The Cursed Blood, стр. 36
My milk arrived and the waiter smiled down at me understandingly, offering to give me more time to consider my lunch order. I gulped down a bit and tried to concentrate on the menu. There was quite a bit to choose from. I didn’t even notice he had gone, kindly giving me time to think.
When next I glanced up from the menu, I was startled to see the pale, little boy, his parents’ hands in his, staring at me. It seemed he had brought them over on their way back to their rooms.
He smiled.
“I’m sorry, little Billy just insisted on coming to see you, I have no idea why…” The tearful mother apologized, wiping at her splotchy face and running makeup with the cuff of her expensive sweater as the dad, pale and silent just gazed at me numbly.
“You’ve lost your mommy and daddy, haven’t you?” Billy asked in the sweet innocent way really little kids do that leaves you speechless. He nodded his understanding before I could answer. “I thought so… It’s not so bad, you know. It really isn’t. You don’t have to be so sad all the time—you can even see them again, if you want… It might make you feel better?”
He giggled and began to pull his stunned and mortified parents away as they tried to offer me another heartful apology. Leaving me sitting there stunned and shaking like a leaf with hot tears streaming down my face.
He waved happily as they exited the dining area. I couldn’t bring myself to wave back. Something his smile told me he completely forgave and understood as the family walked down the hall, Billy playfully pulling them along.
Gramps and Grandma Mary arrived not long after, and noting my pale face and unnerved expression, they knew something was up. Not surprisingly my Clairvoyant Grandmother almost immediately sighed and leapt into an explanation as Gramps eyed the luxurious room uncomfortably.
“Some spirits, particularly the little ones will sense the sadness in one such as yourself miles off. The poor things can’t help themselves. If they can ease your suffering, they will try,” Grandma Mary explained wistfully as the waiter sat an uncorked cloth wrapped bottle of champagne in a silver ice bucket on the table and bowed away.
“Of course, not all spirits are so benign. Some can be quite malevolent and dangerous, especially here—so much psychic energy and ethereal tampering guaranteed to attract the worst of them like bees to honey. And those too will be attracted to the energies you all but pulsate with, my dear… And they will not be interesting in helping, I assure you,” she warned seriously as Gramps poured her a healthy measure of champagne then filled his own glass with much less of the bubbly amber liquid.
“He will be dealing with one with me later this afternoon,” Gramps announced as he set the bottle back into the ice bucket, carefully trying to avoid his sixth wife’s eyes as he said it.
“Yes, I know,” she asserted unhappily. “The one in Room 33, am I correct?”
“Yup,” Gramps nodded a bit distractedly.
“I won’t dare tell you how to be a Darkling, but I have to say as the boy’s grandmother that I am far from comfortable with that. What resides in Room 33 is pure evil. It’s not a thing to be trifled with.”
“I’m not in the habit of trifling with poltergeists,” Gramps snorted, but his departed spouse was far from amused.
“You think it’s just a simple poltergeist, do you?” Her question and glare melted the smile from his lips, and he sat down his glass in sudden uneasy interest. “It alone is a black, suffocating evil aura that all but covers that cursed room in a darkness I’ve never felt the likes of before. Even should you manage to banish it there’s no real guarantee it will stay gone.”
“Why do some of them look… Well,” I thought about the strange maid and the guy with the hole in his head and shuddered. “Different?” I asked uneasily as I stared about the room.
“Different how?” Grandmother Mary demanded sharply, but not unkindly after sharing a troubled look with Gramps.
“Well, some, like you, look pale—but normal…”
“Well, I’m delighted to know I look normal, dear.” She chuckled. Something deeply troubled shimmering in her eyes as she laughed a fake little bell like laugh. “My love, do I look just normal to you?”
Gramps ignored her nervous attempt at fishing a compliment from him and eyed me with obvious trepidation while worrying at his sleeve button and chewing at his lip.
“Well, you’re beautiful,” I assured her honestly, something that seemed to please her immensely. “But some of them look, well…more really dead than others,” I explained.
“Do they now?” Grandmother Mary asked softly. “How so precisely?”
In explanation I pointed to a man with a twisted, broken looking nose and sandy hair in a cheap looking suit who had just walked in and was glaring about the room. His neck was awkwardly bent, fingers itching at his collar which was rimmed with an unnervingly red stain and did little to hide the ear to ear cut along his throat.
They glanced over at him and shrugged, then looked back to me. “What exactly do you see?” Grandmother Mary inquired, as if she dreaded the answer.
“His throats been slit.” A shiver went through me as I stared, which he noticed. He glared back, snarled, and stormed out of the dining area in an obvious huff.
Grandmother Mary swallowed and again gave her widowed husband a strange look and a nod. He sighed and again shrugged.
“You can’t see it, can you?” I asked them both. Pointedly they didn’t answer, and I took the hint and let the matter drop. As annoying as it was, I was somehow getting used to not getting answers.
Just then the food arrived, saving them from answering what seemed to be an extraordinarily