Chapter 31
thirty-one
There are monsters in the rowan wood, and I am one of them. I feel it in the way my skin burns the nearer I get to Death, the way it aches to become just like him. A Reaper of souls, a dealer of deals. Father’s eyes glint while I close the gap between us, my heart thrumming wildly in my ears.
Let it. Let it beat like a wild, untethered thing. Let it set me free.
“Addie, stop.” It is Bram’s voice at my back, brimming with fear, confusion, the knowledge it is all slipping from his hands. Every spilled drop of blood will vanish.
I pause before Ransom. The skin of his face knits back together, the facade I thought I cared for, assumed I knew, drawing back, as it always should have been. Untouched by Mother’s magic, the deadness of it all.
I ignore Bram and drink in the sight of Ransom, the man I once thought broken, hoped I could mend. The man I now realize has torn himself to pieces and sewn new ones over the old scars. To be kept hidden.
I reach forward and brush a pale curl from Ransom’s face.
“I think there were parts of us that knew each other,” I say, voice quiet.
“I think there was something in me that knew something in you that first day we met out at the water. A kind of lodestone, two opposite ends of a terrible future. I even think you might have loved me—or, perhaps, the idea of me.”
His face softens the more I speak, becoming every inch the man who kissed me in the confessional. The man I thought was home.
“And for all that, I am so sorry.”
His face morphs like wind on a pond. I take no further time.
Squeezing the last remaining bitterbloom between my fingers, I allow the sap’s warmth to course through my veins, then press my lips against his.
Something breaks in the room. A tension that weighs heavy. Sick air.
Ransom tastes of salt, the first bite of frost. Bile rises in my throat when Bram cries out, the betrayal in his voice a knife at my back.
But I press the kiss deeper, willing the life coursing through me to leak from my mouth and slip into the chasm of Ransom’s soul.
He chokes, pulls away, sap dripping from his decaying lips.
Ransom wipes at it, scowls at me through darkened brows.
“What…what have you done?” And then he is sent sprawling, shadows leaching from his skin, his screams like a tortured beast.
I don’t waste time.
Turning to my father, I rip the pin from off his cloak. His darkness swirls, Mother’s mouth opening in a shrill scream. But they are too late. I hold the clapper bead between two fingers, threading it with the slender strip of metal from the pin.
The warmth is still inside me, the power of so many lives. So many lives that were not mine yet were given to me freely. Heat floods my body, and when I turn to Bram, there is recognition on his face.
The metal clicks into place, the full power of the bell filling me up, like so much summer light. My father turns gray, skin like stone. He opens his mouth, teeth spindly and long, but his jaw freezes. There is pain in his eyes. Betrayal.
“What…what are you?” he struggles out between his hissing teeth.
Days ago, I would have said nothing. I am nothing. Nothing but wickedness and weakness. A woman with a heart that refuses to heed. And then I learned the truth, that I was a Reaper, a collector of souls. But now I know what I really am. Who I really am.
I turn to Bram, to Clara, to Rascal.
“I will never be like you, Father,” I say, each word a cut across my wrist. “I will never be like you or like Mother. Because I am alive, and I hold both shadow and light.”
I lift the bell and listen while it rings pure and true and whole. Father’s body seizes, shadows wisping, flinging out around us. He opens his mouth, bloody screams ripping from his throat.
Ransom is on his hands and knees, vomiting poison, but his face is breaking. The skin tears apart at the seams.
“Addie.” His voice is weak, thin. On the floor, his body convulses, lines of darkness seeping from between the ripping black thread. The sound makes me queasy.
I take a few steps back from him, the bell still bright and warm in my palm. The wool of my dress sticks to my flesh.
“I’m so sorry, Ransom.” Bram’s hand is once more at my back, and I lean into it. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you.”
Father’s shadows wheel around when he collapses to the floor. Mother is quick beside him, but already, he is nothing. Already, Death has found a new home.
It wriggles between my bones, pressing deep into the tissue of my chest, my throat, the gauzy space above my lashes. I thought it would be cold, this power, but it is like a sunburst growing inside me. Filling me up with so much warmth I could be a woman tied to a stake.
But no ropes encircle my skin. No longer am I tied down by men who wish to subdue me. Make me better. I am no monster, and I am no witch. Neither am I a god. I drag the honeyed air into my lungs while the thing that is no longer Mother cries out, kneads the shadows between bleeding knuckles.
I am the breath of life.
“Adelaide.” Ransom’s voice comes from the floor where he lies, nothing more now than a tangle of ratted clothing, jumbled bones, flesh melting waxy into puddles beside him.
He is not dead. Ransom is something far, far worse.
A tethered soul. “Please,” he says, voice a puff of putrid smoke. “Finish it. Kill me.”
The words draw pity from the darkest parts of me, but Mother’s fists pound the ground. Her cries have turned to black bubbles on her lips, screams cracking from rotten teeth.
“This is you! Your destruction.” It takes her three strides to cross the room, to tower over me with a tongue that smells of old blood.
I do not move or cower. Instead, I hold the bell tight in one hand, Bram’s fingers in the other.
“We could have had everything, you know?” Her lips are pale and swollen, pustules ready to burst. “You held the power to keep your family together, and instead, you ruined it.”
“You’re wrong,” I say, Bram so fiercely real behind me. “I do not need you. I never needed you or Father. We were never a family.”
Her eyes go wide, the poison leaking into the glassy orbs. Clara’s hand wraps around my arm, and Rascal growls. Mother stretches tall, gathering the darkness to her while Ransom groans on the floor.
“Addie.” Bram’s voice is hot in my ear. “Ring the bell.”
The metal thrums in my hand, but when I look down at Ransom, writhing on the floor, my skin stills. I should never have brought him here, should never have followed my mother into the dark. And now, there are ghosts haunting me. My name spelled on too many lines.
My eyes flash to my mother, and I see the truth. Her lips form a sneer, a black line across pale flesh. Opening, opening, opening. The Haunts rise, two at each hand, stretching for me.
There is only one thing left to do.
I ring the bell.
The sound is clear and sharp as crystal. Snow against autumn leaves. Everything goes black. The moon and sky above go out. Clara gasps behind me. Mother’s screams turn to hollow echoes. Bram’s hand is tight around mine.
“Hold fast,” he whispers, reaching through the darkness for Clara’s hand.
It starts at my back. A wind like the first kisses of winter.
Slowly, it turns, growing warmer, filling with the scents of rose hips, pumpkins harvested from the fields.
The air begins to swirl, a wave of red light bursting forth around us.
I am thrown back, head cracking against Bram’s shoulder when we are flung to the ground.
The bell blinks in the blinding light of a ripped opening, the sudden warmth making me nauseous, and I fumble the brass. My fingers tense around the collar of Bram’s shirt, and I turn into him. All swells to silence.
And then the screams.
My mother’s screams.
She is bent over Ransom, his skin almost whole. Almost as though he is once more himself. Real. Alive. But he is anything but. Gray as a corpse in winter, lungs hardly moving.
Do not make deals with these people.
Mother’s eyes flick to me, but they are not hers any longer. They glow bright red. As crimson as apples. She scrambles to her feet, claws outstretched.
“What have you done?”
I stare down at my hands, where the light from the bell is shining so bright my eyes cross, then look back up at her. My mother. Not Mother. A beast. A twist of wishful thinking turned obsession.
I struggle to my feet. Leaving Bram behind, Clara, Rascal.
The bell vibrates in my palm, and I drop it to the far reaches of the pocket.
The light from the door is blinding, beyond it, the scent of rye in the sunlight.
I look to Mother. The way her hair sways like wheat about her face.
Not her face. So many features that do not belong to her.
I feel them, the ghost women. Eddying at the back of my neck. But it is not pain, not really. For the first time, it is strength. I have found their bones where the bitterbloom grows, can feel each soul passing to peace while they give me the last of their power.
When I stop before Mother, I reach out a hand and run a finger down the crooked line of her jaw. The unevenness of all the sewn skin.
“Do you remember the flower beds, Mother? The dirt beneath your fingernails, the sun at your back?”
She does not speak at first. A quiver on her lips. Her mouth opens. A small hole at first. And then it grows. Wider and wider while the inky rot swallows her face. I wheel back, and Bram’s hand is there to catch me.
“We must leave, Addie. The veil won’t stay open for long.”
I turn to the ragged red rip undulating before us, golden mist swirling around its edges.
Beyond, wheat and rye fields, Farmer Whitley’s orchards, the scent of harvest. Home.
Not the vicarage. Never the vicarage. But Rixton.
Where Bram belongs. Where I belong. Not here.
Not trapped in a world cursed between death and life.
I turn back to Mother. To Ransom. A film covers his eyes, but he looks to the door, so much longing in him that it breaks me. Once more, he is the broken boy in the garden. Not the murderer my mother made him.
“Addie.” It is Clara’s voice now, tense.
The girl who followed me through the trees into Death, just to make sure I was all right. I breathe slowly until my muscles loosen. Brush a finger across Ransom’s lips. He chokes on his own breath.
“Don’t let this be your end.”
I turn and take a hold of Bram’s hand, Clara’s in my other.
A wind brushes through the opening—wet dirt, river water, leaves falling in the rowan wood.
There are monsters there, but I am not one of them.
There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing broken.
In everything, I am whole. I have always been so.
Bram steps toward the rip, with Rascal at our heels. I watch Clara pass through, the weave of her plum skirt slipping through all the gold. Bram turns to me, his face soft.
“Are you coming?”
The question strikes me as odd, a sort of split happening inside. My name is still scrawled on lines. Lines that, if I leave this place, will still be owed. But Father is dead, is he not? The Vicar Thorn was never a true man.
One more glance to my mother, the sight of her breaking my bones. She leans against Ransom, the last bit of life leaking from between the stitched seams. Erybrus can decide what becomes of them.
I open my palm. A root wriggles from my skin, white petals blooming. I pluck it and let it fall to the ground.
“A remembrance of life,” I say and follow Bram home.