Secret Sanctuary. Amanda Stevens

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      But for just a split second, Elizabeth’s mind wandered, and she thought about Cullen Ryan, a boy she’d had a crush on for ages. In trouble with the law, he’d dropped out of high school the year before and left town in the middle of the night. Elizabeth had no idea where he’d gone, or if she would ever see him again. But she prayed that wherever he was, he was safe, too.

      And at the very moment when her concentration was weakened, when the spiritual circle was broken, thunder cracked overhead and a scream ripped through the darkness.

      Claire!

      The girls scrambled to their feet and raced toward the mausoleum. The door was stuck at first, but Kat managed to shove it open. The beam of her flashlight chased away shadows and shimmered off cobwebs suspended from the ornate ceiling. The scent of death and decay permeated the air, but there was no sign of Claire.

      Elizabeth’s heart started to pound with a terrible fear, a horrible premonition. She knew what had happened. While she’d been thinking about Cullen, the protective circle had been broken. The evil had been allowed in, and now Claire was gone.

      And it was all Elizabeth’s fault.

      Chapter One

      Five years later…

      Elizabeth peered through her rain-spattered windshield as she wended her way around the curving drive toward the lighted mansion. February-bare oaks reached skeletal arms across the narrow lane, entwining with one another to form a natural arbor through which only thin tendrils of light could creep. The night was very dark.

      Comprising well over a hundred acres of landscaped grounds, the Pierce compound—hidden from prying eyes by eight-foot, ivy-covered stone walls and thick stands of evergreens—was a masterpiece of design and privacy. The focal point was a lavish brick colonial owned by William and Maureen Pierce, the town’s most prominent citizens.

      A Pierce ancestor had founded Moriah’s Landing in 1652, and the descendants had lived there ever since. The family remained active in many areas, most notably politics and science. Rumor had it that William and Maureen’s lavish masquerade ball tonight was not only to continue the celebration that had begun on New Year’s Eve to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the town’s founding, but to help launch their eldest son’s first political campaign.

      Elizabeth liked Drew Pierce well enough and she thought he’d make a fine mayor, especially considering she didn’t particularly care for the current one, Fredrick Thane. But in spite of the gossip regarding Drew and the potential for fireworks when Mayor Thane made his appearance at the ball, Elizabeth wasn’t looking forward to this night. She’d never been particularly adept at socializing, and a masked ball was a little out of her league.

      But then, disguising herself as someone other than who she truly was might not be such a bad thing, she decided. A seventeenth-century noblewoman, dressed to kill in a lavish gold ball gown with a plunging neckline, might know how to seize the moment—should one present itself—as Elizabeth Douglas never had.

      She tugged at that neckline, discomfited by the amount of cleavage showing. Her new WonderBra, she decided, was truly that.

      A bolt of lightning temporarily blinded her, and she slowed the car. Dark, roiling clouds hung low on the horizon, and over the sound of her car engine, she could hear the ominous rumble of thunder.

      Earlier, when the first raindrops had pelted the roof of her cozy cottage, she’d hurried over to the window to stare out, thinking with a fatalistic shrug that, naturally, it would storm tonight. It always stormed in Moriah’s Landing on momentous occasions—such as, she’d been told, on the night twenty years ago when Kat Ridgemont’s mother had been murdered. And fifteen years later, on the night Claire Cavendish had vanished from the old haunted mausoleum.

      Claire had been found in the cemetery several days later, her body tortured, her mind so tormented she hadn’t been able to tell anyone what had happened to her. She’d resided ever since in a mental hospital a hundred miles west of Moriah’s Landing, and every time Elizabeth drove up to visit her friend, she was stricken with guilt.

      Which wasn’t rational, she knew. There was nothing she could have done to save Claire that night. She and the other girls had never even seen who took Claire. To this day, the authorities still didn’t know how the assailant had managed to get inside that mausoleum, subdue Claire and carry her off without anyone having seen anything.

      At first, the girls had been under a cloud of suspicion—a sorority initiation ceremony gone terribly awry. But they were all so distraught, so terrified that the police had finally believed their wild tale.

      To think that any of them would have done such a horrible thing to poor Claire….

      Rounding a sharp curve, Elizabeth was momentarily facing eastward, and in the distance, she caught a glimpse of the Bluffs, a towering stone castle perched on the edge of a steep cliff that fell sharply away to the sea. It was there, on the jagged rocks below the castle, that Tasha Pierce had met with a horrible fate of her own, only one month after Claire had been found. It had been storming that night, too.

      First Claire and then Tasha.

      There were only three of them left, Elizabeth thought. She, Kat and Brie. And poor Brie hadn’t exactly led a charmed life. She’d had to drop out of college after becoming pregnant, and she’d struggled ever since to take care of her fatherless child and her ill mother.

      Elizabeth frowned. Sometimes she couldn’t help wondering if they’d unleashed something terrible that night. Something evil. Sometimes she wondered if she and Kat would be next.

      But then, Kat had already suffered. Her mother had been murdered when Kat was only three years old, and the killer had never been apprehended.

      That left only Elizabeth.

      As lightning fired the eastern sky, the castle came into sharp relief for just a split second. It was miles away, but Elizabeth could have sworn she saw a dark figure lurking on one of the turrets.

      David Bryson, she thought with a shiver. The man who might or might not have killed her friend, Tasha.

      Pulling up in front of the Pierce mansion, Elizabeth waited as two valets came rushing toward the car to meet her. One carried an umbrella which he used to shield her from the rain when she stepped outside, and the other climbed behind the wheel to park her new Audi. Elizabeth winced as the tires squealed against the wet pavement, but to her credit, she didn’t look back. Instead, she wrapped her velvet cloak more tightly around her as she hurried up the granite steps.

      As if of their own accord, the massive oak doors swung open, and Elizabeth stepped inside. Her cloak was removed from her shoulders, and she took a moment to arrange the shimmering folds of her gown. When she glanced up, she caught her breath.

      She’d been to the mansion before, but it had been a long time ago, before Tasha’s death, and Elizabeth had forgotten the elegance of the place, the sheer opulence.

      A set of inlaid marble steps led down to an immense, sunken hall with a chessboard floor of black and white. Directly across the foyer, a magnificent staircase was crowned by a ten-foot cathedral window through which sunshine would pour in the daytime. Tonight, however, lightning flickered through dark clouds as rain slashed against the glass.

      Below the window, the staircase СКАЧАТЬ