November 14, 2024. Abandoned Briarwood Manor Estate. It’s all fun and games until the bloodleech starts to panic…

Thursday landed on us like a feral cat, moving at the speed of life. By the time we closed up shop later that day, we were ready for a change of pace. Searching Briarwood Manor, where we’d nearly died, certainly counted.

We turned onto the cracked concrete driveway, driving through the open gate and up to the front. The old, sprawling Victorian manor house loomed large in the late afternoon. Red brick walls were stained dark from age, or swallowed by a carpet of ivy determined to reclaim the space for nature. Dirt-stained windows stared like splintered, jaundiced eyes as we eased out of the car.

Cassidy closed the car door, squinting at the house and the skeletal limbs of fall trees. “Daniel? This is a really weird place to say this, given what happened to us, but thank you for seeing the doctor today. I really appreciated that.”

I lightly tapped my fingers against our car, giving the property a suspicious glare. “You’re welcome. I know I’m terrible about seeing a doctor, but…” A long, low breath tumbled out of me. “After three near-death experiences, I got the message.”

She smiled thinly, green eyes warm. “Good. I like you alive. So please put a pin in that message and refer to it often, okay?”

“Deal,” I replied with a half-grin. “The same goes for you, too, beloved.” Tree branches rattled in a light wind like brittle bones in a bag. “This doesn’t feel as good an idea now that we’re here.”

“No, not really.” Cassidy shuddered. “But your idea about Valeria using Briarwood as a murder set makes way too much sense. When I was little, I heard so many stories about this place just being… wrong.” I raised my eyebrows, and she grimaced. “You know… hauntings. Cursed family that murdered guests for crazy rituals. Ghouls, things like that.”

“Wait. Ghouls?” I froze in mid-step. “Ghouls are real?”

Cassidy’s brow furrowed a bit, giving me a sour expression. “Not ruling it out now, love. Ghosts weren’t supposed to be real.”

“Tough but fair.”

We reluctantly left the car, walking up the last of the driveway. Two steps in, Cassidy’s hand found mine and squeezed. The manor’s front door loomed ahead, set back in the shadows of the porch. A pair of crows settled on the estate’s cracked brick fence, silently considering us with interest.

“You’re cursed,” she said flatly. “I refuse to cry or panic, but be prepared to get hugged a lot before I beat the snot out of this Amanda Price for cursing you.”

“Also tough but fair,” I replied with a sigh. “To be honest, I've only written a page and a half. Didn't even use Kyle's escape phrase.” I frowned at the ground, nearby long-dead hedges, anything but the house, while I pulled up the memory. “No obsession. Just came to my senses after an hour downstairs. The inkwell was glowing like mad.”

“Still worried,” she sighed.

“Me, too.”

Signs decorated both sides of the porch and the old oaken manor door. A brass raven knocker glared at us. I tried not to notice. Yellow bits of police tape hung limp from the frame, most of it torn away. To the right of the entrance hung a pale, weathered sign for the Blighridge County Historical Society, indicating that the house was a historical landmark.

“More like Murder Mansion,” I scoffed lightly as we approached. “Sheriff said he wrapped up the public side of what happened here. Officially, Valeria’s still missing.”

Cassidy cracked a weak smile, watching the crows uneasily. “Makes sense. Keeps people from finding out Valeria was a bloodleech.”

We stood on the porch next to each other, staring at the entrance. I reached for its handle, hesitated, then pulled my hand back into a fist.

“The sheriff also said he never caught that woman who jumped us outside Naomi and Issac’s house. He has deputies out looking for anyone matching Amanda Price’s description. Even plans to bring in Caleb Hayes to ask him about Amanda Price.” I licked my lips, staring at the front of the house.

“Makes sense,” Cassidy said, gently squeezing my hand again. “Love? We’re stalling.”

I nodded again, watching the shadows. “Yep. We are, but we need to go in. Everything circles back to Valeria. It just feels like the piece we’ve been missing all this time is in there.”

Cassidy drew a long, ragged breath. “Yeah, and who she was working for. Everything in my head points this way.” She pursed her lips. “Daniel… we almost died here.”

“Yeah.”

I reached for the door with a deep breath.

“Daniel! Cassidy!” Dorian’s cheerful voice cracked the air behind us, echoing off the dead manor’s weathered walls.

I jumped back, swatting at imaginary nothing, before grabbing my chest. Cassidy whirled around in a crouch, eyes wide and blazing, jaw tight. We gulped air as if it were a new concept.

“Dorian…” I stuttered. Cassidy simply grabbed a part of the porch railing as if she wanted to strangle it.

“Thank you for the heart attack,” Cassidy said in a brittle tone.

Dorian raised his eyebrows, brushing imaginary wrinkles from his perfectly pressed flannel shirt as he joined us on the porch. His smile was as sharp as a polished scalpel.

“You’re welcome, my dear. Now, have you two been inside?” He grabbed the handle, unlocked the door, and shoved it open. “No? Well, no time like the present, eh?”

The foyer was just as I remembered it—wide and spacious at the base of an elegant wooden staircase, as if out of an old movie. A stained rug, haunted by a putrid stench, was framed by a pair of warped end tables. One was bare, the other sported an empty cream ceramic vase. A dusty painting of purple lilies kept the vase company. Sunlight slid through half-open shutters and dusty windows, painting shadows that my heart wished weren’t moving.

“It doesn’t look any better in the daylight,” I muttered. Cassidy nodded tensely.

“I never guessed that Valeria owned this place,” Dorian said airily as he breezed inside. “It makes sense that she dragged people here. I like to get takeout on occasion, too. This is a real fixer-upper.” He raised his eyebrows at dubious stains on a questionable throw rug at the base of the stairs. “Still, I’d have worked a bit harder on the ‘fixing’ part.”

I reviewed the ragged mental map in my head of the place from two weeks ago. There were scary holes in it. “Dorian, you and Valeria often tried to kill each other. That include here?”

The bloodleech raised his eyebrows at me, gray eyes fully astonished. “Please. I’d never. Manners and all that, even if that never really stopped her much. While I didn’t think she owned this place, trying to kill her in her home just felt… so pedestrian. We preferred free-range.”

Cassidy shot him a pained look. “I can’t even with you. It feels like I need a tetanus shot just from looking around.”

I rubbed one of my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Right. Okay. This place is wildly huge. I hate to say it… but if we split up, we’d cover more ground that way.” The logistics ran through my head. “I suppose… I’ll take the attic?”

“Oh no,” Dorian replied sternly. “Last time that was more than a bit dicey. I’ll take the second floor and attic.”

Cassidy gently touched my back. “I’ll take the basement again. Not fun since we know what she stacked down there like cordwood, but it won’t take long.”

I headed down the main hallway while Cassidy and Dorian departed for other parts of the manor. My first stop was the kitchen, where I found nothing worse than expired pickles and similar groceries. The fact that the fridge worked at all surprised me. After that was a basic storage closet, then a surprisingly normal office off the library.

“Oh, come on,” I grumbled, pausing in the library’s doorway.

My heart raced as two-week-old memories flashed before my eyes. Valeria transforming into a bloodleech down to claws and needle-teeth. That fight where she threw me into the wall, ripping the air out of me.

“No. I’ve got to do this,” I snarled at myself. “She’s not lurking out of sight… she’s dead. Move.”

One foot after the other, I rushed through the library and into the office.

The small side office was dusty and mostly brown, which was the highlight of its appearance. Compared to the rest of the house, it was actually clean. Given the lack of frantic horror in the decor, I swore the room actually looked refurbished.

A trio of five-foot-tall, gunmetal-gray filing cabinets stood against one wood-paneled wall. Two paintings, more lilies, decorated the opposite walls of the room. A mostly shuttered window looked out over a dead backyard. An ordinary wood-toned desk occupied the middle of the office.

“Vintage… 1980s? 90s?” I said, then methodically went after every drawer I could.

Nothing was locked, so in a few minutes I had covered the desk with newspaper clippings, files, and a staggering amount of handwritten story. Most of it was from the filing cabinets, but a few were from the desk.

“Lots of articles and notes about Meredith Rawls, Eugene Altamont, even Amanda Price.” I sorted the articles and frantic handwritten notes into some sort of order. “If I had to guess, Valeria was following the desk and the pens.” I furrowed my brow, sorting again. “Why the desk? I wonder if she was chasing down anything to do with Amanda Price, Ollie Hayes, and Martin Altamont.”

Then I found an old clipping from the 1950s with a photo of two men with familiar names.

“Oliver ‘Ollie’ Hayes and J. Stewart. Some sort of writing contest in Sleepy Hollow, New York?” I stared at the article. “J. Stewart. The name from the Bestiary.”

For a quiet moment, I stared holes into the newspaper clipping, lightly rubbing my thumb over the aged texture.

“… it put a question mark by his name. What does that even mean?”

I quickly stacked the papers together, then focused on a manila envelope I had found hidden in the back of a filing cabinet drawer. Inside were four flash drives. None labeled.

“My tablet’s in the car…” I mused.

“Daniel!” Cassidy charged into the room. Panting, she gulped two lungfuls of air, gesturing at me. “Phone not working downstairs. Basement. Now. Mason jars. Lots of Mason jars.”

I texted Dorian, then swept the papers under an arm and stuffed the flash drives in a pocket. “Lead the way.”

The basement was a stagnant mess of old cobwebs, bitter brown mold, and unearthed graves I didn’t want to look at. Scents of disturbed earth were as thick as fog off the water, trying to rob my lungs of air. I coughed as I reached the bottom stair, then followed Cassidy to the far side of the room with Dorian next to me. Cassidy’s find was in an old storage closet behind a rotten, hollow white door. Tall wooden shelves inside were crowded with jars.

“Mason jars,” I said in a low voice. “That’s what? A dozen? Two dozen?”

Dorian folded his arms over his chest, frowning at the jars. “Odd. Valeria never had an interest in making preserves. Didn’t have the patience for it.”

Cassidy scowled at the jars. “They’re not glowing.”

“No, they’re not,” I replied, surveying the rest of the small room. A shadow gaped overhead, with a dark rectangular frame suspended in the gloom above the closet’s sole dim light on the wall.

Dorian stopped moving, except for his eyes; they slid between Cassidy and me. “Glowing?”

“Yeah, glowing,” I said absently, feeling along the wall. My fingers found a switch, and I flipped it. A rattling hum came from overhead. “Hm. A dumbwaiter. Old, but still working. Where does this go? Kitchen?” I stiffened. “… that library?”

“Wait. What’s this about glowing jars?” Dorian asked warily.

Cassidy hesitantly gestured at the nearest Mason jar as if it might bite. “Glowing. Amanda Price, the lady who keeps attacking us, keeps one with her.” She pursed her lips. “These shouldn’t be here… unless Amanda Price knew Valeria. That would explain these jars.”

I rubbed a shoulder, wincing from the bruises. “It would. Amanda wasn’t any of the people who’ve bought Mason jars from our shop, though. There was that one lady from out of town; Craigbrook, I think.”

It was another few seconds before I realized Dorian hadn’t moved. He was still as a statue, staring at the jars, face wooden. Carefully, as if handling a bomb, he picked up a jar from the shelf. Gray clumps of soot inside it shifted to one side in a puff. I watched Dorian lose control of his human disguise. His eyes melted into solid black orbs. Skin shriveled like overheated paint, with reddish-purple veins pulsing into view.

I swapped a nervous look with Cassidy. “Um… Dorian…?”

He lightly tapped a black claw against the jar before gingerly returning it to the shelf, hands trembling. “Well,” he rasped, the word scraping from his throat. “That’s… interesting.” Slowly, his eyes trailed over the shelves, then out into the basement. He scrubbed his hands together, then once over the front of his flannel shirt, wrinkling it. “Cassidy? Daniel? Perhaps we should have the rest of this conversation… elsewhere?”

“Upstairs?” Cassidy asked in a hushed voice.

“Oh no,” the bloodleech replied airily, still looking like a walking nightmare. “I was thinking more like the land of the living. Such as your shop, which seems impervious to… things. Maybe even my house, which is even farther away.”

Somewhere above, the rafters creaked, followed by a low moan, as if the house itself had its own opinion.

“I found some flash drives we need to look over,” I suggested haltingly.

Dorian’s face rapidly shifted back into his all-too-perfect human appearance. His smile bordered on frantic. “Perfect! We should go look. Now. Better lighting.”

We practically ran to keep up as Dorian headed for the stairs, then out onto the manor’s front porch. He paused on the steps, letting out a ragged sigh. Cassidy stepped partway into his path.

“Dorian, what was that all about? That wasn’t like you,” she said crisply.

He sniffed, pulling on a smile as he glanced back at Briarwood.

“Cassidy, I’m sure Daniel hasn’t, but have you ever heard of a nightjar? Not the silly brown bird. The monsters who have a nasty habit of stuffing people like us into jars. Sort of ‘people preserves’ for later.”