Chapter 27 #2
“She learned that with death she could have more power and control. Become as close to Ithrandril and Erybrus as is possible for a human soul. And without me here, without access to the bell, she took rule of my dominion.” His shadows undulate. “But I intend to take it back.”
His eyes flash to my pocket.
“I need you to give it to me, Adelaide. Give me the bell.”
My fingers tighten, the sharp brass slitting lines in my skin, and my blood drips hot. Somewhere, outside the bleating darkness, Rascal growls.
“Why do you want it?” I ask.
A flicker of irritation crosses Father’s face.
“So I can stop her. Don’t you understand?
If she gets her hands on it, if she and Ransom take the power, they will be able to hold dominion over both the wood and our world.
Esme will take my place, become a Reaper, and take any soul she wants.
The bell bends to the Reaper, Adelaide.”
The answer I was looking for. I fist the bell; blood leaks along its cracks like veins.
My parents are Death and death alike. One, a shepherd of souls.
The other, a thief. I thought the bell would make me a thief too.
The lines of my name signed over in red ink to Erybrus.
But I am so much more than a thief. Once, a fool.
Twice, a thief. The power of death in my hand, deals made in blood.
I am the very power of the bell itself.
“If I use it, if I ring the bell and bring Bram back home, I will become a Reaper, and you’ll what…die?”
Father stiffens. “I thought I was keeping you safe. When I abandoned the bell at the bank of the river, I thought that was the end. But then your mother…I heard every girl screaming, begging for me to help them cross over.” His visage twists, pain growing in his eyes.
“That is what a Reaper does, Addie. And it is the last thing I want for you. If you give me the bell, I can convince your mother to let it go. We can stay a family. Here, in the rowan wood.”
Family. My heart aches, pinches in my chest. I bite my tongue and shake my head.
No. I will not belong to a dead family. And we have been dead for so very long.
“I am not giving it to you.” I set my jaw, hard and firm.
Father’s face clouds, the shadows around deepening until all I can make out are the citrine glow of his eyes. A monster in the wood.
“Do not defy your father, Adelaide.”
I grit my teeth, clasp the bell. “I should have defied you from the beginning. I should have climbed from that window in the garden shed years ago. You’re a monster.”
He stretches tall, growing like a silhouette in a broken mirror. His face turns gray, handsome and terrifying at the same time. As if he can see to my very soul and know what it is made of. But I hold my ground.
“That’s where she did it, you know.” His voice is poison sap dripping from a tree. A weeping wound. “That’s where she cut the girls to pieces, chose their best parts to build herself an everlasting body.”
I almost choke on his words when they slip around my throat like a noose.
A brick covered in blood, black thread amongst bitterbloom and oleander seeds, goatskin gloves stained, smelling of earth and iron.
Mother’s journal speaking of ways to create an everlasting body.
My stomach turns sick, claws sinking into my flesh and peeling back the folds.
I clutch the bell so tight the brass starts slipping.
“You locked me in there on purpose, to face the sins of my mother, even though I knew nothing of them.”
A smile slips against the darkness. Each tooth polished and sharp. Father’s laugh ripples through the swirling shadow. “We are all the sins of our parents, Adelaide. Some just have more than others.”
The sins of our parents. My knees knock together, and I almost yearn for the taste of dirt in my mouth. The release of death. But then something breaks through the cloud in my mind.
Bram’s soft hands, caring for living and dead alike. The way he held me in the vestry, worshiped me like wine on an altar. I take the bell from my pocket, and shock spreads hot fingers across my chest.
It is glowing. Like fire without the burn. It lights the space between me and Death, and I see him here for what he is.
Nothing but a corpse. Gray and rotted skin hanging in dry folds. Broken horns curve from his head, and his smile is made from lips like burst pustules.
“There you are,” I whisper.
Death steps toward me, the scent of him no longer pine needles and sage, but turbid fruit, a carcass left over from the hunt. Sick rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. Hold the bell aloft.
“You cannot use it for what you want.” His voice is like metal in my ears. “The bell is broken.”
In the near-blinding light, veins crack along the brass. I clutch it to my breast, some sort of absurd self-preservation.
“You’re a liar,” I hiss, holding it tighter. “I will never give you the bell.”
“I am so sorry, but you have already lost.” Death steps closer, the moon like a halo behind his crooked horns, as if it has been pinned there. When I concentrate on him, on the shifting blackness, white bones seem to throb beneath his skin. Beat an unsteady rhythm.
My arm tenses. Something akin to pain. I grind my jaw, take a step back until Clara’s warmth blossoms at my spine.
“You could have stopped them both. Mother and Ransom. You knew what they were doing, what they were trying to accomplish, and you just sat by and let them.”
All the faces flash before my eyes. So many dead girls. And Bram, the man who saw what he shouldn’t.
“She wasn’t mine to stop.” Death’s voice is a shadow now, a mere leaking of words between dry lips.
My arm trembles with pain, and I clutch the bell fiercely. “She was only yours to stop.”
Death opens his mouth to speak, but it is Clara’s voice that filters through the trees. “Addie, your arm. Look at your arm.”
My hands are suddenly numb and shaking, a keening sound whistling in my ears. Something sizzles hot in my veins, the same heat that shook me when I touched the bitterbloom behind the ruined vicarage.
I lower the bell, my jaw going slack at the sight of my bare skin. The delicate bones of my wrists are smeared in dark liquid. I hold up an arm, the light from the sky glowing red in the wetness.
Blood.
And yet, not blood. It runs warm, but the smell is something else. I gag, retching dryly, while the scent floods my nose. Bitter. Lemons and wormwood. Wet soil. Farther up my flesh, past the freckles dotting my forearm, something like coiled rope spills and curves.
Vines.
My lungs squeeze.
“What is this?” Father’s voice—the one I know—filters through the glade. When I look up at him, he is all flashing eyes and pointed teeth. And I see it, there in the black pits above his hollow nose.
Fear. For the first time, Vicar Thorn, Death himself, is afraid.
Beneath me, the ground sways, and Clara falls to her knees behind me. But I cannot turn around. Something holds me tight. I lift my skirts and find the cause.
All the creeping vines of bitterbloom.
They twist up from the ground, wrapping about my ankles, skimming the soft skin of my stomach, looping around my chest to spill along my arms. Sap drips ruby-red down my wrists, and my stomach roils. Sap that kills. One taste and the heart will spasm and still forever.
I raise a shaking hand toward my father, and a hundred blooms burst on my skin. Each one as delicate as a snowflake and as hot as fire.
He steps closer, the shadows pouring out behind him like raven feathers. “I asked you a question.”
The sap seeps into the creasing of my palms. I should be afraid. An odd feeling coats me like a waterfall. Peace, calm, surety. A smile slithers across my lips. “I made a deal, Father. He asked me to kill you. Didn’t give me a reason. I’ve learned not to ask questions in the wood.”
I lift a palm, and vines thread out between my fingers, reaching toward Death, each one so green the air smells of spring. They wrap through his shadows, bursting with white blossoms.
The bitterbloom.
What Mother used for death, I now use for life. My life.
Father opens his mouth, his teeth like crooked tombstones, and a root spins flaxen from my fingers. It stretches out, long and lithe, before it takes hold and flowers bud on my father’s tongue, slip down his throat.
He screams. It is an unholy and spine-cracking sound, bubbling from him while my knees hit the ground.
Something splinters along my bones, my heart bursting against bone when the vines crumble from my skin and turn to dust. I scramble back, not meaning, not wishing, to hurt him, but there is no strength left in me. All I smell is the leftover remains of lemons.
The bitterbloom.
“Adelaide.” My name is sharp in the Reaper’s mouth. “Give me the bell.”
Something inside me hardens to ice, and somewhere, in the darkness, Rascal gives a low growl. The sound alone gives me courage, and I step forward, the bell once again outstretched.
“I will not give it to you.”
The scent of iron fills my nose, chokes my throat.
I fall to my knees, sick with the stench, and darkness swirls around me.
Agony, like nothing I have felt before, ripples through my body.
The shadow grows teeth, sinks them into my flesh, and I open my mouth to scream, but the sounds turn to decay on my lips. I stagger but keep a hold of the bell.
“I will not give it to you.”
Every word is forced between my teeth while I gasp for breath.
Father’s magic whirls stronger, quicker, until I am completely cut off from the light.
It descends, pressing me to the forest floor until my hands are etched in dirt.
A great weight blooms along my shoulders, my spine, the back of my skull.
Through the black mist, Clara shouts my name, but Death is descending. White petals rain on me, kissing my brow like snow while the darkness grows.
Twigs cut lines into my cheek, and my chest seizes like cords around my heart. Is this how it ends? Devoured by the thing I once called Father?
And then a horrible shriek floods the air.
Rascal howls, gnashes his teeth. The sounds shatter the mist, distort the air around me. But when I unfold myself from the ground, I smell the blood. Thick and tainted.
Father is prostrate before us, shadow gushing from the meat of his leg, trousers shredded. Roots and leaves and petals sprout from his skin.
Rascal hurries to my side, dark fabric and pale muscle threading his teeth.
“You are a fool.” Father struggles to his feet, darkness still dripping from his shoulders like torn wings. “That bell is broken, Adelaide. You’ll need me before the end.”
With grit between my teeth, I stagger backward. He disappears in a cloud of dark mist.
Clara is beside me, clearing the dirt from my cheeks, but I hardly make out her face. My vision swims, lines and colors turning to haze.
“Addie?” Her voice is soft, fingers now on my shoulders, shaking me. “Addie, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
Nausea roils in my gut, and my body wrenches back to the earth, emptying my stomach into the wet leaves. Clara strokes my hair.
“Is he gone?” I ask, my voice like sandpaper in my throat.
Clara nods. “Did you kill him?”
I lift my head toward the sky, where the moon hangs heavy and white. “No, I think I would feel differently if I had. What happened?” My tongue is slow and sluggish in my mouth.
“I thought you were dead, is what happened,” Clara says.
“As soon as he wrapped you up in all that shadow, Rascal started whining, pawing at the stuff, but he couldn’t get through it.
And then all of a sudden, the smell in the woods changed from mold to spring flowers, and those vines were everywhere.
” She points to the remainder of a root system of little white blooms.
I drag myself over to it, not caring when my gown catches on twigs and tears. The petals are soft between my fingers, my touch bringing them back from gray.
“How can you do that?”
I look down at my shaking hands, trying to clear my mind. “I don’t know.”
My father is Death, a Reaper. As am I.
And my mother, her obsession with living turned to something else. Rotted into a desire to wear the skin of dead women and live forever. So, what does that make me?
I think of the rabbit, the rat, their hearts still and then pulsing at the touch of my finger.
Of the flowers behind the vicarage, dead as Bram when he held them, but alive when I took them.
And then Bram himself. Dear, good Bram who saw his heart wounds mirrored in my own.
The woman whose own mother killed him when he saw too much and chose love anyway.
Gods below and above, Bram.
I choke on his name, look back at the wilting petals strewn about the red leaves. Snow against blood. One, a fool. Two, a thief. Three, a thing of contrasts. Death and life. Light and darkness. Brother-gods warring in my veins.
I want you to kill Vicar Thorn.
I have signed my name on too many lines, sold my soul to countless devils. And now Bram is gone, split open by a man I thought I knew and a mother I only wanted to love.
But I know nothing of love, not truly. Only what I have made of it. Only Bram. And whatever I am—monster or devil or demon—I must get him back. He is the only way for me to save my soul.
I turn back to Clara, Rascal beside her, but the look in her eyes stops my words.
“Clara, what’s wrong?”
Her fingers sink into the damp earth, pulling brass shards from the dirt. She holds them up, lets them catch in the moonlight, and my heart thrums at the hollow of my throat.
“The bell,” she whispers. “It’s broken.”