“Oh?” My breathing is short and hot, choked on the scent of him. “And why’s that?”
“Because you need me.”
ten
Sometimes, I wonder if men are made of reaching hands. Searching hands. Always hungry, never satisfied. But when Ransom presses closer, the smell of him cancels out the wet soil of the gardens. He is all I can think about. The bell is gone, and Bram is far away. Even the thoughts of Mother become nothing more than a buoy eddying at the back of my mind.
But there is something inside me, something that smells of lemons, peeled and festering in the sun, and it makes my fingers tighten around the brass. I pull away, standing to my feet. Ransom sits at the fountain’s edge in front of me, gunpowder eyes ablaze.
“Don’t fight it, Ade—”
“Why would I help you?”
His lips tense, tight against teeth. And then he stands, shoulders slack. When he looks back up, the fire is gone, and the bleeding man is back, dripping mildew and rot, just like the old house surrounding him.
“I thought we might help each other, Thorn. Get back what we both have lost.”
His words play over and over in my ears, like an untuned piano.
Our mothers.
One, a fool. Two, a thief. Three—my heart whispers unholy hymns against my breastbone.
“I do not understand how you know about the bell.”
His eyes widen at this, misty at the edges, like an autumn field thawing in morning sun. “So, it is true.”
Betrayal washes over me in thick waves. “You said you knew! You lied to me?”
That mischievous grin spreads like butter on his lips. “I never lied; I only twisted the truth, and isn’t it a delicious thing?”
I watch the curve of his mouth, then say flatly, “I don’t trust liars, Ransom.”
His smile wanes, and he steps closer. “Forgive me, Adelaide. I—” He takes my hand.
The air is brushed with sweetness, and I fight the simultaneous urge to both strike him and kiss him, neither being an unpleasant thought.
“You know how it is, don’t you? Watching a loved one melt away into nothing. When my mother died, Father went into his study and never came out.” His finger strokes my knuckles. “He was different after that, with his spells and seances and whispering. The house began to fall apart, the mold crept higher and higher, and then he died and left me to take it on.”
I pull away. There are tears gathering at the corners of his eyes. The ghost of his fingers still kisses my skin, making my stomach swim. I can’t remember the last time I was touched and didn’t suddenly balk and gnash my teeth. It takes every inch of self-control not to reach up and wipe my tears away.
Between us, the dark air tightens, grows so hot I feel as though I’m breathing fire. Idoknow this pain, know it like I know the souls swirling at the edge of the forest. Like I know the way my heart beats uneven in my chest.
After pulling the bell from my pocket, I press it to Ransom’s hand. “Tell me how to use it.”
His expression changes, something akin to curiosity. His fingers curl at the edges of the bell. There is so much hunger, so much desire in his eyes. I will burn if he looks at me.
“You offer it to me freely?”
Our gazes catch, and my throat shuts tight. His hands against mine are like hellfire, brimstone, molten ash. A dull ache throbs through every inchof my body, the agony swelling in my chest. Ransom Black has turned into a dragon.
I withdraw the bell and slip it back into my pocket. My nose fills with basalt and brine. The smell of the river licking up through the soil at our feet. And something else too. A sucked-penny scent.
“Ransom—”
He steps forward, face twisted with shadow. “Let me show you how to use it, Thorn. We could rescue our mothers, together.”
Together. The word is a boon to my lonely heart. To the woman trapped in her room, her only friends the illness thick in her veins, the scripture on the walls. There is a string connecting Ransom’s heart to mine. Two wandering souls without the guide of a mother’s loving hand, only the willow bark switch of a father’s anger or grief taken out on the next best thing.
