Chapter Sixty-One That which does not burn
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
That which does not burn
I KNEW I WAS DEAD the moment I woke in the garden. All around me, dying roots and decay lay in wait. I recognized shrubs that I’d once called skeletons. And there on a bench, a single moth was perched.
As it fluttered through the air, the sound of its wings was a soft, steady heartbeat, a whisper of voices from another realm. Along its path, it left a glittering trail of silver-and-gold tendrils that led to a small pond that had nearly dried up.
I was at Westfield. In the courtyard behind the woodshop.
The silence here was aching, like a memory lost to time.
I moved toward the bench, and my hem caught on a mangled root.
I was wearing what I had been in when I’d died: the black dress with the corset top, my hair styled as it had been that night, my curls framing my face, the front braided into cornrows.
This had been meant for the vigil. Instead, I would be wearing it to my own funeral.
Not that anyone would think to plan a service for me.
Except, perhaps, for Aunt Louisa. Jojo too, of course.
And Kasem. Would he miss me? Would he mourn me now that I was gone?
My heart ached. Tears fell; bitter, hopeless. The droplets floated within the remains of the pond like a slow, hovering stream of starlight, as if gravity didn’t exist here.
On my hands, the gloves I wore showed the burn marks on my fingertips. I pulled them off, thinking of Kasem and how he’d bartered for them for me. How he’d slipped them onto my fingertips once, a shy glint in his eyes, a gentle smile on his lips.
Kasem. I would never see him again. Would I?
I looked around at the death that surrounded me.
Perhaps, even if I was gone, I could make something of my new home.
I had my powers. I could feel them churning in my mind and tingling against my fingertips.
I would make death my home. I would dust away the cobwebs here, sweep the corners, polish the surfaces, and find comfort, whatever that might look like.
I started with a wilted flower at my feet.
With my bare palms, I cupped the roots. Their memories were long and fast, spanning centuries to before a building had even existed here, before people had even roamed the earth.
Time slipped through my fingers, gathered in my palms, and gradually, the bud sprouted from seeds.
I spent hours going from one corner of the garden to the next, bleeding life into the foliage as time passed.
Eventually, all that remained was the pond.
I dug my feet into the dirt, burrowed my hands into the soil, which was no longer drying and cracked, but soft and warm from all the plants I’d brought back to life.
Again, I channeled backward in time, back to when rainfall and irrigation had made the water source here rippling with life.
Water began to fill the pond, and as it did, I saw my reflection and those of others beyond me. First Vivian, and then a silver alligator that morphed into a young man, a young Melvin. He’d been a wraith too, and now he was free.
Melvin’s eyes were bright, joyful, and free from the rage he’d been bound to as a wraith. Vivian and he held hands, a tender smile shared between them.
Now all of the spirits trapped at Westfield could move on to the other side.
They emerged from within the pond, climbing to the surface, laughing, smiling, light gleaming around them as they stepped into the garden and outside to the exit, where a bright golden light would take them to rest. I hadn’t seen it earlier as I gardened, but now I wondered if I could follow them there too.
There were hundreds of them, all trapped here. Students, and faculty, and staff, all of whom had been killed because of General Winhall and his curse.
Vivian smiled at me, and Melvin held her hand as they approached the light on the other side of the door.
“You helped save my family,” Melvin said. “We are forever in debt to each other.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not a debt to be repaid. Never that.”
“Well, thank you, nonetheless,” Vivian said. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too,” I said. “But we’ll see each other soon, I figure.”
She frowned and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not yet. There’s life in you.”
They walked to the other side, and as they disappeared, more spirits emerged from the pond. Most I didn’t recognize. But there they were, among the passing souls—faces I’d never thought I’d see again. My mother, my father, untouched from the night the fire had taken them.
As they walked past me, my mother placed her arm on my shoulder and my father did too. Their touch was just as I remembered it: nervous, protective, gentle yet fierce.
When I spoke, my voice trembled.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s my fault you’ve been trapped here all these years.”
“Not your fault,” my father said.
“And not trapped,” my mother added. “Waiting. For you. To see you shine. That’s all we wanted, Sianna Grace. Perhaps we lost sight of that.”
It wasn’t an apology. I don’t think either of my parents had lived to learn how to fully form one, most of all to their child.
It wasn’t how they’d been raised. And yet, even a stone may shift in water, even if it was over time, over decades.
Through life and death. This was that shift in them.
And maybe there had been more shifts, tiny erosions in the patterns their parents before them had shaped.
Maybe I hadn’t recognized the shifts in them, but I saw it now, remembered when my mother had found a charge for a bus to Virginia in her bank statement, how when she’d asked me about it and I’d blatantly lied, she simply shook her head and said that she’d be waiting for me to tell her the truth when I was ready.
That moment had been a shift in her sands.
At the time, it had felt like nothing. And now it meant everything.
“Let me go where you go,” I said, standing. “I’m ready.”
“We failed you once before, Sianna,” my mother said. “Let us do right by you this last time.”
She took my hand in hers, and we knelt at the pond. At my feet, a bracelet of cowrie shells had emerged on the surface. And at its center, there, carved into the body of the ring, were his initials.
KSJ.
From Kent Saint James, its first owner, to Kasem, its last, decades later.
My father brought the bracelet to my wrist and my mother held both of our hands.
When she channeled, I could feel time weaving through her fingertips, could taste the salt and soil of the land on the other side.
Light gleamed all around us, and then they wrapped their arms around my waist, kneeling slowly before sending me off into the depths of the pond.
There was a voice on the other side. A soft voice that I recognized as Angelica’s.
Let her go. You have your inheritance. What more do you want, Kasem?
I’d seen this future, had known—no, hoped—that it would be there, at the end of everything. And here it was coming to pass: Kasem, holding me in his arms, brushing lilies away from my cheek as the pond coalesced around us.
“Sianna,” he whispered, his voice strained. “Sianna, please.”
He was trembling. It was so faint that I almost thought it was the water rippling between us until he pulled me closer, his arms circling my waist, his forehead resting against my own.
My lashes fluttered, my right pinkie shifting slightly in the water.
When I opened my eyes for the first time, his warm brown eyes looked back at me like they had that night in the alley. But things were different now; between us, beyond us, and within myself.
A sense of peace overcame me. And, for the first time since I was a child who had first fallen in love with the piano, I let myself dream.