Page 76 of The Legend of Lovers Hollow

“We’ll check in on you in a while,” Morgan assures her.

“’Ere we go.” Artie reappears, his little arms piled high with puzzles, books, and an old, boxed train set. “What do you want to do first?” he says excitedly.

Esme’s eyes are misty when she smiles at him. “Anything you want, you pick.”

A quick glance around tells me that Bertie and Stanley are nowhere to be found. Sam nods his head towards the door, and the three of us slip out of the room. Once we’re outside in the corridor and the door has clicked closed behind us, Sam turns to me and Morgan.

“Okay, I don’t want to alarm you, but you are in some very deep shit.”

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My stomach clenches at his dire words and my heartbeat picks up. “What do you mean?”

“You have got something very,veryangry lurking in this building, plus a whole host of ghosts, a ghost-hunting crew, and a group of guests looking to stir up a psychic hornet’s nest with this ghost hunt of yours.”

“Oh, um.” I bite my lip. “Well, the house ghosts are very nice and very benign. Although they do often make very questionable decisions.”

“So Tristan tells me.” Sam’s mouth twitches. “But they’re not the ones that concern me.”

“You’re talking about Lady Clare and the other two,” Morgan says.

“I think you two better tell me what’s been going on here,” Sam says seriously, “because I could feel it the second I walked into the hotel.”

“Feel what?” I ask.

“The fury of the dead. This whole place is chock full of psychic energy, and those angry spirits are feeding off it. My hair is almost standing on end with it right now.”

“I’ve felt that a couple of times since the séance.” I nod. “It’s like static electricity in the air.”

“That’s it, exactly. Only this building, this whole place, is like a powder keg. All it would take is one small spark to set if off,” Sam warns.

Morgan winces. “A spark like a ghost hunt and a room full of ghost hunters with electrically charged equipment?”

“Quite possibly, but to be honest, I really think just about anything could set it off.” Sam scratches the stubble at his jaw, which is scruffy but in a kind of cool, sexy way.

“Okay, Tris gave me a quick rundown before I set off. He said you accidentally woke three ghosts up.”

Morgan and I look at each other and shrug. “We’re not really one hundred percent how it happened, but we know who they are.”

Sam makes aplease continuegesture with his hand and folds his arms, then stares at us in expectation. I kinda feel like we’re in trouble.

It’s hot.

“There’s a local legend about one of my ancestors,” Morgan begins. “Lady Clare. The short version is she had a lover and was planning to run away with him. Her father forced her into a marriage for money. The night of the wedding, there was an argument between Lady Clare and her husband. He threw her down the stairs and broke her neck, then made a run for it so he wouldn’t get in trouble. Lady Clare’s lover showed up and murdered the husband and then got killed himself.” Morgan frowns. “Everyone’s a little sketchy on the details. There have been so many versions of the tale over the centuries that no one is sure what happened. Some say her lover killed her husband and then was trampled to death by the husband’s horse. Some say he couldn’t live without his love and took his own life.”

“Either way, you’ve got traumatic death, murder, and possible suicide, any of which can give rise to angry malevolent spirits on their own,” Sam muses.

“It gets worse,” I add.

“How can it get worse that a three-way murderfest?” Sam asks.

“Well, no one ever saw or heard from those ghosts again. Not in the whole three-hundred-odd years since their deaths.”

“If they were angry spirits locked in a death cycle, then they would have been haunting this place from day one,” he explains.

“What’s a death cycle?” Morgan asks.

“When a person dies suddenly in violent or traumatic circumstances, they can become locked in what’s known as a death cycle. It means they are unable to alter how they show themselves, appearing the same way they did at the moment of death—bullet wounds, stab wounds, missing appendages, and quite often wearing the same blood-stained clothes. The only way to break the death cycle is to resolve their unfinished business, which is what Tristan and his spirit guide Dusty do. They help spirits resolve their unfinished business so they can cross into the light and be at peace. Most of the time, despite being locked in a cycle, those spirits can still interact with those around them. Only in the worst cases are they locked into a repetitive set of actions they can’t break at all. You would have thought over the years, there would have been sightings.”