“I said, do not fucking touch me.” I rip the mask from my face, throwing it to the stone floor where the icicles shatter.
His grin widens when he steps closer, the wood of the banister digging into my spine. “You should join your mother, Adelaide. Let her use the bell. The things she offers.” He looks down at his hand, spreads his fingers before looking at me with eyes that could be made of fire. “We could live forever. Your mother found a way, showedmethe way—”
“What…what do you mean, showed you the way?” I pull away from him, stumbling.
His grin ekes out the corners of his lips, like someone has cut him. “Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand? Eternal life.Vita aeterna. An everlasting circle. Blessed by Erybrus. No more worries, no more rot, no more trouble. Here, he would make us kings.”
An everlasting circle.I recall the snakes drawn on the molding walls of Blackbourne Castle, the sign of Erybrus, the Devil. I close my eyes and see only red. The red of natural blood, the red of the unnatural sky, the red sap of Mother’s bitterbloom vines.
The remembrance of life.Bones half buried in dirt.
I should know what it means, but my mind is a fogged window. Ransom is so close now I smell the scent of him.Lemons. I choke.
Hands thrashing, I push him out of the way and scramble up the stairs. I take in the ballroom around me, all the dancing dead. Is this what we will all become, shades of our former selves, waiting in this purgatory until we align with the light or the shadow? I look at Ransom, and there, in the pits of his eyes, I see it.
The truth.
He has already sold his soul.
My chest cracks in half, hands grappling for the banister, anything to steady myself on. His eyes catch mine. He recognizes the knowing and smiles. All teeth and rotten tongue.
“What have you done?” The words are weak when they leave my mouth, fear shimmering on the surface of my skin like sweat.
The floor beneath me shudders with each step forward he takes, closing the space between us. “I have joined her, Adelaide. I have joined the side of eternal life. And don’t you want it too? We could be king and queen of this place, you and me. What I would give to see you enthroned, wrapped in shadow.”
I shake my head, claws hollowing out pits in my stomach. “This is a half-world, Ransom. You and I, we wouldn’t be ourselves. We’d be bitter, broken, dead things bent on making deals and … and cheating death. We would belong to Erybrus.”
There. Just there. Behind the darkened eyes, I find the man I met in the garden beneath the moon. Thetruemoon. The man who was broken, who held pieces of his heart in his palm and asked me to fit him back together. I lunge for him, taking his hand in mine.
“Ransom, what about your mother? Don’t you want to find her, bring her home?”
For a moment, a light dawns on his face, and then it vanishes. Something akin to greed—thathunger—swathes his face like moonshine. His hand crushes mine, and when I look at his lips, his teeth hang in cracked and bleeding gums.
This is no longer Ransom Black.
This is a monster. Atruemonster.
“My mother is already claimed. Ithrandril took her the day she was brought here. Righteous and pure and for the light. I watched my father kill her. After he pulled off her face, took the skin to build a body, I brewed poison from the bitterbloom in my garden, slipped it into his tea every day, and watched as it carved away his life until there was none of it left. And then, I did the same. Took his skin and the skin of others. Over and over and over again.”
My breath shudders, stomach dropping to the soles of my feet. The scent of upturned soil. The catch of slurried fruit baking in the sun. My knees cave, and the floor rises to meet me. One hand slips to the bell, the cracks familiar, grounding.
“You’re…you’re not making any sense. You didn’t—you couldn’t. This isn’t you talking, Ransom. It’s something—”
“It has always been me, Adelaide Thorn.” His face is inches from mine, the scent of his breath like apples rotting on the branch. “I only picked up where she left off.”
Wheresheleft off. Not his mother. But someone else.Someone.
My stomach swills, and I am sure I will empty whatever lies there out onto the stairs.
Another hand at my back.
Solid. Cold. Dependable.
Bram.
He lifts me to my feet, steadies a hand at my waist. The scent of ink-stained pages, dry leaves. I sag against him.
“Leave her alone, Ransom. She isn’t yours.”
