Chapter 17
Mallory knew rehearsals over the next few days would be difficult, but she didn’t expect them to feel like dying.
Night after night, she senses Ezra’s eyes on her in the cavern below the stage. The bite marks on her neck burn beneath his invisible glare, as if they know he’s nearby. Sweltering and swelling, calling to him.
She’s kept them hidden beneath a velvet choker, an ever-present reminder that, seconds after forging her new pact with Arden, Mallory was forced to lie to her again.
I must’ve cut myself in the hedge maze, she scrambled to say when Raf spotted the wounds.
I came back through the gardens and kept getting nicked by thorns.
That evening, as they rehearse one of Juliet’s soliloquies, she can’t remember a single word.
Ezra feeds phrases to her from the dark—serpent heart, honorable villain—until Hendrix finally calls Saskia to step in.
Mallory sits in the hollow wings of the Crypt and tries to remember what it feels like to succeed at something.
Between classes, Mallory and Saskia huddle in the library, poring over donor records and board meeting minutes beneath the dusty glow of a banker’s lamp.
On Monday, Mallory’s focus is laser sharp, fixated on the old documents, driven by the desire to find something.
But by Wednesday, she’s falling apart. She shows up at the library with red-rimmed eyes and unbrushed hair, running on two hours of sleep.
She can barely focus on anything until Saskia sucks in a sharp gasp.
“Look at this,” she says, pointing to a clipping from The Shoreview Post-Gazette. “It’s a letter to the editor from a pastor, warning people about the exhumations. It’s dated 1880—a decade before Lily died.”
“Yeah.” Mallory rubs circles on her temples. “Exhumations were happening throughout New England for a century—”
“Right, but listen to this,” Saskia insists.
Most citizens are acting out of desperation to protect living family members, believing in misguided superstition.
They falsely believe that blood in a new corpse’s heart is a sign of evil, when, scientifically, it is not uncommon for blood to temporarily remain in the circulatory system for hours or even days after death.
But there are some individuals exploiting this helplessness, with sinister motives.
I have repeatedly tried to warn my congregation to no success.
And so, I write to implore you: Do not be manipulated into handing over the hearts of your deceased loved ones to these charlatans.
You cannot begin to understand the nefarious level of their intentions.
There are no bloodthirsty creatures in your relatives’ graves.
The men who seek their organs are the real monsters—and you should be afraid of them.
She sets the paper down, turning. “This sounds like what Lily’s sister said in your dream.”
Mallory chews her already-chapped lips, remembering Rebecca’s words about the man who wanted to exhume Lily’s grave. Jacob.
He’s creating a frenzy for no reason other than it serves him.
She skims the article, gaze snagging on words as though they’re bolded just for her. Monsters. Nefarious. Sinister.
Bloodthirsty.
And something clicks inside her.
“After that dream, I thought Jacob performed these exhumations for money,” Mallory murmurs. “Maybe it’s worse.”
Saskia frowns. “What do you mean?”
“What if Lily’s heart wasn’t destroyed at all? What if it was used for something else?” She swallows. “Given to something else. And that’s why she’s so angry.”
“Given to something?” Saskia leans back in her chair. “Like, as a gift?”
Mallory shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “Like an offering.”
The word makes her think of Ezra. Mallory stares at the moon-shaped scab on her middle finger, the echo of Ezra’s kiss like salt in a wound. She’s certain the mark will scar, forever branding her body with the offerings she made for him, too.
“Hello?” Saskia waves a hand in front of her face. “Did you hear anything I just said?”
Mallory’s lashes flutter, distracted. “Sorry, what?”
Saskia swivels, her thigh pressing against Mallory’s beneath the desk.
“I said—we need to find out exactly what went down at Lily’s exhumation.
We should see if there are town records that might explain what happened to her heart after it was cut from…
” She sighs, catching sight of Mallory’s drooping gaze, and snaps the binder shut. “Alright, Nancy Drew. Out with it.”
Mallory blinks. “What?”
“You’re acting funny.” Saskia studies Mallory in the dim light. “Did something happen with Ezra?”
Her stomach flips at the direct question. “What makes you ask that?”
“You’re sad.” Saskia stretches out her legs, hooking an elbow behind her chair. “The kind of sad that doesn’t let you sleep or eat or brush your hair, apparently.”
Mallory picks at her nails to hide her surprise at how easily Saskia has read her. I almost loved him, she could say. I was so close to falling, and he burned it all down. The matches were in his hand from the start.
“I thought we had something real,” she finally answers. “But it was actually a waste of time.”
Saskia is quiet a moment. “I don’t think anything is a waste of time. If it felt real in the moment, then it was.” She drapes her arms on their shared desk to lean closer. “But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”
Mallory contemplates what it would feel like to tell Saskia everything. To allow all the regret and shame to spill outside of herself, become a messy tangled thing in the room with them. She wonders if it might hurt less that way.
“Mal.” Saskia nudges her, and Mallory feels her head tip in an involuntary nod.
“Yes,” she says. “There’s a lot more.”
And then, before she can change her mind, she lets it all out.
She starts with auditions and doesn’t stop.
Her bloodstained dress in the costume dungeon.
Chasing ghosts with Ezra beneath the stage.
His mouth around her slashed fingers, the iron injectables in his drawer.
His twisted lies. His worse apologies. The wings along his spine. The panic that hasn’t abated since.
“And there’s something else,” Mallory finally says, as she undoes the clasp of her velvet choker and shows Saskia the bite wounds underneath.
Saskia’s eyes turn to amber globes as she stares. “The fuck? Ezra did that to you?”
Mallory nods and Saskia leans closer, lashes narrowed.
“I don’t understand. It looks like a snakebite.”
“He had fangs,” Mallory replies. “Like a…like a vampire.” She swallows, recalling the way she tried to talk herself out of this exact conclusion.
Unsure of what it means to even say the word out loud, to reckon with the possibility that vampires don’t just exist in stories.
That she might have met one. Kissed one.
Let him into her body in every way possible.
She pushes a hand through her hair, overwhelmed.
“Saskia, I know it sounds crazy, like I’m making it up, but—”
“Mal.” Saskia’s hand lands on her forearm. “I know you’re not making it up.”
Saskia’s response reaches that vulnerable, soft part of her, the part that’s craved for someone to just look at her and say, I believe you.
That could have been Ezra, it almost was Ezra, but his belief in her was just another lie.
Mallory wants to wrap Saskia’s words in silk, keep them in her pocket like a lucky rabbit’s foot.
It takes her several moments to remember Saskia’s hand, to realize she hasn’t pulled away. Her palm still rests against Mallory’s arm, fingers carefully tracing the ridges of her sweater.
A strange warmth creeps into Mallory’s stomach.
Her entire body aches from what happened with Ezra—she should be immune to rebellious butterflies from another person’s touch.
And yet, here she is. Heartbeat hammering, suddenly transfixed by the press of Saskia’s fingers, the delicate graze of her nails.
Maybe nothing is ever neat and clean. Maybe a person can straddle past and present this way, mourn the fragments of something that almost was and simultaneously reach for something that might yet be.
Ezra might have broken her heart, but the pieces are still her own.
“Tell me the rest,” Saskia finally says, her hand falling away, and Mallory hears it again in her voice, unspoken and firm: I believe you, I believe you, I believe you.
At rehearsal that night, Mallory arrives with an even worse headache, sweat prickling her skin like the onset of a fever. Hendrix calls for places for the poison scene, and Mallory’s stomach twists when he adds that Saskia will run it first.
Saskia joins her onstage, dressed in a nearly identical costume to Mallory’s, a lace-up rose-colored corset and flowing skirt. Mallory watches Saskia flip through her script, her lines highlighted in all the same places, and swallows an unexpected bite of envy.
“Before we start,” Hendrix says, “let’s talk about this scene.
It’s the most iconic moment in the play, one that raises the question of how far you’d go to be with the person you love.
For Juliet, no distance—not even death—is too far.
” He turns to Ezra. “Pierce, what do you think an actor should know about this scene?”
The sweat on the back of Mallory’s neck turns cold as she looks at Ezra, sitting at a table in front of the stage.
His long coat is strung over his chair, button-down shirtsleeves rolled up, and he’s already staring when she catches his eye.
As though he’d been studying the shape of her, calculating where he’d sink his teeth into next. She tears her gaze away.
“Well,” Ezra says, “the ending of this play is why people think Romeo and Juliet is the quintessential love story. They perform the ultimate sacrifice to be together.”
At the word sacrifice, her head snaps up.