Myfear.
“Adelaide, we must go! Now!” Bram’s screams ring in my ears.
And then we are running. Through the doors and out into the blood-soaked night.
twenty-five
It is not the cold that stops us; it is the color. White, lemon yellow, glimpses of red seeping from roots. I sag against Bram, his hand firm at my side. The bitterbloom by the ruined wall of the vicarage wink their wicked faces at me, reminding me what I have lost.
What once was will never be again.
The remembrance of life.
I pull away from Bram, Rascal quick on my heels, and perch on the crumbling wall. “Have we lost them?”
Bram turns back, searches the sky beyond. “I don’t think they were ever chasing us to begin with.”
My feet burn, each spark of pain a blister. I gather my skirts and lift them to examine my skin. It flares a sickly orange-pink trimmed in the black of my blood, flesh slipping where my shoes have rubbed to the bone. I toss a boot to the ground, drag a finger along one heel. The pain swells, shoots up my leg like venom.
“Here,” Bram says gently. “Let me help you with that.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I snarl, all my sharp edges showing. While I should retract them, tell him I am sorry, Bram is the safest place I know, and so I bite. “Haven’t you done enough already?”
Betrayal winks in his eyes, and a twisted laugh cracks from my lips.
“What do you mean?” His voice is soft. He crouches low, his hand reaching for my knee.
Anger boils inside me, seeping between my bones like black tea. “It’s your fault I’m here! It’s your fault Ransom is…is whatever the hell he is! It’s your fault that—that—” My voice melts into tears, and I am on the ground beside him, weeping in the dead grass.
His hand comes to cup my jaw, brush my hair, and I do nothing to stop him. There on the ground, I am nothing more than a shell. A corpse of the girl I once was. The one who held her mother’s hand and ran wild through the wheat and rye fields. Who watched her parents embrace when they walked through the village. The girl who used to laugh at the stars because they were so small and she was so big.
Now I am nothing but blackened blood.
Bram’s hand is steady at my back, helping me sit up slowly. When I stare down at my hands, the bell lolls in my palms. I must have reached for it. Just to feel its solidity. My chest stings.
I study the engravings on the brass. The skull and crossbones. The wilting flowers. It is such a little thing to cause so much toil and pain. So much loss. And what can it really do? Open the doors to this purgatory?
It can restore someone to life, yes, but it also is held by hands who collect souls and morph them until they are nothing more than whatever it is Ransom has become.
Do not make deals with these people.
Bram leads me inside the crumbling walls of the vicarage and stops when we reach where the kitchen should be.
“What is it?” My eyes are still trained on the bell.
“Do you remember leaving a fire going in the church when we left?”
Tears roll down my cheeks when I look up. Smoke belches black from the cracking steeple.
“No.”
My fingers itch with anxiety, and I wring them against the bell. But the darkness is beginning to swarm. I tuck it away between its wrappings. Hidden. Secret and safe. Bram’s eyes are on the church, the curl of black smoke.
“Stay here,” he says.
But I am not a dog, and even Rascal is giving him a look that says, “Over our dead bodies.”
“I’m coming with you.”
