Chapter 6 #2
I push myself off the floor, pacing. Outside, the world drifts toward night, nothing beyond the window except a village cloaked in shadow and the glow of lamplight. Chaos niggles at the back of my mind, eating away at my gray matter, like a worm on dead flesh.
This shouldn’t be possible, isn’t possible. I try to blame my heart, the pain growing like a thick-barked tree at the base of my skull.
A monster, just a monster.
But he’s not.
All these years, I haven’t been seeing monsters. I’ve been seeing souls.
And I am frightened of what it might mean.
My stomach twists into knots, and when I turn back, there he is—Bram Avery—the man who mysteriously died ten years ago. The only betrayal of passing age are the creases along his eyes, the look of hungry panic spilling from his irises like shadow.
“This shouldn’t be happening.” I retrieve the bell from off the bed. “It’s just a bell. Rubbish I found down by the river.”
Bram scrambles to his feet, backing me up against the bedpost, chest heaving beneath the tattered linen of his shirt.
My eyes drift to his throat, the skin there taut and covered in scars.
I suck in air, my flesh growing hot. I breathe in the chill of him, the distant scent of woodsmoke and something else…
something so familiar my heart cracks along its own fissures.
Lemons.
“Do you remember the orchard?” he asks, voice low. “The day you caught me hiding up in the trees? I didn’t have a book that day. I was just up there, hoping the branches would be thick enough to hide me from my father’s fists.”
I close my eyes, traveling back to my younger self, the girl who still had a mother and didn’t know the cruelty of a father who had forgotten how to love her.
A girl who wore a dress the color of daffodils and laughed at the sun.
A girl who didn’t know true fear until she found a young man tangled amongst leaves and ruby red apples and saw it there, pulsing in his eyes and just below his skin. A girl who was too little to help.
“I remember.”
I watch as relief washes over him in steady streams, and he shoots a look skyward. Whatever he sees sends him ducking, scuttling across the floor like an injured beast, until his back is to the corner.
My stomach hollows. All this time, he has been here, just outside, trying to speak, to get me to pay attention, and I called him a monster.
“Bram.” I hold out a shaking hand, tracing his hurried path across the room until I am crouched beside him, wishing he was solid so I could feel the warmth of his skin. Make up for so much lost time. “Bram, I don’t think—”
He lifts a shaking finger to his lips. “Use the bell,” he whispers. “Use the bell and come to the wood. Find the river.”
Nerves like claws sink deep into my flesh, to peel it back and spill the shadowed blood.
Cursed.
I drop my gaze to the cool brass in my hand.
Such a small, insignificant thing. I wrap my palm around it until its sharp edges carve grooves into my palms. Pain shimmers above my body, and for a moment, I shut my eyes, thinking when I open them this will all disappear—Bram, the bell, Father’s sentence of the house of healing in Idlewild—and I will be here, alone.
Nothing that has happened will be true. It will have been a dream. Even Clara and Hester and Ransom Black.
But I feel the crooked sting of the cut on my foot, the wrappings tight around the shredded flesh. Ransom’s hand on my skin, warm and real, his breath on my face while he spoke to me with such anchoring surety.
I snap my eyes back open, and there Bram remains, huddled in the corner, arms now up around his head. My heart slips against my ribs. The bell vibrates in my hand. Brief, but enough to draw my attention back to it.
Fear coils in my chest. This isn’t real. None of it is real. It is simply an illness. My illness. The wrongness of my heartbeat, the pain soaking my limbs like salt water. I press to my feet, cross to the table beside my bed, and open the drawer.
“What are you doing?” Bram’s words are rushed and quick, a waterfall with sharpened rocks at the bottom.
I don’t turn back, but keep my eyes fixed on the pearl-white glow of the moon above the fruited rye fields. “I can’t help you. This—it’s not right.” The fist around my heart loosens, crawls up the back of my throat while I choke back tears.
“Adelaide.” His voice is as hard and cold as shattered porcelain.
I squeeze my eyes shut, tears eking out to dampen my cheeks. My fingers fumble with the drawer when I shove the bell away, back between all the papers, the dusty bottles of ink.
“I’m so sorry, Bram.”
Perhaps girls like me, girls without someone to love them right, maybe we are broken things. China dolls left on mantles, laden with dust, waiting for the day the ground shakes, gives way beneath us, and we tip head over heels to shatter on the floor.
I sink my fingernails into the soft wood grain of the table and open my eyes to darkness.
All I know is that I am resolute. Mind firm in places it was pliable only moments before.
Whatever it means—this Reaper’s bell—it does not concern me.
I turn back around to face Bram, barely registering the heartbreak etched on his face.
“You have to go back,” I say. “Back to the—wherever you came from.”
There is so much pain on his face I think it might break me. His eyes harden, and it takes all my strength not to crash toward him and wrap my arms around whatever fog and cloud forms his body.
“Adelaide, please. I’ll die here.”
“You’re already dead.” The words fall from my lips harsher than I mean them.
“Bram Avery died ten years ago in the springtime. I remember because the cold earth was soft when they buried the casket and the flowers grew.” My fingers flex at my side.
I remember the way we all tossed the dark kernels of dirt over the wooden box. “You will only be my damnation.”
Ghosts drag souls to Erybrus.
There is silence, the only sound the echoing scritch of a naked willow branch against my window.
I cannot tear my eyes from Bram, sunk deeper into the corner of my room, shadows glistening on his face like oil.
It is a familiar feeling, the helplessness leaking from his very skin.
It pools at the hollow of my throat, threatens to sever the veins there, to crush my skull until I am nothing more than a pile of bone dust to be caught and carried away by the winter wind.
I am about to turn away, to curl up on my bed and watch the stars lick across the black sky until Father’s cane is heard along the paving stones, when Bram turns his face up to mine.
“What if I told you there was a way to save someone else? Bring someone else back?”
His words set my heart racing, an ache spreading out against my chest and up my throat. “Who—what are you talking about?”
His lips quirk, a bitter, wretched twist of a smile. “You bring me back, and we rescue another in the process.” His gaze snaps up. “Two faces beneath one hood. A deal.”
My body goes as chill and stiff as a shaft of wheat in an ice storm. “I don’t understand.”
Bram peels himself from the floor, mist hounding at his heels. “You bring me back, and I’ll make sure someone else comes with us. Someone I’m sure you’d very much like to see.”
The cold licks around my spine and settles between my shoulder blades. I open my mouth, but the words shrivel into nothing. My lungs constrict, pulse quickening, a stunted laugh bursting from my lips.
“You mean my mother, don’t you?” I half believe I have gone mad. That this is all a dream and soon I’ll wake to Father splashing cold water on my face, calling me to obey him, even as I spit dirt and ice to the floor of the garden shed.
Bram takes another step closer, hands fisting at his sides. “Everyone with unfinished business is left behind in the wood by Ithrandril and Erybrus, waiting. That is our choice, Adelaide.”
A coal kindles in my chest. “Waiting for what?”
Bram’s smile widens, stretches like a snake bathing in the sun. “Their own deals. Their own decisions. The Rending made us this way, Adelaide. We must choose, and it is a terrible choice to make.”
He ducks low when something invisible swoops overhead, and my heart crashes into my breastbone. I drop beside him, fingers groping at the shadow. At once, nothing and everything makes sense.
In the Rending, we were torn from Ithrandril.
Tossed so near Erybrus, we spend every minute of our waking hours scrambling back toward the god of life’s warmth.
And when we die? Father preaches that with each good deed, our souls are brought back into the glow of Ithrandril.
But what if we die while we are still deciding?
Choosing between the god we will serve for eternity hereafter. A place where light and darkness are still at war. A place where we must make one final deal just to find the rest we have so long hoped for.
My heart thrums in my ears. “How do I bring my mother back?”
Bram’s eyes are untamed fire while they dart about my bedroom.
My hands sink into the cold mist swirling around him like a maelstrom.
It kicks up, bringing with it the scent of frozen leaves, ground licked by frost. I try to scream his name, to calm him as the shadows spin, but the rush of the wind swallows my voice, and I am blinking up from the floor, knees aching from where I have fallen.
Bram’s hair whips violently around his face. His skin begins to stretch, peel back. My chest constricts.
“The bell, Adelaide!” he cries above the tumult. “You must use the bell!”
Between the rips of wind and tendrils of my own hair, my gaze snags on my table. So far, so very far. And now the wind smells of blood, growing hotter while it spills through my room.
“Bram!” The word dies as soon as it leaves my mouth, and I am up on my knees, tearing aimlessly through the empty air.
Bram is swallowed up by the coppery wind, the eking shadow, and I am left all alone.
I fall forward, palms slapping the cold floorboards. My breath comes in short gasps between sobs. I drag myself up, heaving toward the window, the little table beside my bed. My shaking fingers fumble the drawer, and the bell rolls to greet me. I reach toward it and then pull back as if bitten.
No.
If I do this, I will have to face the truth. That what the village, what my father, believes of me is true. That I am touched by shadow. Abandoned by Ithrandril.
Bram Avery is a ghost. A devil wanting to drag my soul to eternal damnation.
I slam the drawer shut and look out into the night.
My father’s silhouette creeps down the garden wall, his shadow licking up the side of the church.
I stare into the darkness, copper still coating my tongue, and whisper all that comes to mind.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m so sorry.”