Chapter 15 #2
But Brom gets to his feet, and I’m honestly surprised he’s doing this at all, considering, well, everything.
It also gets me hot under the collar to know that even in this setting, he obeys me like the good boy that he is.
It takes all my self-control to keep from praising him like that as he stands in front of me on the platform.
I’m still grinning at him like a fool, though.
“Brom,” I say to him, standing much closer to him than I was to Paul.
“Professor Crane,” he says slowly, his jaw flexing.
“Tell me,” I say, tapping my finger on my chin, “let’s pretend you’re the horseman for a moment. What kind of power would you have, what kind of magic would you use to try to hurt me?”
He stares. “I’d probably use my ax and chop your damn head off.”
Students burst out laughing. Even I find it funny, though a little unsettling at how much he seems to mean it. Perhaps I should tread more carefully with him and his moods.
“So,” I go on, “let’s pretend for a moment that the horseman is an evil spirit. What would be one way someone like me could disable such a spirit?”
And if the actual horseman could give Brom some real insight right now, that would be lovely.
“You would have to disable the source,” Brom says, surprising me, and I’m not sure if he just came up with that or if he knows something.
“The source?” I ask. “You mean—”
“Professor Crane?” one of the students says.
I squint at Brom, trying to figure him out, then look over at the student. They’re standing by the window along with a few others, staring outside.
“What is it?” I ask testily, wanting their full attention, wanting Brom to keep talking.
“There’s a woman standing on the roof of the cathedral,” Josephine says, staring at me with saucer-wide eyes.
“What?” I say, running off the platform and over to the window, putting my face close to the glass. Sure enough, on the top of the Gothic cathedral, in between two of the spires, is a girl.
Not just any girl though. She’s as thin as a beanpole, with long dark hair, and is dressed in a dirty white gown, torn at the seams.
She looks exactly like the girl I had seen dancing by the lake one night before the sisters came and took her away.
“That’s Lotte,” someone else says. “She was in my history class the first week of school and then never came back.”
Suddenly Kat is beside me and I move over to make room for her, Brom coming behind me. “Oh my God,” Kat whispers. “She’s going to jump.”
“Are you sure?” I ask her, and sure enough the girl starts looking over the edge and dangling one foot off it.
“Jesus,” I swear, and run out of the classroom and down the hall, bursting through the doors and outside. I hear all the students following me as we run into the light rain, yelling at the girl not to jump, and in seconds Brom is running beside me as we sprint across the wet lawn to the cathedral.
“Do we try and catch her?” he asks, legs pumping effortlessly with pure athleticism.
“We have to try something,” I say. “Lotte!” I yell up at the roof as we get closer, hoping that really is her name. “Stay where you are, don’t jump!”
But Lotte starts laughing. “Stay where I am?” she yells back. “And let them continue to eat me alive? We’re all just flies in a web.”
And then, before Brom and I can reach her, she throws her arms up in the air, as if she’s doing a ballerina spin, letting herself fall off the cathedral.
I scream, running as if through a bad dream, watching as her body dances on the way down, before landing on the stone path with a sickening splat.
I stop dead in my tracks, unsure of what to do.
Flashbacks of Marie keep coming into my vision, mixing with the girl on the ground.
I see Marie’s head hitting the wooden floor in the living room, blood pooling around her like a cape of death. If the rug had been a few inches longer, she would have lived, it would have softened the blow.
But it hadn’t been longer, and Marie died.
I see Marie’s eyes staring up at the ceiling and watch as the light goes out of them.
I was screaming then, and I’m screaming now.
The girl lying on the stones, the blood slowly pooling out of the back of her head, the way her limbs are broken and splayed at unnatural angles—the girl blinks at the gray sky.
She isn’t dead, not yet.
It’s enough to make me move, stumble to my knees beside her.
“Lotte,” I say to her, my voice a quiver, placing my hand at her cheek.
Her eyes look at me, a light green, and though I don’t know this girl, I feel like I do. She is hovering in that space between here and the veil, about to leave, but still present. The light is going out of her eyes like it did with Marie, but it’s leaving slower. She wants to stay.
May you find peace, I say to her using the voice, and I’m surprised to find my magic comes back to me.
She stares right into my eyes, and I think she hears me.
I reach down and I grab her hand, her cold, frail hand, letting her know she’s not alone when she goes.
It’s what I wish I could have done with Marie instead of what actually happened.
All around us I hear crying and screaming and yelling and more and more people rushing to the scene, but right now it’s just this girl and me on the damp stone and a spreading lake of blood.
It would be selfish to ask this dying girl what she meant. It would be selfish to ask her what happened to her. It would be selfish to ask her what caused her to take her life.
But I am a selfish man.
Who did this to you? I ask, because someone has done this to her. Someone has led her here, to jump off the roof, to end her short life surrounded by strangers such as myself.
Someone has thrown her into a misery from which this is the only escape.
The girl stares at me, her mouth moving slightly.
Everything here is built on bones, she says inside my head. Save yourself.
Then I see the life leave her.
It moves out of her like strands of gold, out of the crown of her head and twisting toward the sky until it’s carried away in the breeze, pushed toward the lake.
In a second, she is gone, and her eyes don’t see me anymore.
“No,” I cry out in desperation, in that wild, panicked feeling of trying to hang on to life when it’s already left. “No. No. No.”
Tears rush to my eyes, and I keep squeezing this girl’s hand as if it will bring her back.
“No,” I whisper.
I feel hands on my shoulders, pulling me back while someone else brushes past me, the school nurse, as if a bandage would fix anything, and then I’m pulled away from the dead girl, from the crowd, and I realize it’s Brom who has me. I rest my forehead against his chest, trying to breathe.
“Crane,” he says, his voice low. “I’m here.”
Such simple words, and yet they mean everything to me.
He keeps his hands on my shoulders, massaging me gently.
“Okay,” I say through a faint gasp. “Okay.”
Because I just saw a girl die in front of me, and it’s the second time someone has died right in front of me. And maybe that means nothing, but it feels like something.
At least I knew enough this time around to not make the same mistake again.
At least I didn’t try to bring her back to life.
No one should ever be brought back to life.
“What a strange thing it is to cry,” I mutter, watching as a teardrop falls from my face and down to the ground between us. “What a strange thing to have our hearts bleed in such a way that it comes out from our eyes.”
I lift up my head and meet Brom’s gaze.
It holds me in place, and for once I let him be my strength.
I put my hand at the back of his head and hold him there for a moment.
“Thank you,” I whisper, hoping my eyes tell him more than my words ever could. “Thank you.”
His face remains impassive, a rock, so unlike the usual Brom who shows everything with the tilt of his eyes, the shift of his brows, the angle of his mouth. But now he’s being what he thinks I need, someone who can weather the storm, not be the storm.
And yet, in the depths of those black-brown eyes, I see him soften for me.
I raise my head, taking in a deep steadying breath, and then look back over the scene.
Classmates have their arms around each other, crying, teachers are standing around in shock.
Then there’s Kat, between us and the scene of travesty, staring at me solemnly, and beyond her are Sisters Sophie and Margaret.
Sister Margaret is chanting something up to the sky.
Sister Sophie is staring right at me with a look in her eyes that I can’t quite decipher.
But it feels like a warning.