Chapter Nineteen Shea
A storm hits midway through the following day, bringing a wall of freezing rain that drives them off the road.
They shelter inside the mouth of a twin-bore tunnel, watching the sleet turn the pavement slick as glass.
The mood in the RV is tense. It’s as if Shea’s fight with Lys has put a crack in the foundations.
The very air feels tremulous. As though at any moment, this unsteady thing they’ve built might all come crashing down around their ears.
Shea passes the time in the corner dinette, loading and reloading the crossbow until her fingers are raw.
Poppy sits in the front passenger seat, knitting her scarf and singing along to an old mixtape she found in the glove compartment.
The sound of classic rock floods the little space, driving out some of the day’s dreariness.
Outside in the tunnel, Asher watches the road.
Lys stays shut away in the dark. He doesn’t speak to anyone at all.
It’s late afternoon when Shea heads out to swap places with Asher.
The sound of the rain is loud against the overpass as she takes her spot against the wall.
The stone is cool to the touch, the air thick and wet.
For a while, Asher stays behind, cleaning the barrel of his gun with a slender boring brush.
She hugs her knees to her chest and peers over at him, watching him work.
“Is this what you pictured?” she finally asks. “When you said we’d leave Little Hill someday?”
He stops scrubbing. “Not really, no.”
“Me neither.” She fiddles with the ring on her necklace. “Out of curiosity, what did you picture?”
He’s quiet for too long. Longer. Eventually, he sighs. “You know how my dad is. He runs the house like a war general. It’s not that he’s— He’s not an angry person, he just doesn’t like disorder.”
It feels like the understatement of the century.
Whenever Shea and Poppy visited, they’d leave their shoes at the door and follow Camellia upstairs on the tips of their toes, stealing like ghosts through the halls.
The Parker house may have been silent to Shea, but it never felt silent.
It felt full. Full of her father’s music, scratching on the record player.
Full of her mother’s singing. Full of laughter and mess and happy, warm disorder.
In contrast, the Thorley house was a powder keg.
Alder Thorley had very little patience for disruptions.
She thinks of an April day eight years past, when she and Camellia broke one of her mother’s vases. They’d been using it as a cauldron, mixing yellow merrybell petals into a maidenhair stew. At some point, they began quarreling over the ladle. The vase went crashing to the floor.
Asher found them seconds before his father did.
He took the blame, staying behind to sweep up the scattered petals and chunks of ceramic. He’d come to school the following day with his knuckles split, the skin raw. He never said a word about it.
“Wherever I end up,” he says now, “it’ll be different.”
“Loud,” suggests Shea. “Chaotic. Messy.”
He cracks a smile. “A pigsty.”
She matches his smile with one of her own. “We’re off to a great start, then. The RV is disgusting. Your dad would hate it.”
“He’d light it on fire,” Asher agrees.
“In all fairness, it should be lit on fire.”
“I don’t know.” He tips his head back against the stone. “It’s growing on me.”
A companionable silence settles between them. She shuts her eyes and listens to the rain.
“Asher?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a good brother.”
The quiet that follows stretches to the point of unbearability. She opens her eyes and finds him watching her, an unreadable look on his face.
“I’m trying to be,” he says.
When he’s gone, Shea passes the time stacking loose chunks of asphalt into teetering cairns, feeling the hum of the rain in the pavement beneath her. Night steals in like a thief, turning the tunnel dark as pitch. At some point, she looks up and finds Lys standing there, his hands in his pockets.
He doesn’t say a word, and so neither does she. They switch places in silence, giving each other as wide a berth as they can manage. When she looks back at him, he’s seated in a jagged semi-circle of stone, quietly examining her handiwork.
Throat tight, she heads back into the RV.
The air here is warmer, but only just. There’s a chill in her bones she can’t quite shake.
She finds Poppy in the booth, studiously examing a jar.
It takes Shea several heartbeats to comprehend what it is she’s seeing—the specimen container from Van Haut’s lab, a human fetus curled within.
“ Ew. I thought I saw you nick that.”
“It looks like him,” says Poppy, balancing her chin on her fist. “Lysander. Don’t you think?”
“This fetus looks like Lys?”
“You know what I mean. Look at its eyes.”
She does. Its stare is black all the way through. It gives the fetus a vaguely cryptid appearance, like it’s some sort of changeling. Like if it had lived, it might have grown into something wild.
“None of the others have eyes like that,” says Poppy. “Like Lysander.”
“Except for this fetus.”
“Shea.” Poppy groans. “I’m being serious. Egor van Haut called him a marvel. There’s obviously something going on. I mean, he has horns. A-and claws. Don’t you think—”
There’s a sound outside, and she falls silent, watching the door. It stays shut.
“I keep thinking about what that guy was chanting,” says Poppy. “The one in the kitchen. Do you remember? He said something about the age of the beast.”
Shea had nearly forgotten. “That was weird.”
“It was more than weird. It sounded like he was praying to Lysander. Like he’s some sort of god.”
“Lys isn’t a god.”
“ I know that,” says Poppy. “But he’s keeping things from us. And with everything that’s happened, I’m worried not knowing the truth might get us into trouble once we get to the Flatwood. I mean, Lysander has asked Asher to kill someone for him. That’s not exactly a small favor.”
“It isn’t a favor, it’s an exchange. Lys is looking for Ellie.”
“But he isn’t,” argues Poppy. “We’ve been on the road for days, and we’ve barely searched for her at all.”
An ice-cold guilt pools in Shea’s lungs. She thinks of Asher’s silence in the tunnel, the cryptic expression on his face. The way it looked a little bit like resignation.
Poppy sits back and rubs at her eyes. “This isn’t a search party. It’s an assassination mission, and no one has stopped to ask why Lysander wants the mark dead.”
“Paris Keeling has sent multiple people to try and kill me,” points out Shea.
“Yes, but he wanted Paris dead before that. This power struggle didn’t start with you, but it’s nearly gotten you killed on more than one occasion. What if the next hit is successful? What if you don’t survive it? What if I lose you and Ellie?”
It’s the first time Poppy has come even remotely close to admitting what Shea has long suspected: that no one is bothering to look for Camellia because she’s already dead. It feels like a light has guttered out. On the table, the fetus stares blackly up at Shea.
“I’m not saying Egor was in the right,” says Poppy, “but it’s clear he’s intelligent. If he says we’re on the cusp of causing some sort of catastrophic chain reaction, don’t you think we should at least try and figure out what that is?”
Outside the RV, Shea can just make out Lys in the dark.
He’s seated against the stone, his hood pulled up and his knee bouncing.
Restless, the way she’s restless. Electric, the way she’s electric.
Her heart tithes a beat, and it’s as if he’s heard it.
His knee stills. His eyes find hers through the glass.
Quickly, she ducks down into the booth, tugging Poppy with her as she goes.
“God.” She buries her face in her knees. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Do you want me to say it,” asks Poppy, “or was that rhetorical?”
“Rhetorical,” Shea grumbles into her kneecaps.
Everything feels suddenly unendurable. If Camellia was here, she’d force them to grin and bear it. To dump it all out into the open, and then laugh themselves sick over how sideways everything has gone. But Camellia isn’t here. Camellia is gone. And so Shea stuffs it away.
“One of us needs to talk to him,” says Poppy. “You know what they say about ignorance.”
Shea lifts her head from her knees. “It’s bliss?”
“ Is that what they say?” Poppy drops her head onto Shea’s shoulder, nestling in close. “My mom always said it was the root of misfortune.”
···
Eventually, Poppy climbs into the cab to sleep. Shea stays awake a while longer, loading and reloading the crossbow until it’s a reflex. Until her finger callus and her knuckles ache. She’s conscious, all the while, of Lys watching her through the window.
He’d promised to Turn her. That was the deal they’d struck—a cure for her mother in exchange for a lifetime in the dark. She’d resigned herself to her fate, back at Mercy Ridge. She’s ready. She’s willing.
And she can’t figure out why he keeps yanking the offer away.
Maybe he doesn’t want this anymore. Maybe he finally sees that it wasn’t courage that drove her to his doorstep that first fateful night, but desperation. Maybe he’ll leave her behind the very first moment he can.
Everyone else has.
She spends the better part of an hour trying to garner the courage to go out and confront him.
It’s near midnight when she gives up. Rising into a stretch, she heads for the bedroom.
Asher is already there, fast asleep on his stomach, one arm draped off the edge.
Doing her best not to wake him, she crawls tentatively into bed.
He doesn’t stir. She lies there, restless, staring out into the open cabin.
She’s still awake when Poppy takes over the watch, sliding bleary-eyed from her perch. Lys appears a few minutes later, taking in the sleeping arrangements through a shuttered gaze.
“I hope you don’t expect me to be a martyr like Thorley. I’m not built for the floor.”