Chapter 9 #3
Ransom smirks. “To what, Thorn?”
“It doesn’t matter. Please, tell me why you have brought me here and let me go. I know you have no intention of keeping me.”
He leans closer. “Do you know why my father was never seen in Rixton, Adelaide? Why he never came to church?”
I shake my head.
Ransom tilts his head toward the dark sky. “Because Lord Hiram Black was obsessed with death.”
The word catches like a bone in my throat. I picture Bram pressed against the wall of my bedroom, whispering of things beyond. A place where death isn’t quite the end. I once more run a finger along the rim of the bell.
Whatever this meeting with Ransom is, it isn’t a chance occurrence.
“I don’t see what any of this has to do—”
“With you?” Ransom is up on his feet now, coming to stand in front of me.
I press myself against the stone, heart like cinnamon in my chest—hot and sharp. “I don’t—”
“Do you know what burnt salt smells like? What blood does when it is mixed with melted wax? How to draw an Ouroboros, the everlasting snake, the sign of Erybrus?”
He drops to his knees before me, eyes burning like torches, leaving scorch marks on my skin. I shake my head again, tongue dry and swollen, like a stretch of desert in my mouth.
“Do you want to know how I know these things?” He’s so close I smell the stale tea on his breath.
“My father was hellbent on searching for a way to stop himself from dying. An endless return.” He points to the shrub in the shape of the looping snake.
“Used his own blood to try and achieve immortality. Served it to Erybrus in streams, hoping it would make him unbreakable. Immortal. But when that didn’t work, he began to use my own. ”
There is pain in his eyes now. Something like gunpowder, just waiting for the right spark. He pulls back and studies the night sky. “Do you know, Adelaide Thorn, what waits for the dead? Surely, as the vicar’s daughter, you must have some idea.”
So, this is what he wanted? A theology lesson? Twigs crunch in the undergrowth behind us. My heart thrums. A sparrow against my ribcage. Ascension to Ithrandril—is that the answer he wants? Or being dragged into shadow? Reapers and bells and so much fire?
And then I remember Bram cowering in a corner of my room, frightened of phantoms. Bram, whole and real and almost alive. Trapped in a place where Ithrandril and Erybrus collide. Where I can rescue Mother. Heat courses from the center of my chest.
“I think only the dead can answer that question, Lord Black.”
He crosses his arms, takes another step back, and spreads a smile. “Please, call me Ransom.”
“Ransom,” I repeat.
There is silence, thick and stifling as summer heat. Ransom glances toward a dying bed of flowers—one of many—its scraggled remains like bits of dry paper. I whisper a silent prayer he doesn’t notice the bone sticking out of the earth.
His eyes trace to the stars, and his chest heaves a sigh.
“I know what it is you found, Adelaide. On the banks of the river.”
My skin freezes, pulls, its surface licked through with spider cracks. I do not look up, keeping my eyes fixed on my feet. A strange kind of ache burrows into my palm, spreading to my fingers.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I have always been a terrible liar, ever since the day my father caught me in a lie and made me drink vinegar by the spoonful.
Sour wine in the mouth of Ithrandril, he called me.
Ransom straightens and comes to sit beside me.
“I think we should make one thing clear.” His voice is almost soft now, rose petals on grass. “I only want to help you.”
I lift my eyes to him. The gunpowder is gone, replaced by something like spring rain. It melts away the ice. All the stars reflected in his face.
“How can you help me?”
He smiles again, and I think how beautiful he is—a broken, bloody man standing here in the light of a harvest moon, trying to be every inch the lord he is expected to be, and only wanting to do good. My edges soften.
“I told you my father was obsessed with death.” He lays a hand on mine.
My skin thrills with the touch. Father’s words once more permeate my brain. Surely ruined. I push them away. If sin was so wrong, why did the cosmos create Ithrandril and Erybrus alike?
“He would have done anything to get my mother back. He held seances, hired mystics, even spilled blood. My blood.”
I glance down at his hands, his wrists. And that’s when I see them.
The thin, pink scars threading up against the dark lace cuffs of his shirt. My stomach flips, a fish on a line. Is this why Ransom Black carries a sewing needle and thread? To stitch up his own wounds?
“Ransom, I—”
He holds out a finger. “Wait, let me finish. He was so close in the end, my father. Knew about the bells, those held by the Reapers. Knew that if he could only get his hands on one, he could—”
He could what?
I sit on every word, hanging onto them like the crumbling rocks of a cliff. Because Ransom is not the only one who wants to get his mother back.
One soul, a fool. Two, a thief.
What would three make me?
I don’t think I want to know.
“Everything you’re saying sounds like madness.” My hand now trembles against the brass in my pocket.
In one fluid motion, Ransom pulls me to face him, eyes glinting like green glass. My breath catches, a finger going to my throat to count the ragged beats. But to my surprise, they are even.
A-live, a-live, a-live.
I flex my palms.
“You know of what I speak, Adelaide Thorn.”
His words are hungry things matching the muck and mold of the old house. The soil cries out beneath our feet with so much pain, and it feels like a living, breathing thing. So, I choose my own with equal bite.
“But do you, Ransom Black?”
A flicker of amusement lights his face, sends the freckles that dot his nose dancing like a constellation.
“There it is,” he says. “I knew it. Show me the bell.”
“And if I say no?”
He moves closer, hands dipping to my waist, breath hot on my ear. A shiver dances up my spine, so warm and delicious, and I can almost taste the spice of him on my lips.
“You won’t say no, Thorn.”
“Oh?” My breathing is short and hot, choked on the scent of him. “And why’s that?”
“Because you need me.”