Chapter 16 #2
Hands outstretched, I push Ransom against the opposite wall, his hair falling messily into his eyes. He grins, a hungry thing, and there is a flash of something else there, a darkness humming just below his skin.
“Good girl.” His eyes shadow with something like black hellebore. “I like a woman who knows what she wants.”
And I know what he wants. Control, power. The need to have me.
I sink my lips into his, and he lets out a deep-throated groan. The gin on his breath is bitter but tastes like heaven. Nightshade berries and oleander.
Ransom’s hands curl up my spine, where the laces of my bodice are tied tight.
He works to loosen them, and Ithrandril, I want this, don’t I?
This aching, throbbing need to get lost in another living soul.
But deep down, my heart hungers for something different.
Something I cannot name. Solidity, where Ransom feels like a plume of smoke. Here one instant and gone another.
I freeze. The desire heating my core wars with quick-spreading resignation. I pull away, breath coming hot and wicked fast.
“Ransom, I can’t.”
His hands drop from my back, and he shovels hair from his sweaty face.
“Why not?”
I rush to retie my laces, heat flushing my neck. “I got caught up. I—I can’t. I’m sorry.”
His face twists, hurt pooling in the color of his eyes. “You’re sorry? Ithrandril above, Adelaide, I thought—”
“I know.” Confusion courses through my veins. The sweat on my brow cools and sends a chill down my spine. “I just—I can’t. Everything is happening so fast, and to add this—” I gesture to his chest, where I know his heart is beating. Alive. “I can’t add this to all of it, not yet.”
He nods, though the disappointment is rutted in the contours of his face. “Sure, that’s fine.” Ransom stoops and retrieves his jacket off the floor, straightening the collar of his shirt, rebuttoning buttons I don’t even remember undoing.
My face flushes. “Ransom, I’m—”
He brushes past me. “I said it was fine.”
I throw myself out of the confessional and nearly slam into Bram. His eyes widen, turn cold. His gaze catches on the wisps of hair matted to my forehead and slides to where Ransom is still wrestling with a button.
My throat tightens. “Bram, nothing—”
“The Haunts will be back.” He cuts me off, refusing to meet my gaze. His words are a punch to my gut.
“But we’re safe here. You said the church was hallowed ground.”
Bram drops a pile of kindling on the floor beside a makeshift firepit. He shrugs off his coat and stacks the wood with practiced ease. Rascal tramps over to me, nuzzles his nose into my side, but my eyes are pinned on Bram. A muscle feathers in his jaw.
“Something has changed.”
My stomach twists inside me. “What do you mean? What has changed?”
Bram crouches down beside the stacked kindling. He draws a flint from his pocket, the knuckles of his hands going white when he strikes a spark. “Did anyone else follow you through that door?”
His words are strange, sharp-edged in my mind, while I try to follow them.
“What do you mean? Nobody could have followed us. I alone used the bell.”
Bram blows a thin stream of air, coaxing flames to life. Ransom, fisting the fabric of his jacket, sighs and drops into a pew.
“I was there with her. No one followed us through that damn door.”
Bram stands, moves to one side of the room, and produces a small pot filled with water. “The night you came through…did the bell act strange?”
“It bloody opened a door to the world of the dead, Avery. What do you expect our answer to be?” The exhaustion is thick in Ransom’s voice.
But that is not what I focus on. The tips of my fingers and toes twinge with dread. “It shook.”
“What?” Bram looks back up from the fire.
“That night, after we woke in the wood, the bell was vibrating. I thought I caught a glimpse of movement, like something familiar, but—”
“Someone followed you through.”
No, that’s not possible. Who would have—
I reach into my pocket for the bell, and my blood runs cold. When I turn the fabric wrappings out, heart racing, I come up empty, save for a few tufts of lint and dry leaves.
“It’s gone.” Sickness surges in my stomach.
Bram is on his feet. “What do you mean?”
“The bell.” The words crumble from my lips. I dig deeper into my pocket. “It was there a few minutes ago, and now…Bram, it’s gone.”
The fear in his eyes mirrors my own.
“How…that’s not possible.”
It shouldn’t be, but it is.
I can’t stop shivering. Not from cold, but from fear. I look to Ransom, watch his lips tilt in a smirk.
“Did you take it?”
He throws up his hands. “Are you joking? Adelaide, trust me. My thoughts were not on the bell when we were”—he clears his throat and points his chin toward the confessional—“in there.”
“I don’t want details,” Bram cuts.
My cheeks go hot, and I look back to Bram, whose own face swims with unbridled panic. He pivots toward Ransom.
“Turn out your pockets.”
“I’m sorry?”
Bram curls his lip. “I said, turn out your damned pockets.”
Ransom looks to me, hoping I will step in, tell Bram to shove off. I can still feel the ghost of Ransom’s hands on my waist, going lower, pulling at my skirts.
“Do what he says.”
My stomach tightens while Ransom digs into the folds of his jacket, his eyes seething. Dry flowers fall from his pockets, a bit of black thread. He goes to empty his sewing pouch, and all that tumbles out is a pair of shears, more thread, and the needle he used to sew up my leg.
His eyes narrow to Bram. “There. Satisfied, Avery?”
I still myself for Bram to push farther, make Ransom strip down until he is nothing but skin and bone, but instead, he turns and ducks beneath a pew.
“Let’s just keep looking.”
We dart through the church, searching under and over things with no set pattern. I run toward the altar and throw back dusty velvet, toppling over tarnished goblets and candlesticks. But the bell is nowhere to be found. By the end, we are sweaty, and I feel sicker than I did before.
Bram scowls. “You’re sure it didn’t fall out of your pocket while you were sleeping, Adelaide?”
I shake my head. Stupid, stupid. “No, I held it this morning.”
Bram’s eyes slip up to Ransom. “And your lover didn’t stash it away somewhere?”
“He’s not my—”
“First of all, I already said my thoughts were not on the bell. And second, I sure as hell wouldn’t leave without Adelaide.”
My lips part, but Bram is already nose to nose with Ransom.
“Why do I have the sense that I shouldn’t believe a word you say, Black?”
Ransom narrows his eyes. “I don’t know. Why don’t you just go fu—”
“Enough!” I shout, squeezing between them.
“Look, I don’t know what is going on between the two of you, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.
The bell is missing, which not only means we can’t bring anyone back, but also, we are now truly stuck here.
So, perhaps we should just have some breakfast and figure the rest out on full stomachs. ”
Ransom’s mouth is a thin line. “Fine.”
“Fine,” Bram echoes.
They each stalk away, one back to the fire, the other outside, his lips still raw from where I kissed him. My fingers slip to the pocket of my skirt, and once again, cold emptiness greets me.
Someone followed you. Bram’s words filter into my mind, and I blink the sting of them away.
Surely, not Father. He would have called it the portal of Erybrus, would have done everything in his power to close it up. All the better for him, ridding himself once and for all of such a wicked daughter. Better to bury an empty coffin than enter a demon realm.
I wonder what he is telling those back in Rixton. That I am dead? That I have gone to Idlewild and shall never return? Whatever lie is on his lips, I am sure he likes the way it tastes.
That is what breaks me, I think. Softens my anger to wretched grief.
I draw a thumb across my own mouth, remembering the feel of Ransom there, so bitter and delicate. His hands on my hips, my waist, higher and higher…
No, he wouldn’t steal the bell, would he? What purpose would it serve? Taking what he wants and trapping me here? It wouldn’t…
A shadow crosses in front of one of the windows, and I look out to the sea of red beyond. Ransom sits on the chopping block, jacket still swung over his shoulder. He rummages for something in his sewing pouch, and breath sticks like glue in my lungs.
But when he takes it out, it is only a golden chain that looks strangely familiar. Like the one my mother used to wear around her neck.
Not the bell.
He did not lie, then.
I close my eyes, biting down hard until blood coats my the tender skin of my mouth.
Sometimes, pain tastes sweeter.
And Lord Ransom Black knows nothing but pain.