Fo-ol, fo-ol, fo-ol.
“I’m so sorry, Clara.” My words are pale and empty things, and the look on her face tells me so.
She will never return home, never marry Liza, never move to the Queen’s city and open a bakery with the one she loves. Will we die here? Cursed to stay in this unholy land until we turn to Haunts, our arms dragging long behind our bodies, sent by my mother to do her bidding?
And what of Ransom? My stomach clenches at the thought of him. The women he unburied from the churchyard, left their bodies to rot in therefuse around Blackbourne Castle. He deserves his fate here, to waste away until the skin sloughs off his face and all he is left with are bones and teeth.
And Bram. Something warm grows at my center and spreads, thins to ice when it reaches my fingers and toes. Perhaps he is already dead.Fullydead. I saw it happen. His own heart ripped from his ashen chest.
Can you die in the land of the dead? Father used to speak of two deaths: death of sin, death of bone. But can one die if one has no sin? Because why else would Ithrandril create a thing as beautiful as Bram Avery, if only to watch it become corrupt?
Clara’s hand on my face pulls me from my darkening thoughts. “Whatever do you have to be sorry for?”
I stare at her as though she is a mirror, showing me all the shadowed parts of myself. A daughter of so much death.
“This is my fault. Whatever—whatever I did with the flowers, they must have broken it. Shredded the ribbon into nothing. And now—now—” It hits me like a tidal wave, the emotion. Tears break from my eyes, and what else is there to do?
Clara’s arms wrap my shoulders, and Rascal paws my knee.
“We’re all going to die here, you know?” Saliva strings my lips. There is silence, a breaking through the trees.
Clara stirs, lifts my gaze to meet hers. Eyes like stone.
“No. We arenotgoing to die here, Adelaide Thorn. I have waited too long for this, too long for us to be friends again. I will not allow some trivial thing like Death stand in our way.”
I blink stupidly. “Death is not a trivial thing. He’s my bloody father!”
Clara brushes a sweaty strand of hair from my face. “The only things that hold any power in this world are things we give that power to. If your parents are Death, if a Reaper has been wearing a vicar’s robe in Rixton all these years, it’s because we gave him the power to do so. So, now, we take the power back.”
“And how do we do that?” I ask.
Clara points to the remains of the bitterbloom flowers. “That, right there. That’s where we start. Whatever you did there is how we take the it all back.”
I stare down at the little blooms, each a reminder of what my motherdid. How she plucked the plant by the light of the moon, when no one in Rixton could see and accuse her of being a witch. But Esme Thorn is no witch. She is something else. I close my eyes when pain eddies at the base of my skull, tiny pinpricks growing to dull, aching throbs.
“Addie.”
I shake my head, tired of this. Tired of the monsters, the ghosts in the rowan wood, the way my heart grips my chest like an iron fist. My father was wrong about one thing, though. Whatever this is, this sickness, it does not make me weak.
If anything, it has made me stronger.
I snap my eyes open and take the pieces of the bell from Clara. In my hand, they thrum, the metal almost too cold to touch. It will never be truly whole, not after the brass has shattered, but neither will I. There will always be pieces missing. Things that should have been that weren’t.
Years of love, parents who cared, friends who weren’t lost. But that is anyone’s life, is it not? A span of time with a few broken and missing pieces along the way. And though I am not whole, I decide which pieces are forever broken and which I will remake, reforge.
There is a flicker of something in the trees, a catch of white smoke.
The look in Clara’s eyes tells me she cannot see the ghost, so I try not to smile when I catch its face. Frances Gordon, who gave me extra sweets at church, came for tea to the vicarage one too many times, and died with the taste of bitter lemon in her mouth.
Another one, Daphne Wates, hovers above the red leaves, a twinkle in her chocolate eyes. She was one of Ransom’s, the girl before Lilith Corley.
And then Hester herself. I almost choke on a sob when she drifts down to me and places a hand on my cheek.
“Addie.” Clara’s voice shakes, and her eyes whip through the trees. “Something feels cold.”
I do not take my eyes from Hester. “It’s Hester, Clara. She’s with us. All of them are.”
They are like bees flocking to nectar. Young women I knew, those I didn’t. They circle around us. The pain is gone, replaced by something like warmth. The same flames that ravaged my body when Bram tried so desperately to say those three little words.
