Chapter Eleven Shea
Here is another memory—an earlier one: Hornbeam Academy in March, the air thick and wet.
Not quite winter, not yet spring, only the hardiest of daffodils pushing through the granulated slush.
Yellow on white. Gray on everything. She’d been ten years old, sitting on the swings at recess and watching the forest through the chain-link fence.
Every memory of that day is a somatic pulse: the rattle of the swing, the creak of old chains, the stream of her ribbons in the leonine wind.
Nearby, Poppy Zahar and Heather Borkowski jumped rope and sang a skipping rhyme. Between them, Camellia Thorley executed a perfect double Dutch, her voice cutting loud and clear across the blacktop:
Better light a candle, better light two.
The trees are watching closely, and they might snatch you.
Shea stayed on the swings and looked on from a distance. She imagined—as she so often did—that she was a part of the forest. Quiet and overlooked. Alone on the fringes. She’d kicked her feet into the air and tried to feel like the branches felt, scrabbling at the sky.
The mist had turned to rain by the time old Mr. Bosch blew his whistle, summoning the students back inside. In the mad dash across the glistening blacktop, Shea accidentally trod right atop Owen Davies’s shoe.
“Didn’t you hear me?” he’d asked, catching her in the rib with an elbow.
Next to him, River Albero wrinkled his nose. “She probably didn’t.”
“She didn’t see me, either. I said ‘move it,’ Helen Keller.”
She’d scurried out of the way, embarrassed and angry, the cold in her lungs.
The forest at her back felt like a wildebeest. A physical embodiment of her anger, wind snarling through its branches.
Like Daphne, she sent the forest a silent plea for protection.
Only, instead of transformation, she asked the trees for something with teeth.
She didn’t want to be hidden away. She didn’t want to fit herself in.
She wanted to bite back.
···
Poppy is knitting. In the middle of the day, in the heart of the Gravewood, in the house of the devil, Poppy Zahar is knitting a scarf.
She’s made quick work of it. Already, the fabric spills over her lap in wefts of brilliant pink and royal blue.
She looks perfectly at ease, and Shea is met with the sense that Poppy could make herself feel at home anywhere.
Her serenity is the exact antithesis to Shea’s current state of being.
“I’m going to die,” she announces, falling back onto the bed.
Poppy doesn’t look up from her knitting. “You’re not going to die.”
“You don’t know that.” She shuts her eyes. She feels as though her bones have been wrenched out through her mouth and then shoved back in, out of order. Everything hurts. Everything throbs. She pulls a pillow over her head and screams into it. Falling slack, she adds, “I need something with sugar.”
Poppy plucks the pillow off her face and lobs it onto the floor. “Maybe it’s a good thing.”
“What is?”
“The fact that Lysander won’t be feeding on you anymore. You’re making each other sick.”
She told Poppy everything as soon as she’d arrived back at the room, crawling into bed with blood still drying on her wrist. Conall Sullivan.
What happened on the bridge. The unsent letters and the pump out in the gazebo and the strange encounter between Lys and Asher in the snowy room.
She left out the details about Lys in the rain, the heart throbbing in his hand.
She skipped over the bit where she reached for him and felt bone.
“Lys isn’t sick,” she counters. “He’s perfectly fine.”
“Are we sure?” Poppy’s needles click soothingly. “He didn’t look fine when I saw him.”
Shea flops onto her stomach, burying her face into the quilt. “It’s not even Asher’s decision to make.” Her voice is muffled by the mattress. “It’s mine.”
“It is,” agrees Poppy.
“He has no right to stick his big, stupid nose in my personal business.”
“He doesn’t.”
Shea picks up her face, aghast. “You agree with him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you’re doing that thing you do.”
“What thing?”
“You know exactly what. Whenever Ellie and I used to fight, you’d agree with both of us to keep from picking sides.”
Poppy doesn’t deny it. “Sometimes it was the only way to keep the peace.”
Her smile is faint, her eyes sad. The mention of Camellia has shifted the mood. Subdued, Shea rolls onto her side and watches Poppy pick at a snit in the fabric.
“Who’s that for, anyway?”
“Ellie. The temperature is dropping a little bit every day. She must be freezing.”
Outside, the snow has stopped, but frost still clings to the glass in feathery whorls. No one could survive in this sort of cold for long. She doesn’t say it. It feels too cruel to point it out, even if it’s true. She owes it to Camellia to believe she’s still alive.
“We’ll find her,” says Poppy, pulling the snarl loose.
“I know,” says Shea.
But it tastes like a lie.
She doesn’t know when she drifts off, but she must, because she’s woken by Poppy shaking her awake. It’s dark, moonlight silvering the ice on the windows. Blanketed in sleep, Shea fumbles under her pillow until she finds her hearing aids. Sound hammers into her skull, loud and obtrusive.
Someone is knocking on the door.
“You’re being summoned,” mumbles Poppy, and draws the blanket over her head.
With a groan, Shea rolls out of bed, snatching up a knitting needle as she goes. When she wrenches the door wide, Tristan is there. His hair sticks out every which way, exhaustion shadowing his features. His eyes drop to the needle, wary.
“What’s that for?”
“I thought you were Asher.”
“You were going to stab him with a knitting needle?”
“I haven’t ruled it out. What’s happening?”
“There’s a package,” says Tristan.
She blinks, unsure she’s heard him correctly. “Okay. And?”
“It’s for you,” he clarifies. “Someone has sent a delivery to Mercy Ridge with your name on it.”
···
Tristan leads her to the basement, where the ceilings dip low over salons full of bar-height tables and backless stools.
A felted pool table sits in one corner, surrounded by bodies.
Lys is among them, his face lit from beneath as he racks the balls in starting position.
Cyrus watches, chalking his ferrule. A few feet away stands Asher, looking out of place.
Of the three of them, he’s the only one to acknowledge Shea’s sudden appearance.
He gives her a grim nod, and nothing else.
She finds the package in question right away.
It’s a sleek black garment box, longer than it is wide.
Someone has opened it already. The crimson ribbon trails loose over the edge of the table, and from out of the interior puffs black wrapping tissue.
Inside is a dress. She lifts it out by the shoulder straps, letting the rich red silk spill away and away from her.
The gown is cut like a slip, overlaid with sheer black lace.
There’s a note on the inside, handwritten.
She sets the dress aside and plucks it off the tissue, her heart in her throat.
For the revel. I think red is your color.
XO an admirer
“Our cover is blown,” says Lys as she sets the note back into the box. “Keeling knows we’re coming.”
Cyrus shoves the pool cue into his hand. “Are you going to make us go over it again, or are you going to break?”
“I’d rather play without him,” grumbles Tristan. “He’s too good. It takes all the fun out.”
Shea runs the silk between her thumb and forefinger and reads the letter again. An admirer.
“I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” puts in Asher. “We don’t know for sure that the dress came from Keeling.”
“Who else would it be?” demands Lys, irate. “Getting you close required the element of surprise. How do you plan to drive a stake through his heart when he’s watching you approach?”
“Like I told you, I’m an excellent shot.”
“Arrogance killed the cat,” quips Lys.
Asher lifts a brow. “I think it was curiosity, actually.”
“Well, it shouldn’t be.”
“ I’m going to break,” announces Cyrus, to no one in particular.
“If it was Keeling,” says Asher, ignoring him, “then why didn’t he sign his name? Why the secrecy? If I was trying to rattle you, I’d want you to know it was me.”
Lys contemplates Asher narrowly. “You want to rattle me, Thorley?”
“I think you’re rattled enough. You don’t need my help.”
“I’ll wear it,” says Shea.
The balls scatter, pinging dully off the felted rail. “Choi,” barks Cyrus, “you and Sunshine take solids. We’ll play Little Hill versus Mercy.”
“ I’m Mercy,” gripes Tristan.
“I’ll wear the dress,” says Shea, a little louder this time.
The only answer is a soft thud as Lys sinks his ball in the corner pocket.
He looks more devil than boy in this lighting, his pupils distending as the monster resurfaces.
She feels the same resurfacing deep inside her chest, the sucking gasp of sense breaking through the shell of her euphoria.
They are doomed to be forever each other’s inverse, the two of them teetering wildly between extremes.
You’re making each other sick.
He sinks a second ball. A third.
“This is what I’m talking about,” mutters Tristan. “It’s a break and run every time.”
“I say we burn the dress,” suggests Cyrus. “We can send the ashes back to the Flatwood.”
“That’s a bad idea,” says Asher. “Feels like poking a bear.”
Cyrus tosses him a look. “Good thing you’re here for your muscle, not your brains.”
“Let’s assume, for a second, that the dress did come from Keeling,” says Asher, ignoring the jab. “If you send him a box full of ashes, you’ll be making a statement. The wrong one. What we need to do is—”
Shea snatches the white cue off the table. Four sets of eyes lift to hers. Three of them human. One of them black as the River Styx.
“I want to wear the dress, Lys.”
His mouth corkscrews into a scowl. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I said so.”
“It was sent to me ,” she reminds him.
“In my house.”