“And that makes her yours, then?” Ransom’s voice is thick with greed.
Bram positions himself in front of me, his face hard, determined. “She is her own, you fool.”
Ransom’s face cracks, the illusion of beauty weeping away, like the painted portraits in his home. Rivulets of something like ink spread across his cheeks, down his neck, along his hands. I open my mouth to scream, but Bram’s hand covers the sound.
He moves an arm tight around my middle, drags me up a step with him.
“Ransom, I said—”
“Oh, I heard what you said, dead man. I heardexactlywhat you said.”
The voice that breaks from Ransom’s lips is not his own. It is, and yet, it isn’t. It is the sound of a hundred, thousand voices, and when I lift my eyes from him, I see why.
The ballroom has gone still, every dancing dead thing now like stone. Their faces are turned to us, repeating the same words Ransom says, their features flooding with shadowed rot. And beyond them…
No, no, no.
I scramble with Bram’s cuff, sobs ripping at the back of my throat. He drags us further up the steps. Up, up, up. Away.
Beyond the dead things, my mother stands at the far doors, her arms raised, blackened roots swarming her body like marionette strings. Except, she is notbeingcontrolled. She is the onecontrolling.
Every word is her own. Every movement the dead things perform,sheis making. My head swims, becomes as light as air. Ransom’s legs and arms jerk in swinging motions, and he takes to the stairs, his head cocked at a wrong angle, eyes lolling.
I open my mouth to cry out, to tell her to stop, to just let him go, but all I taste is the salty sweetness of Bram’s hand.
“Adelaide, look.” His voice is a hot whisper at my ear. “Look at your mother.”
What is there to see but the rotten vines, the bleeding skin? But he whispers it again. Over and over until I do as he says.
And my stomach falls to the depths of my toes.
For Mother is not Mother. Not anymore. Her face—her body—is made up from things that are not hers. A patchwork of stolen features held together by black string. My knees buckle. Bram’s hands come to catch me.
The pages of her journal sitting on my bed at home…The sketches of what I thought were merely catches of fabric, bits of thread. A body to live in forever. Made from…
The truth settles over my skin like a film. Sickly and bitter. The tang of lemons in my mouth. The bitterbloom. The dead girls buried in the churchyard. My mother coming in late from the garden shed, smelling of freshly scrubbed skin, the upturn of soil, red sap still dripping from beneath her fingernails.
The poison.
A murderer stitching together the skin of dead girls to make herself an immortal body. To become a god.
“We need to leave.” Bram’s voice is a rushed breath at my ear. “Now.”
I nod, barely able to tear my eyes from my mother. But she isn’t Mother anymore, is she? She is something else. A monster. Not Lady Black. She only used that name here to draw us in, like a fly to a spider’s web. No. She is something else now.
Lady Death.
I find my feet, pulling out of Bram’s arms while he pushes me toward the door. Rascal comes around a corner, mouth open, baying. The sound sends my hair on end, prickles my skin. His eyes are red as blood, and his snarl is wicked.
Everyone stills. Even Ransom, halting like a porcelain doll on the stairs.
I grapple with my skirts, searching for the bell—I must not lose it. It greets my hand with its cold brass sting, and my lungs find air again. Mother is screaming something, something that sounds of blood and anger. I stare at her open mouth, watch the shadows run from it, each one turning, morphing into…
Haunts.
Three of them. The ones who took us from the river. They rise from the tendrils of darkness eking from Mother’s lips, arms dragging, teeth gnashing.
Bram’s hand tightens at my waist again, the catch of fear in the air.
