Father is prostrate before us, shadow gushing from the meat of his leg, trousers shredded. Roots and leaves and petals sprout from his skin.
Rascal hurries to my side, dark fabric and pale muscle threading his teeth.
“You are a fool.” Father struggles to his feet, darkness still dripping from his shoulders like torn wings. “That bell is broken, Adelaide. You’ll need me before the end.”
With grit between my teeth, I stagger backward. He disappears in a cloud of dark mist.
Clara is beside me, clearing the dirt from my cheeks, but I hardly make out her face. My vision swims, lines and colors turning to haze.
“Addie?” Her voice is soft, fingers now on my shoulders, shaking me. “Addie, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
Nausea roils in my gut, and my body wrenches back to the earth, emptying my stomach into the wet leaves. Clara strokes my hair.
“Is he gone?” I ask, my voice like sandpaper in my throat.
Clara nods. “Did you kill him?”
I lift my head toward the sky, where the moon hangs heavy and white. “No, I think I would feel differently if I had. What happened?” My tongue is slow and sluggish in my mouth.
“I thought you were dead, is what happened,” Clara says. “As soon as he wrapped you up in all that shadow, Rascal started whining, pawing at the stuff, but he couldn’t get through it. And then all of a sudden, the smell in the woods changed from mold to spring flowers, and those vines were everywhere.” She points to the remainder of a root system of little white blooms.
I drag myself over to it, not caring when my gown catches on twigs and tears. The petals are soft between my fingers, my touch bringing them back from gray.
“How can you do that?”
I look down at my shaking hands, trying to clear my mind. “I don’t know.”
My father is Death, a Reaper. As am I.
And my mother, her obsession with living turned to something else. Rotted into a desire to wear the skin of dead women and live forever. So, what does that make me?
I think of the rabbit, the rat, their hearts still and then pulsing at the touch of my finger. Of the flowers behind the vicarage, dead as Bram when he held them, but alive when I took them. And then Bram himself. Dear, good Bram who saw his heart wounds mirrored in my own. The woman whose own mother killed him when he saw too much and chose love anyway.
Gods below and above,Bram.
I choke on his name, look back at the wilting petals strewn about the red leaves. Snow against blood. One, a fool. Two, a thief. Three, a thing of contrasts. Death and life. Light and darkness. Brother-gods warring in my veins.
I want you to kill Vicar Thorn.
I have signed my name on too many lines, sold my soul to countless devils. And now Bram is gone, split open by a man I thought I knew and a mother I only wanted to love.
But I know nothing of love, not truly. Only what I have made of it. Only Bram. And whatever I am—monster or devil or demon—I must get him back. He is the only way for me to save my soul.
I turn back to Clara, Rascal beside her, but the look in her eyes stops my words.
“Clara, what’s wrong?”
Her fingers sink into the damp earth, pulling brass shards from the dirt. She holds them up, lets them catch in the moonlight, and my heart thrums at the hollow of my throat.
“The bell,” she whispers. “It’s broken.”
twenty-eight
My mother used to tell me stories of brave women. Women who were not afraid, who stared into the many faces of danger and laughed. But then she went wrong, stitching together skin that was not her own to make what, some paltry excuse for life? To rule a land stuck in between living and dying? A place where souls wander aimless, making deals, collecting on debts?
Esme Thorn is not the hero I thought she was, nor the mother I needed.
I look up at Clara, at the way she holds what is left of the bell, as if it were the last ticket home and the coach has already left the village. In a way, that is exactly what this is. My heart shudders, and I lift a finger to my throat, terrified of what I will find. All the stillness. But it rises to meet me, a single word thudding against my skin like a curse.
