Chapter Twenty-Two Shea
The drive the next day is silent.
Even Kit is quiet, dozing in a cabinet out of sight.
They stop to rest at a cabin along the Gravewood’s southern terminus.
So far off the main roads, the forest is wet and lush.
It feels like a land lost to time, like they’ve stumbled out of the real world and into a storybook.
Everything is lovely and green, white-capped mushrooms growing in rings everywhere Shea looks.
The inside of the house is just as charming.
Well-tended, as if whomever lived here kept it with a loving hand.
The main room boasts towering ceilings and a pressed stone fireplace, the hearth blackened with soot.
The soaring cathedral windows have been thoroughly blacked out, and the walls are paneled wood.
In its abandonment, signs of neglect have crept in.
The furniture is damp and moth-bitten. A careworn couch sits atop a rug gone patterned in mold.
“What is this place?” asks Asher, once he’s finished his inspection.
On the couch, Lys kicks his feet onto the coffee table. “An abandoned nest.”
It’s the most they’ve spoken in hours, their voices clipped, as if they’re each doing their level best not to come to blows.
Asher eyes the blacked-out windows. “We don’t have to worry about guests?”
“We shouldn’t,” says Lys. “No one comes here anymore.”
“Why not?”
“It has bad blood.”
“That’s not an answer,” says Asher tightly.
Lys tips his head back and shuts his eyes. “It’s all you’re going to get, Sunshine. Be a good little soldier and build me a fire. There’s wood out in the shed.”
“Sure,” says Asher. “And when it’s done, maybe I’ll shove a hot poker up your—”
“Poppy and I will bring in the firewood,” says Shea, cutting him off.
In the end, the task is easier said than done.
It takes them the better part of an hour to find wood dry enough to burn.
With a fire sputtering in the fireplace, they scrounge together a meal from the remainder of their food supply.
They eat in silence, the cabin smoky. Shea finishes first, shoving back from the table and snatching a flashlight from the top of Asher’s bag.
“Where are you going?” calls Poppy, when no one else cares enough to ask.
“To find a window to fling myself out of,” she says, without turning back.
“Oh,” says Poppy. “Okay. Be careful.”
Two sets of eyes follow her out. She finds a bedroom at the very top of the stairs, small and sparse and neat.
A crib occupies the farthest corner, its wooden slats splintered.
Over the top of the crib hangs a handcrafted mobile of felted stars, all of them red.
A book sits on the wooden rocking chair beside it, pages deckled.
She picks it up and flips through. It’s a collection of old poems, none of them familiar.
It feels invasive, snooping through the room’s battered contents—like she’s a grave robber rifling through a tomb.
She sets the book back down, careful not to knock the pages loose.
When she straightens, her flashlight sweeps over the wall.
Her eyes catch on the black gloss of marker, handwriting small and cramped.
There’s writing over the crib. A lot of it.
She leans in close for a better look, her blood running cold.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
It isn’t written just the one time, or by just the one hand. It’s been inscribed over and over, from floor to ceiling. Sometimes neat. Sometimes scribbled. Sometimes etched deep into the paneling, as if by a knife.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
From the fount of the forest comes the age of the beast.
A soft scrape draws her upright. She whirls, her heart flying into her throat, and finds Lys standing by the crib, lit silver in the beam of her light.
“You scared me,” she says. “I didn’t hear you come in.”
He looks as serious as she’s ever seen him. “I need to talk to you.”
“Oh.” She lowers the flashlight to their feet. “Okay.”
He pokes a finger at a red felt star. They all go wobbling, cast out of orbit by his touch. He waits for them to still before saying, “Not in here.”
“What’s wrong with this room?”
His gaze drifts meaningfully to the wall. To the dozens of inscriptions, repeated like a prayer over the empty crib.
“It feels like a crypt,” he says, mirroring her thoughts. “Let’s go across the hall.”
She lets him lead her out of the nursery and into the adjacent bedroom, flashlight glancing off every oblique shape in the dark.
This room is sparse and undecorated, save a modest bed and an empty dresser.
A set of doors leads out onto a balcony, panels shattered and mullions snapped.
He steps outside and she follows, glass crunching underfoot.
The trees grow in close, red cedar pine engulfing the railing.
A screech owl takes off at the sight of them, gliding into the woods with a ghostly tremolo.
“I think Thorley is hiding something,” says Lys the moment it’s quiet.
Shea bristles, wary. “Hiding what?”
“I don’t know.” He doesn’t look at her. His focus is honed on the railing as he pries up a splinter with his thumbnail. “I haven’t figured it out yet.”
“Oh, well, obviously.” It comes out sharper than she meant it to. “And you’re basing this off what, exactly? Did he say something? Do something?”
“It’s just a feeling I have.”
She gapes at his profile, incredulous. “A feeling.”
“Yes.”
“A feeling ?”
His eyes lift to hers. “Are you going to keep saying it?”
She bites back a scream. “You’re unbelievable, do you know that?”
She turns her back on him, walking away before she says something she’ll regret. He tails after her, undeterred, glass ground to stardust beneath his boots. Her fury finds her there, in the middle of the room. She whirls, nearly crashing headlong into him in the dark.
“This is about last night, isn’t it? You’re upset.”
His eyes flash dangerously. “What do I have to be upset about?”
“Jealous, then.”
He looks, for an instant, startled. And then he laughs right in her face. A cold, unfunny laugh that makes the hairs on her arm stand on end.
“You think I’m jealous? Of Thorley? A barely sentient jarhead?”
“Don’t call him that.”
“It’s what he is,” snaps Lys, swallowing up the space between them. “He’s a small, little crush from your small, little town, and if I hadn’t stepped in, you would have settled for him and gone on to live a small, little life.”
The words hit her like a slap. She rears back, shocked. Lit from beneath by her flashlight, he looks as unassailable as ever. Not a god but a demon cut from the cloth of hell.
Tightly, she whispers, “Maybe that’s what I wanted.”
His jaw wires shut. “Maybe it is.”
It shouldn’t hurt, hearing him say it. It shouldn’t feel like she’s been ripped open. She’s known all along that this thing between them is synthetic. Ugly and unsustainable.
But , says a voice inside her. But.
Directly in front of her, Lys stands as still as a living statue. His cheeks are veined like marble. His throat bobs beneath thin cobalt bruises. He’s menacing in the gloom—menacing and inhuman and all his own.
And she thinks she might love him.
“I need to leave,” she gasps out. “I can’t be in here.”
His gaze turns thunderous. “Go, then. I’m not keeping you.”
She turns, her flashlight carving a wobbling arc through the hallway’s inky black. The dark feels like it’s going to collapse in on her. The knot around her chest cinches tight enough to cut off circulation. Spots bloom in front of her eyes. She can’t breathe.
“You should know,” calls out Lys, his voice as cold as she’s ever heard it, “Thorley was acting on my orders.”
She stutters to a stop atop the threshold. She waits for him to say more. When he doesn’t, she swings around to face him. Her throat feels like she’s swallowed nettles.
“What are you talking about?”
“I told him to get close to you,” says Lys. “To trick you into thinking he liked you as more than just his kid sister’s friend.”
“What?” She searches his face, not understanding. “When?”
“His first night at Mercy Ridge.”
She stands frozen, useless, the fight going out of her.
She thinks of Asher on the bed, the box full of letters in his lap.
He’d been too forgiving. Too eager to move on.
She’d seen right through it, and she ignored her intuition.
Because she was weak. Because she was afraid. Because she wanted it to be true.
“Why?” Her voice is thin as a reed. “Why would you do that?”
“Because this thing between us is a sickness,” says Lys, “and you were starting to mistake it for something else.”
She wants to laugh right in his face, but she can’t find the air. It feels like her lungs have been punctured. Each inhale rattles like broken glass inside her chest.
“If that’s true, then why did you bring me? Why talk me into coming? Why drag me along on this whole stupid road trip?”
“Come on, Shea,” he goads. “You’re smarter than that. You know why.”
It’s become a habit, reaching for her wrist—running her thumb along the raised sickles of his bite. She does so now, his eyes tracking her movements. Blue splits deeper into his skin, veins popping along his throat. Hungry, even now. Insatiable, even as he breaks her.
“You needed me,” she realizes. “You needed blood. God. You let me think it was something more. You let me—”
Love you. You let me love you. She feels like she’s going to be sick, right here on his shoes. Cyrus Talbot’s voice plays on a loop through her head. This is how he hunts.
“Were you ever going to Turn me?” Her voice wobbles, unsteady. “Or was that a lie, too?”
A muscle ticks in his jaw. “I told you what you wanted to hear.”