“IfI use it, if I ring the bell and bring Bram back home, I will become a Reaper, and you’ll what…die?”
Father stiffens. “I thought I was keeping you safe. When I abandoned the bell at the bank of the river, I thought that was the end. But then your mother…I heard every girl screaming, begging for me to help them cross over.” His visage twists, pain growing in his eyes. “That is what a Reaperdoes, Addie. And it is the last thing I want for you. If you give me the bell, I can convince your mother to let it go. We can stay a family. Here, in the rowan wood.”
Family. My heart aches, pinches in my chest. I bite my tongue and shake my head.
No. I will not belong to a dead family. And we have been dead for so very long.
“I am not giving it to you.” I set my jaw, hard and firm.
Father’s face clouds, the shadows around deepening until all I can make out are the citrine glow of his eyes. A monster in the wood.
“Do not defy your father, Adelaide.”
I grit my teeth, clasp the bell. “I should have defied you from the beginning. I should have climbed from that window in the garden shed years ago. You’re a monster.”
He stretches tall, growing like a silhouette in a broken mirror. His face turns gray, handsome and terrifying at the same time. As if he can see to my very soul and know what it is made of. But I hold my ground.
“That’s where she did it, you know.” His voice is poison sap dripping from a tree. A weeping wound. “That’s where she cut the girls to pieces, chose their best parts to build herself an everlasting body.”
I almost choke on his words when they slip around my throat like a noose. A brick covered in blood, black thread amongst bitterbloom and oleander seeds, goatskin gloves stained, smelling of earth and iron. Mother’s journal speaking of ways to create an everlasting body. My stomach turns sick, claws sinking into my flesh and peeling back the folds. I clutch the bell so tight the brass starts slipping.
“You locked me in there on purpose, to face the sins of my mother, even though I knew nothing of them.”
A smile slips against the darkness. Each tooth polished and sharp. Father’s laugh ripples through the swirling shadow. “We are all the sins of our parents, Adelaide. Some just have more than others.”
The sins of our parents. My knees knock together, and I almost yearn for the taste of dirt in my mouth. The release of death. But then something breaks through the cloud in my mind.
Bram’s soft hands, caring for living and dead alike. The way he held me in the vestry, worshiped me like wine on an altar. I take the bell from my pocket, and shock spreads hot fingers across my chest.
It is glowing. Like fire without the burn. It lights the space between me and Death, and I see him here for what he is.
Nothing but a corpse. Gray and rotted skin hanging in dry folds. Broken horns curve from his head, and his smile is made from lips like burst pustules.
“There you are,” I whisper.
Death steps toward me, the scent of him no longer pine needles and sage, but turbid fruit, a carcass left over from the hunt. Sick rises in my throat, but I swallow it down. Hold the bell aloft.
“You cannot use it for what you want.” His voice is like metal in my ears. “The bell is broken.”
In the near-blinding light, veins crack along the brass. I clutch it to my breast, some sort of absurd self-preservation.
“You’re a liar,” I hiss, holding it tighter. “I will never give you the bell.”
“I am so sorry, but you have already lost.” Death steps closer, the moon like a halo behind his crooked horns, as if it has been pinned there. When I concentrate on him, on the shifting blackness, white bones seem to throb beneath his skin. Beat an unsteady rhythm.
My arm tenses. Something akin to pain. I grind my jaw, take a step back until Clara’s warmth blossoms at my spine.
“You could have stopped them both. Mother and Ransom. You knew what they were doing, what they were trying to accomplish, and you just sat by and let them.”
All the faces flash before my eyes. So many dead girls. And Bram, the man who saw what he shouldn’t.
“She wasn’t mine to stop.” Death’s voice is a shadow now, a mere leaking of words between dry lips.
My arm trembles with pain, and I clutch the bell fiercely. “She wasonlyyours to stop.”
Death opens his mouth to speak, but it is Clara’s voice that filters through the trees. “Addie, your arm. Look at your arm.”
My hands are suddenly numb and shaking, a keening sound whistling inmy ears. Something sizzles hot in my veins, the same heat that shook me when I touched the bitterbloom behind the ruined vicarage.
