He sighs and wipes ichor down his trousers. “Sometimes, things get through, even without the bell. Animals, mostly, just poking around in places they shouldn’t be until they end up here. Sometimes a human, though that is rare enough. It’s usually when they aren’t looking for it. Just another lost soul.”
I try to digest what he is telling me, but the words scramble in my mind. “So, you gut them?”
Bram grows frustrated. “You wouldn’t understand if I told you.”
I vomit laughter. “None of this is understandable, Bram. The bell, the Haunts, this damn place itself, whatever the hell I am. I think I can handle a little spilled blood.”
“Fine.” He leans back over to the pile of now-damp leaves and uncovers the body, which I see now to be a rabbit, fur glistening white beneath the blood. “I didn’t kill it. Sometimes, they show up like that. Half-alive and gutted.”
Bram slips fingers into the slit at its belly, and my body swims with sick. He pulls thin lines of intestine out, followed by what can only be its kidneys, its lungs, its heart.
The sight of the last organ alone is enough to send my pulse racing. I reach for it. How small it is compared to my palm. Is this how mine looks, pressing so hard against my lungs and chest some days it feels as though I will never breathe again?
“Interesting choice,” Bram muses.
The heart is feather-light in my hand. The blood pools around it, slipping into the creases of my palm.
“Interesting how?”
Bram rocks back on his heels. “They say the heart is the core of our emotion. That is where we truly feel things. And you, Adelaide Thorn, felt enough for a perfect stranger to come rescue him from Erybrus itself.”
My smile slides over to him. “So, you’re not angry with me anymore?”
He winces. “No, and I shouldn’t have been so upset with you the other day. We both hid things from one another in hopes for the outcome we wanted. I’m sorry I lied too.”
My smile softens around the edges. “I forgive you.” In the red light, his eyes are almost feverish, tinged with a haze, so lifelike it steals my breath away. “Besides, you are no stranger, Bram Avery.”
He arches his eyebrows. “Oh?”
I shake my head and look back at the heart still warm against my skin. “That day, in the orchard, wasn’t the first time I remember seeing you. I used to watch you when I was little. You and your sisters trudging down the lane from Avery Manor with your mother and father. I think I was jealous, really, of what you had and I didn’t. I always thought you had a nice smile.”
When I look back up at him, there is no smile. Instead, a shadow haunts the corners of his eyes. His shoulders shrink in, eyes flashing.
“There wasn’t much to be jealous of, if I’m being honest.”
There is silence for a time, and I watch the blood coagulate on the ground in front of me. Red liquid merging to form a jelly.
“You seemed happy enough,” I say finally.
The skin above his eye twitches. He turns back to the trees. “Father didn’t approve of my…well, my enjoyments. He thought it was better for me to learn to hunt, to keep the manor, to become worthy of the seat of Avery Manor than to stuff my nose in books. I told him I didn’t want it. Why couldn’t Matilda have it? She was next in line and smart as a whip. He didn’t take too kindly to that.” He fidgets with the collar of his shirt. “He used to beat me, Adelaide.”
I nod. It is something I have long suspected, but that doesn’t take the pain away. “I’m so sorry. No one deserves that, Bram.”
He looks back to the dead beast at our knees. “Better if Rixton thought him the great man he seemed than the man he was at home.”
I swallow, and the ridges of my throat press tight.I’m sorrydoesn’t seemlike enough. Not when the men of Rixton beat their daughters, drain blood from their sons, force their children into spaces they have no desire to be in. Sometimes, the only real question I have is, what is the necessity of men?
“I know you didn’t just come for me,” Bram interrupts, nodding back to the heart. “I know you’re here to find your mother, and I’m sorry I lied to you.”
His eyes are so soft now in the light, a kind of sunset glow. The blood drips down my wrist while I stare at the tiny organ.
“I understand now, I think, why you did it. I want my mother back just as much as you want to be back with your sisters.” My throat catches. “Just as much as Ransom wants his own mother back.”
There is silence then, nothing but the wavering wind through the strange trees. Bram reaches forward, sinks his fingers between the folds of the rabbit’s belly, and tugs. There is a soft pop.
When he draws his hand back out, his skin is sheened in carmine. He wipes the viscera away and holds up something pale and pocked in his hand. I steal a glance at his face, but his eyes have lost their softness.
“This rabbit was sick.”
