The sting of my words is a snapped band in the air. We say nothing, the rush of the water beyond the only thing making a sound. That and the ravens nesting in the creaking trees.
When I look at Clara, her eyes are clogged with tears, turning the whites bloodshot, rimmed in red. My stomach swims, tying itself into a knot that settles low and clings to me like a sickness.
“Clara, I’m—”
“No.” Clara holds up a hand. “No, you’re right. It is no business of mine. I’ll leave you to whatever it was you were doing.”
She goes to turn, the edges of her skirt making curls in the icy mud. A crack echoes from the forest, and I whip toward the line of trees on the far bank.
The monsters.No. The souls.
All the waiting dead things.
“Adelaide?”
I blink and turn back to Clara, her eyes sparking with curiosity. She’s hardly a breath away from me now, so close I smell her father’s bakery wafting from the folds of her rust-colored coat. Marble rye bread and apple scones.
“Adelaide, you look as though you’ve seen a ghost.”
The irony of her words curdles a bitter laugh at the base of my tongue. “What do you know of ghosts, Clara?”
Her brow crinkles, lips forming a crescent moon over her chin. “Adelaide,don’t.”
It is not what I was expecting her to say, and it leaves me standing there, breathless, any witty comebacks left dry and shriveled.
Clara’s eyes glaze with tears, her gaze darting from me to the river and back again. “Don’t pretend as if I know nothing. As if I haven’t watched you waste away, get all tucked up inside yourself. You were my best friend, Adelaide, and now…now it’s like I don’t even recognize you. You’ve turned so sharp.”
I don’t reply. What is there to say when every word she speaks is a truth so hard it lands like a stone in my gut?
“This isn’t you,” she says. “The girl I saw hardened in the churchyard, the girl right now, words like needles…that’s not you.” She steps closer, and there is pain in the lines between her brows, eddying there like a storm at sea. “What happened to you, Adelaide? After your mother died, I was here. I havealwaysbeen right here.”
My face heats under her words. Do I show her the scars on my palms from where my father hits me? Do I open my mouth and let every verse of Blessed Scripture he has made me memorize in the dark and the cold of my room spill out? Do I empty the bell onto my raw and bleeding palm and tell her the story of Bram Avery, the man who died, hiding in the shadows of my bedroom, begging me to bring him back from the dead? Do I tell her of the way my own heart betrays me, pulls me down until I see black and forget the things I might have done?
I cast my gaze to my feet, my toe scooping troughs in the muck. “There is so much you don’t know, Clara. So much that you would never believe me if I told you.”
Her boots come into my line of vision, shiny black leather dulled with frozen mud. Her finger curls beneath my chin, drawing my eyes to meet hers.
“You can tell me, Adelaide. And I will tell you my secrets. Sisters in silence.”
A strange emotion grabs a hold of my heart and squeezes. For a moment, I brace myself for the pain, the slippage of arteries and chambers in the wrong moments, the wrong time. But they do not come. I am like a bud caught in spring frost, tossed about by bitter wind. There is so much to say, but all of my words taste of poison.
“I’m so very different from you, Clara,” I say finally. “So very different from any of the women in Rixton.”
Because my father beats me? Because I see dead people? Because I am known by the souls trapped in the rowan wood?
Because, perhaps, it is I who is the true monster? The girl who steals souls.
Mayor Samuels certainly believes it. And do I truly know where I go in the blackness of my fits? For the first time in my life, I allow my mind to truly drift to places I have only entertained. My black blood, my white hair, the way death seems to limn my body like a second skin. The Reaper’s bell like a stone in my pocket.
Maybe I am in the shadows because Erybrus is all I have ever known. Perhaps my soul belongs to the darkness.
Clara clucks her tongue. “Even though I doubt that is true, I know what it’s like to be different.” Her eyes lower to the basket she is holding, and curiosity overwhelms me.
I study her sunken cheeks, the way she has almost seemed to age years since I last glimpsed her.
She frowns. “There are things you don’t know either, Adelaide. When you lost your mother, I lost someone too.” She reaches out, faster than fire, and grips my hand before I can pull away. “I lostyou. I lost the person I told everything to. Every secret, every joke, every pain or hurt or joy.”
Her eyes light at the last word.Joy. It’s a funny one. So few letters for so big a thing.
