Chapter 29 #2
I study his face for any signs that might betray his words, but there are none. He is as set as stone. And in the end, that is what breaks me. That the man I love—truly love—would give himself up for me to breathe life again.
“Do you think really think so, Thorn?”
The voice lashes through the air like oak switches. I pull back, spinning on my knees.
Ransom leans against one wall, his fist full of Clara’s dark curls, a hand wrapped tightly around her lips. Here, his illusion is fully in place. Honeyed hair, eyes like gunmetal, a cocked smile I still taste, as a kind of sickness on my tongue.
I am quick to my feet, the bell still glowing in my hand. His eyes flick greedily to it.
“Let Clara go.”
Ransom’s smile twists. A glint of sliver in the hand holding Clara’s hair. “I wonder what would happen if I were to drag this knife across her throat. Would she die, you think? Or just bleed out on the castle floor for all eternity?”
Clara’s eyes bulge, throat bobbing.
“You wouldn’t dare.” The words are barbs between my teeth.
Ransom’s smile widens, and I notice the patched skin beneath, the black thread. “I have done so much worse, Thorn. Would you like to know about that too?”
Anger boils in my stomach. “That you murdered girls from Rixton, and when that wasn’t enough, you dug up their bodies and pulled them apart to find the pieces you thought could save your own soul?
Is that what you’re so proud of, Ransom?
That you used me to get to my mother, someone just as bad as you, just as rotten? ”
His brow quirks. “You want to speak of someone rotten? I tried to use the bell. When my hand sunk into your pocket in the confessional—”
“So, you did take it.” Bram’s voice is dark fire.
Ransom’s mouth parts, slippery and wet. “I did. But it would not work for me. You want to speak of things rotten, Thorn? Look in the mirror. Only Reapers can use the bell. Only Death. You think your sickness is natural? Of the earth? It’s not.
Your illness was never something that made you weak. It was your strength.”
It is a truth I already know. Why I heard the sound of bells every time the souls came.
My illness was never truly something wrong with me.
It was so much more. Is so much more. The plunging of my heart in my chest, my breath coming quick, the pain, it was simply the truth trying to break free, to show me my strength lay with shadow and with light. That I contained multitudes.
Ransom’s lips peel back, mold leaking from his gums. “We need you. You’re just like us. And I did it all for you, Adelaide. Can’t you see that?”
I recoil. “Take that back.”
His smile widens, sludge seeping from between his teeth. “It’s such a very strange thing, human life. No one really seems to see it for what it is.”
“And what’s that?” I spit.
“Something to take.” Silver flashes in his hand, the knife pressed against Clara’s throat.
Rascal’s lips peel back.
I hold the bell out and watch the bitterbloom grow in my hand. The flowers shoot toward him, knocking the knife to the floor and pinning him against the wall. Clara scrambles up and runs toward me.
For a moment, Ransom doesn’t react. He just stands there, motionless, sweating. And then his face cracks, every seam of skin stretching to show the rot beneath, the pulling black string, and laughter spills from his mouth like oil while he struggles against the vines.
I hear my heart in my ears, a cold feeling trickling down my back. “You’re sick, Ransom. Please, let me take you home, find help.”
His face contorts when the light from the bell brightens. It floods the room, forcing me to shield my eyes. I feel the dead girls, their energy spinning through the bitterbloom, soaking into my skin.
“This is home, Thorn,” he snarls. “I thought we could do this together, you and me. We could become stronger than either of your parents. Neither for the light nor for the shadow, but for ourselves.” Something softens in his eyes. “I would have had you at my side.”
A dark feeling spills through my bones, anger sharp and hot. “I am on no one’s side, Ransom Black. Least of all yours.”
He surges forward, mouth nothing but teeth and lashing tongue. Clara screams when Rascal launches himself at Ransom, flinging her out of the way. I peddle back.
Bram crosses in front of us, one hand slung against his peeling stomach. His eyes flash with danger. It takes him two strides to close the space between him and Ransom, and his free fist sinks into Ransom’s stomach. Rot blooms, a stinking, sulfurous stench misting out.
“She doesn’t need me to fight for her,” Bram hisses between his teeth. “But I’ve been wanting to do that for a very long time.”
Ransom spits something black from between his lips.
“You aren’t going to win this, Avery. Should I kill one of your sisters next?
Polly, perhaps? Always with those sad, brown eyes, walking to the churchyard every day, just to lay flowers at your miserable grave.
Or Isabel. Those lips would be delicious. ”
Anger is roiling off Bram like steam, ruddy dust spilling between the fingers clutching his stomach. He makes a move for Ransom, but I hold him back, hand soft.
“Bram, he isn’t worth your time.”
Something in the air shifts. A kind of warmth spreading out from between my fingers. It shakes me to my very core, and when I open my mouth to scream, all that comes out of me is a twisting vine. It grows from my lips, my viscera its soil.
Clara’s eyes widen, and a sound like a sawn-off limb presses past her lips. The vine grows, the taste of it like honey in my mouth. It does not hurt. If anything, it feels like heaven. So warm, so welcoming.
So much like how home should feel.
The plant grows toward Bram, wrapping him up in golden light.
I reach forward into his chest, feeling for the dry and sunken heart, then cradle it in my palm, dead and still.
White flowers bloom along his skin, their centers yellow as bumblebees.
And the lightest flutter in my hand—his heart restarting.
Ransom makes a sound like a gutted lamb, his lips curling. Bram is lifted off his feet, and I let go.
Between the shafts of light and green leaves, his skin knits back together, turns to something pink and healthy. Bones slip back into place, lungs inflating to fullness, and the flesh is pieced together and made whole. And then, he’s gone. Every inch of him devoured by the golden mist.
The last of the vines leave my body. I surge forward, but the light is blinding. The air smells of autumn leaves, freshly cut fields, apples crisping on the branch. The room goes dark again.
I fumble for the bell, hurrying it to my pocket, while Ransom’s voice echoes in the darkness.
“What have you bloody done?”
Tears sneak from my lashes and fall down my cheeks. The shadows are all-consuming.
“Bram?” My voice is light. I am half afraid to speak his name and not hear a reply. Never again.
Something scuffles, hands against stone. Clara moves in the dark beside me. Rascal’s ears are piqued to the sound.
“She’s become something stronger than you’ll ever be, Lord Black.”
My chest contracts. I push forward, swimming through the darkness. Bram. Bram. And then I feel him, solid, there, and…warm. So warm it is like he has been lying in the sun.
“Are you—gods below and above, Bram. Are you alive?”
An arm comes to circle my waist, a hand to my cheek. “As close to it as a dead person can get. What was that?”
I open my mouth to tell him, but it is Ransom’s rasping voice that fills the space.
“You could have had it all, you know? Your mother promised me a spot at your side, magic beyond our wildest dreams. The power of Erybrus and Ithrandril combined. And you have traded that in for what? The petty ability to grow flowers?”
The bell glows once more in my pocket, feeding off the angry beating of my heart.
Ransom Black is fast against the wall, vines like ropes at his wrists.
The poisoned shadows seep from him, every inch stinking like rot.
I fist my hands, leaving Bram’s side, until I am so close to Ransom the stench rolling off him sends my stomach roiling.
“Death can only take you so far. I am more than happy to let you stay here, molting in your own greed, but give me one answer, Ransom. One.”
He tips his chin at me, lips peeled back in a sneer.
“Why did you do it?”
Something in his eyes flickers, something akin to what little humanity he has left. He struggles against the vines, veins bulging blue in his neck.
“You’ll never understand. Don’t cry to me about being tied to a chair.
At least your father was yours. At least for the brief years your mother held you, she did so with love.
You want to know why the castle is rotting, Thorn?
Want to know why my inheritance became nothing more than sludge and rubble?
Because my father was all hate, down to his very bones.
He knew from the day I was born I wasn’t his.
My mother had found love somewhere else.
She couldn’t take my father’s purpling fists. But what were they to do?”
The revelation is a lightning strike to my guts. “So, you chose death?”
“I was death!” He rips against his bounds, skin shredding white between the vines.
“I killed my father the day I came out of my mother. Not in blood and bones, but in knowledge. I was no Lord Black; I was not his trueborn son. I was the son of a stable hand! An embarrassment, a stain on Blackbourne’s history.
So, what choice did I have?” He glances at the shadows bleeding from his pale hands.
“Those women, the power they gave me, it was all I had.”
For a moment, I feel nothing but pity for Ransom Black. The lordling who never knew love. Only understood pain, loss, the slip of rot on his cheek. But anger replaces it.
The light from the bell pulsates. “You’ve been killing for so long.”
He smiles at my realization. At the scent of blood on the air. Something creaks above us, and I feel Bram at my side. Ransom’s eyes rove madly, laughter cracking out between his rotten teeth.
“He’s coming, Adelaide. They both are. Your mother thought I might be able to sway you, but now your time is up.”
Bram’s hand is in mine, warm and solid. The fear rising in my throat tastes sour and sick. I hurry a hand to the bell, but it is still. Cold. Rascal whimpers, and Clara buries her nose in his neck.
Ransom’s laughter echoes through the dim chamber.
The door is thrown aside, hinges ripped from the wall like splintered wood, and Death stands in the shadow. A Reaper and his Lady.