But what if it is?
Her nightmares had never manifested before. The closest she’d come to anything similar was braving her early childhood home. But even then, it was only her traumatic memories growing bold; she could still blink those away.
She’d not been able to blink away the muck in the tub. Nor the apparition from the passageway.
She couldn’t dispel the voice in her head.
Her finger reached to her neck. To where she’d once been injected with a solution that brought her insecurities to shadowed reality. But she’d not been attacked with any needle here. Had she drunk something she shouldn’t? Eaten something toxic? Maybe the pressure had stressed out her senses.
Lux’s true fear beat somewhere underneath, but she refused to dig that far right now.
Maybe she really should return to her room. Rest, as Corvin had so graciously directed. Wait for him to return for her.
The sea air urged her otherwise.
It promised a cure—albeit a momentary one—by standing at the edge again, absorbing the spray against her skin and relishing the feel of some sort of freedom. But…there was also a second path through the brambles. Where she’d chosen to go right yesterday, what would going left reveal now? It couldn’t lead nowhere, she didn’t think. What would have been the purpose of that?
Lux didn’t think anymore on it.
She set off down the path.
Though it was cool, she didn’t miss her cloak. The sun had finally severed the clouds, and now it shone unobstructed upon her head. The feel of it brushing against her temple did more than any cup of tea ever could. Out here, she thought, she might breathe every tumultuous emotion away.
Still, she kept darting glances from her periphery. The brambles shifted too much for her liking, and they were uncomfortably tall. Taller than most people she knew. Clearly, no one minded this wild garden.
And while the air did smell a little sweet, she now noticed it smelled a bit like iron too.
Like blood.
She tucked her elbows in farther when the breeze brushed them aside. Scarlet stems topped by a mimicry of teeth peekedfrom underneath. “Don’t even think of it,” she snapped at them. “I’m not some all-forgiving botanist—I’ll rip you out by the roots.”
The strange plants shrank back from her threat. Or it might have been the wind.
The path curved then, and a bench appeared, the seat hardly visible in its overgrown state. A short stone statue perched just beyond it. Lux slowed, stopped, and tilted her head.
The stone had been sculpted into a man, his face pulled into a grimace, the edges worn smooth. She frowned at it. A single vine had wrapped its way around the base, up and up, until it encircled his throat with a deep-blue bloom to match the manor’s. The mayor’s mansion hadn’t anything but busts of the mayor himself lining its rich halls; she’d never seen a fully formed statue before. Unlike the saintlike style guarding Mothlock’s shrine to its dead founder, this one had been intricately detailed and was quite smaller. She could see the man was made to be handsome, with a strong nose and jaw, and hair to his shoulders. But like the brambles, he was unkempt.
Forgotten, perhaps?
Lux shook herself free of his gaze before leaving it behind.
She curved immediately into a second statue and stumbled to a halt. Her hand clutched her throat. “Youscaredme,” she scolded it. Orher.The form of a woman only stared back, her eyes sad and stone cheeks drooped in melancholy. She was not strangled like the man before, but her bare feet were covered in moss. Another bench was set beside it.
“No one is assigned to your upkeep, either, I see.” The statue only pondered her in all its pitiful sorrow. Lux couldn’t help herself. She knelt at its feet.
The moss was darkly green and soft to the touch. She pressed a finger against it to be sure, but nothing leached from it. It was regular, with hardly any scent at all. She pried it away.
The dirt beneath crumbled and blew in the breeze. What was left, Lux brushed aside. “There you are,” she said, a moment before her fingertips snagged on an indentation. “What—”
Oh…
ROSAMUND GRIMROOK
The House of Grimrook
Lux shoved to her feet, her hands limp at her sides. She stared at the woman and then at what must be laid beneath. They’d been buried in the garden, Hildred had said.
“What a way to be remembered. Who carved you like this?” Then she glanced over her shoulder at the man.
