Accursed by Amber Benson Read Free Book Online Page A

waving one hand in the air. “Try to get along with Sophia. For my sake?”
    For several moments she only looked at him. Finally, she nodded slowly. “All right. But you’ll need to have the same chat with her, if you want my efforts to bear fruit. Now go on, and leave me to dress. You’ll have Farris bring the carriage ’round?”
    “Twenty minutes?” William asked.
    Tamara considered her unruly hair and how quickly she could tame it. “Best make it thirty. We don’t want to offend our hosts, but I’d like to look in on Father before we go.”
    William hesitated as though he had more to say, then seemed to think better of it.
    “Thirty minutes, then.”

    A FTER HER FRUSTRATING argument with William, Tamara had been even more determined to follow Byron’s suggestion. As promised, she wore her most daring dress, a deep saffron with a bodice that cut low across her bosom such that her every breath might draw the eye. It was a lovely dress. Tamara had purchased it while shopping with Victoria Markham one afternoon the previous year, but she had never had the temerity to wear it. Now that she had at last put it on, she found it a bit heavy, the domed skirt spreading broadly around her. It certainly had not been created for comfort.
    Much as she loved her brother, there had always been a certain friction between them. By his very nature he was cautious, relying too much upon logic and too little on instinct. Tamara was his opposite in so many ways. Like her grandfather, she had many passions and loved to indulge her imagination. In the absence of a mother—for theirs had died quite young—William had taken it upon himself to watch over his younger sister, and she had bristled with his every attempt to subject her to his own claustrophobic sense of propriety. He was a kind and decent man and a good brother, but Tamara knew that they would never quite understand each other.
    The house was disturbingly silent now as she made her way up the stairs to the third floor. There were only three rooms on this floor: the music room, the nursery, and the bedroom that had once belonged to the governess who had looked after William and Tamara when they were very young.
    Until the previous fall, all three of the rooms had been empty for years. Now a constant din arose from the nursery—the one farthest from the main hall of the household. Mad screams could be heard echoing through Ludlow House at all hours of the day and evening.
    Her boot heels scuffed the stairs as she trod upward, a bowl of cold soup in her hands, her reticule dangling from her left wrist. A pair of lamps were mounted in sconces on the wall at the top of the steps, but they offered only a very little light. In truth, the darkness always seemed deeper up here, as though no matter how brightly the fire might burn it could push the shadows back only so far.
    Each time she strode down this hallway she felt ice form along her spine, and her throat went dry. Her eyes burned with tears she would not allow herself to shed. They would be wasted should she allow them to fall, and Tamara was stronger than that.
    There would come another time for tears, of that she was certain. For now, however, there was life to be lived and a war to be fought. A war against the darkness. And if she could not yet win the battle against the fiend that was locked in the room there at the top of the house, well, she had not surrendered hope.
    Nor would she ever, as long as she drew breath.
    In the gloom of the hallway she had to narrow her eyes to see the figure standing in front of the door of the nursery. Only as Tamara grew nearer could she make out the image, more like the suggestion of a presence. If she turned her head slightly the form would disappear, but from a certain angle the image of the specter was clear.
    Had she still been of flesh and blood, the ghost would have been the tallest woman Tamara had ever seen, taller even than most men she had known. Her red hair was a wild