Blackbird (A Stepbrother Romance #1)(2)
From the mist, the high chimneys and glowing lights fold into existence, vague shapes growing more solid as I approach. It catches in my chest.
This is my home. I am going home.
Except I’m not. Now the high walls with their jagged glass tops and wrought iron spear points are there to keep me out, not in. My home no longer.
One of the oldest continuously occupied homes in the entire state, the Amsel estate is sprawling expanse of almost three hundred acres. Kolonie, my great-great-insert-more-greats grandfather named it. It’s the German word for rookery. The family name, Amsel, means Blackbird. The house sits far back from the road, so far back, in fact, that in the deep gloom of a cloudy moonless night the only thing visible is the windows, like the distant lights of Xanadu or that green light in The Great Gatsby.
I didn’t pay any attention in high school English, but I used to know somebody who cared a lot about that shit, and it meant I started caring about it, too.
If I keep driving half a mile there will be a break in the ancient brick wall that surrounds the wilds of the estate. The trees peel away and there’s a huge wrought iron gate, almost fifteen feet tall, overtopping the wall itself by five feet. I’ve been casing the place for a while now. The new owners patched some broken places in the wall.
My ancestors coated the very top with broken glass, and the wall is also adorned with six inch long wrought iron spikes, each wickedly sharp. When they built the walls there was a real possibility the house might actually be attacked.
On top of the old school security system, there’s all the modern conveniences. Motion sensors, cameras, and a pack of dobermans running on the property. Silent sentinels. I’ve always liked dobermans. They don’t f*ck around with barking, they just rip out your throat. If you toss them some sausage they’ll eat it after they finish with you. Good, loyal, no nonsense dogs.
The place is a fortress, and with good reason.
It’s old, though, and old houses have secrets. They start to love their families.
I could go on and on about my family. It used to be a huge extended network, all over the East coast. Distant relatives of mine fought on both sides of the Civil War, and both sides of the Revolutionary War, but only on one side of the French and Indian War. I can trace my ancestry back to a Hessian mercenary who switched sides and married into the family and took the Amsel name for himself, as the current patriarch at the time had only daughters. They did things like that back then.
Later on, the owners of the house were abolitionists, and the estate was a stop on the Underground Railroad. That’s where I’m headed now.
I’m not sure who owns the farm that borders my family home, but the dilapidated barn is still there, edging up to the wall. I pull the Toyota off the road, bounce and jounce down a dirt track, and pull it right into the barn. I’m going to leave it here. It’s not mine anyway, and after today I won’t need it anymore. Four-thirty in the morning, now. Plenty of time, plenty of time. I leave the keys in the ignition and the doors unlocked.
Dad showed me this tunnel once. It still stands. In the barn, in the back corner, the half-rotted floorboard lifts up. The tunnel is dark, and barely tall enough for me to stand, bending my head a little. I take a flashlight and a stick. It’s always full of spiders. I f*cking hate spiders. Suffer not the arachnid to live. I think that’s in the Bible somewhere.
If it’s not, it should be.
The tunnel is sixty feet long, shored up with old timbers that are so hard they may as well be stone. It looks like a mine shaft in a cowboy movie. When I was a kid, I was terrified of this place. Of course, it’s November and it’s freezing cold at night, so the few times I have to knock down the web the one that made it is already dead, spindly legs curled up on themselves. I didn’t need much encouragement to stay out of here when I was a kid but Dad made it very clear I wasn’t ever to travel the tunnel alone; once he was younger then I was the first time he showed it to me, he found a nest of black widows and it was just luck that he didn’t put his foot in it and get bitten half a hundred times. Probably would have killed him. Adults can usually survive the widow’s bite, but not that many.
When I emerge from the other side I’m covered in dust and a little dirt and my stick is coated with filmy old spider silk.
I toss it aside and cut off the flashlight, then take a few minutes for my eyes to adjust.
I make it about twenty yards when the dogs show up.
They fold out of the darkness on silent legs, black specters with bobbed tails and cropped ears that make them look like silky black devils. I stop and they surround me, staring, silent. One by one they bare their fangs.
One of them is older than the others, gray hairs silvery on his dark face. He pads over, the stump of his tail twitching as he tries to wag. I crouch down and offer him my hand. He sniffs, and gives me a friendly lick as I scratch behind his ears.
“Hey, buddy,” I whisper. “I wish I could remember which one you were.”
The others take their cue from the leader, surrounded me and sniff at me and I pet them one by one. They’d rip out an intruder’s throat and leave his rotting carcass to be found by the groundskeeper in the morning.
I’m not an intruder. The intruders are inside, sleeping in my f*cking house.
One step at a time.
After I pay my respects to the dogs, I move silently through the grounds. This section is wooded, kept wooded to conceal the movements of runaway slaves and the new owners have let it run wild. There are oaks here that stood before the United States was the United States. Hell, the ivy growing on some of the trees is older than that. It’s like walking through some ancient forest. Dobermans hadn’t been developed yet but my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather probably walked these woods with a pack of hounds, just like I am now.