Chapter Twenty-Three
Hyacinth
“Sabine? Sabine is that you? What are you doing out here this late?” Hyacinth knew she was in a dream the moment the woman spoke her ghost’s name.
Yet it was Hyacinth’s eyes that opened and turned in the dark of night.
Barefoot on the sidewalk, she could feel the scrape of stone across her skin.
It ran a shiver up her spine. It created an ache she couldn’t soothe thanks to the wings.
They were fresh, the scarring around them so sensitive that with every twitch of her nightgown, the scabs opened.
The white cotton wrapped around her was dotted with little dots of blood from where it bled through the bandages.
Her nightgown was the kind that went from her neck to her ankles, to keep her fingers from scratching open her wounds in her sleep.
Not that this helps.
Hyacinth stared at a woman who stepped out of a dimly lit building.
She was downtown, she knew that by the smell of it.
A knowledge she shouldn’t have but did. The buildings downtown were more rustic, the road more cobblestone than solid asphalt.
Streetlamps hummed with magic over her head, their crystals dim.
Stars glittered over her head, but the moon was hidden behind clouds.
“Sabine! Oh, my dragons, I thought something happened!” The woman rushed up to her without question, throwing her arms around Hyacinth.
The dead fae hissed in pain, ripping out of the stranger’s arms. The woman with her hair up in a cute ponytail with a cat on her sweater eyed Hyacinth.
“Sabine? What’s wrong…what…what are you wearing? ”
Hyacinth took a step back. Tentative. Suspicious. Her body lurched awkwardly as she was still unsure how to use her parts. Yet, her eyes stuck on the woman in a cat sweater.
“Sabine, you’re scaring me. We didn’t see you at gardening club this week. And then when Kathy went to check on you, your house looked roughed up. Then…then…Sabine?”
Hyacinth tried to open her mouth, but it wasn’t her tongue that moved.
It wasn’t her teeth that gnashed. It wasn’t her.
Hyacinth wanted to run back home to the manor.
Sabine was the one who lunged forward. The ghost possessing her body pinned the concerned woman into the bushes next to some little shop and ripped her heart out.
Grisel and blood under her fingernails, she held up the organ and walked with it back home.
Back to her tree.
Back to him.
Only, she stood in her yard, howling in despair as she found it gone.
No! Sabine shrieked into the night. The sound echoed off the trees and sending the birds roosting into the moonless sky.
The tree was gone. His roots were ripped up, leaving a hole in the earth she tended to so delicately.
All the soil where she buried their bodies was tilled.
All the graves were turned up, leaving nothing but a crater where her heart used to be… just like the woman in the bushes.
Thwack!
Hyacinth jerked forward, gasping for air as she recognized the shift from sleep to fully awake.
With several blinks, she reached back to the tender spot at the back of her head.
Then she turned, inch by inch to see the house awaken around her.
The front door pressed into her back. When she glanced down at her hands, having pulled them back from the back of her skull, she found dried blood.
Her fingernails were torn up from her nailbeds and they bled freely.
But there was no beating heart in her palm, nor was she screaming in the middle of a yard she shouldn’t be able to remember clearly.
Blink, blink. She raised a brow to Agatha. “What did you just hit me with?”
The banshee trembled from a few feet away with another skillet in her hand. “A frying pan.”
“Why?” Hyacinth grimaced, rubbing at the back of her head again. It ached, but her ability to feel pain was so disjointed that she could have cracks in the back of her skull and not know it.
“Because you wouldn’t wake up. You were just scratching at the door like a cat, begging to be let out.” Agatha leveled the skillet at Hyacinth like a sword. “Who am I speaking to right now?”
“Hyacinth,” she huffed, untangling her bloody fingers from her hair.
Agatha sighed with relief, sinking to the floor like she’d collapsed. The pan clattered against the floor as Agatha sat, legs out in front of her, hands folded in the bunched-up fabric of her skirt. “Hyacinth, you about scared me into re-death.”
“Sorry, I think…when I dream, I sleepwalk.” Hyacinth flashed Agatha an apologetic smile before she sank to the running carpet in front of Agatha’s translucent feet. “Did Lord Rosemont lock up the house again?”
“He had to,” Agatha exhaled heavily, flapping a hand at her in exasperation. “With Smith going into the city to see why you were banished and the cleric, we wanted to make sure there was no way you or anyone was out of sight.”
“Why would you worry about that?” Hyacinth furrowed her brow, studying the banshee. Agatha craned her head to the side, studying Hyacinth with a pinched expression. It only took a moment for the dead woman to put it together. “You’re worried about me?”
“Well, you’re not the first person to sleepwalk in this house. We learned our lesson with Lady Rosemont. At least if you’re stuck in the house, you can’t get hurt!”
“Or hurt anyone else,” Hyacinth blurted out.
“Pardon?” Agatha floated up into the air. She offered Hyacinth her hands, that the dead woman took. “Did you say anyone else?”
“I think Sabine was—”
Hyacinth was stopped by the sharp pounding of a fist against the front door.
Agatha zipped to her side. The pair stared at the rattling door.
Seconds later, Lord Rosemont smoothly walked around the pair of them like they were a cat on the carpet, easily avoidable.
Dahlia stepped up beside Hyacinth, arms crossed under her bust as Sebastian opened the door.
A man with a dark stare and black cloak loomed in the frame.
Smith stood at his side but said nothing as the bird-like man immediately locked his gaze with Hyacinth.
His eyes were pools of obsidian rage that broke away from her to level on her maker.
Feathered arms and clawed fingers pointed at him. “Lord Rosemont.”
“Aravis, my boy, what has gotten into you? And what are you doing this early in the morning?”
“Sebastian,” Aravis growled as his eyes shifted once more to lock onto Hyacinth. She froze in the middle of the foyer, turned to stone under his hardened glare. It’s like she’d seen those eyes before, like they’d threatened her before, but she’d never met him.
I’ve also never met the cleric in the woods or that woman with the cat sweater and yet I know them. Sabine knew them.
“Who is this?” Hyacinth asked, unsure why her voice wavered so much.
“Ah, where are my manners.” Sebastian stepped back motioning for Smith and Aravis to join them. “Hyacinth, dear girl, this is Lord Aravis Blightwood. He is the city’s keeper, so to speak. The Lord Commander. He ensures the safety of King’s Fall.”
Her heart skipped a beat uncomfortably.
“Hyacinth?” Aravis jerked his head to her maker, furrowing his full brow. His cape and feathers dripped. Unfortunately for them, the weather outside was bright but drizzling. A strange mix of delightful sunshine and hot rain, leaving the air muggy as it seeped into the cool manor.
“Yes, this is the newest member of our family.” Sebastian closed the door, locking out the flying bugs that thrived in such weather. Hyacinth tried not to stare at the space between the door and frame, where she saw Sabine’s fingers curl like vines around an abandoned house.
“Sebastian, this woman is Sabine Moss.” Aravis jabbed a finger at her first. Then he looked at her and really observed her for the first time.
Hyacinth stiffened even harder as his eyes fell to the large scars across her chest, to the wings that fluttered anxiously behind her. “What have you done to her?”
“Aravis, maybe this is best discussed over tea.” Sebastian cleared his throat.
“He stitched up my vessel!” Hyacinth offered, though she didn’t need to defend her maker.
Sebastian’s ocular lens flashed in her direction, but she couldn’t tell if he was warning her to be silent or was surprised she spoke up.
She slipped from Agatha’s clawed grasp to stand an arm’s length from Aravis Blightwood.
“I’m not her. I know what she’s done. I know what you found under that tree. But I’m not her.”
“Hyacinth,” Dahlia whispered softly in her ear, her hand on her shoulder.
“How did you know what was under the tree if you’re not her,” Aravis narrowed his eyes on her.
“What tree?” Sebastian jutted in, stepping up to Aravis’ side.
“The tree with all the bodies in it. The one she was feeding their bodies to; it was in her yard.” Hyacinth tried to confess more, only to be dragged by both arms backward by Dahlia and Smith.
“Sebastian,” Aravis snarled, glaring at her maker.
“My boy, I promise you, that there are reasonable explanations for this.” Sebastian flapped a hand at Hyacinth dismissively.
“A reasonable explanation for fifty victims? And those are just the ones I can identify. Those are just the ones I still have evidence of—Smith!” Aravis’ eyes jumped from Sebastian to the slender at Hyacinth’s side.
A shadowy hand was pressed to her mouth, holding her voice in.
She struggled against it. Just let me explain.
Just let me tell him. She was tired of not telling people.
Hyacinth wanted to scream. Open her mouth and expel all the things in her skull out into the air.
Then she might finally feel like a person instead of a thing playing tug-o-war with a body she only had partial claim over.