Clara appears ready to knock Bram to the floor when she notices Rascal. She freezes. “Is that…that’s ahellhound.”
I whistle, and Rascal bounds across the room, burying his nose against my skirts. Clara gasps and backs away, but I am already down on my knees, scratching the hound behind his ears. He bays, licks my face, and gazes expectantly at Clara.
“His bark is worse than his bite,” I say, standing. “He’s really no harm at all, unless you’re one of the Haunts or…” My voice trails off.
Or my mother. My murderous mother.
A thought rises inside me, and the wind howls around the steeple of the tumble-down church.
“Clara, how did you get here?”
She is still staring between Bram and Rascal, trying to piece it together. A puzzle with too many razor points. “I don’t know, really. I’d been following Lord Black, I suppose. He’d been in Father’s bakery the day before, acting strange. Asking after Liza, about our plans regarding the future, marriage.” She hugs her arms around her chest, shivers in the chill of the room. “I didn’t think much of it until the next day, when I saw him coming from the graveyard behind the church, carrying something—a bag, I think. He saw me and grinned.”
She grabs my hand, pulls me so close I can smell the yeast and sugar still clinging to her clothes.
“It was awful, Addie. A thing of nightmares, really. All stretched and patched skin. And his teeth were so white they might have been made from glass.” Her body shudders beneath me.
The description plunges me into a panic. “What do you mean, his skin was stretched and patched?”
There are tears in her eyes, glinting off the fire glow. Bram, behind us, mutters and cuts at something with a knife. The scent of iron slips past my nose, and I bite back a gag.
Clara’s eyes shine. “Like he was a quilt. Made up from pieces all stitched together. But the stitching was crude, done with too big and dull a needle.Blood had dried in the cracks between the pieces, and something was dripping from that bag. Something that smelled like…” She sniffs the air. “Like whatever it is I’m smelling now.”
Blood.
I turn to the fire where Bram still crouches, the flames reflecting in something wet on his hands. “Stay here a moment,” I say to Clara.
She nods, pulls her knees up to her chest.
Bram doesn’t look up when I approach, but I see what it is he is holding. A rat, its tail long and fleshy pink. There is a slit in its belly, viscera spilling out in oily tangles.
“It was near the fire when we came in,” he says, one finger slipping through the meat. “Took it as I sign, I suppose. Did the only thing I could think of.”
My stomach swills, but I bend down anyway. The thick tang of fresh blood fills my nose.
“And what do you see in all the mess?”
For a moment, Bram doesn’t look up. He sweeps a finger through the guts, making patterns and swirls in the red. I recognize the lungs, the pink lump of stomach, the stilled heart, and lean forward to take it in my hands. Maybe what happened with the rabbit heart was a fluke. A cruel trick of my eyes. Something that shouldn’t have happened.
But the bitterbloom. The touch of my hand.A remembrance of life.
A hot pressure starts behind my eyes, a tightening in my chest that makes me want to drop the thing, go back to Clara, take her home.
And then—a gentle thud.
My breath quickens.
“Bram, are you seeing this?” I don’t look up at him, just keep my gaze fixed on the beating organ.
“Gods below and above.” His voice is a whisper at my ear.
The heart contracts in my palm, like organ bellows. And then the blood on the floor begins to move. It creeps like a creature, sucking up each drop spilled, each organ ripped from the cavity of the rat. It crawls between Bram’s swift cut until all that is left is the heart in my hand.
With fingers shaking, I place the heart near the corpse. Still beating, itinches its way across the floor until it too disappears between the bones and sinew. Bram and I fall away, the bell clattering in my pocket.
Slowly, the slit in the rat’s stomach sews itself back together, fur fusing. My stomach wretches. My hands burn when the thing moves to its feet, eyes glinting in the light of the fire. It bares wicked fangs at Bram, and Rascal bays.
“Adelaide, what’s happening? What’s wrong?”
