“I—I thought…” Cordelia tried to say when she saw a second figure lean over the railing much higher up. She could make out the slender form of a woman, the pale oval of her face, the shape of her hair tumbling down, the grip of her hand on the smoothmahogany. She raised a finger to ashen lips, bidding Cordelia stay quiet.
Cordelia’s heart shrank, withering like a fig left out in the sun. The whispers she had learned to live with, even prize, using them to her advantage. But the things she’d seen were a different matter. In dark halls and spare closets, curling against the far corners of empty rooms, passing by open doorways. Those were harder to swallow.
Now all those breathless childhood moments came flooding back. The things she didn’t understand that her mother refused to explain.
Close your eyes, Cordelia,her mother would say.Don’t look at them.
But more important,Never,everspeak to them.
“Really, Cordy. I know that picture has you spooked, but the way you’re acting, no one would know you do this for a living. It can’t be the first old, vacant house you’ve been in. Anyway, this floor is clear. Must have been one of the bats,” Eustace teased before stepping away.
Cordelia watched, rooted to the floor, as the woman opened her hideous mouth to speak. But no sound emerged. Her eyes burned with invisible fire as she glared down. Then she wrapped both hands around her throat and squeezed.
A feeling of cold dread washed over Cordelia, her own voice frozen in her throat, lodged like a block of ice. She saw the house with the blue shutters again, the one where the nightmares started, where the woman with the tangled black hair and the brain matter dripping down her shoulder, the off-white bra and panties strapped around her sagging flesh, wandered from room to room. And then the screech sounded outside, the little boy prone in the street, their mother’s latest boyfriend shrieking that it wasn’t his fault. She was five when they came to that house,five when they began to show themselves to her, five when her mother pressed her back against the rough siding of the shed—the one populated with rats and orb weavers and other things formed to frighten little girls—and told her the three rules she must never forget. Don’t look at them. Don’t speak to them. Don’t sing for them.
Bad things will follow. They’ll come for you,she’d threatened if Cordelia forgot, if she broke the rules even once.They’ll take you away.
Cordelia’s eyes had widened then, her fear running down the leg of her overalls to think the ghosts could separate her from her mother and sister, her only comfort in the world.
They’ll drag you back to their hell, Cordelia Bone, and there won’t be a damn thing I can do to stop them.
After that, whenever Maggie caught her daughter with that fixed, faraway look in her eyes, she would raise a finger to her lips in warning, and Cordelia would force herself to blink and look away before bolting for the nearest bathroom.
Now, without her mother there to stop it, Cordelia felt the house and all its fixtures, the world of Bone Hill, pressing in on her in a flood of horror. Unable to scream, she did the only thing she could.
She ran.
SOMETHING INCORDELIA’Schest was collapsing, and she couldn’t breathe. If Maggie had taught her anything, it was this—there were parts of herself that simply couldn’t be trusted. Parts that would be her undoing if she ever looked them in the eye. Behind the shed that day, she’d promised her mother she would never break their rules. And it was a promise she intended to keep. John, for all his faults, had been a boon in that regard. He’d kept everything that didn’t fit—inside and outside of her—at bay.The last five years had been blissfully ordinary. Of course, she’d felt less and less herself with John. But then, wasn’t that what she wanted? To be less Cordelia, less like her mother, less a Bone?
Her head hammered with sudden ferocity as she crashed through a door beneath the stairway into a dining room. There was a table long enough to seat fourteen and a chandelier dripping in crystals. An enormous fireplace with a mirrored mantel ran along one wall, while on another hung portraits of what she could only assume were her own family members.
She didn’t pause to investigate. She circled the table and pushed through to the kitchen, complete with an enamel gas range checkered by more doors than she owned pots to cook in. A back exit caught her eye, and she bolted for it.
If she was seeing them again, seeing themhere,then she knew why Maggie never wanted to come back to this place. This house was like the one with the blue shutters—a place of unrest. Here she would never be free of them, never safe from their clutches and the things inside her they could unleash. She’d kept her promise; she’d pretended not to notice when they staggered past, and she’d moved on as quickly as possible until she found somewhere blessedly vacant of them. Now she’d do what she had to to get Busy’s “associate” his money, because her neck depended on it, but then she’d get the hell out of here. Because after all, one could only pretend for so long.
Cordelia had hoped the door she slammed through would lead outside. Instead, she found herself in an iron-and-glass solarium crowded with overgrown tropicals. Palms did their best to block out the light, raining over her like weeping giants, and everything was sticky with vapor as if she were trapped in a glass-and-iron lung. A moody pond brooded at the solarium’s heart, spotted with lily pads bigger than dinner plates. She half expected that some kind of water-dwelling cryptid lived under its surface, a kelpie or lake monster. It was the kind of superfluousspace only the Victorians could appreciate, and on a normal day, Cordelia might have found it enchanting. But there was nothing normal about this dayorthis house, and she was as revolted by the conservatory as she was pulled to it.
Something burned up and down her nerves. Something deeper, colder than a whisper. It drove her on. She didn’t trust her own vision or voice, didn’t trust the sounds licking at her ears. She didn’t trust the plants crushing in around her, lolling like sick tongues, leering without eyes. Her feet tripped over the cobbled walkway as she slapped at fronds, unsure what waited behind each drooping, oversized leaf and curl of steamy mist, desperate for a way out.
She was just rounding an Elephant Ear palm, hand pressed anxiously against her head, when she slammed into something hard. Her eyes focused on a broad chest and two bulging arms that grabbed for her, gripping her shoulders like beastly paws.
Cordelia screamed.
The man released her, raising his hands in surrender. “Whoa. I was just trying to keep you from falling.”
She flinched and shrunk back. He was the largest man she’d ever been confronted with. Taller than John by half a foot and rippling with muscle, hiding his face behind hanks of wild, black hair. But she couldn’t miss the wide, sculpted brow or proud nose, the way his cheekbones bowed like hammered iron, sweeping down the planes of his face to a perfectly squared jaw. His eyes were dark, flashes of Baltic amber in them, and they hovered over her pitilessly. Like a man from an ancient windswept battlefield or the keep of some nightmarish castle, he seemed to hold the world up with his shoulders. Atlas unleashed. Thunder in a body.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, a mix of fear and magnetism goading her. She was only aware of her tone a beat too late, but grateful her voice had returned.
“Gordon Jablonski,” he told her, defensive. “I live here. I should be asking you that.”
Cordelia felt her temper flare, a hot pulse under her skin, as the pain in her head spiked. She disliked being questioned in her own home, but nearly as soon as she registered the thought, a fresh wave of panic washed over her. Bone Hill was not home, these strange apparitions not her family.
Beneath the anger, a giddy hunger raged, the way she felt right before biting into a hundred-dollar steak. She crossed her arms and tried to steady her voice. “I’m Cordelia Bone—proprietor.” It might have been the only time that having Bone as a last name truly served her.
“The niece,” Gordon replied under his breath.
The way he said it made Cordelia feel judged, as if there were something distasteful in the way she handled the role. It stung with unexpected rejection. “Pardon?”
