A thousand things raced through my mind. My first impulse was to run to him, but I felt there was something there, in the dark shadows that lurked in the corners of my room, that watched us. Something or someone that shouldn’t be seeing us together. But then I also thought about how I desperately wanted to belong somewhere—to be a part of something—to have a family and fall hopelessly in love.But how could you find love in such a hopeless place?
A door creaked somewhere in the hallway outside my room and hushed voices hissed in low tones. Mathias whipped his head to the sounds, listening, his brows pulling together quizzically. “Someone’s coming,” he mumbled to himself. “I must go.”
“Wait,” I said, lunging for his arm without thinking. My hand gripped around his forearm, the pads of my fingertips pressing into the soft, cold leather of his gloves.
His eyes snapped to my hand then quickly darted up to meet my stare. They were wide and full of pain and confusion.
“Wait, please,” I said, pulling my hand away. “I’m sorry, uh…I tried to ask you last time, but we didn’t have enough time. Do you…do you know who Erebus is?”
His face went paler than it had before—so white it seemed to glow, “Erebus?” he asked, repeating the name slowly.
In the hallway, the bustling and noises drew nearer.
The air around us shimmered, a sudden iciness chilling me deep inside my bones. “If you don’t know, could you find out for me?”
He blinked and nodded once, his rigid posture stiffening even more.
“Thank you,” I whispered, as I watched him walk backwards into the shadows of the room. “Do you know who’s coming?” I blurted out, wanting him to stay. There was so much more I wanted to ask him—to talk to him about.
“It’s Rose.” Mathias’s form faded, slipping into the colorless void of the room as he answered hoarsely. “She is going to take you to see Mary.”
“My mother?” I asked breathlessly. I couldn’t believe it. What I said to Rose before worked. She was actually letting me see my mother!
I needed to change into clothes that weren’t torn to shreds.
Mathias was nothing more than a soft outline—a dull trace of what was, when the noises of the hallways became louder. I whirled around, wildly changing into clothes more befitting, so I could finally,finallyspeak to the mother I thought was dead for the last seventeen years.
Chapter 7
Istared at the door, impatiently bouncing on the balls of my feet, mouth dry, waiting for Rose to arrive. I traipsed back and forth, wearing down the narrow handwoven runner that lay on the floor at the foot of my bed, tearing a small cluster of holes through its middle.
My ears clung to each sound they heard outside the door, passing footfalls and deep murmuring whispers, until the shadow of Rose’s feet cut through the dim light that spilled in from under the door. When I swung it open, Rose was waiting, holding two skull-carved goblets of spiced wine.
“Wine, sugar?” she asked me with a smile, pushing one of the cups toward me. My stomach instantly hardened from the memory of the last glass of mulled wine she offered me.I wasn’t going to drink anything that woman poured me. I needed to keep my wits about me around here—no matter how much I wanted a sip of any sort of liquid courage.
“Um, thank you,” I said as I accepted the wine and pushed the drink aside, leaving it on the mantel closest to the door.
Her eyes danced, bouncing from the wine goblet to me and back again, and not for the first time I wondered whether she was trying to poison me with my favorite alcoholic beverage.
Rose linked her gloved arm with mine and steered me into the hallway, “Come with me for a walk now, sugar.”
I didn’t hesitate, letting her escort me through the crowded corridors filled with the dead of Ravenswood who stopped and stared.
Down a great spiraling staircase and through mazes of narrow passageways, she silently pulled me by the arm.
She pushed through the double doors of the ballroom where paintings of devilish creatures and dark beady-eyed birds hung eerily over the walls. Their faces, every one, seemed to stare down at me and follow me with questioning eyes.
There was the portrait of a man in a dark field. A long white sheet covered his face and cascaded down into tall grass. To the left of him, a raven, with its wings spread wide, hung in the air, caught in mid-flight. Another painting was filled with hollow-eyed children dressed in dirty white gowns, staring blankly up into a tombstone-colored sky, while above their heads, dark feathered birds circled low.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked as she pulled me toward the cathedral-length wooden doors that led out of the castle and into the city of Ravenswood itself. Six dark, shadowy figures blocked the exit, and I stumbled for a breath the closer we moved toward them. Taller and broader than any men I had ever seen before, they seemed to hold the illusion they were floating, as if they were hanging, suspended with an invisible cord from the high ceilings.
Yanking me forward, Rose grinned at me with a questionable smile, one that almost looked sinister and beguiling, but was gone too quickly for me to figure out.
“Are you taking me to see my mother?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady as I eyed the rigid forms she was dragging me toward. I pulled back, not wanting to walk past them.
The black-hooded guards stood like centurions in front of the doors. I lost my footing looking at them the closer we came. They were like nothing I’d ever seen there before.
Where their eyes should have been, there were only clumps of grayish ash clinging to the jagged curves of hollow eye sockets. Their hands that reached out from under the long-sleeved cloaks were covered with decaying, bloated flesh dripping off alabaster bones. These weren’t the painted-on skull faces of the dead here; these things, these creatures, were something more, something darker, full of evil and despair.
