Page 24 of How the Belle Stole Christmas

Silas awoke again in his bed, with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He’d been standing in Grace’s tenement room … And then he’d been here. The Ghost of Christmas Present had shown him what he needed to see and then abandoned him just as its associate had done.

The room had grown so cold that frost etched the corners of the windows.

Silas’s breath hung in the dim air. Had he been gone for seconds or hours?

He sat up abruptly, every sense on high alert, as the door swung open, an impossibly slow arc that filled him with dread.

A figure emerged from the hallway—its deep, midnight robe obscuring any suggestion of form, a face hidden beneath a heavy cowl.

The final spirit glided toward him, this one more terrifying by far than the others before it. Silas searched the shadows for escape, for meaning, for anything but this dark apparition of what might yet come.

A slow chill spread through his chest, a sensation of suffocation.

The ghost’s robe rippled with a soundless motion, each thread woven from the essence of night itself, trailing a darkness that swallowed even shadow.

The candle trembled, then flickered again, mirroring the churning in his gut.

This was it—the final harbinger of his fate.

Silas’s hands gripped the bedding, knuckles white, skin nearly as pale.

The terror this spirit roused bore down on him with such force that he wondered how he did not collapse beneath it.

He did not want to know the future. He was terrified to find out he’d failed yet again, that Emmaline had not survived, that Grace hated him.

Silas’s mouth opened in a shallow gasp, not of surprise—no, not after what he’d already seen—but of futile protest, a sound barely escaping his lips before being choked by the bitterly cold air.

The tattered hem of the ghost’s robe curled around the guttering candle, and it submitted at last to darkness, snuffed out by the shadow that even now wound its fingers toward the hearth.

Finally, the spirit loomed over him, seemingly without a face or a voice.

“Are you the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?” Silas asked in a shaky voice, somehow already knowing that it would not answer.

The spirit merely took his hand, and suddenly they were in a cemetery.

Fog spilled across the tombstones, shrouding everything in gray until even the distance between sky and ground disappeared.

A path, barely visible, wove in broken lines of tangled weeds and tilted stones, and Silas found himself walking upon it, led by the dark spirit.

His footfalls were hollow, noisy behind the silent gliding of the specter.

Finally, the mist parted, revealing a small, weathered headstone.

The name—Emmaline Hollybrook—carved itself into his vision, stark and shattering.

He dropped to his knees, the cold, wet earth imprinting its finality on his skin as he reached out a trembling hand.

A second figure emerged from the shadows, and he knew before he saw her face, knew by the droop of her shoulders and the absence of her joy, that it was Grace, older and deeply alone.

His breath caught, and Silas fought to reclaim it. No! This cannot be! He refused to believe it. The spirit paused, its dark presence casting shadows tangled with the low mist.

His eyes filled with tears, and the letters of Emmaline’s name blurred and refocused, stark white against the gray, an accusation and an elegy etched in stone.

He traced them with unsteady fingers, the rough surface grazing his skin like a wound torn open.

Eleven years. That’s all she’d had. Christmas Day one year from the present.

The dates beneath her name gouged the truth deeper into his conscience, marking not just the brevity of her life but the interminable length of his guilt.

The spirit lingered, offering no relief. Silas bowed his head, tears streaking down his cheeks, and then turned toward Grace.

Silas’s heart constricted at Grace’s evident sorrow.

Her features had aged in this desolate future; every line and shadow seemed carved by years of sacrifice and solitude.

A single, wilted flower dangled from her hand, its petals as pale and fragile as the life for which it stood.

He watched as she knelt by the grave, placed the bloom with a gentle, deliberate movement, and let her fingers linger on the stone, an echo of his own desperate touch moments before.

Grace straightened slowly, and Silas saw the full extent of what he’d done—and what he’d failed to prevent—engraved upon her.

It was there in the way she wiped the rain from her brow and in the silent set of her lips.

Where once she had carried herself with grace and defiance, now there was only a hollow dignity, the pride of one who endured what she must because there was no other choice.

He tried to call out, to break the silence with some sound of contrition, but the gravity of her grief swallowed his voice.

Grace turned away. Her shoulders slumped, and he saw in them every moment he wasn’t there, every piece of himself he’d withheld and could not reclaim. The flower wilted further, and his eyes stung.

The spirit hovered, immense and unyielding, as Silas focused on the listless sway of Grace’s dress, the soft crunch of her footsteps on the path, the vast, silent absence she left behind.

He stood like another grave marker, petrified by what his neglect would cause, and felt the deadening weight of consequence settle into his bones.

At last, the distance swallowed Grace, and the ghost turned its attention to Silas alone, the hollow intensity of its silence nearly more than he could stand.

“Can I change it?” Silas asked, dreading the answer. “Please, tell me I can still change it.”

In response, the ghost turned and led him farther into the cemetery, to a plain wooden box ready for burial.

His nephew Benedict moved toward the casket. The rain made his careful steps even more deliberate, but he never faltered. His coat was soaked through, but he stood ramrod straight, the weight of being the new Earl of Coldharbor obviously pressing heavily upon him.

Silas knew with cold certainty that he was the one in that pine box. No one but Benedict would care enough to be here on the day he was put to rest.

The spirit loomed close, watching, and the water dripping from Benedict’s hair marked the only passage of time.

Benedict put his hand on the coffin and said something.

Silas could not make out the words, but he thought he knew what they must be.

Benedict had cared for him, had tried so hard to build a relationship between them, despite being rebuffed time and again.

He was probably speaking kindnesses that Silas had never earned.

Benedict finished and turned away, disappearing into the mist. It was so hard to watch his nephew’s retreating form. Even harder to know that someday soon this cold ground would take him as well.

Silas’s whole life had been wasted. He had nothing to show for it. Nothing at all.

He searched the thick fog for a path that led anywhere but here, desperate for a different direction or another chance.

The fog and the spirit pressed in on him until Silas could see only the dark outline of the ghost and the accusing white of the gravestone.

And then the vision folded away, leaving him once again cold and alone in his bedchamber.