Chapter 25
twenty-five
It is not the cold that stops us; it is the color. White, lemon yellow, glimpses of red seeping from roots. I sag against Bram, his hand firm at my side. The bitterbloom by the ruined wall of the vicarage wink their wicked faces at me, reminding me what I have lost.
What once was will never be again.
The remembrance of life.
I pull away from Bram, Rascal quick on my heels, and perch on the crumbling wall. “Have we lost them?”
Bram turns back, searches the sky beyond. “I don’t think they were ever chasing us to begin with.”
My feet burn, each spark of pain a blister.
I gather my skirts and lift them to examine my skin.
It flares a sickly orange-pink trimmed in the black of my blood, flesh slipping where my shoes have rubbed to the bone.
I toss a boot to the ground, drag a finger along one heel.
The pain swells, shoots up my leg like venom.
“Here,” Bram says gently. “Let me help you with that.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I snarl, all my sharp edges showing. While I should retract them, tell him I am sorry, Bram is the safest place I know, and so I bite. “Haven’t you done enough already?”
Betrayal winks in his eyes, and a twisted laugh cracks from my lips.
“What do you mean?” His voice is soft. He crouches low, his hand reaching for my knee.
Anger boils inside me, seeping between my bones like black tea. “It’s your fault I’m here! It’s your fault Ransom is…is whatever the hell he is! It’s your fault that—that—” My voice melts into tears, and I am on the ground beside him, weeping in the dead grass.
His hand comes to cup my jaw, brush my hair, and I do nothing to stop him.
There on the ground, I am nothing more than a shell.
A corpse of the girl I once was. The one who held her mother’s hand and ran wild through the wheat and rye fields.
Who watched her parents embrace when they walked through the village.
The girl who used to laugh at the stars because they were so small and she was so big.
Now I am nothing but blackened blood.
Bram’s hand is steady at my back, helping me sit up slowly. When I stare down at my hands, the bell lolls in my palms. I must have reached for it. Just to feel its solidity. My chest stings.
I study the engravings on the brass. The skull and crossbones. The wilting flowers. It is such a little thing to cause so much toil and pain. So much loss. And what can it really do? Open the doors to this purgatory?
It can restore someone to life, yes, but it also is held by hands who collect souls and morph them until they are nothing more than whatever it is Ransom has become.
Do not make deals with these people.
Bram leads me inside the crumbling walls of the vicarage and stops when we reach where the kitchen should be.
“What is it?” My eyes are still trained on the bell.
“Do you remember leaving a fire going in the church when we left?”
Tears roll down my cheeks when I look up. Smoke belches black from the cracking steeple.
“No.”
My fingers itch with anxiety, and I wring them against the bell. But the darkness is beginning to swarm. I tuck it away between its wrappings. Hidden. Secret and safe. Bram’s eyes are on the church, the curl of black smoke.
“Stay here,” he says.
But I am not a dog, and even Rascal is giving him a look that says, “Over our dead bodies.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Bram turns, eyes flashing. “Like hell you are.”
“If you haven’t noticed, Hell is exactly where we are,” I spit. “And I’m not being left alone. Especially not when…”
I think back to my mother—rather the thing beneath my mother’s skin. Wearing faces that don’t belong to her, half-smiles of dead girls in dirt. Flowers in her hair, like dying stars.
I move past Bram, my body still hazy from everything I have seen. He says nothing but follows.
His footfalls crunch in the icy snow. While we move toward the church, my courage subsides. It leaves me like steam from a teacup, and I am glad for Rascal at my side, glad for the warmth of his fur to rid my fingers of this wretched cold.
Behind the stained-glass windows, there is a soft, orange glow. Someone, or something, has indeed lit a fire in Bram’s makeshift ring of stones. He is at my back, and I swallow the fear slipping up my throat.
“What should we do?” I ask.
“All that there is left to do.” He presses past me and pushes on the door.
It does not budge.
Something scampers inside—the sound of feet on stone, the shushing of cloth. I bend low and fit my eye to the tarnished keyhole. Rascal growls in my ear.
Shadows shift inside the church. A fire crackles near the altar, a pile of blankets beside that. A pair of brown boots.
A strange sense of familiarity tangles through my bones. My sight goes black, and an eye matches my own. A hazel eye.
Breath whooshes from my lungs, and I fall backward, clambering up against Bram while I rattle the door.
“What? What is it?” Bram’s voice is stringent.
I tear at the wood, not caring when splinters break off and sink into my skin. “Clara.”
Bram blinks stupidly at me for a moment, and then his fingers are at the door, rattling the hinges. “Clara, it’s Bram and Adelaide,” he hisses. “Please let us in.”
I wait for a reply, that voice I know and love so well.
“How do I know you aren’t…aren’t the dead things?”
A sob cracks against my ribs. “We aren’t, Clara. We can explain everything.”
There is silence. The wind stirs, bringing with it a scent of iron. My eyes flash to Bram.
Gods below and above, let us in.
There is the metallic shushing of a bar being drawn back, a latch clicking. The door swings open. Clara stands in the frame, the glow of the fire bright as morning sun behind her. Dark curls lie in tendrils over her face, dirt smudging her cheeks, tear stains streaking in lines.
It takes Clara all of a moment to throw herself into my arms, body shaking. I say nothing, only stroke her hair softly. Bram hurries us into the church and secures the door behind us.
“Clara,” I whisper, reaching for her face. “Are you all right? How are you…how are you here?”
She presses a finger to her lips, eyes frantically glancing to the nearest window.
“They can hear you. Every word. They listen for it, crack their hands against the walls until the very ground is quaking. Sometimes, they get in and I have to hide.” Her face darkens, turns to me.
“Prove you are not one of them, Adelaide.”
I pull the bell from the fragmented folds of my gown. It catches gold in the fire glow. I run a finger along the rim of the sharp-edged dome. Pain stings through me, and the blood beads like licorice drops on my skin.
“There,” I say, holding it up to the light. “Not dead. Not exactly.”
Clara hesitates, takes a hold of my wrist, drags a finger through my blood, and rolls it on her thumb. I wait for her to balk, to spit curses at the sight of my illness. My Reaper’s blood. But she doesn’t. She only turns her eyes back to mine.
“Fine. Not exactly dead. But what about him?” She points to Bram, who is crouching over the fire, hurrying for something in his satchel.
For some reason unbeknownst to me, I smile. “Oh, he’s very dead. But he will not hurt us.”
Clara appears ready to knock Bram to the floor when she notices Rascal. She freezes. “Is that…that’s a hellhound.”
I whistle, and Rascal bounds across the room, burying his nose against my skirts. Clara gasps and backs away, but I am already down on my knees, scratching the hound behind his ears. He bays, licks my face, and gazes expectantly at Clara.
“His bark is worse than his bite,” I say, standing. “He’s really no harm at all, unless you’re one of the Haunts or…” My voice trails off.
Or my mother. My murderous mother.
A thought rises inside me, and the wind howls around the steeple of the tumble-down church.
“Clara, how did you get here?”
She is still staring between Bram and Rascal, trying to piece it together.
A puzzle with too many razor points. “I don’t know, really.
I’d been following Lord Black, I suppose.
He’d been in Father’s bakery the day before, acting strange.
Asking after Liza, about our plans regarding the future, marriage.
” She hugs her arms around her chest, shivers in the chill of the room.
“I didn’t think much of it until the next day, when I saw him coming from the graveyard behind the church, carrying something—a bag, I think. He saw me and grinned.”
She grabs my hand, pulls me so close I can smell the yeast and sugar still clinging to her clothes.
“It was awful, Addie. A thing of nightmares, really. All stretched and patched skin. And his teeth were so white they might have been made from glass.” Her body shudders beneath me.
The description plunges me into a panic. “What do you mean, his skin was stretched and patched?”
There are tears in her eyes, glinting off the fire glow. Bram, behind us, mutters and cuts at something with a knife. The scent of iron slips past my nose, and I bite back a gag.
Clara’s eyes shine. “Like he was a quilt. Made up from pieces all stitched together. But the stitching was crude, done with too big and dull a needle. Blood had dried in the cracks between the pieces, and something was dripping from that bag. Something that smelled like…” She sniffs the air. “Like whatever it is I’m smelling now.”
Blood.
I turn to the fire where Bram still crouches, the flames reflecting in something wet on his hands. “Stay here a moment,” I say to Clara.
She nods, pulls her knees up to her chest.
Bram doesn’t look up when I approach, but I see what it is he is holding. A rat, its tail long and fleshy pink. There is a slit in its belly, viscera spilling out in oily tangles.
“It was near the fire when we came in,” he says, one finger slipping through the meat. “Took it as I sign, I suppose. Did the only thing I could think of.”
My stomach swills, but I bend down anyway. The thick tang of fresh blood fills my nose.