Chapter 17
seventeen
A day passes, and the bell is nowhere to be found. Bram is insistent we do not leave the area surrounding the church. Ransom tries to argue, but we are in Bram’s world now, and he will tell us when it is safe to leave.
I would smash their heads together and march out of this church myself if not for the blooming dread that I will be stuck here forever. A living soul amongst corpses. The thought freezes my bones.
The Haunts do not bother us, even though we hear them in the distance, their cackling like the baying of wolves.
Ransom and I do not speak of the kiss. He keeps mostly to himself, only bothering to move from his pew when it is his turn to take watch, slipping swigs of communion wine when he thinks no one is looking.
I steal glimpses at Bram sometimes. He is a strange creature. Someone so familiar yet so far away. Like something out of a dream, a mirror image of the world as it once was. A man who lived and laughed, but now, the only remembrance of that life are the gentle lines around his amber eyes.
He barely speaks to Ransom, stewing in his anger. It is rather beautiful, like that I see in myself. Angry at the world for what it did to him, what it took away. And the smell of him. Like lemons. It haunts me—a reminder of the mother we now might never find.
On the third morning, I wake to an empty vestry.
Even Rascal has abandoned my side. My bones are stiff and heavy, the result of sleeping too many nights in all my skirts and bodice.
To hell with decency, I want to say and rip the fabric from my body until I wear nothing but a shift.
But I fear what Ransom might do if he saw me like that.
And I shudder when I realize I don’t think I would stop him.
I push the thoughts away and step clumsily from the cot, my hand instinctively going to the pocket I know to be empty. The open space greets me like icy wind, and I dig fingernails into the soft flesh of my palms.
In the nave, our fire from the night before dwindles, cores of half-gnawed apples rotting on the floor. Bram does not say where they come from—he does not need them—and sometimes, I wonder if it is safe to eat the food of the dead, drink their drink. But it seems, for now, I have no other choice.
My fingers curl around the edge of the door, and I peek outside, praying against any Haunts, against whoever—or whatever—Bram swears followed us that first night into the wood.
There is nothing but red, dusty light and, beyond that, the crumbled walls of the vicarage.
I have to approach it, to feel the somehow alive bitterbloom petals, soft and damp between my fingers.
Fear boils hot in my belly. I have stayed within sight of the church, hardly leaving the stones behind.
Outside, the air hangs with a chill, the scent of creeping hoarfrost on the wind. Ransom is nowhere to be seen, but Bram, his back turned to the church, kneels near the line of the forest.
My feet crunch on the frozen grass. He straightens when I approach. I stop just behind him, a metallic scent filling the air. My stomach turns. When Bram shifts to look at me, I notice his hands are covered in blood.
“Are you hurt?” I ask, falling to the cold ground beside him.
I do not need an answer, though, for the truth lies clear before me. A creature of fur and bone lies prostrate on the frozen earth, its blood warm and sticky on the grass.
“How…”
Bram gathers spilled guts into his hands, shoving them back inside the carcass. “I didn’t mean for you to see this.”
“What exactly is it that I’m even seeing?”
He does not answer at first and, instead, covers the dead beast with leaves and twigs. The mangled pile of bones and crimson blood holds my gaze.
“Sometimes,” Bram begins, “humans aren’t the only ones who get through.”
I blink blearily at him. “You’re saying this…whatever it was…is the thing that followed us into the wood? So, you killed it?”
He shakes his head. “No, it’s not like that. It’s hard to explain.”
“Two nights ago, you told me I have Reaper’s blood flowing through my veins. Try me.”
He sighs and wipes ichor down his trousers.
“Sometimes, things get through, even without the bell. Animals, mostly, just poking around in places they shouldn’t be until they end up here.
Sometimes a human, though that is rare enough.
It’s usually when they aren’t looking for it. Just another lost soul.”
I try to digest what he is telling me, but the words scramble in my mind. “So, you gut them?”
Bram grows frustrated. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”
I vomit laughter. “None of this is understandable, Bram. The bell, the Haunts, this damn place itself, whatever the hell I am. I think I can handle a little spilled blood.”
“Fine.” He leans back over to the pile of now-damp leaves and uncovers the body, which I see now to be a rabbit, fur glistening white beneath the blood. “I didn’t kill it. Sometimes, they show up like that. Half-alive and gutted.”
Bram slips fingers into the slit at its belly, and my body swims with sick. He pulls thin lines of intestine out, followed by what can only be its kidneys, its lungs, its heart.
The sight of the last organ alone is enough to send my pulse racing. I reach for it. How small it is compared to my palm. Is this how mine looks, pressing so hard against my lungs and chest some days it feels as though I will never breathe again?
“Interesting choice,” Bram muses.
The heart is feather-light in my hand. The blood pools around it, slipping into the creases of my palm.
“Interesting how?”
Bram rocks back on his heels. “They say the heart is the core of our emotion. That is where we truly feel things. And you, Adelaide Thorn, felt enough for a perfect stranger to come rescue him from Erybrus itself.”
My smile slides over to him. “So, you’re not angry with me anymore?”
He winces. “No, and I shouldn’t have been so upset with you the other day. We both hid things from one another in hopes for the outcome we wanted. I’m sorry I lied too.”
My smile softens around the edges. “I forgive you.” In the red light, his eyes are almost feverish, tinged with a haze, so lifelike it steals my breath away. “Besides, you are no stranger, Bram Avery.”
He arches his eyebrows. “Oh?”
I shake my head and look back at the heart still warm against my skin.
“That day, in the orchard, wasn’t the first time I remember seeing you.
I used to watch you when I was little. You and your sisters trudging down the lane from Avery Manor with your mother and father.
I think I was jealous, really, of what you had and I didn’t. I always thought you had a nice smile.”
When I look back up at him, there is no smile. Instead, a shadow haunts the corners of his eyes. His shoulders shrink in, eyes flashing.
“There wasn’t much to be jealous of, if I’m being honest.”
There is silence for a time, and I watch the blood coagulate on the ground in front of me. Red liquid merging to form a jelly.
“You seemed happy enough,” I say finally.
The skin above his eye twitches. He turns back to the trees.
“Father didn’t approve of my…well, my enjoyments.
He thought it was better for me to learn to hunt, to keep the manor, to become worthy of the seat of Avery Manor than to stuff my nose in books.
I told him I didn’t want it. Why couldn’t Matilda have it?
She was next in line and smart as a whip.
He didn’t take too kindly to that.” He fidgets with the collar of his shirt. “He used to beat me, Adelaide.”
I nod. It is something I have long suspected, but that doesn’t take the pain away. “I’m so sorry. No one deserves that, Bram.”
He looks back to the dead beast at our knees. “Better if Rixton thought him the great man he seemed than the man he was at home.”
I swallow, and the ridges of my throat press tight.
I’m sorry doesn’t seem like enough. Not when the men of Rixton beat their daughters, drain blood from their sons, force their children into spaces they have no desire to be in.
Sometimes, the only real question I have is, what is the necessity of men?
“I know you didn’t just come for me,” Bram interrupts, nodding back to the heart. “I know you’re here to find your mother, and I’m sorry I lied to you.”
His eyes are so soft now in the light, a kind of sunset glow. The blood drips down my wrist while I stare at the tiny organ.
“I understand now, I think, why you did it. I want my mother back just as much as you want to be back with your sisters.” My throat catches. “Just as much as Ransom wants his own mother back.”
There is silence then, nothing but the wavering wind through the strange trees. Bram reaches forward, sinks his fingers between the folds of the rabbit’s belly, and tugs. There is a soft pop.
When he draws his hand back out, his skin is sheened in carmine. He wipes the viscera away and holds up something pale and pocked in his hand. I steal a glance at his face, but his eyes have lost their softness.
“This rabbit was sick.”
I drop the heart, wiping my hands with leaves, but Bram does not seem concerned. He holds the yellowed organ up to the light.
“Poisoned, I’d say. Ancient scholars used to believe the liver was the source of life and death.” He drops his hand and stares directly at me. “Ransom is not to be trusted.”
Before I can stop myself, a laugh cracks against my teeth. “You’re getting that from the liver of a rabbit?”
I don’t want to believe him, can’t, but the way he looks at me—the hard-set line of his jaw—tells me that the words he speaks, his very existence in this dead world, is the only thing there is to believe.
He drops the liver beside the dead beast and cleans his hands off in the damp grass. “I don’t make things up for sport, Adelaide. I only speak what the animals tell me.”
I watch him, curious. “Are you a witch, Bram Avery?”
I mean it as a joke, something to lighten the air between us, but he doesn’t smile.
“I don’t know what I am, to be honest, but I’ve always been able to do that.
” He nods to the rabbit. “My mother caught me in the gardens with a dead sparrow in my palm, its intestines spilling out, telling of how my father would die, his own body poisoning him. All that damned wine he drank. That’s when we stopped attending church.
What was the point of trying to please Ithrandril when we were already struck through by Erybrus? ”
I almost choke on his words. “That’s horrible. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“There’s a lot you don’t mean, Adelaide, but things happen anyway.” He gets to his feet, brushing the last of the blood away on his trousers. “We should get going, pack up after we eat, set out on our way.”
I try to ignore his former words, the way they singe my skin like I’m standing too close to a fire. “On our way to where?” I ask.
“To find your mother, of course. Your leg seems healed up enough. Ransom isn’t good for much, but he’s adequate with a needle.”
I blink stupidly and scramble to my feet. “Right, of course. Do you know where to start looking?”
Bram is already walking away from me, back toward the church. “Haven’t the foggiest. Though, I do know where we can go for information.”
Anticipation threads through my bones. “Where?”
He turns, a slick smile on his face. “Where everyone goes for a bit of gossip—a dead pub.”
His words stop me in my tracks. Whatever this destination is, I don’t like the sound of it.
I gnaw on the inside of my mouth. If I’m going to find Mother, there are probably many things I will not like. I go to follow him, but something rustles in the grass behind. My stomach folds.
Beside the torn rabbit, the heart lies in a pool of blood.
And it seems to be beating.