He lifts a shaking finger to his lips. “Use the bell,” he whispers. “Use the bell and come to the wood. Find the river.”
Nerves like claws sink deep into my flesh, to peel it back and spill the shadowed blood.
Cursed.
I drop my gaze to the cool brass in my hand. Such a small, insignificant thing. I wrap my palm around it until its sharp edges carve grooves into my palms. Pain shimmers above my body, and for a moment, I shut my eyes, thinking when I open them this will all disappear—Bram, the bell, Father’s sentence of the house of healing in Idlewild—and I will be here, alone. Nothing that has happened will be true. It will have been a dream. Even Clara and Hester and Ransom Black.
But I feel the crooked sting of the cut on my foot, the wrappings tight around the shredded flesh. Ransom’s hand on my skin, warm and real, his breath on my face while he spoke to me with such anchoring surety.
I snap my eyes back open, and there Bram remains, huddled in the corner, arms now up around his head. My heart slips against my ribs. The bell vibrates in my hand. Brief, but enough to draw my attention back to it.
Fear coils in my chest. This isn’t real.Noneof it is real. It is simply an illness.Myillness. The wrongness of my heartbeat, the pain soaking my limbs like salt water. I press to my feet, cross to the table beside my bed, and open the drawer.
“What are you doing?” Bram’s words are rushed and quick, a waterfall with sharpened rocks at the bottom.
I don’t turn back, but keep my eyes fixed on the pearl-white glow of the moon above the fruited rye fields. “I can’t help you. This—it’s not right.” The fist around my heart loosens, crawls up the back of my throat while I choke back tears.
“Adelaide.” His voice is as hard and cold as shattered porcelain.
I squeeze my eyes shut, tears eking out to dampen my cheeks. My fingers fumble with the drawer when I shove the bell away, back between all the papers, the dusty bottles of ink.
“I’m so sorry, Bram.”
Perhaps girls like me, girls without someone to love them right, maybe we are broken things. China dolls left on mantles, laden with dust, waiting for the day the ground shakes, gives way beneath us, and we tip head over heels to shatter on the floor.
I sink my fingernails into the soft wood grain of the table and open my eyes to darkness. All I know is that I am resolute. Mind firm in places it was pliable only moments before. Whatever it means—this Reaper’s bell—it does not concern me. I turn back around to face Bram, barely registering the heartbreak etched on his face.
“You have to go back,” I say. “Back to the—wherever you came from.”
There is so much pain on his face I think it might break me. His eyes harden, and it takes all my strength not to crash toward him and wrap my arms around whatever fog and cloud forms his body.
“Adelaide, please. I’ll die here.”
“You’re already dead.” The words fall from my lips harsher than I mean them. “Bram Avery died ten years ago in the springtime. I remember because the cold earth was soft when they buried the casket and the flowers grew.” My fingers flex at my side. I remember the way we all tossed the dark kernels of dirt over the wooden box. “You will only be my damnation.”
Ghosts drag souls to Erybrus.
There is silence, the only sound the echoingscritchof a naked willow branch against my window. I cannot tear my eyes from Bram, sunk deeper into the corner of my room, shadows glistening on his face like oil. It is a familiar feeling, the helplessness leaking from his very skin. It pools at thehollow of my throat, threatens to sever the veins there, to crush my skull until I am nothing more than a pile of bone dust to be caught and carried away by the winter wind.
I am about to turn away, to curl up on my bed and watch the stars lick across the black sky until Father’s cane is heard along the paving stones, when Bram turns his face up to mine.
“What if I told you there was a way to save someone else? Bring someone else back?”
His words set my heart racing, an ache spreading out against my chest and up my throat. “Who—what are you talking about?”
His lips quirk, a bitter, wretched twist of a smile. “You bring me back, and we rescue another in the process.” His gaze snaps up. “Two faces beneath one hood. A deal.”
My body goes as chill and stiff as a shaft of wheat in an ice storm. “I don’t understand.”
Bram peels himself from the floor, mist hounding at his heels. “You bring me back, and I’ll make sure someone else comes with us. Someone I’m sure you’d very much like to see.”
The cold licks around my spine and settles between my shoulder blades. I open my mouth, but the words shrivel into nothing. My lungs constrict, pulse quickening, a stunted laugh bursting from my lips.
“You mean my mother, don’t you?” I half believe I have gone mad. That this is all a dream and soon I’ll wake to Father splashing cold water on my face, calling me to obey him, even as I spit dirt and ice to the floor of the garden shed.
Bram takes another step closer, hands fisting at his sides. “Everyone with unfinished business is left behind in the wood by Ithrandril and Erybrus, waiting. That is our choice, Adelaide.”
A coal kindles in my chest. “Waiting for what?”
