In the space of a heartbeat, it was gone.
The smell vanished, the cold faded and Devlin seemed to shake off his trance as he leaped from bed and reached for the lamp. Light flooded the room, revealing nothing amiss in that tiny space but the rumpled bedsheets and our discarded clothing.
I scrambled out of bed and into my jeans, hands trembling so badly I couldn’t manage the snap. Drawing on a T-shirt, I curled up in a chair and hugged my knees to my chest as I watched Devlin move about the room, shirtless and barefoot. He’d pulled on his pants, not bothering to buckle the belt as he checked windows and doors in full police-detective mode. I heard him moving around in the bathroom and when he came back out, he even searched under the bed.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” I asked on a shaky breath.
He shot me a glance that I couldn’t decipher as he opened the front door and scanned the porch. “I saw something,” he admitted. “Wait here while I take a look outside.”
I jumped up from the chair. “Don’t go out there!”
He turned with a scowl. “It’s okay. I’ll just be a minute. Where’s your flashlight? All I have is a penlight.”
I unzipped my backpack and fished out the light. “There’s a loose connection. You may have to give it a thump.”
He tapped it on. “Lock the door behind me.”
That won’t do any good! “Maybe I should wait for you on the front porch.”
He looked as if he wanted to argue, but then nodded. I followed him out the door, watching from the top step as he disappeared around the corner of the cottage. My gaze lifted to the back of Nelda’s house where the light in the upstairs window still shone. I wanted to take comfort in that lonely beacon, but instead I found myself wondering who was still awake at this hour and what were they up to.
Devlin came back around the cottage, playing the flashlight beam all along the edge of the porch.
“Did you find anything?” I asked anxiously.
“I saw some fresh footprints in the dirt below the bedroom window. Someone may have been looking for a way in.”
“Someone or something?”
That seemed to give him pause. “Let’s go back inside.”
I turned with trepidation toward the doorway. I could see the bed from where I stood, and my gaze automatically scaled the wall over the headboard.
Devlin came up behind me. “Nothing’s in there. It was only a shadow.”
I tightened my arms around my middle. “It wasn’t a shadow. I felt it on my skin. It was touching my hair.” I remembered the phantom tongue along my jaw and shuddered. “I know you saw it.”
“What I saw was the breeze stirring your hair,” he insisted. “The wind is up because a storm’s moving in. That also explains the static electricity.”
“There was no breeze inside. The doors and windows were closed.”
“The window in the bathroom was open.”
Had I not shut it earlier after my bath? I couldn’t remember, but it hardly mattered because the entity didn’t need an open window or an unlocked door. It could just have easily come up through the cracks in the floorboards.
“What about the smell?” I asked.
“The jasmine?” He flicked the beam down into the garden. “There’s a trellis of it near the patio.”
I gazed back at him in shock. I’d smelled Papa’s witch hazel, but the entity had manifested Devlin’s daughter’s favorite flower to entice him. It could use any scent. Invade any space in search of a conduit through which it could work its evil.
“We both know it was there,” I whispered.
Devlin took my arm. “Come back inside. I want to show you something.”
Reluctantly, I let him lead me back through the door and then I watched anxiously as he moved around the bed to turn off the lamp. Darkness and claustrophobia enveloped me and I had to fight the urge to flee back outside to the porch.
“Look at the wall over the bed,” Devlin instructed.
I didn’t want to. I wanted to squeeze my eyes closed so that, like my great-grandmother before me, I could unsee the unspeakable.
“Do you see it?” he asked and I shifted my focus to the space above the headboard. Something moved on the wall. My pulse jumped before I realized it was the silhouette of a tree branch thrashing in the breeze.
“That doesn’t explain the look I saw on your face,” I said. “You were frightened.”
“I was alarmed,” he said. “And with good reason. Someone stood outside that window looking in on us. Whoever it was cast a shadow on the wall, and the wind in the tree branches created an illusion of movement.”
I almost wished I could buy the explanation of a Peeping Tom. The notion of Micah Durant or anyone else spying on us made me ill, but the alternative was far more distressing. “That still doesn’t explain the look I saw on your face,” I said stubbornly. Or the reflection I’d glimpsed in his eyes.