CHAPTER 35
Grandad didn’t flee, though he looked frightened enough to. His chin wobbled as he spoke. “I knew this day would come.”
The wraith tilted its head, antlers dripping dark ichor, which hissed and evaporated.
“I don’t know if you can speak or understand me, but … I’m sorry I failed you.”
“What’s he talking about?” Kessian said.
“I don’t know.”
The wraith kept tilting its head until it was at the entirely wrong angle.
“Are you too far gone to understand or remember me? I should expect as much. You’ve been gone so long.”
What did that mean? Did he know the wraith— Was it a person?
It’s a part of you, Briar had said. That’s how it can get through your wards.
The wraith took a halting step forward.
Edwin didn’t retreat. “I won’t fight you.
I’ve been at this long enough to see that some things are a choice, some are preordained, and some seem a peculiar mix of both.
But I am old, and I think of my available choices, I’ve made them all.
” He huffed dryly. “Some I’m far less proud of than others. ”
The wraith let out a hungry, screeching noise like a rusted hinge, drifting more boldly toward Grandad. He watched its progress, the tremble of his fingers the only sign he was afraid of his impending death.
“Will you make it quick?” he asked.
Then the wraith did something very, very strange.
It knelt.
Its limbs twitched, and at times it seemed to fight itself, like a barely domesticated beast bending to the yoke of some greater power. It reached out a talon toward Grandad’s heart.
He stared at it, his expression turning from confusion to enlightenment. Even something like love.
“I see,” he said. “I must pass on the mantle to you, or it will go to him.”
“Does he mean Marlowe?” I whispered.
“I’m ready,” Grandad said.
The wraith, still jerking like a dog at its leash, bowed its head and gored Grandad through the chest on its antlers.
Rather than blood, magic surged from the wound, a great rip current of it.
It twined up the wraith’s horns, lit its skull from within, made a skeleton glow amongst the smoke.
In a brief flash, a scrawny, adolescent figure was silhouetted within.
The magic dissipated as quickly as it came. The wraith stood. Grandad sagged to the floor, gaze unfixed, a distant smile on his face.
He was dead.
I couldn’t breathe. Kessian held my hand tightly. The slats of the door painted shadows like the bars of a cage over his face. I must have looked pale or wrecked or something, because he put his arms around me.
“Mum was right,” I whispered. “It was my fault.”
“No, Tal.”
“If I hadn’t come here—”
“You heard Edwin. He’d been waiting for this day. He probably dreamed it a thousand times.”
The wraith still stood over its victim, fingers clenching and unclenching.
Kessian shifted his weight, sore from standing still so long. Something crunched underfoot—a piece of dried pasta, its hard shell cracking apart.
The wraith’s head turned sharply toward the pantry.
I froze. Kessian did, too.
The wraith’s head tilted with interest, birdlike as it stalked a few steps toward the closed doors. The light through the slats painted Kessian’s face in a mask of terror before the wraith’s shadow blocked it out.
We had no place to run. We could burst out and try to make a run for it, but the wraith occupied the entire breadth of the kitchen.
It advanced a few more steps. Kessian wound his arms tighter around me. I held him, too, pressing a silent kiss into his hair.
The wraith’s shadows flickered, briefly dispersing like a swarm of bees. The flash of a hazel-green eye shone through.
Then the sound came of a key turning in the lock of the front door. It opened, and the sound of voices drifted in. I recognized Lettie’s background nattering, Amelia’s surly, monosyllabic responses. Then Marlowe’s voice saying, “Roast smells lovely.”
I nearly burst from the pantry to warn them, but before I could, the wraith’s head whipped around as it listened. It lunged for the flue above the oven, clambering into the narrow gaps like a spider.
It hadn’t come to kill the entire family. It had only come for Grandad, but why?
Kessian, thinking along the same lines, whispered, “I think … I think the wraith took on the mantle of Keeper from him.”
“What?”
“The way it lit up. That’s what happened when the wraith touched me, in Lunaris when we were fleeing from it for the first time.”
I’d never thought the wraith was cognizant enough for that.
We’d thought Shearwater had chosen Kessian.
If the wraith was an avatar of the strid and those who’d died in it, perhaps we hadn’t precisely been wrong.
But it made sense now, how Kessian had inherited the mantle when it usually passed through families.
Amelia was saying, “What have you got cooking in here?” Then she entered the kitchen.
Her eyes fell on the body. She fell to her knees, crying, “Grandad?” She touched his neck, searching for a pulse.
Lettie appeared next, shrieked, then Marlowe rushed to see what was the matter.
“He’s dead,” Amelia sobbed.
As my family broke down, so did I. My ribs seized around my lungs like a vise, making it very hard to breathe. “It wasn’t Warwick. It was me. It was my fault.”
Kessian denied it with a shake of his head and a quiet, “No.” His arms squeezed and squeezed, the pressure releasing some of the stress from my body, but my head still hadn’t caught up with it all.
I didn’t understand what any of this meant. Grandad’s ghost told me to find the one who poisoned Shearwater, and the truth behind the wraith. The true face of the one who killed him. Those were his words. Marlowe poisoned Shearwater, but if he wasn’t the face behind the wraith, who was?
I didn’t know, but one last memory, one last death, could hold the answers.
We couldn’t leave the confines of the pantry amongst the noises of grief and Lettie announcing they needed to call the rest of the family, the funeral director, and oh, Marlowe, who should be the one to tell Fae, what with the wedding so close?
In all the chaos, I didn’t notice the temperature in the pantry dropping until something wet dripped onto my bare arm.
I shuddered, touching it with my fingers. They came back smeared with an inky darkness. The room got quiet, as if the world beyond the little pantry had fallen away. Enough that I heard another drip on the floor.
I didn’t want to look up, but I knew what I’d find. I tilted my head back.
The wraith clung to the ceiling, watching.
I let out a yell and grabbed Kessian, intent on fleeing with him, but the wraith descended upon us. Its weight bore us down. I anticipated the hard crack of my body against the parquet, but upon impact, the parquet splashed as though it had been a mirage on the mirror of a lake.
We plunged into deep, dark water.