The first time I saw him, angling down Bantlers Close, his nose was stuck between the pages of a book. I thought him the strangest man I had ever seen. When all the other young men in Rixton were off foxhunting or stringing Farmer Whitley’s cows into trees, Bram Avery could be found wandering the streets, sipping gingerbread tea at the bakery, or nestled under apple trees in the Avery orchards. Always, always with a book in hand.
I thought him marvelous, and as I study him now, I still do. The curve of his jaw, the mussed hair, the way his eyes flash like molten gold… My heart stutters, breath rushing from between my two lips when he catches my eye.
“What do you remember?” His voice edges near a gentler tone.
“It’s just. It’syou.” My brow crinkles, and my mouth runs dry as sand. “You haven’t aged a day.”
He reaches for my hand, and when his fingers only pass through mine, I crouch down beside him. Like the closer we become, the more hidden he will be from whatever it is I cannot make out.
His jaw clenches, eyes weary. “I said I wasn’t fully dead. Doesn’t mean I’m not partially dead.”
“You don’t age? Wherever you are, I mean.” The words feel impossible on my tongue, the very sound of them ridiculous.
I am talking to a ghost. A dead man in similar age to me now than he was ten years ago. My fingers itch to peel the skin from my own throat, just to feel the slick wetness of my veins beating against them. Just to know how alive I truly am. Because right now…I take a shuddering breath. Right now, I feel as empty as a corpse.
“The rowan wood.” Bram draws a knee to his chest and leans heavy on a dirt-caked palm. His hair drifts like seaweed. The mist swirls so cold around him it is a wonder he doesn’t shatter like river ice.
“I’m sorry?”
He gestures at the space around us. “Where I am. Where all the dead go to await their choice. Trapped between the living and whatever waits for us after.”
My brain jitters with the information while I rationalize every possibility.
“Purgatory. You are still waiting to make your choice between the gods—”
“Adelaide, listen to me.” Bram turns, eyes shining. “Call it whatever you like. I don’t care. I just need you to get me out, bring me home. I can’t let…” He turns back to the empty window, gritting his teeth.
I push myself off the floor, pacing. Outside, the world drifts toward night, nothing beyond the window except a village cloaked in shadow and the glow of lamplight. Chaos niggles at the back of my mind, eating away at my gray matter, like a worm on dead flesh.
This shouldn’t be possible,isn’tpossible. I try to blame my heart, the pain growing like a thick-barked tree at the base of my skull.
A monster, just a monster.
But he’s not.
All these years, I haven’t been seeing monsters. I’ve been seeingsouls.
And I am frightened of what it might mean.
My stomach twists into knots, and when I turn back, there he is—Bram Avery—the man who mysteriously died ten years ago. The only betrayal of passing age are the creases along his eyes, the look of hungry panic spilling from his irises like shadow.
“This shouldn’t be happening.” I retrieve the bell from off the bed. “It’s just a bell. Rubbish I found down by the river.”
Bram scrambles to his feet, backing me up against the bedpost, chest heaving beneath the tattered linen of his shirt. My eyes drift to his throat, the skin there taut and covered in scars. I suck in air, my flesh growing hot. I breathe in the chill of him, the distant scent of woodsmoke and something else…something so familiar my heart cracks along its own fissures.
Lemons.
“Do you remember the orchard?” he asks, voice low. “The day you caught me hiding up in the trees? I didn’t have a book that day. I was just up there, hoping the branches would be thick enough to hide me from my father’s fists.”
I close my eyes, traveling back to my younger self, the girl who still had a mother and didn’t know the cruelty of a father who had forgotten how tolove her. A girl who wore a dress the color of daffodils and laughed at the sun. A girl who didn’t know true fear until she found a young man tangled amongst leaves and ruby red apples and saw it there, pulsing in his eyes and just below his skin. A girl who was too little to help.
“I remember.”
I watch as relief washes over him in steady streams, and he shoots a look skyward. Whatever he sees sends him ducking, scuttling across the floor like an injured beast, until his back is to the corner.
My stomach hollows. All this time, he has been here, just outside, trying to speak, to get me to pay attention, and I called him a monster.
“Bram.” I hold out a shaking hand, tracing his hurried path across the room until I am crouched beside him, wishing he was solid so I could feel the warmth of his skin. Make up for so much lost time. “Bram, I don’t think—”
