Chapter 29
A RECKLESS PLAN
We return to the estate with full bellies and three plates of leftovers.
“One is for Jude,” Mrs. Calloway had said.
As if she knew exactly how he was spending today.
A Porsche is parked along the circular drive, which means he’s still stuck with his stepmother and the Everlys.
His Thanksgiving involves formal attire, catered food, and their cavernous dining hall.
I can almost hear the clinking silverware, the stiff conversation.
Mr. Tulane waiting on them in his uniform while eating alone in the kitchens.
Unlike Mrs. Calloway’s no-Christmas-until-after-Thanksgiving rule, Isabel brought in a crew at the beginning of the week.
The manor is beautifully decorated and as impersonal as Isabel’s catered Thanksgiving.
As though sensing my thoughts, my phone vibrates. The message is from Jude.
Movie later?
My stomach twists.
I’ve already decided I’m not going to tell him about my plan, which makes me the world’s biggest hypocrite.
I made him pinky promise never to lie, and yet, that’s exactly what I’m about to do.
Not blatantly, I suppose. I’m not making up a dying grandfather or anything.
But I am withholding a pretty big truth, one he would absolutely not be okay with.
Which is why I can’t tell him.
He would try to stop me.
Of course he would try to stop me.
What I’m going to do is wildly reckless.
So much so, I didn’t even tell Twig. Rafe is a bad egg.
An immortal with a rotten soul. He can’t be trusted.
I know this. But beggars can’t be choosers.
Despite everything, he’s more informed than we are.
He knew about Lainey before we did. He knows how to navigate the Overlay.
And until I get him out of there, he’s going to keep haunting me in mirrors, which I can’t have happening for the rest of my life, so I might as well get this over with.
I just have to keep my mouth shut between now and midnight.
I text him back.
Gremlins?
It’s a date.
Two hours later, I bring him Mrs. Calloway’s plate of food, which he puts in the refrigerator, and a side of my grandmother’s Jell-O, which makes him wrinkle his nose.
The fact that he tries a few bites is incredibly romantic.
We watch Gremlins. Or rather, he watches Gremlins while I watch him watching Gremlins.
It’s every bit as good as talking to him on the phone while he watches Tales from the Crypt.
When the credits roll, he turns to me and says with only a hint of mockery, “It’s sad he didn’t get to keep Gizmo.”
“I know,” I reply with genuine enthusiasm.
Because it is sad.
I love Gizmo.
Jude grins.
The night is still young, so I concoct a side quest adventure—one that involves a handsaw from the maintenance shed and a box of forgotten ornaments from the storage room on the third floor.
Outside, we find a scraggly Virginia Pine not even five feet tall—Jude’s very own Christmas tree.
No professionals allowed. Jude cuts it down, and while we’re hanging the ornaments, I can’t help but notice the shadows under his eyes.
I ask him about the mark on his chest, but he diverts the conversation, and while he did make me a pinky promise, I have a hard time pressing the issue with the night’s agenda before me.
He looks tired, though. Wiped. Like something is slowly draining him. Which makes my stomach twist tighter.
I watch as he starts a fire in the hearth.
Then we crawl into bed and cap off the evening with The Christmas Carol. The 1984 version with George C. Scott, who also starred in The Changeling, a movie Jude watched with his roommate in boarding school.
The fire crackles.
The Charlie Brown Christmas tree glows in the corner of his room.
I lay with my head on Jude’s chest, his arm heavy over my shoulder, his heart beating steadily against my ear, when Scrooge is taken to Bob Cratchit’s home.
“Which ghost do you think—?” I stop.
Jude is asleep.
His long, dark lashes cast shadows along his cheeks.
The circles under his eyes look like purple bruises.
I’m tempted, so tempted, to peek under his shirt, to see if the mark has changed.
But there’s no way to do that without waking him.
So I kiss his cheek ever-so-softly and carefully untangle myself from his arms. At home, I say goodnight to Dad.
I shut myself in my bedroom. Then gasp at the sight of the plant—twinkling in my window.
Like it knows.
Like it’s ready.
Like it wants to help.
Half past eleven, when I can hear Dad softly snoring down the hallway, I take the plant, snag his keys, and sneak out to his Bronco. I don’t turn on the headlights until I’m outside the gate.
At the cemetery, fog clings to the ground and swirls around the tombstones. Clouds drift in front of the moon. With the plant clutched in one hand, I make my way to the ruins of St. Fortuna’s. I step over fallen beams and toppled stones and set it on what’s left of the altar.
An owl hoots in the trees.
A rodent scampers across a beam.
I blow hot air into my palms and rub my hands together, waiting for midnight. When the time on my phone flips to 12 a.m., I release a shaky breath.
“Here goes nothing.”
The second I touch a leaf, the air begins to hum.
Warmth spreads through my hand and tingles up my arm. At first, it’s a pleasant feeling. But then the warmth starts to burn—too hot to hold. With a hiss, I let go. But the blood-red, capillary-like vines snake around my finger.
I try to shake them off, but they stick like glue.
The air crackles and splits.
Wind rustles through the trees, kicking up debris.
My forearm is on fire, searing with pain as the vines turn black. I watch in horror as they spread. As they grow. Crawling into the rift. Digging into my skin.
Burning.
Scalding.
Infesting.
A fist slams onto the dining table. “She is not fit.”
“But I love her!”
My chest heaves.
My heart pounds.
My mother cries.
Lily gapes.
And darkness swirls.
It gathers into a black hole that sucks us up.
Into darkness.
Into pain.
My parents are slaughtered.
Lily is dead.
Unmoving on the bench.
Her eyes empty, devoid of all life.
I am devastated.
Horrified.
Backing away as her body twists into the hound that killed her.
The rift widens over me—a spiral of chaotic energy.
On the other side, in the Overlay, a flock of winged creatures swarm and swirl like a tornado.
The vines surge through my veins.
They wrap around my heart.
They are going to yank it out.
Or yank me in.
Someone is screaming.
I am screaming.
I am dying.
But then, light flares and something shrieks.
The plant lets go.
Of my heart.
Of my arm.
I stagger backward, stars dancing in the periphery of my vision as two of the winged-creatures swoop through the rift right before it closes. With an ear-splitting screech, they burst into the sky and disappear.
Someone steps into the moonlight—tall and broad-shouldered with wild hair—firelight flickering along her profile.
The plant is burning.
And I am fading.
I fall to my knees as darkness closes in.
I awake to a splitting headache, stabbing pain in my arm, and a smell so astringent, my nostrils burn.
I squint at my surroundings.
I’m lying in an unfamiliar bed with a kerosene lamp lit on the nightstand, along with a chipped bowl of murky liquid and a wrung-out rag.
There’s a wooden crate nearby, as though someone has recently sat upon it, and a low-burning fire crackles in the grate.
Shadows move across the walls, which are covered in hand-drawn charts and reference guides.
Mistress Bramble stands with her back to me, hunched over her rickety table, muttering quietly as she grinds something in a stone mortar, the pestle scraping against the sides of the bowl.
The curtains are drawn over the windows, blocking out the world beyond. It could be day or night for all I know.
The thought induces panic.
I try to sit.
My arm aches.
The room spins.
Nausea lurches up my throat.
“Lie back down,” Mistress Bramble says without turning around. Like she has eyes in the back of her head.
I dare a glance at my arm but it’s covered in a damp cloth.
“I—I need to go home,” I say. “My dad—”
“Is asleep, I reckon,” she replies. “You’ll be home ’fore the crow caws.”
“So it’s still night then.”
She gives me an affirming grunt.
I sink against the pillow, cold sweat prickling my brow.
I take steadying breaths as Mistress Bramble pours liquid into the bowl.
She mixes and grinds, then rubs some of the substance between her thumb and forefinger.
Seemingly satisfied, she clomps to my bedside with the bowl in one hand, strips of linen in the other.
She lowers herself onto the crate and removes the damp cloth.
Nausea rises again, more forceful this time.
My arm is mangled—the lacerations raw and deep.
Mistress Bramble clucks her tongue then uses her hand to scoop the paste from the bowl. It looks like mud and smells like turpentine.
My muscles tense.
I brace for the pain.
But instead, as she presses the damp mixture against my wounds, there isn’t any pain. Just sweet, heavenly relief.
I relax with a sigh.
“I ain’t rightly sure what possessed you to fool with a plant like that,” she says.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Veil root,” she replies. “Grows where the boundary is thinnest.”
“Is it known for giving people visions?”
Mistress Bramble pauses, like I’ve said something surprising, which is answer enough.
“When I found the seed,” I tell her, “it gave me a vision of my mother being chased through the woods. Her name is Clara Green.”
I watch for a reaction, but she just continues applying the paste.
“I planted the seed and a leaf grew and I saw her again. Imprisoned inside de Overlaag with Simon Vandenberg.”
This time, she does have a reaction.
She knows that name.
Everyone knows that name.
Even a recluse like herself would have heard it, along with the other three in the family—Lily, John, Maureen.
“It showed me how his sister was killed,” I tell her.
She sets the bowl aside and picks up the strips of linen.
“I watched her twist up into a hound.”
Mistress Bramble begins wrapping my arm.
“There really is a Hollow Walker in this town, isn’t there?”
She meets my eye.
Hers are a steely, watchful gray. Her face, a map of hard lines and sunspots. The wooden crate creaks under her and finally she says, “It is very hungry.”
“How do we stop it?” The old stories never mention this part. They only tell of appeasing his hunger and repelling his hounds. But black bread and salt won’t do. “How do you kill a Hollow Walker?”
“I find with most things, fire does the trick.”