It is a relief to say it. To know I am not the killer. That never, in the darkness of my fits, did I lose control. That I was simply becoming what I am. Who I was always meant to be.
A Reaper.
For the first time in so very long, I feel no guilt.
Ransom smiles. A twisted thing that, I realize, is all that still belongs to him. “Your mother was a great teacher, you know.” He pulls something from his pocket. “Even from beyond the grave. She taught my father first. He didn’t mean to call on her. But once it was done, he couldn’t turn down her offer. Eternal life. Neither claimed by shadow nor light. Neither for Ithrandril nor for Erybrus. But making our mark here. Ruling here.”
His eyes glimmer, and he holds the thing from his pocket out in front of him. A flame-shaped locket. My knees go weak. My mother’s locket.
“Where did you—”
“Ah, not important, Adelaide. What is important is that we learned howto communicate with her. Father first, then me as Father grew…ill.” He smiles. “It was easy, really, taking the power. Poison is so easy to distill undetected when you’re learning from the right teacher.”
“You’re a monster,” I spit.
His smile deepens, skin tearing at the seams. He hooks a finger under my jaw. “Oh, Adelaide. I am no monster. I am a miracle.”
Something inside me snaps, something that remembers the rub of rugged ropes, the taste of vinegar on my tongue. I slash a hand across Ransom’s face, my fingers exposing something wet. His hands are at my wrists, searing pain blooming in my shoulders, and he wrenches me around, pulls my back flush against him.
Bram stands in front of us, arms held by two Haunts, their graying, shadowed frames like empty holes where the light can’t shine. Hot panic fills my chest. How have they gotten inside? And then I remember Ransom at my back. His presence has desecrated the place. Turned it unholy.
Bram’s mouth is open wide, as if he is screaming, but there is no sound. He is frozen. The touch of the Haunts so cold, so bitterly unalive, they have sapped any semblance of life left in his bones.
“Now you see, Adelaide, there are two sides to this.” Ransom’s voice is ice in my ear. “The side of life eternal. Ruling this place—ruling all of it, really. Who comes, who goes, who is sent to the fires or light beyond. We would be greater than Reapers. Their kings and queens. Or…you can choose the side of living death.” He grabs my jaw so hard my teeth crack. Points my gaze to Bram. “That is his side, by the way. Your dead man.”
I twist, my muscles aching for release. “You killed girls, Ransom. You and Mother.”
He chuckles, breath like hoarfrost. “Oh, Adelaide. To gain life, other life must be taken. It is a simple rule, and your mother perfected the technique. Passed it on to me through this.” He lifts Mother’s locket. “The dead can speak through objects, Thorn. And your mother was all too willing to carry on her work through another.”
I fight against it, the idea that my mother—Esme Thorn, who kissed my brow at night and sang of gardens and sunlight—murdered women in Rixton. “You’re a liar.”
Ransom’s laugh grows, morphs to something sick. “Adelaide Thorn, the daughter of a Reaper, of death, and a woman who refused to die.”
His words are stones in my belly, ropes around my heart. I sag against him, breath whooshing like poison vapors from my lungs. In the shadows, Rascal’s eyes glint like twin moons. Waiting.
“You know it’s true, don’t you?” Ransom’s voice is a growl in my ear.
Yes, I know. My stomach roils, nausea like a thick film in my mouth.
“That’s how I pieced it all together. The bell, your mother, this place. I followed your father home one night, when he thought he was alone. He walked into the graveyard, and when the shadows hounded him, when the trees curled and parted at his very touch, I knewexactlywhat he was. My father used to say the line between the living and the dead was thin in Rixton. But he didn’t know it was because he had a Reaper preaching holy words to him from the pulpit each Sunday.”
The truth spills along every inch of my bones. It makes sense. My blackened blood. My father hiding me, afraid of what I was becoming. What if that meant I would become as powerful as him? But I push away those thoughts. It does not matter that I am what I am. All my mind focuses on are the dead of Rixton parish. Of life stolen.
“How did you do it?” I ask. “Murder all those girls? Steal their life, their faces?”
“That was the simplest task of all. Just as your mother taught me.” The curve of Ransom’s lips brushes my ear, and his voice drops. “Bitterbloom.”
My chest seizes. A twinge of pain at the base of my skull. No, no. My stomach churns.
And then the souls appear. The first in so many days I can’t remember. There are twelve. Twelve shimmers of cloudy white. The dead women. And they have come to help.
“Rascal!” I scream. “Now!”
The dog pounces before Ransom has a chance to register my words. He sinks his teeth deep into Ransom’s thigh, and I wrench away, reaching for Clara, who has balled herself up on the floor.
The souls—the dead women—brush their wisping hands across the shadows of the Haunts, and those poisoned mouths gape open. TheHaunts scream. My eyes feel as though they are about to pop. Their lips break open, and the muscle and teeth begin to clatter down to the floor.
Bram drops to his hands and knees, life slowly filling him back up. Behind me now, Ransom is screaming. The voices are not his own. They are the girls: Lilith, Dinah, Frances, even Hester. And they have come for vengeance.
