Her eyes hollowed.
Her smile split further, revealing a darkness where a throat should have been.
The lace collar at her neck liquified into her skin. Dozens of tiny black legs spilled out from beneath it—spiders, impossibly fast, spiraling over her shoulders and vanishing beneath her gown like rats returning to the walls.
When she reached toward me with a hand that wasn’t a hand anymore, something in me shattered.
A scream tore free from my throat, wild and ragged. I surged backward, scrambling over the settee like an animal cornered. My skirts tangled. I tripped, crashing into a side table, sending porcelain flying. The world pulsed, light and dark, then light again.
In that final moment of madness, her face shifted once more.
Not Isolde.
Not entirely.
A bloated, pale, lifeless visage slid beneath the Dowager’s dissolving features like a second skin.
Elizabeth?
I shrieked, clutching at my skull as if I could claw the vision out before it fused into memory. Glass tinkled. The fire hissed. Somewhere above, Poe screamed in a fury not meant for mortal throats.
Voices cut through the madness.
Mrs. Ashby’s heels struck the floor sharply as she rushed toward me, skirts swishing with haste. “Your Grace!”
Isolde had already risen, stiff and imperious, eyes wide with a mixture of shock and contempt. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed, stepping back from the chaos as if she feared that whatever plagued me could be contagious.
I cowarded in the center of the wreckage. My breath came in short, fractured gasps. Hair wild, my hand outstretched as if warding off phantoms, I curled my knees to my chest and tried to will my mind back into my body.
But something inside me had splintered beyond repair.
“Your Grace,” Mrs. Ashby repeated, ignoring the shaking of my hand as she knelt beside me. Her voice lowered, gentle and firm as she cupped my chin. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I couldn’t bear to look. I was too afraid the horrors would still be there, lurking in the corners of the room, crawling in the corners of her face.
“The bugs,” I cried, barely able to speak around the rawness in my throat. “Her face…”
Her fingers, though cool, were steady as she lifted my chin. “Look at me, Your Grace,” she urged softly. “There are no bugs. No… faces.”
Something in her voice, steady and grounding, cut through the madness enough to make me trust her. I opened my eyes slowly.
Mrs. Ashby’s face hovered before mine, her brows drawn in concern, her eyes filled with something I could almost call kindness.
The room was still once more. The fire crackled in its ordinary cadence. Shadows rested instead of writhing. The heavy, pulsing pressure that had surrounded me was gone.
And Isolde, when I dared to look at her, was only Isolde once more.
She stared down at me with an icy, aristocratic glare. Not with the face of some hideous creature or the mask of adead woman, but with that of a woman who saw madness before her and was thoroughly… utterly disgusted.
I opened my mouth, shame rising fast in my throat. I had made a spectacle of myself. A hysterical bride with madness in her blood. But, before I could say anything, a thunderous flurry of wings tore through the room.
Poe.
“Merciful heavens!” the Dowager shrieked as a black shape hurtled past her head.
The raven swooped once, twice, then dove for the Dowager’s powdered coiffure with all the fury of an avenging spirit.
“Wretch! Thing of evil!” he screeched, talons tangling in her silver curls as she batted helplessly at the air. “Nevermore! Nevermore!”
