Chapter 27
twenty-seven
Through the trees, the sky drips like blood.
This world smells of it too, and my throat closes in on itself.
I push up from the damp leaves, leaning back against the nearest tree, sharp-edged twigs scraping my palms. My gown is stained with mud.
The skin on my wrists, where Ransom held me, molts purple.
I catch my breath, shivering in the cold, my arms goosing. Clara lies beside me, bundled in her wool cloak. Bits of red leaves catch in her oak-brown hair, and she turns to face me, blinking in the sullen light.
“What time is it?”
I stare blankly ahead. “There’s no way to tell. I think we’ve been asleep for a few hours.”
It is a lie. I have not slept at all. How can I?
I close my eyes, conjuring the image of Bram slit open, gray guts spilling to the mud at his feet.
My own ache from running, blisters rubbing raw on my heels, boots puddling with my own blood.
We stopped only when Clara could go no further.
I told her to sleep, and she did. Though judging by the charcoal circles beneath her eyes, she has not gotten much.
“Any sign of them?” She rubs the dirt from her cheeks.
I assume she means the Haunts, and I shake my head. We ran as though they had whips at our backs, but we never saw them. Rascal stirs in the leaves at my side, sits and sniffs the air. I ruffle his ears.
“Do you smell something, boy?” I bury my nose in his fur, taking deep breaths of his smoky musk.
He prickles, skin pulling taut. My eyes dart to the trees surrounding us, each gray and white trunk a corpse. A forest of living death.
A branch snaps in the undergrowth behind us, and I push to my feet. Clara and Rascal are alert at my sides. She takes a hold of my hand, her skin chilled.
A shape grows amongst the trees. A shadow of a black so deep the space it takes almost seems empty. More a void than a solid thing.
A growl starts at the back of Rascal’s throat. I place a hand on his head to settle him, to calm myself. Fear grows in my gut like mold while the thing before us blossoms, stretches tall, and turns a face toward us in the red light.
My stomach drops to the soles of my feet.
My father stands before us, drenched in inky shadows.
Father and yet not Father. His face is the same: stone-set and heavy-browed.
But there is something else, something that clings to the hollows of his cheekbones, the citrine irises of his eyes.
When he meets my gaze, a smile spills along the line of his lips, dripping a cloying sweetness I have never seen him use.
The shadows form a cloak at his back, embracing him like raven wings.
Here, he is Father—Vicar Thorn—but he is someone else too.
He is Death incarnate.
A Reaper.
“Daughter of mine,” he muses, voice like cracking ice. “I have been looking for you.”
My body tenses, goes rigid. Everything I have ever known seems a lie.
Our home near the river, the flower beds beneath the window, Mother and Father dancing in the kitchen before the world turned gray.
Before Mother wasted to ash in their marriage bed.
And if that is all a lie, what does it make me?
Father takes a step closer, the pin on his cloak glittering in the moonlight. “So, you have discovered my secret?”
Clara trembles beside me. I tighten my grip on her hand.
“You lied to me.”
Amusement glistens on his face. “I never lied, Adelaide. If you would have only asked me.”
“Asked my father if he was Death? A Reaper? If he was the thing that killed my mother?”
He scowls, the shadows deepening around him. Rascal whines and paws at the dirt.
“I did not kill your mother,” Death growls. “I have killed no one, in fact. I only harvest souls once they have died. A faceless blur on the wind. Your mother was responsible for the actions that led to her loss.”
Anger boils hot in my veins, tearing down my arms like cinnamon. “You watched her die. You allowed it to happen, and in the end, it was me who lost. Me!”
The darkness grows, closing in around us, but I do not care. I only shake. My heart pounds while Clara’s hand loosens in mine. Father steps closer.
“Your mother was sick, Adelaide. Her mind had grown weak. Her obsession with life eternal grew like a weed in her gardens. She did not want to be human. She wanted to be a god. I did my best to pluck it out, to show her that death was only a beginning, that no matter what we could always be together, but that was not what she wanted.” His shadows swirl and brush my cheek with the scent of pine needles and sage. “In the end, I had to let her go.”
His words are a punch to my gut, lungs collapsing, and the breath rushes from me.
Let her go.
“You let her die?”
Father takes a step forward, one hand outstretched to cup my cheek. I do not pull away, though his touch is ice.
“I could not save her, Adelaide. So instead, I tried to save you. To keep you from your true nature. I thought, if I hid the truth from you, you could live some semblance of a normal life. But you were bred from light and shadow. Your mother was special, touched with a hunger for life that inspired me, drew me to her. But after we wed, she discovered my secret, caught me ferrying souls in the rowan wood, and stole the bell.”
My fingers go to my pocket, where the brass greets me, cool and clear. “She knew about the bell?”
Father nods. “She told me she only wanted to use it once, to bring her own mother back from the dead. But I told her it didn’t always work that way.
Most times, souls made their choice quickly.
For Ithrandril or Erybrus. Light or shadow.
But she was desperate for power and took it.
I chased her down to the river, struggled with her to gain it back.
She fell and cracked her spine along the stones. ”
My mind goes dark, fills with memories. Mother and Father not in the kitchen, their voices rattling from the riverbank, my face pressed against frosty glass while he brought her up the hill, slung like a rag doll in his arms. She was never the same after that.
My father continues. “With her body so broken, she could no longer carry on with her work and, eventually, gave herself the bitterbloom poison so she could continue on from the other side, through the soul of another.”
Ransom.
My stomach swills sick.
“But what happened to the bell?” I ask, one finger still tracing the sharp edges.
“I abandoned it. I knew it was only a matter of time before Esme found it. She had been killing those girls for so long, burying them in her flower beds, and I knew—”
Breath hardens in my chest, turns to iron rock. “What do you mean, she buried them in her flower beds?”
The shadows around us darken, swirl until all I see is Father. No Clara, no Rascal. We are alone. I wrap my hand around the bell.
“You must know now what your mother was doing all those years. Frances, Dinah, Rosalyn …they were all stolen by her hand, and now, beneath her facade, she wears their faces as trophies. The lives she stole to live forever. She even taught the little Lord Black when she sensed his hunger. And I was…I was so scared, Addie. When he called you up to the castle, I thought for sure he would kill you too.”
His hand sweeps through the darkness, reaching for my face. But I pull away, loathe to let him touch me.
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Father drops his hand, face morphing to grief. “Because I do not have that kind of power. I cannot stop sin, Addie. I can only carry out the results.”
My stomach turns, one hand groping in the darkness for Rascal’s calming warmth. But all I find is empty cold.
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Chaos is not meant to make sense. And that is what your mother has become. She almost died once, before we wed. And the fear of it morphed her into what she is now. I didn’t know it was her at first, killing the girls in Rixton.
They don’t speak to me when I bring them over, the souls.
But I caught her. Katherine Wright—do you remember her? ”
The name brings a ghost to my eyes. Hair like sand, eyes as pale as the winter sky. She was the innkeeper’s daughter, nearer Bram’s age than mine, though that would make us the same age now. I swallow the bile creeping up the back of my throat.
The day they buried Katherine beside her own mother in the church graveyard, her father placed a stone angel in the upturned earth and cried tears I thought were made of diamonds.
Ransom mentioned that the line between the living and the dead was thin in Rixton, but I think it is something different.
It is a town touched with grief. Perhaps that is why Father was drawn to it. My eyes flash to him.
“You should have stopped her.”
A sort of sadness collects on his face, sinks into the hollows of his cheeks.
“There was no stopping her, Adelaide. By then, she’d perfected her technique, and she was so close to gaining what she wanted.
In the end, it was her own mind that ruined her plan.
But then the Lord Black learned of her work, kept it going.
And by then the bell was gone. I did my best to help those girls to peace as Ransom stole their bodies and buried them beneath the castle. ”
The castle.
Mother’s bitterbloom beds.
A remembrance of life.
“They have been here the whole time,” I say, more to myself than anyone else.
The bones.
“What?” Father’s face twists.
I picture the bitterbloom behind the vicarage, the petals like a moat around this twisted version of Blackbourne Castle. The way they bloomed brighter at my touch, seemed to grow.
“But now that she’s here, she doesn’t want to go back,” I say. “She asked me to join her.”
Father nods, scratches his jaw, the ring on his finger glinting. I can still feel the heat of the metal when it cut my lip.