“Are you seeing this? It isn’t just me?”
“Perhaps we shouldn’t have drunk that ale. Perhaps we’re still at the alehouse, intoxicated. Or…” His voice trails off.
“You know that isn’t true. Look at me.” I reach for Bram’s face, and heflinches. As though my touch is painful. “When you gutted that rabbit and I chose the heart, you said it was an interesting choice. Why?”
His eyes dart like a caged beast. “Most souls here, we crave the things we have forgotten. The taste of fresh bread, the swill of wine on our tongue. I have seen people rip apart a deer, only to come away with the punctured stomach, the liver. Just to taste something that reminds them of home, even if that means tasting grass, the poison of river water. But you chose the heart. Which means the thing you desire most is life itself.”
My body goes rigid. The memory of the heart in my hands is hazy, trapped on the other side of a frosted window. But I can still remember the way it felt in my hands.
“That’s foolish, Bram. You’ve seen my blood. You heard what the innkeeper called me.”
Little Reaper.
He shakes his head. “You don’t get it, do you? Here, in the wood, we are neither Erybrus’s nor Ithrandril’s. We have a choice. The Reapers, they have a choice too. Ithrandril wants all souls to come to them, but it allows the Reapers to make their choice. Are they for Erybrus or for Ithrandril?”
“But the dead, Bram. The dead are broughthere. And the dead belong to Erybrus.” I am desperate, trying to make sense of all this against the teachings I have grown up with. Father telling me time and time again that I was cursed, death walking, touched by shadow.
“You’ve missed the entire point of this place, Adelaide. People aren’t trapped here because they want to come back to life. We’re trapped here because we’re greedy. We don’t know how to move on into true death. There’s something we feel we’ve been cheated of. Something that holds us to home with fraying ropes.”
Don’t make deals with these people. Bram didn’t tell me just as a warning. He told me because the inhabitants of this place are obsessed. With winning. With beating andcheatinglife.
“But don’t…don’t you want to be brought home, Bram? To be brought back to life? That was our deal….” My voice drops, and I feel punched in the gut. I twist on him, eyes hard. “You tricked me.”
He raises his hands in surrender, a shy smile on his lips. “I did no suchthing. I made a deal to be brought home. I bargained for life, not to cheat death. And I’ve upheld my side thus far, haven’t I?”
What am I even doing here?
What could someone like Bram possibly need from me when I can’t even find my own mother? I have signed away my own father’s life. How can I uphold my end of this wretched deal with Bram?
“I just want to find my mother.” I only realize I’m crying when I reach up to wipe at my cheeks, my hand coming away wet.
Bram looks at me like I am a portrait in a gold frame hung in some museum. Behind rope. Behind glass. Untouchable.
“Don’t.”
“What?” he asks, shrinking back.
“Don’t look at me like I’m something broken.”
“I’m not. I’m—” There, in his eyes, the recognition. “Sorry, let’s…let’s get moving.”
He turns, takes one step, and freezes. The mud slurries around his boot, letting up an awful stink. Rascal whines and nuzzles my leg. I sink my fingers instinctively into his fur.
“Bram, what is it? What’s wrong?”
He holds still, so motionless he might be made of marble. Breath turns to ice in my lungs. Slowly, he turns, one finger pressed against white lips. The sight of it is enough to turn my insides hollow.
“Haunts,” he says. “They’ve found us.”
twenty-one
They rise from the river, dripping shadow, their faces filled with gnashing teeth. In a frenzy, Bram pulls me behind his body, and I do not stop him. Rascal inches out ahead, his lips pulled back in a vicious snarl.
The Haunts move toward us, their arms dragging along, eyes white like the moon. My heart pulses in my fingertips. But it is steady, and I hold my ground, even when the air around us turns sick. I bury my nose against Bram’s shoulder, and his hand slips reassuringly into mine.
One of the Haunts breaks away, traces lines in the mud when it comes toward us. The air grows cold, and I shudder, spine cracking like a twig. The shadow woman—full, gray lips; a prim nose; a face with bones like diamond edges—stops and smiles down at Rascal as if he is a toy. He growls.
“Quiet.” The word drips from her slackened mouth like water.
