‘Gone where?’
She grimaced and convulsed, more blood seeping out further and further.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, patting myself down for my phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘No time.’
She reached out a hand, stretching up towards my face and wincing in pain with every minuscule movement. Her fingers found my hair, tangling up in the ends like a toddler. ‘You have to help me.’
‘But I don’t know what to do,’ I replied, burning with guilt and fear. Where was my so-called strength now?
‘Anything,’ she gurgled, flecks of red appearing at the side of her mouth. ‘Do anything.’
When I was thirteen, my dad made me take a first aid class ‘just in case’ but this wasn’t a cut or a scrape. Ashley hadn’t burned herself on a pot, she was bleeding out in front of me. A deathly groan rattled out of her deflating lungs. I prised her fingers out of my hair, and tried to focus.
In the centre of the chaos I had created, I searched for stillness, begging for help from any source that might be able to give it. Inside the deafening silence, I heard a gentle whisper, an acknowledgement that felt familiar but brand new at the same time. My request was granted. Strands of Spanish moss crept down from the trees to wrap themselves around my arms like gauntlets. They breathed through me, lending me the strength of the live oaks, enough to lift the beam off Ashley’s legs before wrapping itself around her limbs. I reached for more vines, wadding them together and pressing them to the bloody mess. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she went silent but I could see her chest rising and falling erratically. She was still with me. I thought back to the orchid in the parlour, how Catherine and I had knitted its stem back together with the tip of her finger. Gritting my teeth, I held out my hands. Ashley was not an orchid but I had to try.
The first pulse that came up from the earth knocked me off balance. I steadied myself, cool hands on the hot stickiness of my aunt’s wounds, and concentrated. Ashley cried out, a hollowwail, as another pulse ebbed up from the ground, through my body and into hers before returning to the earth, a repeating cycle, a bargain I didn’t yet know the cost of.
All the vines in the garden crept towards us, winding around Ashley’s feet, binding her legs together and holding the Spanish moss bandages in place. The sweet-smelling honeysuckle and jasmine, the pretty purple wisteria, and the ivy she lovingly tended to every day, trailed down the side of the house and snaked along the ground to help, sealing the other vines in place and carrying the healing energy to where it was needed, her damaged internal organs, cracked ribs, crushed pelvis. Just like in Bonaventure, Ashley’s blood seeped into the ground and disappeared too quickly, and that was when I understood. This was how we paid for the help we’d been given. One way or another, we paid in blood.
By the time her breathing was calm and even, the panic outside Bell House had died down too. Hesitantly, I stood, my knees cracking from being in one position for too long, and went to check on my damage. One of the oak trees in Lafayette Square had dropped a heavy limb on the front end of a bright blue truck, completely crushing the cabin. Anyone who had been inside was surely dead. My stomach turned and I doubled over, retching into the flowerbed, but there was nothing in me to bring up. I was completely depleted. I made myself look again, panting heavily and pushing up on my tiptoes to get a better view. Two men in matching polo shirts, one sat at the side of the road with tears streaming down his face and the other pacing up and down on the phone. It was their truck, they had escaped alive and unscathed. They would be fine but I couldn’t say the same for myself. Once again, I’d lost control and almost killed entirely innocent people, people who were probably on the phone with the insurance company right now, trying to explain what had happened. An earthquake, a freakaccident, just like the lightning bolt that almost broke Jackson’s leg and the storm that killed my dad.
Unless they weren’t accidents at all …
‘Was it me?’ I yelled, storming back to find Ashley already sitting upright and staring at the red welts on her legs, all that was left of her injuries. ‘Did I kill my dad?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Her pupils were pinpricks and her head rolled around on her shoulders like it wasn’t properly fastened on.
‘Did I summon the storm that killed my dad?’ I demanded, blood still boiling with the possibility.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘Of course, you didn’t.’
‘How can you be so sure?’ I demanded. ‘Look what I just did to you?’
Ashley smiled as a clutch of purple flowers from the wisteria sprang into life around her thighs. She wasn’t just healing, she was high.
‘I know it wasn’t you,’ she replied dreamily. ‘Because Catherine killed your father.’
Chapter Thirty-Eight
She was still delirious when I carried her into the parlour and laid her down on the chaise longue. All the birds on the walls began to call and cry, the trees swaying in a terrible wind I could not feel. I couldn’t feel anything.
Catherine killed my father.
‘Don’t move,’ I ordered unnecessarily, the words still ricocheting around my mind. ‘I’ll get you something for the pain.’
‘What pain?’
Ashley’s words were as light as air and when I looked up, the ceiling was covered with threatening grey clouds.
‘Oh, she’s going to be so mad at me,’ she muttered, flinging one arm above her head and almost hitting herself in the face. ‘I was not supposed to tell you about your dad. I didn’t think I could. Very interesting.’
Catherine killed my father. I wanted to crawl under a blanket, pull it over my head and pretend none of this was happening but there could be no hiding now.
‘Why wouldn’t you be able to tell me?’ I asked, sifting through feelings and searching for facts, something solid I could hold on to. ‘Why did she kill my dad?’
‘Until a new Bell witch rises, I’m linked to Catherine,’ Ashley replied, only answering the first question and overenunciating every word. ‘The caretaker thing? It’s not a voluntary position. She knows where I am, she hears what I say. She tied my life to the house on my seventeenth birthday. I literally cannot leave.’
