Chapter 43
Chapter forty-three
“Devil’s tits!” Lux cradled her shoulder, slumping to the ground.
“If it didn’t work for me, I’m not sure why you thought it would for you.” But Shaw rubbed at her shoulder with one hand anyway. With his other, he flipped quickly through Brilliant Brushstrokes.
Still.
He’d been at it for several minutes, crouched, his brow furrowed and chewing at his lips. But Lux couldn’t handle more waiting. Thus, she’d propelled herself into the stone wall.
“What are we going to do?” The makeshift torch weakened, any breathable air slowly siphoning away. She shoved painfully back to her feet. “Should we go back?” When Shaw didn’t answer, she nudged his elbow with her knee.
He pushed her away. “We can’t go back. It’ll be engulfed by now.”
“We can’t stay here until it finishes burning!” She heaved in a gulping breath. Devil below. I feel it. The…air…
Shaw cursed.
“What?”
He closed the book carefully, and then his eyes trained upon hers. “Do you remember when I told you I needed to mix blood with my pigments? This book says I was right.”
Lux’s mouth dropped wide, disgusted firstly and then confused. “That was a joke and blood is for curses. Are you saying your brilliance is…cursed?”
He cast her an exasperated look. “No, I’m not cursed. It doesn’t have to be blood, but it does have to be a part of me. It could be hair. Or a fingernail.” His expression turned pointed.
“And then?”
Lux sucked a sharp breath at Shaw pulling his knife free, slicing the tip vertically along his thumb.
“Shaw!”
“I have nothing else to paint with.” He pressed his seeping finger to the stone.
His hand moved quickly, and Lux couldn’t make out anything in the shadows. But once she stepped around to his opposite side, she held the torch out—lighting upon a quickly forming doorknob.
Flat and dripping. Formed entirely of blood.
Her stomach twisted.
When it was done, Shaw stepped away. She could tell his breaths, too, had shallowed.
“What did you do?” she asked. Streaks marred the stone where Shaw had wiped excess blood in the shape of a doorframe. Afterward, he twisted his wounded finger in the hem of his shirt. She stepped closer.
“It needs to dry. They always need to dry first.”
He sounded as if he were willing to wait, but Lux couldn’t stomach the feel of being robbed of air, and so she bent to the bloody work of art and blew.
She’d closed her eyes. She’d had to. But she could smell it still—the iron. She held herself back from heaving, though it was a near thing, and breathed out all that was left in her lungs. When she blinked open her eyes, a crimson knob sat directly in front of her face.
“Saints above,” she gasped.
“Devil below,” laughed Shaw. Then he grabbed the knob and twisted it.
The door swung outward into a flickering corridor.
They both stood in the stairwell; he didn’t move, and she didn’t either. Finally, Shaw peered around the newly formed doorway. “We’re on the fourth floor, same as before,” he murmured, low. “But Riselda’s portrait…”
Lux was never one to starve her curiosity. She ducked under Shaw’s arm to see what he saw.
Down the hall. The portrait. Melting. Riselda’s piercing green gaze folding and falling.
A peculiar quiet doused the manor. She waited to feel Death’s triumph. It didn’t come.
She could have missed it—Riselda’s long-awaited trip to the Beyond. Or Death was still lurking, and Riselda somehow still alive. Again.
The truest cockroach of them all, she thought.
The quiet was interrupted by a distant shuffling and muffled voices.
Lux’s body seized. She whipped back to Shaw, only for him to shove her farther out into the corridor.
To then see him muscling the thick stone of the door closed, reopening his finger with his teeth and swiping it over the red doorknob.
He copied her earlier methods. He blew upon the crimson paint.
When it dried, the knob was gone. All that remained was a bloodied handprint.
How much time had passed, Lux didn’t know. She blinked awake in the dark.
She couldn’t see at all, not even the outline of the room. Her hand stretched outward, and of that, at least, she could note the vaguest outline. She pushed the four-poster’s curtains aside.
She hadn’t remembered drawing them.
She hadn’t remembered climbing into bed to start.
It was dark, too, in the remainder of the bedchamber.
The fire had guttered, leaving only blood-red coals, and the moon had vanished.
Thick clouds must have gathered at some point in the night.
Lux glanced down at her nightgown, picking at the silky material.
Goosebumps littered her arms—the garment was thinner than anything she’d ever worn—and she searched for a robe.
Her steps led her through the bedroom, the bath, and into the dressing room, but she found nothing.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
She returned to stand in the center of the room when she heard it. A soft wail. It seeped underneath the door. Her stare narrowed on the wood.
It tremored once, and then she was there, standing in front of it. Lux twisted the lock. The click reverberated throughout the room. She carefully turned the knob, and when the door creaked open, she fitted her eye to the crack and peered out.
A stray cloud had entered Mothlock. The entirety of the corridor was grey with fog and the lamplight had dimmed.
Inside it, a figure moved.
A woman. With ebony locks loose down her back and a nightgown the replica of Lux’s own.
Lux caught her breath. The wail came again, louder this time, even as the woman was farther away.
Lux could see the glisten of tears on her cheeks when she turned to face a black door.
It was odd, she thought, that they looked so much alike.
Odder still that another girl came to be here, crying in the corridor, not more than two doors down—
The door swung open. A pale hand stretched from the dark. It grasped hold of the girl’s wrist—and hauled her in.
The resulting scream froze the very blood in Lux’s veins. She tumbled out into the hall.
In her hand was the gallow blade—she didn’t remember grabbing it—and she was immensely thankful. She sprinted toward the door only to stumble and choke at its stoop. Death poured over her, soaking into her pores. The silence that followed was absolute.
“Too late,” whispered a voice, and though Lux still clutched a knife, she clutched at her head too.
9, read the door. She reached and traced the curve of it. Her finger only just met the number’s end when it was drawn away from her. Lux stumbled back.
Corvin filled the frame.
Though it wasn’t him. Not exactly. Because instead of a collector’s robe, he wore the black trousers and shirt same as when she’d first met him.
And his hands—they were ungloved. Pale and elegant, he stretched his fingers toward her.
The room behind him was black as midnight, but the lamp lit his eyes.
A murky grey. A mark of the twisted revived.
“Welcome home, Vesperine Grimrook.”
The walls began to throb. A tempo that first matched her heartbeat before exceeding it.
And Corvin’s hand cupped her cheek. It was cold; it burned like ice.
His fingers gripped the base of her skull and only then did his thumb caress her, running along the fullness of her bottom lip.
He dragged her to him. When he smiled, his teeth dripped, a red and silver mix.
“Little doll. Don’t you want to stay?”
Lux jolted out of the vivid nightmare, her head cracking against stone.
She cried out, cradling her skull, only to have another pair of hands claim that space.
She blinked her eyes slowly open. To her darkened bedchamber.
Her fireplace, the coals red and warm. To Shaw kneeling beside her, his nightshirt loose and open at his throat and his hair a mess.
She tried to orient herself but couldn’t. Not until Shaw said, “Did you have a nightmare? I didn’t even hear you climb out of bed.”
Lux crashed back to the present. Her back was propped against stone and her head pounded.
She glanced to her right to find the door, closed and locked, and her stockinged feet tucked back into the folds of her thick nightgown.
“He wasn’t real,” she whispered. Only, her instinct rejected that line of thinking immediately.
Hot then cold, a sickness in her gut—her mind had granted her a warning in the most horrifying way imaginable.
Careful hands worked the sweat-drenched hair from her brow. A bandaged thumb scratched her skin. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
Shaw scooped her up before she could form a reply, cradling her to him. He came to stand beside the bedframe and laid her gently down. “Do you need something to drink?”
Lux cleared her throat. “There’s a pitcher of water—”
“I know where, love.” He made for the table, and she watched him in the dim, red light.
“You need to go back to your room before they find you gone,” she said.
He returned with a cup in hand. His glance strayed beyond the curtains, to the shut balcony door. “I can stay awhile yet.”
His voice was gravel-rough from sleep, and Lux didn’t protest when he climbed over her, settling himself against her back. She managed a single swallow from the cup before she had to set it down. She turned into his chest.
Her nose settled against the hollow of his throat. She drew a long breath.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” he rumbled against her ear.
She shifted and waited for his arms to tighten around her. She smiled when they did. “No,” she sighed. “It’s nothing I don’t know or will ever allow to happen.”
“Mmm, that’s reassuring.”
Lux’s smile widened over his sarcasm. Really, she felt too safe and too warm to believe anything like that nightmare could come to pass.
She would wait a few hours more. After that, she would ready herself for the Hallowed Eve celebration, and as the guests amassed, she would walk the many corridors.
The flames had been hungry in the tower.
She would see if the blue fire elsewhere had a similar appetite.
She would set the entire place ablaze.
Damn Riselda and any and all of her plans. Lux would burn it all down.
But first—her eyelids fluttered when Shaw’s lips pressed to her hair—first, she would do only this.