Cordelia put a hand to her neck. That would explain the burn she sensed there—the shredding of her vocal cords.
“That’s not all you were doing,” he told her. “You were kind of—well, you were—” he tried. Finally, he got it out. “Levitating. You were suspended above the ground.”
Cordelia looked up at him, barely comprehending, the photo they had found of her grandmother suddenly making its own kind of sense. “I was what?” She looked around, searching for the blue dress, the white hair. “Is she still here?”
“Who?” he asked.
Cordelia tried to get to her feet.
“Careful,” he told her, helping her up, steadying her with his big arms.
“Did you see her?” she asked now, turning in a circle. But Hella was not there, and with her had gone the mountains and trees, that vast cerulean sky, the gleaming coastline.
“There was no one else.” He looked at her softly, but Cordelia brushed off his concern.
“I wasn’t up here alone. I was with someone. Her name is Hella. She’s our—our ancestor. She was right here.”
Gordon gave her a worrying glance. “Maybe you should sit back down,” he said. “I think the fall must have confused you.”
“What fall?” Cordelia asked, turning to face him.
His mouth tightened. “When I got up here, you were lying on the ground. I figured you must have dropped while I was climbing. I was afraid you hit your head. You could have a concussion,” he tried to tell her.
“I’m fine,” Cordelia snapped. “I just need to find her. She said to call when it was time, but I don’t know what she means. She said we had one root but two branches, and that someone must be felled. She said they need my blood to shed another’s. She couldn’t mean the baby, so she must have meant Eustace. But that can’t be right. She said she could save Eustace.”
Beside her, Gordon’s beautiful mouth went slack, his eyes wide like a spooked horse’s. “Baby?” he whispered. “I think we should call Dr. Mabee.”
But Cordelia ignored him, flailing and twisting to break his grasp. “I don’t need a doctor,” she said. “I need to find her!” Her eyes widened with realization. “And I think I know where she is.”
Gordon tried to grab her, but Cordelia dodged him, starting down the hillside, half on her knees and half on her feet, much the way she’d come up. Gordon followed quickly, springing down as if he were part goat.
At the bottom, Cordelia bolted into the crypt, aiming for the back wall. She began to press and knock on the stones all around the bloody handprint, grabbing at corners to try to pry them loose.
“Cordelia,” Gordon said, coming up behind her and grabbing her hands with his. “What are you doing? Let me help you!”
She stopped fighting and spun on him. “You want to help me?”
He stepped back. “Please.”
“Then go get a crowbar and anything else you can think of. We’re taking this wall down,” she insisted.
He stood there a moment before nodding his consent. “Okay. I’ll be right back. Just… stay here.”
Several long minutes later, he came thundering back in with a crowbar in one hand and a pickaxe in the other. “Stand back,” he told her as he approached the wall, swinging hard and hitting deep between the stones. “I’ll loosen them and then you can pry them out.”
They worked like that, side by side, until they’d managed to create a four-by-four-foot hole.
“Give me your phone,” Cordelia told him as she tried to see inside.
He handed it to her, switching on the flashlight app as he passed it along.
When Cordelia shone the bright light through the hole they’d made, it streamed down a narrow corridor and a steep set of stone stairs. She started down. Near the bottom, the light sparked off a dozen surfaces, butter-white and smooth as alabaster. Cordelia found herself in a small room, shaped like a beehive—a cavity within the hill beyond the crypt itself. Every wall and surface was lined with human bones arranged to create elaborate designs, like a tiny chapel of death. Skulls stacked on skulls rose above them in sinister pillars. Femurs and humeri were piled like logs. Metatarsals and phalanges were pressed into thick mud, dried like spackle, in a circling pattern overhead. Many had been carved with runes.
Gordon entered behind her, brushing dust from his hair as he looked around. “Holy Bologna,” he said, taking it in.
The center of the tableau was a skeleton in the middle of the room. She sat on a stool of oiled wood, with a low back and a wide base, a tattered but colorful cloth cast over it. A series of runes and swirls were carved around the edges. Her garment of pristine blue, rimmed in ruby trim, had not faded much despite its countless years. Even the fur lining of her cloak, though spare, still sported soft tufts. Strands of ash-white hair hung from patches of desiccated scalp still clinging to her skull. Her hands lay in her lap, near the brass-decorated staff leaning against her, a little crooked toward the top where it split apart into three branches. Every detail had been carefully arranged, perfectly preserved. From her hide pouches to her strands of glass beads. Every tiny thing in place. Except…
“Look,” Cordelia said, pointing. “Her teeth. They’re missing.” All but a few of the woman’s teeth had been pulled. And Cordelia knew why. To create the runes they’d found in the basement. Hella of the Bones was indeed still speaking for the dead.
