Free Ruined 2 - Dark Souls by Paula Morris Page A

open at the neck. There was something across the base of his throat — a dark line, like a ribbon or a leather string. Miranda squinted, trying to make it out. The candle flickered again, its flame dancing and quivering. And she realized that it wasn’t a ribbon around his neck, or any kind of jewelry. It was a wound, dark with blood or bruising.
    The guy in the window smiled at her — just the glimmer of a smile — and raised his right hand to the window, resting his palm on the pane in an exact mirror image of her gesture. A chill rippled through Miranda’s hand. The glass was cold, of course; it was snowing outside. But this was a sudden, intense cold, turning her fingertips numb and shooting some kind of electric currents down her arm. Miranda knew this cold. She knew exactly what it meant.
    Miranda wanted to pull away from the window, but she couldn’t. This was different from seeing the face in the river, or the farmer, or the little girl in Bedern, or the ash people. She wasn’t scared. She didn’t want to cry out or run away. All she could do was keep looking into that beautiful face with its sad, dark eyes, feeling the cold of his hand burn its way into hers.
    The candle’s flame dwindled and then, as abruptly as last time, was extinguished. Miranda could see nothing but inky darkness through the haze of snow, and her hand, still pressed against the class, stopped tingling. It just felt limp and heavy, not zinging with electricity. Her legs started to feel stiff, cramped from kneeling in one position.
    Her heart was still hammering. She’d thought he was real, but the guy in the attic was a ghost. A ghost with a terrible wound.
    Crawling back into bed, Miranda flicked on her bedside lamp. The book, she thought, reaching for it — not
Northanger Abbey,
but the book she’d been reading earlier that afternoon. The Shambles was a famous old street; maybe there was something about the gorgeous ghost in
Tales of Old York.
She turned its musty pages, looking for a chapter on the shambles. maybe there would be something here to give her a clue.
    Many local folk claim to have seen ghostly apparitions along the Shambles, although for a street so ancient and alive with history, it has surprisingly few consistent legends of hauntings andsupernatural occurrences. But during the nineteenth century, numerous witnesses reported a sighting in an upper window of one of the oldest houses in the street. The spirit in question was a young man, purported to be the ghost of an apprentice garroted by his cruel master.
    Garroted
— that meant strangled, Miranda remembered, though where she’d learned that word, she wasn’t sure. Probably one of her father’s gory stories about some medieval king’s evil hobbies. The dark stain at the young man’s throat: It had to be a bruise, the kind caused by a rope drawn tight around his neck. This was the ghost she’d seen tonight, the ghost who’d appeared to her in the attic window. He could be two hundred years old by now. Still sad, still haunting the street where he died. Still insanely beautiful — dark, handsome, angular.
    Miranda lay the book down and wriggled low under the covers. If only
this
guy were living and breathing, and Nick were the ghost, she thought, feeling instantly guilty for thinking something that mean. Nick was just so odd — spiky and caustic. There was something beyond edgy about him. She was sure he was going to get her into trouble, somehow. Even though she wanted to meet up with him tomorrow at dusk, it was out of curiosity, not infatuation. This was nothing like the thing Rob clearly had for Sally, where he was all puppy-dog smitten with someone he barely knew. Nick could see ghosts, just like Miranda could; he seemed to know how to navigate thatworld. She wanted to hear what he had to say, to see what he had to show her.
    The guy in the attic window, on the other hand: He didn’t need to say anything.
    When he looked at her, everything else seemed