“Aunt Augusta’s top-secret Christmas cookies?” Cordelia joked.
Eustace smirked. “Decoding this book is the key to understanding what kind of witches we are, what our family was doing when Mom left to drive her away, and what made her so sick and vulnerable. This is how we help you, Cordy. I know it is.”
Cordelia stared at the markings on the page, alien and alluring, hungry to understand them and also afraid.
“I also figured out a couple of other things last night,” Eustace told her, closing the book. “Those teeth we found? They’re rune stones, an ancient practice of divination. You would throw themor drop them and read the future in the design. Usually, they were made out of wood or rock. Ours are just more gross.”
Cordelia winced.
“And our family name,” Eustace went on. “The Viking thing got me thinking, so I started digging online. Miraculously, the WiFi held up. I wanted to find out ifBonewas British or Nordic, but it came up as Old French. Possibly from the wordbon,which meansgood,” Eustace told her. “Also, I looked up that motto, which is in Latin.”
“A British American family with a French name in a Victorian house who writes in Nordic runes and has a Latin motto. We are so much weirder than I realized.” Cordelia hung her head. “What does the motto mean?”
“It’s creepy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She bit her lower lip. “Silent in life, vocal in death.”
The words passed through Cordelia, kicking up something she had tried for years to keep down. A current of understanding wound its way around her mind. The necromancy thread brought up a moment ago tightened like a garrote.
“You have that look on your face you used to get whenever you did math homework,” Eustace said, getting up to pull a tray of dough from the fridge.
Cordelia stood, pacing the kitchen. She’d divulged so much already—and this was Eustace, after all—but her last secret was also her darkest. The hardest to explain. Where did she begin? She’d been harboring it since childhood.Of course,she thought. She knew where to begin.The house with the blue shutters.“Do you remember the house on Rocket Street?”
Eustace peered up at the ceiling, thinking. “You had the worst nightmares at that place.”
It was the first house where Cordelia really remembered the whispers. Long nights lying awake waiting for them to stop, only to fall asleep and hear them in her dreams. But it wasn’t just therooms or the beams or the floorboards that were speaking to her there. She’d always kept them to herself growing up, the ones who didn’t belong. Once, it was her only secret from Eustace. “I saw someone there—a woman. She terrified me. It was the same day Kenny T. hit that little boy on the bike out front of our house. I thought I was the only one who saw her, but…” Cordelia looked at Eustace, who was brushing egg whites over her dough.
Eustace paused, waiting for her to finish.
“Then I saw Mom.Watchingher.” Cordelia swallowed. “That’s when I knew she could see them too.”
“Them?”Eustace laid her pastry brush down. “Cordy, what are you telling me?”
Cordelia suddenly understood. It wasn’t the woman or the whispers that were haunting her. It wasn’t the shadows that walked or the Rocket Street house or the things she heard when a room was silent that made her feel so petrified. It was their mother. Maggie was what scared Cordelia most. Deep down, Maggie was the reason Cordelia couldn’t sleep at night. She closed her eyes, rabbit heart sprinting. “That night, she took me behind the shed out back,” Cordelia said, remembering.
Eustace stared at her, dumbfounded. “Where the rats lived?”
“That’s when she gave me the rules.”
“Rules?” Eustace looked lost. “Honey, what are you talking about?”
Cordelia forced her eyes open, met her sister’s wide gaze. “There are three rules when the people who shouldn’t be there show up: Don’t look at them, don’t speak to them, and don’t sing for them. She always emphasized that last one.Never sing for them, Cordelia,she would say.Never sing, period.”
Her sister gaped. “Why have you never told me this?”
“Because you didn’t see them like we did,” Cordelia told her honestly. “And she said it had to be our secret.”
Eustace sucked in air. She slipped her dough into the oven.“Is that where the singing thing came from? Her hatred of all things musical? From this…visionyou both had?”
Cordelia shrugged, leaning back against the counter for support. “I don’t know. She never told me why the rules were what they were. Never made sense out of any of it, but I have my suspicions. I think engaging with them activates something, changes the energy between us and them. Draws them in. I think it gives them power.”
Her sister swallowed. “Or us.”
“I don’t know,” Cordelia told her. “I just remember feeling so ashamed. Like Ibroughtthem there. Like it was my fault.”
Eustace brushed Cordelia’s cheek, a flash of anger crossing her face. “Mom was batshit.”
“No. That’s just it,” Cordelia said. “I don’t think Mom was crazy. I think she was scared. I just didn’t understand it then.” She looked at her sister. “The motto—think about it, Eustace.Silent in life.That’s what she made me be.”
“Andvocal in death?”
