Shea shuts her eyes. She feels as though she’s splintering into a thousand pieces. “About Asher—”
The sudden clap of a bell pours through the dark, silencing her. It rings and it rings, pealing out in a clarion call. A brassy convocation, low and deep. Over the tops of the buildings, Shea can just make out a red-capped cathedral, narrow campanile lit from beneath.
A ward against evil, or else a summons.Come kneel at my feet.
“That’s him. It’s Lys.”
Poppy doesn’t look so sure. “Are we positive?”
“Yes, I’m sure. It has to be.” She breaks into a run, dragging Poppy behind her. “Come on. If we hurry, maybe we can get there before Paris does.”
The church sits on the opposite side of a narrow river, over a segmented bridge with the pavement gone efflorescent and down a thin side street set with squat residentials devoured in pokeweed. Only the house of worship stands intact. It rises out from behind a wall of leafy dog fennel, two towering palms flanking the entrance like sentinels.
Inside, the sanctuary is carpeted in a hush. A fountain sits behind the pews, dark with varnish. Inside the lower basin is a pool of standing water, the surface sponged in fairy moss. The cathedral’s sole source of light pours in from overhead, moonlight raining down through a hole in the roof.
Just before the altar stands a boy. He’s discarded his jacket, and his forearms are violet with blood. His head is bowed, eyes downturned. In his talon-sharp claws, he clutches a book. He looks almost like himself this way. Quiet. Contemplative—the way he looked the first night she came upon him at Mercy Ridge, crimson pooling in her palm.
“Lys,”she calls.
His head darts up at the sound of his name. Blood paints his throat in Rot-dark spatters, thick as oil. The book slips out of his hand, toppling to his feet. Moonlight limns the curve of his horns. He reminds her of the Minotaur, shut away in the labyrinth of his own mind.
Waiting to give chase.
The wrongness of it all strikes her cold.
“I wouldn’t approach him if I were you.” In the dark of the sanctuary, Paris Keeling rises from a pew. He tugs Camellia up after him, hauling her onto her feet. Next to Shea, Poppy gasps.
“Ellie?”
Camellia’s eyes lift, horrified. Her voice is fractured, full of teeth. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I came to find you,” says Poppy. “We all did.”
Camellia looks as furious as Shea has ever seen her. “I didn’t ask you to do that. I don’twant you here, Poppy. You should have stayed in Little Hill.”
Poppy flinches back as if she’s been struck.
“Easy now,” says Paris soothingly. “There’s no need to lash out. Your friends have been worried about you, that’s all.” He smiles over at them, unfazed. “You’ll have to be patient with Camellia. She, like Oliver, is undergoing a bit of a personal reckoning.”
“A reckoning,” echoes Shea. “You destroyed him.”
“On the contrary,” counters Paris. “I had very little to do with his deconstruction. It was all you. And—might I add—you did it beautifully. All Oliver’s life, I have worked to nudge him into greatness—to trigger the snap in him, so that he’d realize his full potential. I did terrible things. Necessary things. Nothing worked. Nothing took. Not until you. You gave him something worth unmaking himself for, and look at him now.”
In the little chancel, Lys hardly seems aware of them. His attention is focused on a warped milk crate someone has set atop the altar. It’s piled high with books, the bright covers and paperboard corners boasting dancing bears and humanoid trains and floppy rabbits. Children’s books. Dozens of them. He lifts one of them from the pile. It’s a thin book of poems, leather bound, the pages dog-eared.
“He was born with the forest beating in his blood,” says Paris. “I have always seen him for what he is. A messiah. His mother didn’t agree. From the start, she dampened his flame. She filled his head with stories. She fabricated for him a soul, taught him how to play at boyhood. And in doing so, she made him weak.”
Without a word, Lys rips a page from the book. A poem flutters to the floor. A second follows. A third. Papers flutter every which way, until finally the book is empty. Tossed aside, it lands spine-up atop its innards.
“You’ve done my family a great service,” says Paris. “I’d like to repay you for what you’ve done to preserve the Keeling name.”
Shea’s eyes blur with tears. “Stop saying it like I did you a favor.”
“Oh, but you have. I meant what I said before. You’re not worthy of my son. But you could be.”
She breaks her gaze from Lys, surprised. Paris’s smile is patient as he gestures toward the fountain, its finials packed with leafy cascades. “We have our very own fount of holy water. It was brought here from a spring-fed stream, deep in the heart of the forest. All you have to do is take a sip.”
“What happens if I say no?”
