Chapter 24
twenty-four
I remember the flowers. Their acrid, lemon smell. It used to waft in through my bedroom window on a spring evening, dust against my nose.
Bitterbloom.
Mother never allowed me to touch them. But she has no sway over me now. Everything I have worked for is dead. I wrench from her grip and lift my hand to the petals in her hair.
“You were always so afraid of death,” I say.
She snorts. “Everyone is afraid of death.”
“But not like you.” My gaze rises to meet hers. “You kept me from so many things. The river’s edge, the poisonous plants, the forest… Not to keep me safe, but to keep me alive. And when you finally died, Father carried on your work as best he could. Alive. But not safe.”
She tenses at the mention of Father, face pinching. “I’m giving you a choice, Addie. Let me use the bell and give us both the life I have wanted for us, the life I have dreamt of giving you.”
“Or?”
The sneer hovers now, like something else inside her is fighting for a way out. “I believe there is someone who has been waiting to see you.”
My eyebrows form a pair of matching arches. It is not the response I was expecting. I imagined a threat, words perfectly barbed, chosen to whip me into obedience.
There are footfalls on the steps behind us, dissonant against the music. Mother’s lips widen, and I see, for the first time, one blackened tooth at the base of her tongue. It sits there like a carrion bird, reminding me of all the rot in this place. My heart quickens, and I turn toward the stairs.
Ransom Black descends. A phantom from the back of my mind. He is dressed in a suit of spring green so soft he reminds me of a snowdrop, pressing against the earth for new life. His honey-gold hair is sleek, pulled back in a velvet ribbon, his skin shorn and shining.
Lord Black.
He fiddles with the cuffs of one sleeve, grins wickedly when he catches my eye, and my stomach curls into delicate knots. I hate him for how he makes me feel despite everything.
Mother backs away, sways left, and is lost amongst the crowd. I open my mouth, but Ransom is already beside me. A gentle finger brushes on my lips and silences me.
“You look radiant.”
I know what those words are meant to do.
Meant to make my knees go weak, fall against him and realize how much I need him.
But he doesn’t get this power over me anymore.
He is every man who operates under the impression that what swings between their legs gives them the ability to do whatever they want. Take whatever they want.
But I am not for the taking. Not anymore. I shove my fist into his shoulder.
“How dare you,” I spit. “How dare you leave us without saying anything!”
He sweeps one hand over my bare shoulder, my skin pricking with cold to meet him. Ransom grins, self-satisfied. “Does it matter?”
Lips like pale apples come to brush against my cheek, his hand drawing slow circles up my back. I inhale, breath fogging the space around us. For a moment, I entertain how easily I could lose myself here, swept away beneath the charm. The promise.
Mother called it eternal life. It sounds lovely, the idea of living forever. Of never having to fear the quick cut of death. But that is not life. Not true life. Ransom pulls me flush against him, but my palms slam back into his chest. His gaze meets mine, and something deep down cracks inside me.
Life is horrible and terrifying and unpredictable—all the things my mother is afraid of.
It can swallow you in one greedy gulp and spit you out as nothing but skin and bone.
But it is also lovely. A kind of spring awakening.
Green shoots pressing through the last of winter’s snow.
Without death, we do not crave the life.
We do not watch the stars and moon in their orbits.
Death is the last great healing. Without that pain, there is no love, no wonder, no living.
I shove Ransom away, wrists snapping back, and he stumbles against the steps. His eyes flash angrily, hot and almost red. He twists away, up on his feet.
“What the hell, Adelaide?”
“Do not touch me.” The thought of him pressed against me makes me ill.
He curls his lip, the expression fermenting like dry wine. “You’re acting ridiculous. Are you feeling well? You know how you can get in your condition.”
His palm is a firebrand on my cheek before I knock it away.
“I said, do not fucking touch me.” I rip the mask from my face, throwing it to the stone floor where the icicles shatter.
His grin widens when he steps closer, the wood of the banister digging into my spine.
“You should join your mother, Adelaide. Let her use the bell. The things she offers.” He looks down at his hand, spreads his fingers before looking at me with eyes that could be made of fire.
“We could live forever. Your mother found a way, showed me the way—”
“What…what do you mean, showed you the way?” I pull away from him, stumbling.
His grin ekes out the corners of his lips, like someone has cut him. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Eternal life. Vita aeterna. An everlasting circle. Blessed by Erybrus. No more worries, no more rot, no more trouble. Here, he would make us kings.”
An everlasting circle. I recall the snakes drawn on the molding walls of Blackbourne Castle, the sign of Erybrus, the Devil. I close my eyes and see only red. The red of natural blood, the red of the unnatural sky, the red sap of Mother’s bitterbloom vines.
The remembrance of life. Bones half buried in dirt.
I should know what it means, but my mind is a fogged window. Ransom is so close now I smell the scent of him. Lemons. I choke.
Hands thrashing, I push him out of the way and scramble up the stairs.
I take in the ballroom around me, all the dancing dead.
Is this what we will all become, shades of our former selves, waiting in this purgatory until we align with the light or the shadow?
I look at Ransom, and there, in the pits of his eyes, I see it.
The truth.
He has already sold his soul.
My chest cracks in half, hands grappling for the banister, anything to steady myself on. His eyes catch mine. He recognizes the knowing and smiles. All teeth and rotten tongue.
“What have you done?” The words are weak when they leave my mouth, fear shimmering on the surface of my skin like sweat.
The floor beneath me shudders with each step forward he takes, closing the space between us.
“I have joined her, Adelaide. I have joined the side of eternal life. And don’t you want it too?
We could be king and queen of this place, you and me.
What I would give to see you enthroned, wrapped in shadow. ”
I shake my head, claws hollowing out pits in my stomach. “This is a half-world, Ransom. You and I, we wouldn’t be ourselves. We’d be bitter, broken, dead things bent on making deals and … and cheating death. We would belong to Erybrus.”
There. Just there. Behind the darkened eyes, I find the man I met in the garden beneath the moon. The true moon. The man who was broken, who held pieces of his heart in his palm and asked me to fit him back together. I lunge for him, taking his hand in mine.
“Ransom, what about your mother? Don’t you want to find her, bring her home?”
For a moment, a light dawns on his face, and then it vanishes. Something akin to greed—that hunger—swathes his face like moonshine. His hand crushes mine, and when I look at his lips, his teeth hang in cracked and bleeding gums.
This is no longer Ransom Black.
This is a monster. A true monster.
“My mother is already claimed. Ithrandril took her the day she was brought here. Righteous and pure and for the light. I watched my father kill her. After he pulled off her face, took the skin to build a body, I brewed poison from the bitterbloom in my garden, slipped it into his tea every day, and watched as it carved away his life until there was none of it left. And then, I did the same. Took his skin and the skin of others. Over and over and over again.”
My breath shudders, stomach dropping to the soles of my feet. The scent of upturned soil. The catch of slurried fruit baking in the sun. My knees cave, and the floor rises to meet me. One hand slips to the bell, the cracks familiar, grounding.
“You’re…you’re not making any sense. You didn’t—you couldn’t. This isn’t you talking, Ransom. It’s something—”
“It has always been me, Adelaide Thorn.” His face is inches from mine, the scent of his breath like apples rotting on the branch. “I only picked up where she left off.”
Where she left off. Not his mother. But someone else. Someone.
My stomach swills, and I am sure I will empty whatever lies there out onto the stairs.
Another hand at my back.
Solid. Cold. Dependable.
Bram.
He lifts me to my feet, steadies a hand at my waist. The scent of ink-stained pages, dry leaves. I sag against him.
“Leave her alone, Ransom. She isn’t yours.”
“And that makes her yours, then?” Ransom’s voice is thick with greed.
Bram positions himself in front of me, his face hard, determined. “She is her own, you fool.”
Ransom’s face cracks, the illusion of beauty weeping away, like the painted portraits in his home. Rivulets of something like ink spread across his cheeks, down his neck, along his hands. I open my mouth to scream, but Bram’s hand covers the sound.
He moves an arm tight around my middle, drags me up a step with him.
“Ransom, I said—”
“Oh, I heard what you said, dead man. I heard exactly what you said.”
The voice that breaks from Ransom’s lips is not his own. It is, and yet, it isn’t. It is the sound of a hundred, thousand voices, and when I lift my eyes from him, I see why.
The ballroom has gone still, every dancing dead thing now like stone. Their faces are turned to us, repeating the same words Ransom says, their features flooding with shadowed rot. And beyond them…
No, no, no.
I scramble with Bram’s cuff, sobs ripping at the back of my throat. He drags us further up the steps. Up, up, up. Away.
Beyond the dead things, my mother stands at the far doors, her arms raised, blackened roots swarming her body like marionette strings. Except, she is not being controlled. She is the one controlling.
Every word is her own. Every movement the dead things perform, she is making. My head swims, becomes as light as air. Ransom’s legs and arms jerk in swinging motions, and he takes to the stairs, his head cocked at a wrong angle, eyes lolling.
I open my mouth to cry out, to tell her to stop, to just let him go, but all I taste is the salty sweetness of Bram’s hand.
“Adelaide, look.” His voice is a hot whisper at my ear. “Look at your mother.”
What is there to see but the rotten vines, the bleeding skin? But he whispers it again. Over and over until I do as he says.
And my stomach falls to the depths of my toes.
For Mother is not Mother. Not anymore. Her face—her body—is made up from things that are not hers. A patchwork of stolen features held together by black string. My knees buckle. Bram’s hands come to catch me.
The pages of her journal sitting on my bed at home…The sketches of what I thought were merely catches of fabric, bits of thread. A body to live in forever. Made from…
The truth settles over my skin like a film.
Sickly and bitter. The tang of lemons in my mouth.
The bitterbloom. The dead girls buried in the churchyard.
My mother coming in late from the garden shed, smelling of freshly scrubbed skin, the upturn of soil, red sap still dripping from beneath her fingernails.
The poison.
A murderer stitching together the skin of dead girls to make herself an immortal body. To become a god.
“We need to leave.” Bram’s voice is a rushed breath at my ear. “Now.”
I nod, barely able to tear my eyes from my mother. But she isn’t Mother anymore, is she? She is something else. A monster. Not Lady Black. She only used that name here to draw us in, like a fly to a spider’s web. No. She is something else now.
Lady Death.
I find my feet, pulling out of Bram’s arms while he pushes me toward the door. Rascal comes around a corner, mouth open, baying. The sound sends my hair on end, prickles my skin. His eyes are red as blood, and his snarl is wicked.
Everyone stills. Even Ransom, halting like a porcelain doll on the stairs.
I grapple with my skirts, searching for the bell—I must not lose it.
It greets my hand with its cold brass sting, and my lungs find air again.
Mother is screaming something, something that sounds of blood and anger.
I stare at her open mouth, watch the shadows run from it, each one turning, morphing into…
Haunts.
Three of them. The ones who took us from the river. They rise from the tendrils of darkness eking from Mother’s lips, arms dragging, teeth gnashing.
Bram’s hand tightens at my waist again, the catch of fear in the air.
My fear.
“Adelaide, we must go! Now!” Bram’s screams ring in my ears.
And then we are running. Through the doors and out into the blood-soaked night.