Free The Restorer by Amanda Stevens Page B

waiting for Papa. Finally, I got up and walked back toward the gate. I saw someone standing just outside and I started to call out to him.
    Then with a shudder, I realized it wasn’t Papa. But I knew him. It was the ghost of the old man I’d seen when I was nine years old. I stood on hallowed ground, so he posed no immediate threat to me, but he terrified me just the same. His presence after all these years seemed menacing, a manifestation of the unrest that had afflicted my ordered little kingdom.
    He looked exactly as I remembered him. Tall, gaunt, with long white hair brushing the collar of his suit coat. Glacial eyes and a faintly sinister demeanor.
    I felt another presence and glanced over my shoulder.
    Papa had come up behind me. His hair was white, too, but he kept it cropped close to his head and his eyes were faded, his demeanor remote but not at all threatening.
    He seemed focused on some distant point, but I knew the ghost had caught his attention.
    “You see him, too, don’t you?” I whispered as my gaze strayed back to the gate.
    “Don’t look at him!”
    His harsh tone startled me, though I didn’t outwardly re act. “I’m not.”
    “Here.” He took my arm and turned me toward the angels. “Let’s sit a spell.”
    We sank to the ground, our backs to the ghost, just as we had when I was nine. For the longest time, neither of us spoke, but I could sense Papa’s tension and what I thought might be fear. I shivered in the gathering darkness and drew up my legs, resting my chin on my knees.
    “Papa, who is he? What is he?” I finally asked.
    He wouldn’t look at me, but fixed his gaze instead on the statues. “A harbinger…a messenger. I don’t know.”
    The chill inside me deepened. A harbinger of what? A messenger for whom? “Have you seen him before? I mean…since that day?”
    “No.”
    “Why has he come back? Why now after all these years?”
    “Maybe it’s a warning,” Papa said.
    “What kind of warning?”
    Slowly, he turned to face me. “You tell me, child. Has something happened?”
    And then I knew. Something had happened. Something had shifted in this world and the next. Everything had been changing from the moment John Devlin had stepped out of the mist.
    My arms tightened around my legs. I couldn’t stop shaking.
    Papa placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “What have you done, Amelia?”
    Now it was I who couldn’t look at him. “I met someone. A police detective named John Devlin. He’s haunted by two ghosts, a woman and a little girl. Last night the ghost child came to my garden. Papa, she knew I could see her. She tried to communicate with me. And then this morning, I found a tiny ring in the garden where I saw her disappear.”
    “What did you do with this ring?”
    “I buried it where I found it.”
    “You have to rid yourself of it,” he said, and then his voice took on an edge of something I’d never heard from him before. I couldn’t quite put a name to it. “You have to return it from where it came.”
    I looked at him, startled. “Return it…to the ghost?”
    “Take it to the place where the child died. Or to her grave. Just get rid of it. And promise me you will never see this man again.”
    “I’m not sure it’s that simple.”
    “It is that simple,” he insisted. “There are consequences to breaking the rules. You know that.”
    His stern voice put me on the defensive. “But I didn’t break the rules—”
    “Keep your distance from those who are haunted,” he recited. “If they seek you out, turn away from them, for they constitute a terrible threat and cannot be trusted.”
    I thought of Devlin asleep in my office, draining me of energy. I didn’t dare tell Papa about that.
    “You must not allow this man into your life,” he warned. “You must not tempt fate.”
    “Papa—”
    “Listen to me, Amelia. There are entities you’ve never seen before. Forces I dare not even speak of. They are colder, stronger, hungrier than any