Chapter Fifteen Shea
November in Pennsylvania is crisp and clear, leaves still clinging to the trees.
As if the cold hasn’t wrung all the color out of this part of the world just yet.
They reach their destination just as the dawn breaks.
The forest falls away, replaced by flat, bucolic fields dotted in decaying colonials.
At their backs, the sun sits in a parhelion along the sky’s eastern basin.
They’ve cut it too close to sunrise. Uneasy, Shea taps Lys’s thigh. He nods once, the pale sliver of his throat visible, and urges the bike a little faster.
Head aching, she holds tight to his middle. Wide flaxen fields fall away on either side—sprawling farmland broken here and there by crumpled silos or flame-blackened barns. A deer flits across the road in front of them, fleet of foot.
Signaling to Asher, Lys slows into an upcoming turn. With a thump, the road narrows to a single, muddy artery. A small herd of horses stands grazing in a nearby field. The stallion whickers a warning as they pass, the whites of his eyes gleaming.
The way is slow going, and it takes several more minutes to navigate to the tunneled end of a driveway.
By then, the sun is nearly all the way in the sky and Shea’s heart has wedged itself neatly in her throat.
She gives Lys’s side a squeeze. Faster. He flattens his gloved palm over her hand and squeezes back. A silent affirmation. I’m going.
The wide, alpine acreage before them is trapped behind tensile fencing, wire swallowed in flowering bull thistle.
A cluster of stables dots the nearby hills, the well-tended buildings nestled into a patchwork landscape left to grow wild.
A mule lifts its head from a patch of clover as they pass, chewing crookedly on the leaves.
They come to a stop beneath an old oak, its branches flooded with ruby-crowned kinglets.
Beyond the tree sits a sagging house. The white siding has gone green with moss, fretted windows cracked.
It looks, at first glance, entirely unassuming—a stark contrast to the old-world grandeur of Mercy Ridge.
Shea doesn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it isn’t this.
Lys—infuriatingly—is slow as mud. He takes his time dismounting, inspecting the chassis of his bike like he has all the time in the world. At his back, the sun creeps steadily higher. The first of the daylight hits the farthest field, gilding the meadow gold.
“Hurry up ,” she mutters, giving him a shove. He traps her hands against his chest, pressing them flat beneath his gloves. She can’t see his eyes through the dark tint of his visor, but she can feel his heart. It pummels into her open palm. With a start, she realizes he’s afraid.
“You don’t want to go in.”
“It’s not my favorite place,” comes his muffled response.
“Then why did we come?”
He tips his chin up to the distant trees, where the sun escapes in brittle shoots of yellow. His throat is gridded in veins, slivers of dark already rising into his skin.
“There’s only one person in the world who hates Paris Keeling more than me,” he says. “And he lives in this house.”
“Hey, prince of darkness,” calls Asher, his eyes on the sky. “Let’s hustle.”
They reach the wide, wraparound porch just as the first of the kinglets begin to herald the morning sun.
The door swings wide seconds before Lys manages to knock.
A man stands there, thin as a spindle and bowed in the shoulders, his hair silver alloy.
His spectacles are bottle thick. He peers through the lenses, his mouth going white.
“Oliver,” he says. “You’re far from home.”
Lys flips up the visor on his helmet. “Let us in.”
“Now just a minute.” The man swipes off his glasses, blustering slightly. “I’m going to need a little more than that. You’ve never darkened my doorstep like this before. Not by choice.”
“There’s been a development,” says Lys.
“Has there?” The man follows his gaze to Shea. He sizes her up for a long moment, his mouth moving in silent appraisal. “This is different company than you normally keep.”
“Like I said,” grits out Lys, “there’s been a development. I need help.”
“I’m afraid you won’t find any here,” says the man. “As you well know, I learned my lesson the hard way the last time you were—”
With a snarl, Lys lunges. There’s a sound of split leather, and then the old man is pinned against the doorframe, Lys’s gloved hand suspended inches from his throat.
Only, the ends have been rent wide. A set of talons protrudes from the interior, tips rutilated as quartz.
He looks as he did the night of the first attack, like he’d been ripped out of the shadows.
“Oh,” says Poppy.
“Holy shit ,” breathes Asher.
Trapped beneath Lys, the man doesn’t even flinch. “It’s started. You should have sent word.”
“And what would you have done?” grinds out Lys. “Cast me out again?”
“I never cast you out,” says the man. “You left on your own. This is different, Oliver. The potential here is catastrophic. You and I both know where this story ends. Your mother fought much too hard—”
“Stop,” warns Lys.
“—and for much too long to watch you unmake yourself like this.”
“I said, shut up !” The kinglets take flight all at once. In the commotion, Lys struggles to quell his temper. “You swore an oath.”
“To your mother,” says the man. “Not to you.”
Out in the field, the sun scrapes across the grass in a widening verdure of gold. The light is nearly at their feet. Shea’s urgency fans into full-fledged alarm.
“Please,” she says. “He can’t be out here. Just let us in, we won’t be any trouble.”
Still pinned beneath Lys’s grip, the man cranes his head around to face her. He looks speculative. Curious. A little bit sad, like he’s just come to some sort of terrible understanding. Solemnly, he peers back at Lys.
“It’s her,” he says gently, “isn’t it?”
“Don’t look at her.”
“You’ve handed him a victory. You do understand that, yes?”
The corner of Lys’s mouth tips up in a sneer. “Not yet, I haven’t.”
Sunlight pushes through the wide old oak in violent pinpricks. The wind shifts, and suddenly the porch is pierced in arrows of white. Lys hisses—a sharp, pained sort of sound.
“Let us in,” says Asher. “He’ll die out here.”
The man mops at his brow, uneasy. For a moment, it seems like he might double down and send them away. Instead—and with one last glance at Shea—he relents. “Get inside. All of you—quickly.”
Lys enters first, the rest falling in behind him. The door swings shut, shrouding the foyer in a murky dark. The only spot of light streams in through a wide entryway at the far end of the hall. A curtained shaft of gold, thick with dust. The smell of cloves clings to the air.
“Do you remember where your room is?” the man asks Lys.
“How could I forget,” intones Lys, peeling off his gloves with his teeth. His nails are short and neat. There’s no sign that he ever sprang talons at all.
“Sun hits the house around eight,” says the man. “It’ll be full light in here shortly. Go on upstairs. Shut the door. I’ll send for you at twilight.”
Lys lingers, his gaze sliding to Shea. “She comes with me.”
“Your companions will stay put. All of them, even the girl.”
Lys’s lip curls. “I don’t want you filling her head with your inane ideas.”
The man sniffs. “They tell me you call yourself a king, up there in New Hampshire. The Gravewood Devil . It does have a certain ring to it. To me, you’re the same feckless little boy you’ve always been, and this isn’t the Gravewood, it’s my home.
Under this roof, my word is law. Now, you’ve asked for my help.
Either you trust me completely, or you get out. ”
Behind the curtains, the sun grows bolder. It turns the hall a funny olive hue. Not quite light. Not quite dark. Lys looks tense as bowstring, his knuckles white.
“Sunshine,” he says.
“I’ve got it under control,” answers Asher.
When Lys is gone, the rest of them are ushered into the living room.
The space is timeworn but neat, every available surface covered in a potted plant.
Fiddle-leaf and spider plants, sweet-smelling jade and a wide golden pothos.
A towering monstera sits in the empty hearth, the wide fans of its leaves gone fenestrated.
“I suppose I’ll go put on the kettle,” says the man, when they’ve sat. “Please, make yourselves comfortable.”
In his absence, Poppy pulls out her knitting. The coffee table before them is clad in a doily, a scalloped candy dish left out beside a planter of striped haworthia. The dish is filled with the same red-foil candies Lys offered Shea the night they left. She unwraps one and tucks it in her cheek.
Wedged on the lumpy velour cushion to her right, Asher sits as if carved from granite, his hands laced between his knees. He hasn’t said a word to her. Not since he stumbled, bleary-eyed, out onto the porch and found her out there with Lys.
“Are you mad at me?” she asks.
He doesn’t lift his eyes from the haworthia. “No.”
“It feels like you’re mad,” she presses. “You haven’t looked at me once today.”
He turns to face her. His eyes are stone, hard and unyielding. “There. I’m looking right at you.”
She should let it drop. She knows it. She doesn’t. “Why aren’t you angry?”
“Do you want me to be angry?”
“It’s just that it feels like a giant elephant in the room. You’ve made your position about Lys and me perfectly clear, and I don’t understand why you’re suddenly okay with it.”
“Because you can’t help yourself.” It pops out of him like he’s been bottling it. “You can’t help yourself, ” he repeats, gentler this time. “And I’m starting to think he can’t help himself, either.”
His anger is one thing. His pity, another. It lodges like a knife between her ribs, makes this thing with Lys feel uglier than ever.Out in the kitchen, a kettle begins to whistle.
“It’s very quaint in here,” Poppy says, a little loudly. “Don’t you think it’s quaint in here, Shea?”
“You didn’t even blink,” says Asher. “He had claws, and you didn’t even flinch.”