Chapter Twenty-Seven Shea
As quickly as the chanting began, it stops.
Silence settles in after it, like an unseen conductor has just brought an orchestral piece to a close. Lys and Shea are left standing face-to-face in the quiet, blinking like voles. He looks devastating beneath the broad white light, a crown of brass gleaming at his temples.
Ridiculously, she thinks this is how he was meant to look all along. Like royalty.
A shadow appears at the edge of the circle.
Slowly, it coalesces into the tapering figure of a man.
Into Paris, wearing Lys’s smile. Looking out of Lys’s eyes.
Seeing them like this—side by side—she wonders how it’s possible that she didn’t see the resemblance right away.
He clasps Lys on the shoulder, his smile paternal.
Lys holds himself still, but she can see the flinch behind his eyes.
“I know you’re angry, Oliver,” says Paris, “but this is what you were bred to do. You’re destined for so much more than what you’ve become. All that drivel your mother put into your head in her efforts to manufacture you a conscience—it’s done nothing but plague you. Yoke you.”
“I’m not yoked to anything,” snarls Lys in a voice Shea has never heard him use.
“You won’t be, before long,” agrees Paris. “Look at you—the change has already begun. Tonight, we put an end to your suffering. We cast off your mortal coil. Set you free.”
Lys’s jaw wires tight. He watches Shea like he’s memorizing her.
Beneath her chest, her heart punches into her bones.
“You’ll see it my way once it’s over,” says Paris. “Every single person in this room has been given the order to hunt and kill Shea Parker. If you don’t want that to happen, you’ll have to bring them to heel yourself.”
Lys doesn’t look surprised to hear it. He doesn’t look anything at all. He is as rigid as a statue. As unblinking as an effigy.
“You can’t possibly save her,” says Paris, “but, oh, you’ll try. You’ll break yourself with the trying. By the time the sun rises, this pretty little distraction of yours will be among the myriad dead. You won’t even remember her name.”
Lys’s stare burns clean through her. She feels like a rabbit must feel, frozen in the crosshairs of a wolf.
“A head start would be sporting, I think,” says Paris. “Don’t you?”
Lys doesn’t appear to have heard his father. He tilts his head, listening. All around them, so do the others. Paris stills, frowning. Shea listens, too. She hears nothing at all. Nothing but the harsh saw of her own breathing.
And then, beneath it, comes the roar of a motorcycle engine.
“Always with the big fucking entrances,” mutters Lys. His eyes slide to hers. “Run.”
She doesn’t hesitate. She turns, racing out of the spotlight and into the crowd, urged on by the way they break and surge, calling after her. They mock and jeer, clutching at her dress and whistling in her direction, but they don’t give chase. Not yet—not without an order from Paris.
At the far side of the ballroom, the doors slam open.
There, bracketed in moonlight, stands Asher Thorley, his shotgun at the ready.
Streaming in behind him is a horde of hollows.
They climb one over the other in a thoughtless swarm, snapping their teeth at anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way.
The cheers throttle, turning to screams. The crowd shoves and pushes, chaos bleeding into carnage.
Tripping over her dress, Shea fumbles up the stairs and bursts onto the balcony, searching this way and that for Camellia.
A hand grips her by the collar and she topples backward, slamming into the railing hard enough to bruise her spine.
A man’s round face appears in her field of view, his fangs gleaming ivory in the light.
“Should have been faster, Princess,” he snarls.
She thrashes, shoving at him as best she can—trying and failing to reach for the stake beneath her dress.
She’s just managed to grab hold of it when, with a yelp, he’s gone.
There’s a heavy thud, the sound of a body crashing against the floor.
Lys is there, crouching over her attacker with claws extended.
In his face is the final death rattle of his humanity.
His talons sing through the air. Skin splits. Blood spatters, violet dark, against the wall.
Shea doesn’t stick around to watch. She runs.
Fast as she can, pulling open the first door she sees and slamming it shut behind her.
She’s in an empty salon, the air thick with dust. The windows here are similarly blacked out, no moon at all to see by.
Enveloped in the pitch dark, she feels her way to the windows, searching for a latch.
As she does, she hears the warning knell of dying batteries.
There’s a single, damning beep, and silence falls.
Not now , she thinks desperately. Not now.
She spins out, pinning herself flat against the wall.
Back home in Little Hill, the silence was a balm.
Here, in the bloodthirsty dark of the Keeling mansion, it’s a bane.
In the newly fallen quiet, she feels the creak of the floor under her feet.
The shifting pressure of a body, moving just outside.
A shadow pulls along the bottom of the door.
She clasps her hand over her mouth, silencing her breathing as best she can.
Waiting—begging—for the owner of the shadow to move on.
Eventually, it does. She waits another minute. She waits two, deaf to the anarchy raging just outside the door. Cut off from everyone, trapped in her little dark corner.
She can’t stay there forever, and she knows it.
Eventually, she’ll be found. In the middle of the room is a chair, tipped on its side.
There’s no way to gauge the volume outside the door.
No way to tell whether or not the sound of shattering glass will draw a predator.
She hefts it up anyway, swinging it at the window as hard as she can.
Glass fractures in an explosion of color, raining to her feet.
She climbs through quickly, her dress snagging on the window’s jagged remains as she crawls out onto the second-story balcony.
The terrace is hemmed in by a stony balustrade, pilasters overgrown with pink begonias.
The air is thick with the sweet-smelling blooms. She leans over the top, hoping it’s enough to mask her scent as she scans the dark.
Below, the revel has begun to pour out into the street, partygoers desperate to get free of the hollows.
It’s a stampede, the ground shaking as everyone flees in each direction.
Blanketed in the silence, she feels apart from it all.
Detached, as though she’s a ghost, floating far above the scene.
Untouchable, the way she is impervious to the Gravewood in the silence.
In the dark, it’s impossible to distinguish between hollow and hunter. She tries anyway, searching the melee for Lys.
She finds him right away. He’s standing in the road out front, watching the building with an unearthly calm.
The black of his eyes bleeds into his face in swollen tributaries.
His hands hang, sheathed in gore, at his sides.
A cluster of hollows breaks free of the crowd, moving as one, their sallow faces peeled back in snarls.
Lys doesn’t move.
The hollows race around him as though he’s little more than an obstruction someone has plunked in their path. They don’t see him. They don’t touch him. The night pulses, the air shifting around the turmoil of fleeing bodies, the sky thick with the smell of blood.
Only Oliver Lysander remains apart from it all.
Removed, the way she’s removed, as if both of them have stepped outside the fabric of time and into a silent little pocket of their own.
His eyes lift, searching. His gaze settles on hers.
He doesn’t move, and neither does she. She knows what it feels like to be hunted.
Slowly, his mouth tips into a chilling smile.
A cataclysm , Van Haut called her. All around her, the night is in violent upheaval. Because of her. Because she couldn’t save herself. Because she didn’t know how. Because she knocked Oliver Keeling so far out of alignment, he came all apart.
Everything has an end , he told her.
The wind picks up, turning choppy. It whips her hair into her eyes, plucks the petals from the begonias.
Pink swirls through the dark in a fluttering maelstrom as she peers overhead.
At first, it feels like she’s seeing stars.
Dozens upon dozens of them, spanning the sky in ruby-red constellations.
Slowly, a helicopter coalesces out of the dark.
It hovers, lights blinking, rotors spinning.
She watches, arrested, as something is dropped into the carnage.
It hits the ground with a bang she feels in her chest. There’s a spark, firecracker bright, and a heavy smoke pours out into the street.
Shea throws herself down on the balcony, covering her mouth and nose with her hands.
She doesn’t know how long she lies there, exposed and afraid, before the helicopter moves on.
The bladed hum of it goes out of the stone.
The wind dies down. For a long time afterward, there is nothing at all.
She lies flat, blanketed in petals, and waits for the air to clear.
Carefully, she crawls on her hands and knees to the edge of the balustrade and peers over.
The stars have gone white again, pale in comparison with the wide face of the hunter’s moon. The street below is empty. A sickly sweet smell clings to the air. It slips down her throat, turning her breaths papery. She coughs into her fist, searching for any sign at all of Lys.
He’s gone. Disappeared, along with the rest of the crowd. A lone figure walks down the road. She’s dressed all in colors, a possum cradled in her arms.
“Poppy,” hisses Shea, waving her hands over her head. “Poppy, I’m up here!”
Poppy spots Shea and smiles, her mouth moving. Shea’s too far to read her lips. Her words are lost to the dark, soundless and adrift.
“Hold on,” Shea calls. “I’m coming down.”
Hiking up her dress, she eases herself over the railing, clinging to the begonia vines as she feels her way slowly to a pilaster. The way is fraught, and there are precious few handholds. She makes it partway before she falls, landing hard in a bloodred swath of burning bush.
“Ow.”
Poppy appears in her field of vision, talking still as she helps Shea up.
“I can’t hear anything,” she explains, brushing petals from her dress. “My batteries died in the middle of the attack.”
Poppy asks something else. It looks like, Didn’t you bring any spares?
“I’ve been busy.” The begonias were thorny, and her palms are gridded in scrapes. “Plus, this dress doesn’t have any pockets.”
Poppy holds up a finger, silently signaling for her to wait.
Fishing through the bib of her overalls, she pries loose a half-empty blister packet, the remaining cells winking silver.
The very last of Lys’s stock. Shea rushes to replace the old batteries with the new, taking a breath as sound comes rushing in on a dizzying wave.
“I could kiss you,” she tells Poppy. “Did anyone ever tell you you’re the best person in the world?”
“It’s been said,” says Poppy. “Are you okay?”
“Not really.” The smoke is gone, but the odor lingers, pungent and sweet. “Where’d everyone go?”
“I’m not sure. Those smoke grenades sent them running. It smells a little bit like the hawthorn trees behind the schoolyard. Did you notice? Whenever the wind blew through the blooms, I always thought it smelled like fish.”
“Why would that make them run?”
Poppy considers as they walk, edging carefully around each subsequent corner.
Every alleyway is empty. Every road is deserted.
There’s no one in sight for miles. “Maybe it’s trimethylamine.
The smell, I mean. It’s the same chemical emitted by a dead body as it decomposes.
I bet they don’t like it. The Rot needs a living host.”
Shea falters, glancing over at her. “Where do you even learn something like that?”
“At school,” says Poppy patiently. “You just never did the reading. Is there a reason you’re wearing a crown?”
“Oh.” Shea pulls off the circlet of bone and grips it tight in her hands. She doesn’t know how to tell Poppy how sideways everything has gone. “Poppy I—” Her voice sticks in her throat. She tries again. “I have to tell you something. It’s about Ellie.”
“She’s here.” Poppy’s eyes are bright in the dark. “We were right, weren’t we?”
Shea swallows sharply. “Yes, but it’s not that simple—”
“I knew it.” Poppy’s smile turns hopeful. “I knew we’d find her. Is she—she’s okay? Has Asher seen her yet?”
Shea shuts her eyes. She feels as though she’s splintering into a thousand pieces. “About Asher—”
The sudden clap of a bell pours through the dark, silencing her. It rings and it rings, pealing out in a clarion call. A brassy convocation, low and deep. Over the tops of the buildings, Shea can just make out a red-capped cathedral, narrow campanile lit from beneath.
A ward against evil, or else a summons. Come kneel at my feet.
“That’s him. It’s Lys.”
Poppy doesn’t look so sure. “Are we positive?”
“Yes, I’m sure. It has to be.” She breaks into a run, dragging Poppy behind her. “Come on. If we hurry, maybe we can get there before Paris does.”