Chapter 15
fifteen
I wake in a cloud of red light. For a moment, I can’t recall where I am, and the panic sets deep in my bones. My fingers claw the cot, and I gasp for air.
My eyes adjust to the dim.
Four walls, a break in the roof above, velvet curtain, tally marks on the wall. One for each day since Bram Avery died. The knowledge hits my gut anew. I cannot fathom how awful it must be for him, how long he has waited for someone to notice.
How long he waited for me to see him. Guilt weighs heavily on my shoulders, but I push it away.
My fingers slip down my sides and into the pocket where the bell rests. It is still a mystery to me—how I came across it. Fate has a funny way of dealing hands. I clamp my own around the bell.
Beside me, the floor is empty. Bram must have taken watch. I go to slip from beneath the velvet covering, but something weighs heavy at my feet. When I look down, Rascal is lying there, curled into a ball, the pale velvet of his belly rising and falling in a gentle rhythm.
A smile curves my lips, and I reach to scratch his ears. His eyes blink sleepily, but he only nuzzles his nose deeper into the makeshift blanket.
“As long as one of us can get some sleep.” I shift my feet to the chilled stone floor. My boots topple over beside the wall, and I lace them tight, then stand gently. Pain slices hot up my leg before subsiding to a dull throb.
At least I can walk.
The church is cold and empty. The only sound is of my boots scraping the floor. I exit the vestry, spilling out into the nave. It is lit with so much red there might as well be a veil of blood over my eyes. The doors are shut, and for a moment, anxiousness swells inside me.
What if they have left without me, gone to rescue Ransom’s mother, leaving me behind to fend for myself? To find Mother on my own?
My fingers go to the bell. No. They would have taken it with them if they were to betray me. I push the niggling thoughts from my brain. A pew creaks, and a current of ice rips up my spine, sending my heart racing.
Scattered and dead leaves crackle beneath my feet when I go to look, finding Ransom asleep on the hard, curved wood, his jacket acting as a blanket, one arm tossed over his eyes.
Here, in the murky red light streaming in through the stained glass, he looks like a saint. An oil painting of a martyr revered for all his spilled blood. The broken man. Something like awe overwhelms me, and all I can think about is sinking my hands into his hair and tasting the gin on his lips.
There is a splintering noise outside, and my spine straightens.
Haunts.
No, I would smell them. The sulfur and lick of red phosphorus. And the air hints at nothing but dry leaves. I inch toward the door and slip into the chill of morning. Or whatever time it truly is.
Bram holds a splintered maul, cracking the dull blade against blackened logs. He brings the blade down, and the wood tumbles over either side, making my ears throb. Bram looks up when he hears my boots scoring the damp ground.
“Good morning.”
“Are you sure about that?” I squint up at the sky—nothing but the pale moon and swirls of black, red, and silver gray.
He follows my gaze, shrugs. “No, guess I’m not. But I had to figure out a way to survive. Told myself if there was day and night back home, there was day and night here too. Helped me keep track of time.”
The tally marks on the wall. All at once, it strikes me how futile this seems: the bell, rescuing Bram, my mother, Ransom’s mother, stealing them from Death.
I can’t stop thinking about the fear I saw in Bram’s eyes that first night in my bedroom, the same fear that matched my mother’s when she held my hand limply and floated into nothingness.
What kind of daughter am I? Thinking I can enter the domain of Death and bring her back to what? Back to life? What if she is naught but bones? What if she crosses the line of rowan trees and crumbles to dust?
I study Bram in the bloody light,. For a moment, I picture him as he lies in his grave. Flesh dry and slack, teeth too wide for his mouth, eyes empty and black. Is that all he will be? All any of us will become?
I can’t stop thinking about it, the death, the chaos. It is all-consuming. I want to deflate. Want to pool at the ground and cry to the skies. What is the point of it all?
But I am not that woman.
I am the woman bound to a chair, fighting.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “That you died.”
Bram leans on the maul. “It wasn’t all so bad, you know. It almost felt like peace in the end, knowing that nothing could be worse than what the sickness was doing to my body.” He gives a self-deprecating smirk and swings another log up to the block. “Little did I know, eh?”
My eyes watch the skies, and with each wisp of shadow, I feel the empty space inside me. The space the wood tried to fill.
“You were sick?”
Bram smiles, a bitter thing, and lifts another log to the block.
“Mother noticed it first, blamed my father. Thought he’d been—” He cracks the maul down, shakes his head.
“Doesn’t matter what she thought in the end.
I died anyway. The nausea was the worst of it, puking my guts up into a crock and watching helplessly as Matilda washed it out, only to replace it moments later. ”
Matilda. The eldest of his three younger sisters. I remember seeing her in the market, all copper curls and blue eyes. What it must have been like to watch her brother waste away before her.
A familiar sort of sadness settles in my gut before it turns ashen with fear and memory. Reaper’s blood.
“Do you remember the face of the Reaper who took you?”
Bram blinks, like it is a strange question, and then his gaze darts to where my injured leg lies behind woolen skirts. “It wasn’t you, if that’s what you’re wondering. I never saw his face.”
His face. A man, then. A breath of relief shudders through me.
“Have you found peace here?”
Bram plants a cut of oak to the block. I want him to say yes, to reassure me that wherever Mother is, she is okay. She is safe. But his face tells me otherwise. He lifts the maul and sends it cracking down again.
“Nobody can prepare you for the rowan wood, Adelaide. It’s like smashing through a wall, only to find a cliff on the other side, and you’re just falling.
” He lifts another log. “And when you finally hit the bottom and realize you’re dead, it’s too late.
You can’t scramble back up, no matter how hard you try.
” Crack. The log splits open and tumbles down, splinters raining.
“That…that sounds awful.”
Bram throws the kindling on the growing pile.
“It is. But it’s not the worst of it. The worst part is what comes next.
” He throws another log to the chopping block.
“Shadows and a voice and three choices. Ascension to Ithrandril, a true hell with Erybrus in the place he resides, or here, staying put and futilely trying to climb your way back up the cliff.”
I blink at him, dazed. “Who would choose Erybrus?”
“Many people choose darkness, Adelaide. Sometimes, pain tastes sweeter.”
I march toward him, my feet moving without heed. My blood pressure rockets when he looks at me, the light catching his green and gold eyes. With Bram before me and Ransom behind, I feel vulnerable. Like my heart could choose either way and it will be my undoing.
I am doomed.
But this is not why I am here.
When he stoops to pick up the rest of the kindling, his dark hair sweeps from his face, and I notice a thin scar on his neck.
I am a thousand miles away, breath whooshing out of me.
“What is that?” I ask, pointing to his throat.
He tosses the wood. “What?”
“That mark on your skin.”
His fingers brush the pale line. “It’s nothing. Just a cut I got when I was little.”
I glower, fist my hands. “I don’t like being lied to, Bram.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
I wince with guilt. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Bram throws the maul to the ground and gathers the kindling in his arms. His movements are pinched, like I have hit a nerve he is trying to pretend doesn’t exist. “Look, I’m sure you have your own reasons for bringing Lord High-and-Mighty along on your little trip to the underworld here, but he wasn’t part of our original deal. It surprised me, is all.”
I stalk closer, until there is only breath between us and the scent of death and dying. “He wasn’t part of my original plan either, all right? But if you have a problem with Ransom, take it up with him. I’m just here to find my mother.”
Recognition dawns in his eyes. Betrayal. My stomach sinks to my toes.
“You didn’t come for me at all, did you?”
The accusation in his voice breaks me. “Bram, I—”
He brushes past, the rough logs scraping my arm.
“Bram!”
He stops, turns back. “What?”
“I came for both of you. You and Mother. Please I—I just want your help in finding her first. Then we can all go home.”
The golden light seeps from his eyes, leaving them almost empty. “You seem to have come to the wrong place then,” he says. “I don’t know where she is.”