Cordelia shrugged. “Unless it was very, very small. Like a pin or a button.” Looking around the crypt, she didn’t see anything matching that description. “What about the room in the basement?” she asked her sister. “Could it be something from there?”
Eustace pushed her bottom lip out. “Could be. It’s full of ingredients mostly. And bones.”
“Could it be a recipe then? Like you saw in the book? Something she concocted?”
“Then it would have been something they all knew,” Eustace replied, shutting that theory down.
But the basement room had Cordelia thinking, with its half-assembled skeletons and bizarre assortment of taxidermy tools and old kitchenware. Of all the items in that room, only one hadgiven her the feeling she had now—that hum of power sunk deep, calling to something within her she couldn’t yet name: the human tooth with the rune carved into it.
“I’ve been thinking too,” she told her sister.
Eustace gave her her undivided attention.
“All this time I thought the spirits of the house were terrorizing us, that they wanted to do us harm. That article we found mentioned Morna killing her own animals and drawing with their blood. And then the rune appeared in the stair hall the morning after our seance. I assumed our mother’s leaving was at the heart of what they were angry about. But after this morning—the man you saw and chased—it doesn’t make sense anymore.” She tapped the bracelet around her wrist with a finger. “They don’t want revengeonus; they want itfromus. They want us to carry out their revenge on someone else. But on whom? And why? Could it be the person that killed our mother?”
Eustace reached out and squeezed her sister’s shoulder. “You’re the ghost whisperer.”
Cordelia shot her a pinched look, her gift still something she wasn’t entirely comfortable with. “Which is why I was thinking, what do all these women have in common? The ones I’ve seen?”
“Besides that they’re all related to us?” Eustace asked.
“They all died tragically,” she said. “Think about it. Morna jumped from the tower. We know what happened to our mom. Somethingoffdefinitely happened to our aunt. Our grandmother died in childbirth, hemorrhaging before anyone could save her. And Arabella apparently drowned in the solarium pond.”
Eustace paled with disgust. “No wonder that thing is so nasty.”
“Even Gordon’s mom’s death is suspicious,” Cordelia muttered. “I thought this place was supposed to protect us, that nothing bad could happen here. My headaches aside, that was the deal, right? So even if you write Mom and Violetta off as the result of leaving the estate, what about the rest of us?”
Eustace thought, tugging at her lip. “Well, Gordon’s mom isn’t a Bone, so the protection doesn’t extend to her. And for that matter, the same can be said of Arabella, who only married into the family. That wall you saw in the basement does not include the names of spouses, only direct descendants. Which means no power and no protection where they are concerned. The two, somehow, go hand in hand.”
“Okay,” Cordelia said. “But then… Morna? Where does she fit in? She’s definitely blood-related. She should have been safe here.”
“She took her own life, Cordy,” Eustace said, squeezing her sister’s hand. “You read that article. The estate can protect us from other things—disease, accidents—but it can’t protect us from ourselves, I guess.”
Something in her sister’s logic clicked into place, illuminating a corner in her mind she’d overlooked. “That’s it, Eustace!”
“It is?”
Cordelia turned to her. “My headaches… The estate can’t protect us fromourselves.That means the source of my headaches has been inside me all along. It’s my magic beating to get out!”
Eustace puckered, piecing her sister’s words together.
“They kept getting worse and worse until a couple of days ago, when I finally embraced my power like you said. I started breaking Mom’s rules.”
It was plain as words in a book. She’d undergone a change of heart about the estate, but more than that, she’d undergone a change of heart about herself. It felt like part of her was just waking up, alive in a way most people weren’t. Parings of herself that had left her rindless and exposed were now fluttering back and settling into place. She’d finally stopped fighting who she was,whatshe was, what she wanted. She’d finally stopped fighting the witch inside her.
She grasped her sister. “Mom wasn’t suffering simply because she left the estate. She was suffering because she was denying her magic. All those years with us, all her rules, she was keeping the witch locked inside, and it was tearing her apart.”
Eustace inhaled deeply, finally catching on. “Does that mean you’re going to be okay now?”
“I think so,” Cordelia told her.
But then her eyes fell on the dried red pigment of the handprint on the back wall, and realized that something still felt unsettled within her. How would Morna experience depression at all if she were here actively using her powers? Or mental illness? Weren’t those chemical imbalances? Didn’t that constitute disease? It still didn’t quite make sense.
She walked over to the back wall and lifted a finger to the dried blood. Theblood.There was something so important about the blood. What were they missing?
“What about murder?” Eustace asked carefully, watching her. “Can the estate protect us from that?”
Cordelia turned and met her eyes. “Let’s hope so.”
