Read Online The Shadow and the Night: Glenncailty Castle, Book 3 by Lila Dubois - Free Book Online

said dreamily.
    For a minute Melissa shivered—the atmosphere was getting to her. The wind howled through the broken window, the shadows wavered as the lights in the hall flickered. Sorcha, with her pale skin, waves of red hair and eerily distant stare, looked like the kind of woman you would expect to see whispering about ghosts while standing in the rain. The only thing she was missing was a billowing white dress.
    “Tristan can see the ghosts.” Sorcha blinked and seemed to come back into herself. “God protect us.”
    Tristan’s face was grim, deep furrows bracketing his mouth. “You see them?” he asked Sorcha.
    “I did. I think I was inside her, the mother, or she was inside me.”
    “We know.” Séan touched her arm. “You were...talking.”
    “Did you understand her?” Melissa asked Séan. “I didn’t get it all.” Though she didn’t believe the other woman had been possessed, which is what Sorcha was implying, it was interesting.  
    “What did I say?” Sorcha asked.
    It was Séan who answered. “You said...that you had to kill them, your children, to hurt him.”
    Tears filled Sorcha’s eyes, and she nodded. “The father, the Lord of Glenncailty, killed the oldest boy because he looked and acted Irish. She was angry, so angry.” Sorcha rubbed her arms.  
    “He kills one child, she kills two, and then he kills her.” Tristan shook his head. “That pain, that rage... They are not ghosts.”
    “I saw them, I felt them. What can they be if not ghosts?” Sorcha asked desperately.
    The mother of all collective hallucinations. Melissa kept that theory to herself.
    “Memories.” Tristan’s gaze scanned the room, and for a moment Melissa believed that he could see something. “They are memories so strong that they left a mark. Ghosts are souls, left wandering because they cannot leave. These are not true ghosts, they are moments of history that even time cannot erase.”
    “We can’t...we can’t make them go away?” Sorcha asked.  
    “No.”
    “We need to leave, run.”
    “I…can’t.” Tristan said, his voice filled with both horror and resignation.
    Melissa had had enough. She wouldn’t let this go on any longer. Since Sorcha now seemed relatively normal, she went to Tristan. Taking his wrist in her right hand, she took his pulse—it was racing. Whatever he thought was going on, it was having a true physical effect on him. “All right, I believe you believe there’s something going on here.”
    Tristan laughed, but it was a sad sound. “You don’t trust what you can’t see?”
    “I’ve seen more dead bodies, graves and horrifying things than most people,” Melissa told him quietly. “Trust me, if there were ghosts, I’d know about it.”
    It was time to end this. Leaving Tristan in the doorway, she went to her kit and pulled out a few things she always carried with her. “Ghosts, or memories, or whatever you want to call them, don’t exist, but people’s reactions are very real. That I can help with.” She took two road flares and an emergency horn out of the bottom of the kit.
    “Most major religions have exorcism rituals,” she said. She’d found that explaining often helped people snap out of it. “They are called a variety of things. I’m not a cultural anthropologist, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you what the exact commonalities and differences are, but I know there are similar elements used in most. The first is fire.”
    She popped the caps from the flares. There was a hiss and then red flame sputtered to life. She turned in a circle, moving slowly and solemnly. There was no mocking in what she did—her belief in the supernatural was non-existent. Her belief in the human mind and the need for ritual was ironclad.
    “The second common element is sound.” Holding up the emergency beacon, she braced herself and pressed the button. The siren was so loud it was nearly physically painful. Sorcha and Séan both bolted from the room, hands clapped over