“What?” I ask.
He collapses to the ground beside me, peeling off his coat. His shirt sticks to his chest with moisture, and a dark stain spreads along the fine fabric.
“We have been running for who knows how long, and yet nothing has changed. I told you we should have followed the woman.”
He is wrong. I straighten.
“She disappeared, Ransom. And anyway, the trees are different here, more spread apart. I can smell the river, and there’s—” I swivel on a heel, taking in the rest of the landscape. “There’s more of those stone things, the walls, like old buildings. There’s three there, all in a row. And another…” My eyes fall on a cut of stone wall, more beyond it.
The shape is strange. Familiar, even. I move toward it, leaving Ransom hurrying to catch me.
“Thorn,” he calls, but I have already reached the wall, am already moving through the space that might have once held a gate but now only plays host to rotten wood and crimson moss.
My boots crunch in the leaves. I weave up a familiar path and find myself at the threshold of a set of stone steps leading to nothing.
I close my eyes. Lift my hand. Imagine a brass knob, a wooden door. Beyond, a foyer, a kitchen cold as death, narrow stairs, a long-stretching hall, a room with a girl tied to a chair.
Me.
My eyes snap open, and I leap back, as though I’ve been stung. Ransom calls my name, and again, I ignore him. I lift my skirts and run the length of the tumble-down wall. It is home and yet not home. A shadowland. I dash around to the back of the ruins, and when I see what lies behind, my breath stops in my throat.
Bitterbloom.
The flowers are as thick as snow blazing up from the ground, reflecting the moonlight. I fall to the dirt, fingers clutching at the petals.
No, no, this is all wrong. Nothing can grow here. Nothing I have seen is truly alive. Even the trees, trapped in the death grip of autumn. Yet, these flowers almost seem to breathe.
I take a petal between my thumb and finger, the surface like alabaster velvet.
Ransom’s boots crackle the leaves, and his shadow casts long and sallow over top of me.
“Flowers.” He sounds less than amused.
“My mother’s flowers. One of many.”
But they cannot be growing here. There is no sunlight. No one to water them. To tend the blooms, to make sure no one digs them up, touches the roots…
A cold sweat breaks out on the back of my neck.
Mother.
I leap up, searching for any signs of life. Any signs my mother is here. My mother is…what? Alive? Between?
“Adelaide.” Ransom’s hand is on my arm now. “I don’t understand. Why are the flowers so—”
“Don’t you see?” I lift my skirts and leap onto the crumbling wall, coming down the other side, then sink fingers into the cold, red moss. “It’s the vicarage. The ghost of it, at least. This is the kitchen, and this—” I run toward the front, pointing frantically. “This is the foyer, the front door, the path, and the gate in the wall beyond that.”
I run for the lane, Ransom on my heels.
“That,” I say, pointing back where we came from. “Those three structures? The Widow Foray’s cottage, the Thatcher’s, the bakery.”
Clara.
My throat goes warm and sticky, and I try to swallow. Ransom is at my side, heaving. His hand slips into mine. The sudden warmth of his skin is startling, and I glance down at our joined fingers, the nearness of him spilling against me like mulled wine. My eyes trace to his face, his sharp jaw and piercing verdant eyes. We are little more than strangers still, yet here we stand, allies against the dark.
His gaze narrows. “I don’t—I don’t get it. Tell me where we are.”
The knowledge strikes me like ice to the gut. A feeling touches the back of my neck, cold and slow and creeping.
