Chapter Twenty-One Shea
The following day is sunless.
The whole of the church is blanketed in a murky dark, the shadows steeped in blue. Shea finds Asher in the rectory, stretching out an ache in his tricep, a cup full of sunflower seeds on the pulpit beside him. He clocks her approach, glancing quickly away.
“Look, Parker, I was out of my mind last night. I said a lot of—”
“It’s okay,” she rushes to say. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
“Okay.” His throat bobs in a swallow. He looks as cautious as she’s ever seen him. “Are we good? You and me?”
“We’ve never been better.”
Her voice is saturated in false cheer, and she can tell by the way he looks at her that he doesn’t quite believe it.
She’s not sure she does, either. Everything feels knocked out of alignment.
She watches as he falls to stretching out his quadriceps, one hand pressed flat against the wall.
The light—what little there is—seems to cling to him.
Anointing him so that he looks silver all over.
The morning is humid, the air thick. He’s shed his outer layers, and Lys’s bite is stark against his forearm.
“There was a tick on me when I woke up,” he says when he feels her watching. “It had about nine hundred legs.”
“That number seems high.”
“Does it?” He casts a wary gaze skyward. “This place is overrun with bugs. I found a silverfish in the bathroom sink this morning. I don’t think they want us here.”
He’s making light of it, or trying to. It doesn’t land the way it might have, back home in Little Hill. Back before she uprooted everything. Back before he followed her into the forest.
“I was wrong,” she blurts out. “I do want to talk about it.”
He stops what he’s doing, his eyes flicking toward her. “Oh.”
“It’s just—last night, you said I was the reason you became a ranger.”
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“I thought maybe I dreamed it.”
“I didn’t even know you were a ranger,” she says. “All this time, I thought you were standing on the top of a watchtower somewhere, bored out of your mind.”
His smile is half-hearted. “You don’t rack up a kill count like mine standing watch.”
Suddenly, she understands. “You were hunting.”
“I was, yes.” She’s never seen him look so uneasy.
“The other day you said you didn’t believe I missed my first shot.
You were right. I didn’t. I hit it, dead center.
I hit it the next time, too. And every time after that.
You remember how my dad was—he used to drag me out before school, show me how to load a rifle without making any sound.
It’s hard to hunt over a scrape when you can’t get close to the trees.
You learn to drop a buck at two hundred, three hundred yards.
Let it wander out, wounded. Hitting a static target was nothing.
Easy. I was a few weeks in when I got tapped for the field program. ”
“Because you’re a good shot,” says Shea. “Not because of me.”
He grits his jaw, exhaling through his nose.
She can feel him skirting the edges of the truth, taking the long way around.
“My mom wrote me a letter. She asked me not to do it. She wanted me to serve my four years on the watch and get out. You’re right—you don’t see a lot of action up in a tower.
But the rangers have boots on the ground. They’re out there hunting hollows.”
She frowns. “Hollows?”
“It’s what we call people who don’t survive the Turning. There’s nothing left in them but Rot. You learn how to spot them pretty quick. They’ve got this look in their eyes, you know?”
She does know. She knows all too well. She thinks of sitting on the cellar steps and begging her mom to look at her.
To see her. To remember the daughter who needed her, still.
Every single plea was met with that same empty stare, as if Ivy Parker had gone into the Gravewood and had her insides scooped out.
Her next breath is a wet hiccup. She hadn’t even realized she’d begun to cry. Embarassed, she swipes at her cheeks with the sleeves of her flannel, but it’s too late. Asher has already seen. He looks quietly stricken, as if he knows just what she’s thinking.
Clearing her throat, she asks, “What does any of this have to do with me?”
His shoulder lifts in a shrug. “High risk, high reward. The watch is four years of active duty. Fieldwork gets you out in two. I’d have been home by the time you graduated.”
There is no word for the feeling in Shea’s chest. No adjective to describe the way it rends her open.
“If you survived it.”
“I would have survived it.” His smile is rueful. “I made you a promise. And I’m a good shot.”
“Oh.” She spent all that time thinking he’d gone back on his word—that he’d left home and forgotten her, the way everyone else had. She’d hoarded her unsent letters, looking for her own way out. In the end, he wasn’t the one who broke the promise. She was. “Asher—”
“We both did what we had to do,” he says, before she can apologize. “And we’ve ended up exactly where we need to be.”
And there it is again, pulsing between them—that everything and nothing feeling. This.
“Here?” she asks. “In an abandoned church in Virginia?”
“Sure,” he says, though they both know that isn’t what he meant. “It’s not so bad. Although there was a spider in my boot when I got up this morning.”
“They come inside when it rains.”
He shudders. “Eugh.”
“You know,” she says, “for a trained assassin, you’re kind of a baby about bugs.”
This time, the smile he flicks her way is genuine.
This time, she can almost pretend everything is exactly how it used to be.
···
She spends the rest of the morning outside.
Alone, and grateful for it for once. The air feels like wet wool.
The grass is rimed in ice. It crunches underfoot as she follows a buried footpath out to the insular courtyard.
It’s a tiny, gated cemetery, the headstones worn flat.
At the graveyard’s center stands a stony angel, her arms outstretched, her sightless eyes weeping black mildew.
It’s as good of a target as any. Shea practices nocking the stake before taking aim, her fingers stiff with cold.
Summoning all the confidence she can muster, she lets the palisade fly.
It veers left, into the trees. Frustrated, she loads another.
She thinks about Asher, hitting the mark every time.
Doing what he had to do to come home to her.
This time, the stake glances off the tip of a wing.
All this time, her guilt has been slowly eating away at her.
Today, it feels like she’s been swallowed whole.
She won’t let herself feel sorry for it—that she did what she needed to do to take care of herself.
The third shot scrapes over the angel’s abdomen before falling to the grave beneath with a clatter that makes her see red.
“It’s not a direct hit,” says a voice from behind her. “But who knows? Maybe you nicked something vital.”
She spins, crossbow notched, and finds Lys hovering under the shade of a black locust.
“You’re getting faster,” he says.
“I’ve had five hundred miles to practice. How long have you been watching me?”
“Long enough to be moderately impressed.” His eyes are black again, no trace of white. He’s gripping something tight in his fist. “There’s a great view up in the bell tower.”
She follows his gaze to the soaring wall of fieldstone.
The belfry is dark, louvers shuttered. When she looks back down at him, he’s staring again.
If being looked at by Asher feels like stepping out into the sun, then being looked at by Lys feels like staring in a mirror.
Like whatever wild thing writhes inside her lives in him, too.
“Why do you want Paris Keeling dead so badly?” she asks.
Amusement glimmers in his eyes. “It’s a little early for all these questions, don’t you think?”
“It’s just one question.”
“Not by my count. You’ve been interrogating Thorley all morning.”
Heat crawls into her skin as she realizes he’d been listening. “That was a private conversation.”
“Relax, Hermia. It’s nothing I didn’t already know.
” He tosses the object in his hand up into the air.
It’s a tiny brass sprocket, plucked loose from a machine.
It glimmers with a penny sheen and then drops, smack , into his palm.
“Let’s talk about something else— Did you know church bells weren’t always used as a call to worship? The Celts used them to ward off evil.”
She wants to press him harder—to double down and ask him again about Paris. Instead, she plays along. She always does. “So, if I rang the bells, you’d go running?”
“Maybe.” He looks delighted. “Or maybe I’ll ring the bells, and you’ll come kneel at my feet.”
Her heart skips a beat. “Try it and find out.”
It’s familiar ground, this push and pull.
This precipice. The smile slips off his face and he surrenders a step, hunger banding his throat.
Beneath her skin, her blood fizzes through her veins.
She always comes back to this in the end—cutting herself open on Lys when the rest of the world becomes too much to hold on to.
This morning’s conversation with Asher felt like clutching a fistful of broken glass.
There’s no way to put any of it back together.
And so, maybe she’ll let it all go.
“I don’t want to be an escape,” says Lys, the moment she reaches for her sleeve.
She draws up short, frowning over at him. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“I didn’t—that’s not what this is.”
“Isn’t it?” His stare is heavy. “You’re feeling guilty, and you want me to make it all better. Maybe I don’t appreciate being used.”
“But I’ll bet you appreciate being fed,” she snaps.
His mouth curls into a sneer. “And you say I’m the one making this feel cheap.”
Whatever else she might have said, she’s not given the chance. They’re interrupted by a whistle, sharp. Asher stands at the front of the church, two fingers in his mouth, a fresh bandage at his wrist.