Chapter Ten Shea #2
“It’s just that everyone keeps saying she ran away,” says Poppy. “They said she was unhappy, and she left. That maybe the trees promised her something better, and she followed where it led.”
Outside the window, the sun has nearly set. The last dregs of daylight gild the heavy bottoms of the clouds. Poppy’s eyes glitter in the fading light.
“She wasn’t unhappy. And she didn’t run. Something took her.”
Silence blankets the room. Shea isn’t sure how to fill it, and so she doesn’t try. Eventually, Poppy drifts off to sleep.
Shea watches the sky sink into black and tries to do the same, but sleep doesn’t come. Neither does hope. She tosses this way and that, restless and bitter and overheating, until the creature wriggles free to hiss at her. It’s Kit, his eyes glowing and his fur spiked.
“Sorry.” She slips out of bed, yielding the blankets to the sharp-toothed terror.
For the fourth time that night, she thinks about it.
Turning.
Out in the hall, Tristan has abandoned his post. To hunt, most likely.
She can feel Mercy Ridge coming slowly alive in the pads of her feet.
Floors creak. Doors slam. The rhythmic thud of bass settles into the stone.
It gives the lodge a heartbeat, like it’s a living, breathing thing.
Another insatiable part of the Gravewood.
Another mouth waiting to swallow her whole.
Her mind made up, she heads downstairs.
Outside, the weather has turned. The air smells cold, like wind over ice. She picks her way along the path, heading for the rose-engulfed gazebo on the western lawn. She’s never come this way before, but she knows what’s out here. What it’s used for.
Up close, the gazebo is so thoroughly encased in canes of winter-dormant vines that only the steepled cupola is visible.
Several whippy shoots of green curl off the handrails, reaching for her as she ducks beneath the matted roof.
Inside is still and dark, both the wind and the moon snuffed out by the leaves.
An old hand pump rises out from the pebbled earth.
Strange, she’d expected more opulence—a well with a pulley and bucket, or else a gleaming fountain, water frothing out into the basin.
Instead, the pump is ugly and plain, its cast-iron spigot orange with rust. There’s nothing to hold the water but her own two hands, already stiff with cold.
Sometimes it keeps her up at night—wondering if her mother drank from the Gravewood’s waters willingly, or if she was tricked by something in the trees.
If she’d been too brokenhearted to go on, or if she’d fought with everything she had to come back home to her only daughter.
Sometimes, in Shea’s very worst moments, she thinks maybe her mother has done something she can’t forgive.
Sometimes, she feels like all that’s left of her are the bitter bits.
It takes several pumps of the handle before water sluices out. She cups her hands beneath the flow, letting it pool like quicksilver in her palm. Her fingers shake as she lifts it to her lips.
“I wouldn’t.”
She glances up, startled, to find Lys standing just outside the pavilion. With his hood obscuring his features, he looks like some sort of ineffable winter god. A midnight Boreas, approaching on the wind.
“Why not?” She dries her hands against her pants, teeth chattering. “It was part of our deal.”
“But it’s windy tonight.”
“What does the wind have to do with anything?”
“You might blow away.” His voice is light, but his gaze is heavy. It sinks into her.
“That’s a bullshit answer.”
He doesn’t walk it back. He watches her shiver, hunger banding his skin like striae in marble.
She thinks of the creature on the bridge—monstrous, clawed, a heart pulsing in its hand.
She knows it was him. She’s never been more sure of anything.
Before she can tell him so, he beckons for her to follow.
“Come on. I want to show you something.”
He heads back toward the lodge, confident she’ll follow. And she does. She always does. She falls in after him, every cell in her body compelling her in his wake.
It’s begun to snow. The wind ferries the flakes in sideways, twisting them round in a white-out squall.
Shea tails after Lys as he slips through a battered fire exit.
The heavy door grinds shut. The wind snuffs out.
The silence here is all-encompassing, like some great Goliath has placed a bell jar over the whole of Mercy Ridge.
They stand in a circular room with soaring rafters, windows fanged in broken glass.
Snow spills in through the gaps, falling in slow motion over a carefully preserved greensward.
Lush. Alive. The floor is carpeted in evening primrose.
Ivy rains from the ceiling in lavish vines.
Most striking of all are the orange jack-o’-lantern mushrooms that cluster along the rotted beams, gills glowing blue-green.
It pits the whole of the room in an ethereal cast, like she’s stepped into a ring of fairy stones and found herself whisked somewhere new.
She does a slow turn, taking it all in. When she stops, she finds Lys propped against a nearby column, a folded letter in one hand. All sense of awe flees her body. Her heart plummets to the floor with an icy crack.
“There were no letters to me in your little tin,” he says.
“That was private.”
“Can you blame me for looking? It really paints a picture of your life back in Little Hill.”
“Don’t be a jerk.”
“I’m not. I’m fascinated. Although maybe you can solve a mystery for me.” He unfolds the paper with needless aplomb, scanning the date scrawled along the top. “This is the last one. May eleventh. That’s six months ago.”
The heat of his gaze cuts through the cold. She thinks of the previous spring—the trees in bloom and the long trek to Mercy Ridge, her palm stinging. The wild way he’d looked with her blood painting his chin, his eyes gray all the way through.
“I hate a cliffhanger,” he says. “Why’d you stop writing?”
“Why’d you kill Sullivan?”
The letter crumples in his fist. Hunger forks into his skin in cyanotic brooks.
“Don’t push me,” she says when he only stares. “I’ll push you back.”
He stalks nearer, casting the balled-up letter aside.
He doesn’t stop his advance until they’re nose to nose in the dark, their foreheads kissing.
Not like lovers, but like boxers in a ring, staring each other down before a match—fists at the ready, both of them breathing just a little bit too hard.
Cutting herself on the edge of Oliver Lysander is better than falling on the blade of her worst mistakes. Fighting him is easier than taking swings at her ghosts. At least, with Lys, she manages to land a blow every now and again.
His voice is sandpapered when he says, “Push me again.”
“I’d never write you a letter. We have nothing to say to each other.”
His smile is soulless. Reaching into his jacket, he procures a narrow blister packet.
The alkaline batteries gleam oddly in the light.
Without a word, he slips them into the front pocket of her flannel.
It’s cold. It’s ugly. It’s familiar ground.
Everything in her steadies as she rushes to cuff her sleeve.
Lys peers thoughtfully down at the shape of his bite, his features limned in a blue-green cast.
He looks like a creature of the forest, more myth than boy.
With a touch that borders on delicate, he closes his fingers over her wrist and guides her into a turn. Her back collides against the flat wall of his chest. Breath held, she allows him to coax her into position. The flat of his thumb digs into her pulse. His breath fans along her skin.
“You know why I killed Sullivan,” he says. “It’s the same reason you stopped writing letters to Thorley.”
She stifles a cry when he bites down. There’s a rush of blood, a white-hot locus of pain, and her head tips back against his shoulder. The bioluminescence seems to ebb and then flare as he pulls deep from her veins. The click of his swallow is loud in the quiet.
So, too, is the sound of a door careening open.
She looks, and there’s Asher. He stands frozen a few feet away, the light from the interior hall falling in around him.
Lys sees him, too. He sinks his teeth in deeper, biting down until Shea sees stars.
His hand finds her waist, fingertips digging into bone.
Every nerve ending in her body gathers beneath his touch and she lets out a single, mortifying gasp.
Asher takes it all in with an unflinching stare, his expression remote.
Some deeply buried instinct tells her to push Lys away.
To wriggle free. To explain. She doesn’t.
The soporific effect of the bite culls her panic.
Her heart slows. The world grinds to a halt.
Even the snow hangs motionless, shimmering.
Inhibitions banished, she reaches for Lys, her fingers skimming the contours of his cheek. There, just above his temple, her touch snags on the hard rind of bone ground flat.
The change in Lys is immediate. He works his bite free, shoving himself away from her in the same fluid movement.
She sways around, dizzy, and finds him wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand.
His cheeks are pink and full. His eyes are the color of a lake in deep winter.
For a tremulous instant, she can see panic thrashing just beneath the surface.
And then his gaze ices over and he turns his attention to the door.
“Thorley. Nice of you to join us.”
Asher’s voice is tight. “What the hell did you do to her?”
“Nothing she didn’t ask me to do,” returns Lys smoothly.
“You’re sick .”
“Incurably,” agrees Lys. “What are you still doing awake? Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“You asked me to keep a closer eye on her. Choi said her room was empty.” Asher’s lip curls in thinly veiled disgust. “Clearly the two of you are occupied. I’ll see myself out.”
“Stay.”
Shea hears her voice from far away, drifting down with the snow. Asher and Lys turn to look at her in unison. Everything feels slow, slow, slow, like they’re all underwater. Afloat, her heart thuds dully between her ears. Lys is the first to recover.
“You heard her,” he says, smiling affably at Asher. “She wants you to stay.”
“You have to do what I tell you.” She can hear how ridiculous she sounds, even buried in the fog of a feed. It doesn’t stop a snicker from bursting out of her. She drops into a mock curtsy, ankles crossed. “Didn’t you hear? Conall Sullivan says I’m a princess.”
Asher’s face is stony. “Conall Sullivan is dead.”
“Well, he wasn’t being very nice.”
Another snicker. Asher looks at her as though he’s seeing her for the first time. The blood at her wrist. The glaze in her eyes. The way she inches nearer to Lys without even trying. She’s a moon in his orbit, winking through the black infinity of his pull.
“Is this good for you?” he asks Lys. “Having her like this?”
“Not at all,” says Lys, with complete sincerity.
“And yet here you are anyway.”
Lys smiles and shrugs. “We all have our crosses to bear.”
Asher’s eyes land on the crumpled letter, his name still partially visible. He stares at it for a long time without speaking. Darkly, he says, “You asked me for a favor.”
“Did I?” Lys swipes his hood from his head. “Or did I suggest a plan that would be mutually beneficial to the three of us?”
“It’s not benefiting anyone,” bites out Asher. “You’re screwing it up.”
The quiet stretches out and resettles. Off in the distance comes the faint call of a whippoorwill. A winged herald of death, alerting to the presence of a predator.
“No wonder Sullivan went after her,” says Asher.
Lys’s jaw clicks. “Sullivan made a mistake.”
“And you’re delusional if you think so.” Asher huffs out a disbelieving laugh. “My sister’s life might just hinge on your ability to maintain control of the Gravewood, and right now you don’t even have control over yourself.”
“That’s what this is about?” asks Lys. “Your sister?”
Asher’s scowl deepens. “You want me to see this through? You want me to put on a show for Paris Keeling? You’re going to stay out of my way. Do you understand?”
“I’m not sure I do.” Lys isn’t smiling anymore. “Why don’t you spell it out for me, Sunshine?”
“Find somewhere else to get your sick little kicks,” orders Asher. “From this point on, you and Parker are done.”