“It won’t come off until the oath is fulfilled,” her sister told her. “The only question now is, do they want revengefromyou oronyou.”
“How do I do that?” Cordelia pressed, rubbing at her skin around the band. She wanted it off more than ever. “Fulfill the oath?”
Eustace looked at her with tired eyes. “I wish I knew. But you had better find out. Maybe it’s time you start talking to ghosts,” she said flatly.
“Onpurpose?” Cordelia couldn’t believe what her sister was saying. After her confession about the blue house, the fear she admitted to, the trauma, the destructive tendencies of her power. “That’s what got me into this mess!”
Her sister stood, looming over her. “If our abilities have gotten us into this mess,” she said with some vexation, “then they’re all that can get us out. Don’t you get it, Cordy? This is a message. They’retalkingto you. They’re trying to tell us something. Who is the revenge on, and why? Maybe if we knew that, we would know what happened to Mom and what’s happening now. We need their help, sister. It’s time for you to start asking questions.”
“I don’t know how,” Cordelia admitted, small, weak, lostbehind the shed. “I’m not like you, Eustace. I don’t know how to use my power.”
Her sister smiled. “You’re not a little girl anymore, Cordelia. Channeling your power is easy—just stop following all of Mom’s rules.” She leaned over and looked her full in the face. “Start breaking them instead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONETHEVISITOR
CORDELIA SUNK INTOdespair. Despite the money they stood to inherit, the knowing she could save herself and her neighbor, she felt defeated. She skulked around the pink room, rarely leaving it, scratching at her wrist, tearing at the bracelet that wouldn’t come off despite her efforts. She stopped eating all but a few bites a day, believing if she shed enough weight, the heavy silver would slip over her bones, freeing her. She became the prisoner she believed herself to be, paranoid and holding on to her last shred of control by refusing to leave the room. And her head pounded all the while, a deafening, incessant throb like a mallet with the force to split granite, her pills impotent against it. Her financial situation had turned around, but she was still running out of time.
The end hovered in her periphery.
She could not do what her sister was asking. She simplycould not.She knew her sister was right—they needed to know more about the bracelet, whatrevengeand why? They needed answers, answers they weren’t finding on their own. But trying to conjure her abilities would be courting the dead, unleashing mayhem. It would be tantamount to opening a door inside that she could never close again. A door filled with all manner of dark,unspeakable things. A door she had been warned to never,everopen.
It took three days to work up the nerve. Three days of skull-crunching pain before Cordelia couldn’t take the beat of her own heart and the joyless pink walls like a washed Cabernet stain, the doom filling her mind. Three days before she wandered down to the solarium, her sister’s words clapping in her ears like gongs.Stop following all of Mom’s rules. Start breaking them instead.
The pond was fouler even than her mood. Gordon had obviously been neglecting his bacterial duties. She stared at the murky green water, spine quickening as she remembered the hair she’d seen drifting in it. How had Arabella managed to drown in these shallow waters? Had someone held her down? The glowering portrait of Erazmus shot through her. She feared they had more than one murderer in the family.
Her head pinged irritably, a sensation nearly as familiar to her as breathing by now. Her reflection was pale enough to note, even in this sullied brew. She knew without seeing that the circles under her eyes had deepened. She was fighting her new reality, and she was losing.
Which is why she stood here now, tired eyes scanning the water. It was either mind her sister or give up. She could see no other way. And Cordelia had always been a fighter.
She tried not to think about sinking bodies or vengeful husbands or the rotten-algae stink. She closed her eyes, attempting to concentrate, her headache ratcheting up by degrees the harder she tried. With effort, she pushed past the pain, hoping to find a way to re-create the magic she’d channeled before. She tried to think about the feeling of power, what it must be like to command the waves and the sky. But that led her nowhere, because Cordelia had spent a lifetime feeling powerless—with her mother, the spirits, John. So, she switched to thinking about that day by the road when the appraiser’s car caught fire. Sheput herself back into that moment, the urgency, the fear. She tightened her whole body around that feeling and waited. And waited. Andwaited.
Opening an eye, she saw that the water was perfectly still, perfectly unchanged.
Eustace made it all sound so easy. And maybe it was for her. Maybe she just couldn’t understand what she was asking Cordelia to do.
She tried to think of a new approach. Eustace had told her to start breaking their mother’s rules. But Maggie had never said anything about the weather, about harnessing the elements or blowing open doors or bringing rain. Although, Cordelia now recalled, she had never once been caught off guard with her mother where weather was concerned—never got stuck in the rain without an umbrella, or in the cold without a jacket. Had Maggie always known? Had she manipulated it to her liking?
The one rule her mother had emphasized was to keep her mouth shut where the spirits were concerned. Cordelia ground her jaw and lowered herself, digging her nail beds into the soil. She trained her eyes on the water’s surface. She thought about everything she had lost and stood to lose—her life, her sister’s, their mother’s already gone—and let the need overtake her.
“Help me,” she said out loud. The pain in her head spiked with her fear. But she held fast, digging her heels and hands in deeper.Blood and soil,she repeated in her mind. And then she let it go as slack as the surface of the pond itself.
She thought of her sister merging with the fox, slipping into its skin, the wet, pulsing feel of it, and allowed herself to merge with the pond—a microcosm of activity, rich and viscous, like amniotic fluid. She became one with wind and water and sky, felt herself soaring over a vast land of craggy mountains and verdant grasses, blankets of snow and miles and miles of sea. And for a moment, Cordelia wasn’t Cordelia anymore. She was water. Andshe was rain. And she was power. And a shape began to form in her mind, through the hurt and the strain, straight like a stick with an angled hook. Arune,Cordelia realized.Magic.
The slap of the water across her face sent her sprawling back, choking and reeling. Her hair hung lank in her eyes, her chin dripped, her mouth tasted sour and wrong. She sputtered as she staggered to her feet, wiping at her face in shock.
“Did the pond get you?” she heard him ask.
She turned to see Gordon walking up behind her. “I must have gotten too close.”
He stared at her strangely. “Right.”
“Did you need something?”
He looked down, scuffed a booted foot against the ground, ran a hand over the back of his neck. “Uh, listen…”
She didn’t like the sound of that beginning. She willed him to look at her.
“There’s no easy way to say this.”
