Chapter 27
Dragging a ghost back out of hell was a lot less poetic than the ancient Greeks made it out to be.
Besides, Elizabeth Ellington wasn’t one to be dragged, even on her best, living day.
And this? This was undoubtedly her worst. Celia could sympathize.
She didn’t blame Biz for wailing at the stern of their beached rowboat, calling into the currents for a brother who would never return.
“George! Come back! Please! I swear I’ll never steal your socks to make puppets or switch your tea with pickle juice again…” She bowed forward, perilously close to the water, hair lank in front of her face. “There’s too much left for you to do. I can’t take it all alone. Again.”
But this river only flowed one way, Celia knew.
The oldest Ellington brother was gone, and she’d made him a promise. She had to get Biz past that gate. No matter what. She grabbed at the other girl’s dress, but the fabric felt alarmingly misty. Celia’s fingers slipped straight through.
“He’s gone, Biz. And we’ve got to hoof it too.” Already the gate looked far smaller than it had at last glance. “We can’t make the same mistake Orpheus did.”
“That was just a story!” Biz cried out. “This is George.”
“It was George.” Celia made sure to keep her voice soft as she walked across black sand to the stern, careful to avoid touching the river. “And if you keep looking over your shoulder, this will be the end of our story too. I think your brother’s sacrifice deserves better. Don’t you?”
Biz looked at Celia’s outstretched hand and swallowed. “I just—why did I have to lose him again? After everything?”
“Questions we can ponder on the other side of the closing gate.”
She reached up and grabbed the other young woman’s hand.
This, at least, was solid.
Solid enough to start pulling Biz toward the fading red lights.
They weren’t the only ones rushing for the door.
The air was thick with ghosts. Far thicker than Celia’s last visit here.
She could barely breathe, for all the strange memories that started crowding her.
And, she realized, breathing brings them even faster.
The ghouls that bottlenecked the gate for a taste of being alive again were catching on to the fact that a living woman walked among them.
And Celia had no more ankhs to protect herself.
Ah, shit.
Served her right for being so selfless.
“Celia…” Biz’s voice wavered behind her shoulder.
Don’t look back. Or to the side. Though Celia could make out leering faces in her peripheral.
They matched a dozen different deaths—trapped in trench mud, strung up on barbed wire, the goddamn Spanish flu after surviving all that.
She could feel these ends reaching for her, desperate to go on, to take over her trudging legs and cast her Celia-ness away.
She wasn’t quite sure what she could do to stop them.
“Hurry,” she called back to Biz.
The gate wasn’t far, but it was shrinking. Celia tried her best to run. Her calves burned. Her lungs felt ready to pop.
Her father’s key slapped against her chest.
It was all she had left… besides her own heartbeat.
And even that felt ready to flutter away when she reached the gate.
Most of it had shrunk to black stone. The center looked like molten metal, only it was being poured back into its crucible.
Vanishing at an alarming rate. Celia reached up and snapped the chain around her neck.
The key to the Sinclairs’ kingdom. It could open any lock, no?
This had to work.
She let out a scream as she shoved this relic into the final traces of the door.
The chain dangled as the key started shifting, going through dozens of skeletal shapes.
Then scores. The searing red lines around the relic had stopped shrinking, but otherwise it didn’t make much of a difference.
Celia doubted she could get anything bigger than her pinky nail through.
“Open, dammit!” Her fist landed on the giant slab of onyx stone. Her scream echoed off the black.
The key flinched into yet another shape.
And another.
And another.
It’s not working. Celia shuddered. She felt Biz against her back, desperate, not just to get through the door but to keep the other ghouls from reaching Celia.
Gray figures in army uniforms pressed in with their memories of schnitzel and smashed-meat soldiers.
Biz’s spirit was a breath of green relief, by comparison.
Her memories of running around Thornhill would have made Celia smile, in any other context.
As it was, she smashed herself against the unyielding stone, pounding her fist desperately against the key. Biz pushed into her even harder.
“What are you waiting for, Celia! An embossed invitation? OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!”
“I’m trying!”
“THEN TRY HARDER!”
That had always been the answer, hadn’t it?
At least, for Celia’s mother. Put in more hours at the shop, smile bright, dress your best, and maybe, just maybe, some fortune will find you.
Celia had tried harder. She’d broken into the British Museum, for Christ’s sake.
But now all her stolen treasures were gone and the last of them was burning into the center of her palm.
She didn’t think she could push any more without piercing her own bones.
“I can’t!”
“WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT! YOU’RE CELIA FUCKING SINCLAIR! YOU CAN DO ANYTHING!” Biz whipped around, still doing her best to cover Celia as the ghost soldiers swarmed the door. “We’ve spent our whole lives shut out, you and I. That ends now.”
The Bright Young Thing placed her ghastly palm over Celia’s hand.
Green memories caught fire.
There was war—yes—endless bombs and bullets breaking the air apart.
But beneath it lay an even deeper violence, the kind men administered like a daily vitamin.
Women were told to swallow it. Smile. Cinch up your corset.
Or ditch it altogether. Don’t complain when a man wants to touch you there—after all, if you dress like a loose woman you can’t expect anything less. Or more.
Celia’s breath went ragged as she watched Elizabeth Ellington dance again.
Pearls whipped over her shoulders and there was a raw line around her neck where Hugo had pretended to lasso her like a horse—Celia remembered this evening well.
She’d almost broken her cardinal rule: Stay quiet.
Stay out of it. A red line of a scream had cinched her own throat, growing even redder when the blisters on Biz’s heels finally broke. Blood spattered the mezzanine.
I’m sorry, my dear Celia. I can’t give you my ring.
Why not?
You’re not a son.
I’m better.
I know, but the rest of the Order won’t see it that way.
Then maybe we can make them see…
A sob sluiced out of Celia. Loud. Messy. Not at all ladylike. Biz pressed even closer, so that there was no telling the two women apart.
Her pain.
Her pain was just as loud. It was so much more than anything Hugo Pratt had ever done.
It was the tears of a twelve-year-old girl as the train full of soldiers crawled away.
They echoed through Thornhill’s rotting halls when the telegram about George arrived.
The house felt so big, and even if she held it all together with blood, sweat, tears, and married gold, it would never be hers.
Daughters didn’t count. Even when they were the only ones left…
And here Celia had been, thinking she was the only one.
Her sob turned into something savage.
The key beneath their palms began to glow.
Even the chain that dangled down to the floor began to shine: link by link. The more memories the two women shared, the brighter the relic grew.
Celia screamed as her hand began to push through.
Biz was howling too.
It felt like both a death and a birth.
This rage.
So much bigger than themselves.
No wonder they won’t let us in. Awe niggled the back of Celia’s mind as she watched the key’s blaze creep across the door, creating new paths through. No wonder they pit us against one another instead. They’re scared shitless.
She wasn’t afraid, though, as the portal began to crack and her arm started sliding through.
She was free.
Absolutely, finally free.