Chapter Ten Shea
The shower water washes away most of the blood.
Shea stands in the tub with her forehead against the tile and watches the drain turn red, then brown, then eventually clear.
When it’s done, she towels dry and dresses slowly.
Her school uniform is soaked through, the stockings ripped, and she fishes through the bag of clothes from home in search of something dry.
She pulls on a wash-shrunk top and her father’s old flannel, a shredded pair of jeans gone soft with wear.
The water was kettle hot, and a gray condensation has collected along the mirror.
Rising up onto her toes to wipe the glass clear, she catches sight of her neck.
Two deep punctures gorge the soft underside of her throat, the bite red and angry and careless.
Her first thought is this: If Lys had Turned her, last night wouldn’t have gone the way it did.
Gingerly, she presses a clean bit of gauze to the wound, taping it in place.
She feels strangely arthritic, her joints ground down and her knuckles throbbing, and it makes every task take twice as long.
When it’s done, she braids her hair into two messy plaits and slips on the pendant necklace she’d found nestled among her things.
It isn’t anything special—just her grandmother’s cross and a flat, silver ring slung on a chain.
Just another piece of home Asher knew well enough to bring along.
As if she summoned him just by thinking of him, she finds Asher waiting when she exits the bathroom. He’s seated on the edge of her bed, his injured eye the exact color of a boysenberry. An immediate and immolating panic consumes her as she realizes what he holds in his hands.
A cookie tin. Her cookie tin. The lid is off and paper juts out in every direction.
Pink stationery and serrated notebook shreds.
Sticky notes and torn-out pages and even a napkin or two.
Most damning of all are the letters. There’s a half dozen at least, neatly folded and tucked into unsealed envelopes, the same name neatly penned on every last one: PVT Thorley, Asher .
Her mouth goes dry. “Where did you get that?”
“Zahar,” he says plainly.
Panic wars with relief. “You’ve seen her? She’s okay? I haven’t been able to find Lys anywhere and Cyrus said—”
He cuts her off. “Why didn’t you tell me you and Ellie fought?”
The question plunks like a stone between them.
Every last answer seems like the exact wrong one.
She watches from somewhere outside herself as he pries loose a ripped bit of paper from the tin.
Camellia’s curling handwriting stares up at her, scribbled in code: I don’t think I can be friends with someone who makes blood pacts with the devil.
“You can understand that?”
“Zahar gave me the cipher,” says Asher. “But it’s not exactly advanced encryption.”
The look on his face wrenches an admission out of her. “I didn’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t—” Asher’s face falls. “Parker, I don’t hate you.
It’s not like you had a road map to Ellie hidden away.
It’s just that—” He seems to be considering his next words carefully.
“I asked you if anything happened with Ellie before she disappeared. You could have told me then. It would have been nice to know.”
“She saw the bites on my wrist.” Her voice comes out thin, chewed up by guilt.
“She wouldn’t talk to me all day. I went by your house after school, and your mom said she never came home.
I figured she must be with Poppy—that maybe they wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore.
The next morning in school, they told us she was gone. ”
“That’s not your fault,” says Asher.
“How do you know?”
He’s quiet. He doesn’t know, and neither does she. Clearing his throat, he places the note back into the tin. “We leave in four days. In the meantime, Lysander has sent scouts ahead to see if they can find any trace of Ellie. They’re going to ask around some of the other nests in the area.”
He says it with disdain. Nests. Like the thought of his sister being holed away with something less than human disturbs him beyond words. Like she’d be better off dead. And maybe she would. Maybe death, to him, is better than being like this. Like Shea, yoked to the devil and waiting to Turn.
She wonders what he’ll think of her after she goes through with it.
If he’ll even think of her at all.
Setting the tin onto the bed, he rises to go. He makes it nearly to the door before she asks the question battering at her chest.
“Are you mad at me? About Ellie?”
He turns back to face her. “Are you mad at me?”
“I don’t want to be.”
“Then let’s start over.”
Relief blooms, petal thin, in her belly. “How do we do that?”
His eyes drop to the cross around her neck—to the ring beside it, plated silver hammered over a mandrel. Another promise unmet. Another bridge uncrossed.
It feels as if she’s set a torch to it.
“We could go back to how things used to be.” He’s being too nice. Too similar to the old Asher, before the garrison carved away everything that made him familiar. It feels like a front. “You can pretend like you’re annoyed with me, and I can pretend I don’t notice.”
When she only stares, reluctant, he adds, “You can make a hurtful joke about my feet.”
“That was one time. And you’ve grown into them very nicely.”
His smile is too easy. She doesn’t trust it. Not really. It doesn’t stop her from smiling back. She’s lost too many people already. She doesn’t think her heart can handle losing anyone else. Even this new, alien version of Asher.
“Where’s Poppy?” she asks, desperate to change the subject.
“Three doors down. I’m pretty sure she’s asleep.”
“Sleep sounds nice.”
“It’s been a long twenty-four hours,” he agrees. She expects him to leave it there, but he doesn’t. He lingers, restless, rapping the back of a knuckle against the doorframe. Finally—quietly—he says, “I wrote you letters, too.”
“Oh.” Everything inside her shuts up tight. “Why didn’t you send them?”
His honey-dark gaze kicks to hers. “Why didn’t you?”
He leaves her there to ponder the question alone, the tin full of letters leering up at her. Door shut, she stares at the wood veneer until her eyes blur. For the third time that night, she thinks about Turning. About swallowing the Rot and letting it case her heart like solid Teflon.
Maybe then everything would stop feeling so sharp. Maybe she’d stop nicking herself on the edges of all that she’s broken. Shoving the tin under a heap of pillows, she tiptoes out into the hall.
Tristan is there, dozing in a windowless nook, his head tucked into the curve of his elbow.
She creeps past as quietly as she knows how, stopping at the third door down and rapping lightly against the frame.
If there’s movement on the other side, she doesn’t hear it.
She knocks again, a little more urgently than before, casting a furtive glance toward Tristan’s sleeping form.
She’s about to give up and leave when the door pulls wide to reveal a bleary-eyed Poppy.
She takes one look at Shea standing there and pads silently back toward her bed, climbing in and lifting the sheets in invitation.
With a swell of relief, Shea clambers in after her.
The room is bathed in a cranberry glow, the sky outside the window awash in color.
Her feet are ice, Poppy’s warm. There’s a lump at the foot of the bed she’s almost certain is some sort of creature.
She doesn’t investigate. Instead, she pulls the sheets over her head and lies flat, breathing in the smell of cotton.
Beneath, the lighting is Thulian pink—like they’re wrapped inside a cocoon.
It makes her think of the blanket forts they’d make whenever Mari Thorley hung the laundry out to dry.
They’d spend their afternoons playing at being witches, mashing rose petals into paste and brewing love potions out of twigs and grass and pale white bunchberry, squabbling until the fireflies winked awake and Camellia’s father came out to gripe about the mess and send them home.
The pang in her chest is strong enough to make her want to weep.
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” she whispers.
“That’s okay.” Poppy’s voice is thick with sleep. “I don’t mind.”
“But—” Shea rolls to face her. “What do you mean? How can you not? You were accepted to Humboldt. Just a few more months, and then you were finally going to get out of Little Hill. You were going to do something important.”
“I am doing something important,” says Poppy. “I’m looking for Ellie.”
Another pang follows, more painful than the first. Shea thinks of the long walk to Mercy Ridge, roots grown over bone.
The forest is full of the dead. Rib cages pried apart by pines, pale white femurs wedged between the branches.
Human skulls, their jaws gaped open, peering out from the hollows of the old oaks.
Picked clean by birds, or else offal for wolves.
She wants to find Camellia alive, she does.
Her doubt doesn’t make her cruel, it only makes her a realist.
“We kissed,” Poppy blurts out, invading her thoughts. “Me and Ellie.”
Shea blinks, startled. “Oh.”
“Well, she kissed me.” Poppy rolls onto her back, folding down the blanket.
The air outside their cocoon is cold. The light has gone mauve.
“Or, I don’t know, I kissed her. The whole thing was kind of a blur.
And I should have told you. I really wanted to tell you, but Ellie said not to.
Not yet. She wanted it to be just for us a little while longer.
I think she was worried you’d feel like our friendship would change.
Like it’d be me and her, with you on the outskirts. ”
“It’s okay,” says Shea, sitting up. “It’s fine that you didn’t tell me. We all—”
We all have secrets , she’d been about to say. But Poppy and Ellie’s secret hadn’t hurt anyone. Hers had. She swipes a finger over a raised half-moon at her wrist. It doesn’t feel remotely the same.