Chapter 32
Blood rushes in Mallory’s ears as she flies up the theater steps. Her boots thud beneath her, wet hair freezing down her back. She slams into the stage door, gaze swinging wildly.
“Ay, those attires are best,” Saskia says from the stage. “But gentle Nurse, I pray thee leave me to myself tonight.”
The poison scene, Mallory realizes with a knot in her stomach.
Arden rests in a cushioned chair, boot peeking from beneath her cream-colored gown.
Jessica stands in the center in her red Lady Capulet dress, her matching headpiece glittering in the washed gold around her.
And Saskia—Saskia is onstage in the Juliet nightgown.
She’s wearing a chestnut- brown wig, tied with a ribbon.
From a distance, anyone might think it’s Mallory herself.
But under the lights, Saskia’s skin looks green yellow, and even with stage makeup, graying circles linger beneath her eyes. Her lips are cracked and red, and when she talks, her voice is a hoarse scrape.
Mallory whirls, rushing into the wings until she finds Paisley, their stage manager.
“Paisley,” she hisses, and the older girl’s eyes widen.
“Hendrix cannot see you here,” she says. “I’ve never seen a grown man so pissed. Wait in the greenroom until curtain call.”
“No, no.” Mallory looks toward the stage. At the prop dagger next to the bed. “I can’t do that. Saskia is—she’s sick. I need to step in.”
Paisley laughs in disbelief. “Absolutely not. We can’t switch you in the middle of the show. Hendrix would have a fucking cow.”
“Give me ten minutes. I’ll dry my hair and throw on some makeup. Please, Paisley.” Mallory wills herself not to cry, searching for something another theater major might understand. “This is my role. I can do it.”
But Paisley only shakes her head.
“Mallory. Girl. Can I give you a little advice?” Her walkie-talkie crackles at her hip; she ignores it.
“Juliet is a dream role—I get it. But theater is a cold, ruthless place. It’s performance.
It’s art. It doesn’t give an ounce of a shit about your feelings.
So, you show up. You play the game, and if you’re lucky, you learn to take your own emotions out of the mix. Eventually, it becomes less personal.”
Paisley’s words poke at something soft and vulnerable inside her. Theater will always be personal for her—it’s the only place she’s ever felt comfortable in her own skin. She’s no one without it.
Even if after tonight, she might not be anyone at all.
“I know,” Mallory says, scrambling to reclaim the urgency she arrived with, “but Saskia is really sick. You don’t understand—”
A murmur from the audience snags Mallory’s attention, and she whirls—
Saskia perches on the prop bed onstage, staring into the lights. Her back is rigid as a wooden plank, her arms robotically tipped in front of her.
But her eyes—her eyes are milk white. No color, no darkened pupils. Just like when Mallory found her with the knife.
Just like her mother’s eyes the day she died.
“No,” Mallory chokes out, gaze flying to the prop dagger. “Paisley, we need to cut the lights.”
Paisley glares. “Absolutely not. I need to go back to the booth. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go to the greenroom.”
“Paisley!” Mallory pleads, but it’s useless. The older girl turns, disappearing into the shadows.
She swings her gaze back to Saskia, just as she starts her final soliloquy.
Except the voice that spills out isn’t hers.
It’s deeper. Older. Gravelly and rusted, as though it hasn’t been used in years. Yet Mallory has heard it before. Screeching in the shadows of Thorne Hall. Hissing beneath hospital lights. Whispering in strips of moonlight many years ago.
It’s Lily.
“How if,” the dead woman inside Saskia continues, “when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo come to redeem me?”
Mallory frantically looks around and around, spotting Raf and Arden in the wings. They’re staring at Saskia in horror.
“What’s wrong with her eyes?” Raf whispers as Mallory rushes to their side.
“Why is she sitting like that?” Arden asks.
“I—”
Mallory’s words evaporate as Saskia cocks her head, peering almost sideways at the audience. Her skin, which had previously had a green tint, appears almost gray beneath the circular spotlight. And then, a trail of blood starts trickling from her nose.
A soft buzz spreads through the crowd.
“Or, if I live, is it not very like the horrible conceit of death and night.” Saskia reaches for the dagger, arm moving rigidly, as though invisible strings are tugging on her from the rafters. But not forcing her movements—holding her back instead.
Mallory suddenly thinks of Lily, listed in her medical chart as her emergency contact. Lily, forcing her hand to write Ruth Golden’s name, forcing her mother to write things, too. Lily, crying You will die in the liminal shadows of Mallory’s mind. None of it was a threat.
It was a warning.
Lily wasn’t just her mother’s ghost, appearing by chance to Mallory in windows and mirrors simply because she was a child.
Her visits were deliberate. Meticulous. Because Mallory is the seventh one—the one who could end a multigenerational chain of devastation, set into motion against Lily’s will a hundred years ago.
This entire time, Lily was never the enemy, never someone to be afraid of.
She never wanted to hurt Mallory, just like she isn’t trying to hurt Saskia right now. She’s trying to help her.
She’s trying to stop her.
Before she’s compelled to carve out her own heart on this fucking stage.
“Cut the lights,” Mallory says, whirling to address the nearest crew member. “Did you hear me? Tell them to cut the lights!”
But they start flickering instead.
“What’s happening?” Arden grabs her wrist. “What’s happening, Mal?”
Mallory’s pulse spikes as she thinks of that library book, the section on signs of demonic activity.
Electrical malfunctions. Around her, other cast members are whispering, peering through the curtains.
A new alarm trills in her ear at the possibility of this secret bursting from its confines and baring its teeth to a world that isn’t ready to see.
“Alack, alack,” Lily screeches from the stage, “is it not like that I, so early waking, what with loathsome smells—”
“There’s no time to explain. We have to get her offstage.” Mallory cuts Arden a tentative, desperate glance. “I need your help. Both of you.”
Arden just looks at the strobing lights, fingers unconsciously clasped around her cross. Even Raf’s eyes have gone round in disbelief.
“O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught!” Lily barks. “Environed with all these hideous fears, and madly play with my forefathers’ joints?”
“Please.” Mallory places her hands on Arden’s shoulders. “Saskia is in danger. Please—”
A distinct thumping steals her pleas, punctuated by a collective, surround-sound gasp.
Mallory’s gaze snaps back to the stage.
Where Saskia is rhythmically thrusting the blunt end of the prop dagger against her chest, in time with the remaining words of her soliloquy.
“And”—thump, thump—“in this rage, with some great kinsman’s bone”—thump, thump, slash—“as with a club, dash out my desperate brains?”
Terror soars in Mallory’s bones at the distinct sounds of the impact, amplified by Saskia’s microphone.
“No, no—Saskia—!”
“Shhhh,” one of the crew members hisses, snatching Mallory’s elbow as she starts for the stage. “She’s just acting.”
“Let go of me!” she snarls. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Tell them to go to blackout!”
Lily growls on the bed. “—O look, methinks I see my cousin’s ghost—”
The crew member hasn’t let go of Mallory’s arm. “The scene is over in two lines, just relax—”
“Relax?” she whispers furiously. “Relax? This is an emergency! Tell them to cut the lights right n—”
“—seeking out Romeo that did spit his body”—slash, slash, squelch—“upon a rapier’s point—!”
“Mal!” Arden now, in horror.
Blood trickles down Saskia’s stomach. Her nose is redder, too, ruby trailing all the way over her chin.
And then, she starts laughing, the sound bursting through her throat, thickened with red-purple veins.
Her chortling roars through the theater, bleeding into a keening cackle as she wrenches out: “Stay, Tybalt, stay!”
“Let go of me, let go— Fucking hell, give me this.” Mallory twists against the crew member who’s holding her and snatches the walkie-talkie from his waistband. She smashes the button. “Go to blackout! Go to blackout! Go to—”
“Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!” Saskia rises on her knees, dropping the dagger and snatching the glass vial with wet, red hands. She tilts her head back and back and back and—“Here’s drink! I drink to thee!”
And the stage slams to darkness just as Saskia vomits mouthful after mouthful of dirt onto the stage, all over the nightgown Juliet is supposed to die wearing.