Chapter 24
My companion dragged me back from the memories, cold air caressing my skin.
I was back behind my own eyes—back in the glass prison my companion had constructed from my own skull, watching through my face as though my body were a window I could press my hands against, but the lock had been painted shut.
The cemetery spread out around me in the moonlight, all silver-washed stone and deep shadow, the old graves standing in their crooked rows like audience members who had been waiting a very long time for the performance to conclude.
Mist threaded between the headstones, low and unhurried.
Somewhere distant an owl called once and fell silent.
Nicholas knelt before a freshly turned grave, his hands steady and careful as he worked to untangle a vine wrapped in small luminous flowers, the two plants intertwined so completely that separating them required patience I was grateful he possessed.
Nicholas.
My husband.
The truth of it moved through me, vast and aching—arriving too late, the way all the most important realizations usually did. There had never been a dead wife haunting the corridors of Ambrose House with vines crawling from her throat.
Because I was his wife.
I was the ghost.
The vine had stolen my memories, stripped every beloved thing from me and left me empty, and when the chance to remember had finally pressed through, it had twisted those memories into weapons—convincing me that Nicholas had killed his wife, that he had put the vine in her, that I was in danger, that he was the monster—all of it engineered to drive me toward the flower with enough desperation to overcome my own judgment.
Now you know how it feels, the voice said, somewhere in the dark interior of me, stripped of its usual hunger and carrying something that sounded, horribly, like cruel satisfaction. To be separated from the one you love.
From my cage, I was bleeding without any visible wound, my heart torn open on the truth of what the vine had done and what I had done before it, and unable to shed a single tear because my companion controlled the mechanisms of my face and had decided grief was not currently useful.
Let me out, I said, pressing forward against the back of my eyes with everything I had. The words echoed off the soft tissue of my skull, returning to me muffled and small. Please. Let me out.
My body shifted. My lips curled into an expression that had never belonged to my face before, the smile sinister and cold.
When I have my flower, the vine replied.
I stilled.
I pressed myself closer to the inside of my eyes and watched Nicholas work, his brow furrowed in concentration, the shears in his coat pocket glinting faintly in the moonlight.
Your flower is right there, I said, measuring each word with the gentle patience of someone negotiating with something that could hear every inflection. I will make sure you have it. But you have to let me out. I need to tell him how to graft it.
A silence moved through me that had texture and consideration in it.
I can tell him, the vine snapped. Be quiet.
Nicholas pulled the shears from his pocket, the metal catching the cold light. My body lurched forward before I could brace for the motion, one hand shooting out.
"Do not cut her!"
His hands stilled. He turned to look at me over his shoulder, and I watched his face from behind my eyes, searching his expression for any sign that he understood what was looking back at him, whether he could see me in here—whether the wrong arrangement of my features had told him something my companion had not intended to reveal.
"I have to cut away some of the vine," he said, his voice measured, a single thread of tension wound through the steadiness of it. "The roots are tangled."
I stared into his amber eyes and my heart broke for the second time.
My companion moved my feet, gesturing toward the vine with a brisk impatience that was nothing like me. "Fine. Do as you must. But do not cut my flower."
The first cut of the shears sent a shock through my nervous system that arrived before I understood what it was.
Sharp pain stabbed behind my ribs, gripping my nerves as though the vine inside my throat felt the blade parting the roots in the cemetery soil.
My companion sucked a breath in through my teeth and drove my nails into my palms, and I felt the bite of them from somewhere muffled and distant.
Anger flooded through me, and I recognized it as the vine's and tried to hold myself separate from it, desperate to keep the distinction clear between my emotions and the thing currently controlling them.
Violent images pressed against my mind—the shears turned, the blades finding softer material, Nicholas’s skin opened to see what lay beneath, his organs carved apart.
I recoiled from the images with everything I had.
You feel it, I said, watching him make the second cut, the answering pain lancing through me again. Every cut he makes on the vine out there, you feel it in here. You are doing to that vine what I did to you—separating it from its companion.
The vine stretched my fingers until the skin pulled taut across my knuckles, then let the cruel smile resurface. Wrong, as always. The laughter that moved through my chest belonged to nothing I would claim. I do not care what happens to it. I only want my flower.
He made another cut. The pain came again, and with it the rage—a tide of it, rising through me with a force I had to press back against with every resource I possessed, shoving it down from behind the glass while the vine strained at every seam.
I had the urge to scream and did, inside my own skull, where the sound went nowhere.
Stop, I pleaded, unable to look away from the images the vine kept pressing at me—Nicholas's chest opened, each rib separated, his heart pulled free and still beating to show him what it was like to have the one thing sustaining you taken away by careless hands.
Do not hurt him. It is me you should be angry with—I am the one who separated you from the flower, not him. He did not know.
The vine pressed its own grief somewhere inside me too deep for me to reach, and said nothing.
Nicholas cursed quietly, bringing his finger to his mouth, a small trickle of blood running down his hand from where the thorns had caught him.
From behind the glass, I pressed forward until my forehead was nearly against the inside of my own pupils, watching the blood on his hand with a helpless desperation that had no outlet.
He made the final cut.
The flower slipped free.
My companion shuffled my feet forward, barely contained, sending a cascade of images through me that I refused to follow to their conclusions—skin peeled back, the flower's roots pressed into the wet landscape of my exposed tissue, burrowing down through blood and muscle until its tendrils found the vine inside me and the two of them completed each other in an ecstasy I wanted no part of imagining.
Nicholas stood and turned, and the vine tunneled my vision to the flower in his hand, moving my body forward with a speed I did not naturally possess. My hand swiped outward, and he stepped back, holding it just out of reach with the ease of someone who had anticipated the movement.
"You will have your flower," he said. "But I will be the one to perform the surgery."
My jaw clenched. My eyes narrowed until Nicholas was a blur at the center of my vision. "Give it to me."
"Mellie—"
"Your precious wife is not here." The words came from my mouth with a flatness that made my stomach turn.
His brows drew together. He searched my face, looking for something specific, something beneath the surface presentation. "Then where is she?"
My finger shot up to my temple and tapped, hard. "In here, where she will stay if you do not give me my flower."
He studied me for a long moment, his brilliant mind turning over the logistics of what the vine had said and assembling what it had not, building the complete picture from the available evidence with the intelligence of a man who had spent his entire career doing exactly that.
He stepped forward and gripped my chin before my companion had a chance to move away, tilting my face up to his. His eyes moved over mine with an examination so thorough I wondered if he could see me inside.
"Can she hear me?"
I threw myself forward with everything I had. Nicholas! I am here! I am right here!
My companion jerked my head away and shoved him hard with both hands. He barely moved, absorbing the impact with the smallest step backward.
"Do not speak to her." The vine pressed my palm briefly to the side of my head, and lunged for the flower.
He shifted left. My grasping fingers closed on air.
"Give it to me!" The voice tearing from my throat was mine and entirely alien at once.
My hands reached again, and again, and Nicholas simply waited, holding the flower above his head with an equanimity that would have been amusing under other circumstances.
My lungs constricted from the effort, my breathing labored.
The vine pressed its borrowed palm to my sternum as it struggled to draw sufficient air.
We stared at each other—Nicholas with one brow lifted and the ghost of a smile at the corner of his mouth, my own lips peeled back in a snarl that I had never worn on my face in my life.
"If you are quite finished," he said, "I need to collect another flower for Hawthorne."
"No." The vine's voice dropped to something low and furious. "There is no time. I want my flower now."
"I am afraid you do not have a choice." He glanced at the specimen in his hand. "Unless you would like to try to take it from me again."
A sound of raw frustration vibrated through my chest, rattling my ribs from the inside. My companion turned my feet and began walking without another word, Nicholas's measured footsteps falling in behind us on the path.
The cemetery stretched on either side—headstones tilting in the moonlight and casting phantom shadows, the flower’s glow in Nicholas’s hand haloing around us.
I felt my companion's awareness of it, moving through me like the vibration of a tuning fork, resonating with the vine in my throat.
The urge to turn and reach for the flower was overwhelming, sending hot surges of frustration through my muscles with every step. I felt my companion considering it, the impulse building at the edges of its control, and leaning toward the decision.
Do not, I said, from somewhere soft and tired. Please.
I knew it did not care what I demanded. I knew there was nothing I could do if it decided to try again.
I added nothing more, hanging onto the small hope that some part of the companion I had spent months with, the dark familiar presence I had taken for my own thoughts, might feel something for the person it had been living inside.
Be quiet, it replied.
But the tension in my muscles eased just barely.
I took what I could get.
"It occurs to me," Nicholas said, his voice cutting through the cemetery quiet, "that if you had allowed my wife to keep her memories, all of this might have been resolved considerably sooner."
My feet stopped.
My body turned.
I crossed the distance between us in several quick steps. My companion rose on my toes to bring my face level with his, pressing my palms to either side of his jaw as it forced our eyes to meet.
"But that would’ve ruined all my fun. I vowed revenge and that’s what I got. It doesn’t feel very good to be the one separated from the one you love, does it, Nicholas?”
He stared at my face and I watched understanding filter through his features. “That is why you took her memories? For revenge?”
My head nodded slowly, and I felt the sting of tears threatening behind my eyes. It swallowed them back without another word, turning my body with a jerking motion and sending a wave of nausea rolling through me. My legs stalked forward toward the eastern wall where the second flower waited.
I retreated from the backs of my eyes.
I moved somewhere further inside myself, somewhere deeper and darker and quieter, where I could not see through my own face, unable to bear the pain of looking at Nicholas and not being able to speak to him or touch him.
It was a terrible mercy, like closing one's eyes before the blow lands—it did not stop the pain, but at least I would not have to anticipate it coming.
I sat inside myself in the dark, thinking about our life together, while my companion tapped my toes with restless impatience as Nicholas collected Hawthorne's flower.
He knew I was in here.
He was going to get me out.
I held onto that hope, and I waited in the dark for him to bring me home.