I leaned in close, staying within the shadows. Watching as Silas continued to add to the pot propped up by a small inlet flame that burned high against the ceramic. He lifted his head toward the door, yellow eyes shining toward the very spot in which I hid. I whipped my head away from view and held my breath, waiting to the sound of pounding heartbeats. I ventured a single glance to the crack of the door. Silas had moved. He hovered over the fire of the mantle with the cup of dark crimson.
An immortal’s somber gaze peered down upon that cup filled with death or life, the gambling of his fare. Silas stretched an arm to the mantle, resting it against the sweeping wood carving downcast to the cup. His knuckles turned white against the stain, and for a moment, I thought it would crack.
Silas raised the glass, toasting to the haunted or the damned or whatever God a creature such as him has to pray to. In one fell swoop, he downed thecontents as it trickled along the corner of his mouth in a sickly red hue.
The cracking of the fireplace answered the space in its eerie silence, becoming nothing then everything. Silas coughed, and blood spurted from his lips and onto the carpet. It seeped from his mouth and eyes, a gruesome sight, his crumpled form silently moving with each rupture. Eternity passed, and Silas convulsed upon the ground on all four legs until he collapsed onto the dark hardwood, body twitching with a pool of blood forming under his head.
I placed a hand to my mouth, muffling the scream that built inside my chest. Shock rooted me to the spot as I watched the last breath disappear into the air of the castle walls. Silas lips muttered softly a prayer in a language I recognized but did not know the words to.
Silas killed himself.
The work had been done for me and Silas... Silas was dead.
I wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream to the rooftop that the beast—the harborer of evil, was dead.
I sprinted out of the west wing, my legs carrying me through the hushed hallways. I threw open the heavy doors to the clean, crisp night air. As I wrapped my hands around the cold wrought-iron gates, the weight of his death played out over and over in my head. I could not help but let the horrifying smile stretch itself across my lips in such elation.
I was free.
I could try and return to Endovier and carve out a life for myself.
The village was free, and there was nothing stopping humanity from living on in absence from the blood drinker. Yet—the unease settled through my bones. The Earth rumbled under my feet, howling screeching into the night air from within the castle, as stones crumbled from the west section of the castle onto the far grounds.
Briar Castle was collapsing.
I clung to the wrought-iron gates, feet unsteady as the rumble ceased to stop almost quickly as it started. Wind stirred the curtains of the windows, dancing in front of the open door.
I staggered to my feet, to the curious gaze of the castle itself, moaning an evening song of misery. Silas was dead, and the castle filled with ghosts—well, there was not much I could do for them.
I pushed open the iron gates, shuffling forward onto the gravel road. The fog hung heavy in the predawn morning. I took a step, closer to the line of fog lapping my heels. I hesitated at the intersection, fists balled at my sides.
Silas was dead—I saw him kill himself. Freedom was right there, beckoning me to cross the threshold and never return. The ballroom and the ghost of the woman—the one from my dreams and vision flashed before me. The desperation in her vacant eyes and the pleading in his voice rattled in my head.
Silas was nothing to me.
He is nothing to me, I repeated in my head despite theburning truth.
I walked swiftly into the fog, swimming through the thick undercurrents of smoke. The crunch of gravel under my toe accompanied me the farther I went into the embankment. The cloud bank opened into the stormy gray of Castle Briar.
My heart sank as I stared up at the crumbling stone and cawing crows. I was stuck in the in-between Silas had locked me in. Castle Briar was nothing but a haunted house.
The cool air against my skin and the fiery heat in my lungs brought me to the edge of a precipice, one I could not hold from jumping into the cool water below. The castle and its crows stood watch, judging on high as the first flash of lightning cracked across the sky in purple streaks.
I gritted my teeth, choked down my pride, and turned back to the castle.
Damn it all.
The ghosts of the wing left me alone, their watchful gaze boring into the back of my spine the longer I stayed within the castle wall. Silas was where I left him, face down onto the hardwood. The mess of blood was extensive enough to kill a normal man ten times over—this was overkill. Silver hair strewn out across the floor as the blood created a halo around his head. I placed my fingers on his neck, checking his pulse.
Nothing.
I sat back on my heels, dumbfounded. I was not sure what I would have found when I walked back into the castle, but this was not what I had thought I’d find. I hiked the skirt of my dress high onto my thigh to clear the blood. I tucked a strand of my hair, looking at the table of herbs and instruments he’d used. Up on the fireplace, the cup stood as a testament to what it held, to what it had done to Silas. I took it off the mantle, sniffing the cup.
It was potent, the subtle scent of various herbs I’d seen in Ayla’s cottage floating through the powerful stench of nightingale. With the idea of an immortal man whose blood was used as a cure-all, using poison did not settle right. I steal another glance at Silas’s body, still unmoving and dead. I strummed a finger along the table in which he had prepared the poison, bottles on bottles, their brown opaque glass a window into their obscured contents.
“What were you doing?” I thought aloud.
I lifted one of the bottles, reading the label.Essence of Rose.
