Chapter 6
six
I am damned.
That is the only explanation for the thing now standing in front of me. A monster of shadow and smoke, boasting a face. But not just any face. One I know.
My knees give out, betraying me. I crash against the bedpost, fingers scraping the wood for any sense of support.
“You.” The word is stupid on my tongue. “How is it you?”
Silence.
It crashes in my ears like ocean waves, and I heave against the bed, my palm shaking on the cotton check of my quilt, smearing blood against the fabric. I stare at the ghost—the man—and my jaw locks, words crumbling to ash.
Father used to say ghosts were demons masquerading as flesh to drag us off to the shadow of Hell with them.
To steal us away from Ithrandril. That in the Rending, Erybrus took his souls and Ithrandril ascended, allowed his brother to abduct who he wished.
But this is no stranger, not a thing with horns and claws.
The figure steps closer, the mist around him undulating. I shake my head and press a finger to my throat. My heart beats a quickening step, my breath short and raspy. The room shrinks, and the man steps forward, fear dancing in his eyes like winking stars.
“You’re Bram Avery.” I wait for a reply, but none comes. Acting on instinct alone, I open my mouth and say the first thing that comes to mind. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“How very astute.” His nose flares in annoyance. Beneath a strong brow, his eyes are embedded with hints of something like grief and longing. His lips turn down at the corners, as though he is waiting for the whole world to come crashing around him.
For a moment, silence lays roots in my mouth, my throat, rolling down to tighten my lungs.
This should not be real. And yet, Bram Avery—a man who should be dead, whose grave I knelt against only days ago—is standing in my bedroom.
He winces and falls to his knees, as if kicked.
Locks of hickory hair swirl around his head, like weeds caught in water.
This is no monster. I know him. Watched him walk with his little sisters to church, followed his coattails when he got lost in the orchards behind Avery Manor. I always thought him handsome, even as a child, but here he is, something else altogether.
When I drop in front of him, I reach out a shaking hand. My fingers pass through the lines of his body. I hiss and pull away from the cold.
“I don’t understand how you’re here,” I say breathlessly.
His expression softens. He drops back against the wall, one leg outstretched, boot caked in reddish mud.
“If I knew, I would explain it. But all I know is that”—he points to the bell still in my hand—“finally let you see me.”
Sweat breaks out along my forehead while his words settle around me. I slump to the floor, head against the side of my bed frame, skirt tucked around my knees.
“Have you been…in here?” I swallow, throat sharp.
“Don’t worry. I’ve always been decent.” He cracks a satisfied smile and drops his head back to the wall.
“And no. It may come as a surprise, but even as a living man, I would rather be out amidst the trees than caught in the bedchamber of a woman I barely know.” His eyes find me again, glinting like polished copper.
“I’ve been trying to speak with you for years, though. ”
His confession twists my stomach. Bram Avery is my monster.
I release a breath. “What I need to know is why Bram Avery, who died ten years ago, is sitting in my bedroom after I rang”—I hold up the bell—“whatever the hell this is.”
He shrugs, gaze licking the curve of brass in my hand. His own breath comes short and fast, as though he has been running for a very long time and has only now found rest.
“Where exactly are you?” I ask. “If you’re dead?”
His eyes dart up to the ceiling, but it is not the plaster he is studying; it is something else. Something I cannot see.
“What is it?”
He is on his feet faster than I can stop him, breath rushing like winter gales on a pond. Bram reaches out to me, his hands passing like frozen teeth through the wool at my shoulders.
“Get away from the window!”
A gust of cold air knocks me to my hands and knees. Bram dives below the windowsill. When I look up, the truth is like a punch to the throat. There is nothing out there.
“Bram—”
He brushes a hand through his dark hair. “Look, we don’t have much time. I need—”
“I don’t understand how you’re here.”
The air hardens to ice. He slides beside me next to the bed, so close I smell a hint of woodsmoke on his tattered clothes. His eyes darken.
“Adelaide, listen to me. I need you to bring me back.”
I stumble against the frame, the bell breaking free from my hands to spill across the checked quilt. His eyes narrow when it rolls to rest near Mother’s journal, Ransom’s handkerchief.
“I don’t—”
“The bell.” Panic beats in his eyes. “You can use it to bring me back. I don’t know how you found it, but that is a death bell. A Reaper’s bell. You know what this is, don’t you?”
My mind is a jumble of words that make no sense, but I weed through it, reaching for Blessed Scriptures.
“In the Rending.” My vision ripples. “Certain souls taken by Erybrus were cursed. Turned to Reapers. Tasked with harboring the dead to whatever awaited them. But you don’t—” My gaze flinches to the bell.
“Yes. And each Reaper was given a bell to travel between the planes of life and death, remember?”
I nod. Yes, I remember. I have sat in church and heard the stories. But they were always just that: stories. Meant to scare us into submission, into a yearning to grow closer to Ithrandril.
“Look, Adelaide, if you don’t—” Bram darts his eyes wildly around us, seeing things I cannot but sending my heart racing all the same. “I’m going to die here. I need your help. You have to use it.”
I blink and shake my head. Maybe Idlewild is the right place for me to go. I am no Reaper. And if I am…then Mayor Samuels, my father, and the entire village is right.
I am touched by darkness. By Erybrus himself.
I stumble backward. “Bram, you’re already dead. I don’t see what this little thing is going to do.”
He ducks, hands clutching aimlessly at the bed skirt. Still, there is nothing in the room besides us. He stays still for a moment, and when he finally looks up at me, his eyes could melt diamonds.
“I’m not fully dead, you know.”
There’s a catch of something in his voice, something like fear, and it liquefies my bones.
“Bram, I don’t understand. My father spoke your funeral rites. I threw earth on your casket after your three sisters. I—” The words hitch in my throat. “Why are you here? Why are you not watching your family? If your sisters knew, your mother—”
“They cannot help me!” He spits the words like gravel. “They cannot see me like you can. Adelaide, you’re the only one who can use the bell. I know it, deep down inside. I know you are my only path to salvation.”
There’s a desperation in his eyes, and it breaks me, shreds my heart to threads. But this can’t be real. It isn’t—
I glance once more at the bell, overwhelmed with my own desperate confusion. And yet, it all makes sense.
In my mind, it begins to slot into place, like pieces to a puzzle. My blackened blood. My wan complexion. The illness tremoring through my veins. Shadow-touched. Cursed. Which means I am something this town should be afraid of. A monster.
Tears hem my eyes. “This isn’t—you have to help me understand. You died so long ago. I remember…” My voice trails off while I study Bram’s face.
The first time I saw him, angling down Bantlers Close, his nose was stuck between the pages of a book.
I thought him the strangest man I had ever seen.
When all the other young men in Rixton were off foxhunting or stringing Farmer Whitley’s cows into trees, Bram Avery could be found wandering the streets, sipping gingerbread tea at the bakery, or nestled under apple trees in the Avery orchards. Always, always with a book in hand.
I thought him marvelous, and as I study him now, I still do. The curve of his jaw, the mussed hair, the way his eyes flash like molten gold… My heart stutters, breath rushing from between my two lips when he catches my eye.
“What do you remember?” His voice edges near a gentler tone.
“It’s just. It’s you.” My brow crinkles, and my mouth runs dry as sand. “You haven’t aged a day.”
He reaches for my hand, and when his fingers only pass through mine, I crouch down beside him. Like the closer we become, the more hidden he will be from whatever it is I cannot make out.
His jaw clenches, eyes weary. “I said I wasn’t fully dead. Doesn’t mean I’m not partially dead.”
“You don’t age? Wherever you are, I mean.” The words feel impossible on my tongue, the very sound of them ridiculous.
I am talking to a ghost. A dead man in similar age to me now than he was ten years ago.
My fingers itch to peel the skin from my own throat, just to feel the slick wetness of my veins beating against them.
Just to know how alive I truly am. Because right now…
I take a shuddering breath. Right now, I feel as empty as a corpse.
“The rowan wood.” Bram draws a knee to his chest and leans heavy on a dirt-caked palm. His hair drifts like seaweed. The mist swirls so cold around him it is a wonder he doesn’t shatter like river ice.
“I’m sorry?”
He gestures at the space around us. “Where I am. Where all the dead go to await their choice. Trapped between the living and whatever waits for us after.”
My brain jitters with the information while I rationalize every possibility.
“Purgatory. You are still waiting to make your choice between the gods—”
“Adelaide, listen to me.” Bram turns, eyes shining. “Call it whatever you like. I don’t care. I just need you to get me out, bring me home. I can’t let…” He turns back to the empty window, gritting his teeth.