Chapter 26 #3
The taste of soil fills my mouth when Bram pushes me to the edge of climax, and I surrender.
Bitterbloom breaks through the stone of the floor, petals unfurling in a blossoming of light.
Bram increases his speed, and I stiffen.
Every inch of me feels ready to explode.
To come apart in this place until all that is left of me is dust.
He brushes his lips against the curve of my shoulder, moaning my name like a holy prayer. Like I am something he has come to worship.
I shatter. Sparks cascade through my core, my chest, my limbs, while I cry out in pleasure. My back arches and Bram follows, stifling his cry in the white curls gathering at my throat. Together, we crash and fall, bursting and then coming together through gasps and moans and delirious smiles.
The woman afraid of dying and the man who only wanted to live.
I do not know what time of day it is when I follow Bram from the vestry, wrapped in a dusty wool dress of winter white. It was tucked in an armoire, gathering desiccated insect shells and cobwebs. Something warm brews at the center of my chest, the fire Bram lit still roaring inside me.
Clara peeks her head over the back of a broken pew, a knowing look glinting in her eye.
“Haunts have been quiet.”
Bram, his hand wrapped tight around mine, nods. “Good to know.”
“A few mice scampered across the floorboards earlier. They seemed alive, not missing fur or teeth or eyes or anything. They were bleeding, though. Thought that was strange, but…” She shrugs. “Didn’t want to disturb you.”
Bram shoots me a strange look, but I read it perfectly. Things—living things—slip into the rowan wood every now and then, yes. But this many in so short a time? Something is wrong. Or more wrong than usual.
I drop his hand and slip into the pew beside Clara.
“Do you remember telling me who it was you followed here?” I ask.
She nods, though the look on Clara’s face says she wishes she could remember anything but. “I swear that’s who it was, Addie. And I’m sorry. You probably don’t—”
“I believe you.” My gaze shifts to Bram. “You know how my blood runs black, Reaper’s blood?”
Bram nods, a rather pained expression on his face. Like he’s trying to hold back the truth but it’s like swallowing poison.
The realization spills across my skin like oil. Smothering me. A lump sticks in the back of my throat. “I think my father is a Reaper. The Reaper of Rixton.”
When the words tumble from my mouth, something I have long wondered at, the truth, is apparent.
My father is a Reaper. Created by Erybrus and Ithrandril alike in the Rending. A servant to harbor souls to this under-land while they await their choice, their final judgment. Or seek a way to broker their peace. Their deals.
Something outside one of the windows catches Bram’s attention. He puts a finger to his lips and crosses the room, each footfall barely a breath.
Clara closes her fingers over mine, and Rascal, from where he lies sleeping next to the cold coals, lifts his head and utters a low, mean growl from the back of his throat. My skin prickles.
“Addie?” Clara’s fingers dig into my arm, but I keep my eyes on Bram, who sidles up to one window and peeks through the glass.
His face goes white, lips peeling back in a snarl. He turns to me, and that’s when I know.
It was a good thing to keep him from saying those three words in the vestry because we will never be safe again.
“Addie, run!” His words echo off the church walls.
I grab Clara’s hand, Rascal leaping to his feet beside me, and pull her off the pew. She is screaming something, but I can’t make out the words. Can’t hear her over the sudden wind, the sound of splitting wood, of Bram yelling at me to run, to get out of here, to go home, over and over and over.
Through the chaos, our eyes meet, and the spark in my chest goes out. Frost sharp. The ice I have been holding onto for so long cracks.
I run for the door, Clara tripping behind me, Rascal on our heels. For the world outside, the flood of iron and snow, all the dead and dying things. My nose fills with the wet scent of rot, thick and sickly sweet. I gag on it, my knees rocking.
No.
The door is knocked off its hinges, wood splintering. I shout, cover my eyes, bend myself over Clara. Rascal rushes forward, haunches raised.
Something crashes through the roof behind us, and Bram cries out.
When I turn, dust blooms in great clouds, filling my lungs and forcing me to my knees in a fit of coughing.
I still feel Clara at my side, Rascal a shadow now in front of us.
And something else, someone else, comes through the shattered door.
“You know, I never thought you’d be the next woman I killed, Adelaide Thorn, but here we are.”
The voice shoots through me like a holly spear, spreading poison between my ribs.
Ransom stands at the door. Ransom and yet not Ransom. Gone are his handsome features, replaced by a patchwork of skin that does not belong to him. One eye blue, the other brown, blink out at me from beneath a crooked brow. His hair is matted in shades of red, gold, white, and black.
My stomach swills, expands, presses into my throat. I reach to sink my hands into Rascal’s warm fur, but he and Clara have scuttled into the shadows, too far away from me and the thing standing in Ransom’s clothes.
“What have you done?” My voice is choked. Bram struggles behind me, but I do not turn. Not yet. I keep my eyes firm on Ransom. And the face that does not belong to him.
“What have I done?” he asks the question as though the words taste sour.
His boots scuff the floor, and then he is bending down, a black-threaded nose coming equal to mine.
The smell rolling off him is foul, blood and cold metal and the sting of winter wind.
“The real question is, Thorn, what have you done?”
I match his gaze with stone, lips pressed into a line. My fingers itch to reach forward, to peel apart his skin, to reclaim it for the girls he stole it from. I search his eyes for any signs of remorse, but all I find is the truth: the boy who cried wolf is the monster in sheep’s clothing.
“You murdered all those girls, Ransom,” I say finally. “Lilith, Hester…Liza was next.”
It is a relief to say it. To know I am not the killer. That never, in the darkness of my fits, did I lose control. That I was simply becoming what I am. Who I was always meant to be.
A Reaper.
For the first time in so very long, I feel no guilt.
Ransom smiles. A twisted thing that, I realize, is all that still belongs to him.
“Your mother was a great teacher, you know.” He pulls something from his pocket.
“Even from beyond the grave. She taught my father first. He didn’t mean to call on her.
But once it was done, he couldn’t turn down her offer.
Eternal life. Neither claimed by shadow nor light.
Neither for Ithrandril nor for Erybrus. But making our mark here. Ruling here.”
His eyes glimmer, and he holds the thing from his pocket out in front of him. A flame-shaped locket. My knees go weak. My mother’s locket.
“Where did you—”
“Ah, not important, Adelaide. What is important is that we learned how to communicate with her. Father first, then me as Father grew…ill.” He smiles. “It was easy, really, taking the power. Poison is so easy to distill undetected when you’re learning from the right teacher.”
“You’re a monster,” I spit.
His smile deepens, skin tearing at the seams. He hooks a finger under my jaw. “Oh, Adelaide. I am no monster. I am a miracle.”
Something inside me snaps, something that remembers the rub of rugged ropes, the taste of vinegar on my tongue.
I slash a hand across Ransom’s face, my fingers exposing something wet.
His hands are at my wrists, searing pain blooming in my shoulders, and he wrenches me around, pulls my back flush against him.
Bram stands in front of us, arms held by two Haunts, their graying, shadowed frames like empty holes where the light can’t shine. Hot panic fills my chest. How have they gotten inside? And then I remember Ransom at my back. His presence has desecrated the place. Turned it unholy.
Bram’s mouth is open wide, as if he is screaming, but there is no sound. He is frozen. The touch of the Haunts so cold, so bitterly unalive, they have sapped any semblance of life left in his bones.
“Now you see, Adelaide, there are two sides to this.” Ransom’s voice is ice in my ear.
“The side of life eternal. Ruling this place—ruling all of it, really. Who comes, who goes, who is sent to the fires or light beyond. We would be greater than Reapers. Their kings and queens. Or…you can choose the side of living death.” He grabs my jaw so hard my teeth crack.
Points my gaze to Bram. “That is his side, by the way. Your dead man.”
I twist, my muscles aching for release. “You killed girls, Ransom. You and Mother.”
He chuckles, breath like hoarfrost. “Oh, Adelaide. To gain life, other life must be taken. It is a simple rule, and your mother perfected the technique. Passed it on to me through this.” He lifts Mother’s locket.
“The dead can speak through objects, Thorn. And your mother was all too willing to carry on her work through another.”
I fight against it, the idea that my mother—Esme Thorn, who kissed my brow at night and sang of gardens and sunlight—murdered women in Rixton. “You’re a liar.”
Ransom’s laugh grows, morphs to something sick. “Adelaide Thorn, the daughter of a Reaper, of death, and a woman who refused to die.”
His words are stones in my belly, ropes around my heart. I sag against him, breath whooshing like poison vapors from my lungs. In the shadows, Rascal’s eyes glint like twin moons. Waiting.
“You know it’s true, don’t you?” Ransom’s voice is a growl in my ear.
Yes, I know. My stomach roils, nausea like a thick film in my mouth.
“That’s how I pieced it all together. The bell, your mother, this place.
I followed your father home one night, when he thought he was alone.
He walked into the graveyard, and when the shadows hounded him, when the trees curled and parted at his very touch, I knew exactly what he was.
My father used to say the line between the living and the dead was thin in Rixton.
But he didn’t know it was because he had a Reaper preaching holy words to him from the pulpit each Sunday. ”
The truth spills along every inch of my bones.
It makes sense. My blackened blood. My father hiding me, afraid of what I was becoming.
What if that meant I would become as powerful as him?
But I push away those thoughts. It does not matter that I am what I am.
All my mind focuses on are the dead of Rixton parish. Of life stolen.
“How did you do it?” I ask. “Murder all those girls? Steal their life, their faces?”
“That was the simplest task of all. Just as your mother taught me.” The curve of Ransom’s lips brushes my ear, and his voice drops. “Bitterbloom.”
My chest seizes. A twinge of pain at the base of my skull. No, no. My stomach churns.
And then the souls appear. The first in so many days I can’t remember. There are twelve. Twelve shimmers of cloudy white. The dead women. And they have come to help.
“Rascal!” I scream. “Now!”
The dog pounces before Ransom has a chance to register my words. He sinks his teeth deep into Ransom’s thigh, and I wrench away, reaching for Clara, who has balled herself up on the floor.
The souls—the dead women—brush their wisping hands across the shadows of the Haunts, and those poisoned mouths gape open. The Haunts scream. My eyes feel as though they are about to pop. Their lips break open, and the muscle and teeth begin to clatter down to the floor.
Bram drops to his hands and knees, life slowly filling him back up. Behind me now, Ransom is screaming. The voices are not his own. They are the girls: Lilith, Dinah, Frances, even Hester. And they have come for vengeance.
I pull Clara to her feet and run for the door. Rascal follows, a chunk of black silk hanging from his mouth.
“Bram!” I scream, turning when the snow outside lashes my face.
He is there, at the door, the dead women holding back the Haunts. Ransom is on his hands and knees, black slime slurrying down his face. Bram is almost past him.
And then Ransom’s hand snaps out, a knife glinting in the moonlight.
He slices Bram throat to navel, and I watch in stunned horror while the dried and dead viscera spills out like ash.
Bram’s face twists, turns gray, and he falls to his knees.
“Bram!” I scream again, going to run, to hold my hands against his skin.
Clara’s fingers hold me fast, pulling at me.
“Addie, we must go!”
Ransom stands, smiles with too many teeth, while Bram kneels before him. He turns, makes sure I am watching—knowing—and sinks his fingers between the cut in Bram’s chest, pulling out his heart.
It is still beating. Just barely. A shrunken, wilting flower of pale pink. A remembrance of life.
A cry curdles at the back of my throat. Clara’s arms come to wrap around my waist. Rascal’s teeth are at my heels.
Ransom holds up the heart, squeezes it. Bram buckles and gasps for air. Ransom’s brow peaks, eyes glinting like wicked coals. His lips part, and he speaks a single word.
“Run.”
And so, I do.