I didn’t have what it took to be popular. I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t the outgoing student government type, and I wasn’t the sporty athlete. What chance did I
I was only me, somewhat pale, and while not ugly, I was far from a vision of teenage perfection. In my opinion, my hair was just a mousy brown, sadly lacking the depth of ebony or chestnut and my eyes were merely a boring blue. I was plain and forgettable; no one would even notice me.
That empty sick feeling came over me again. In a big school it was easy to fade into the background, but I didn’t know if that would be possible here. I tried not to think about it anymore.