“I remember.”
Lysander feels Asher’s answer like a knife to the chest. Here is another piece of Shea he doesn’t possess. Another sliver of her psyche he’s never seen—Shea Parker in the daylight, holding tight to the shattered fragments of her family.
“She started keeping letters or cards or anything similar,” says Poppy. “I think maybe it was a way for her to hold on to people. I thought if I found something from Camellia—a note, or something—I could find a clue.”
“Ellie’s been gone for weeks,” says Asher. “Why didn’t you ask Shea earlier?”
Now, Poppy is deliberately avoiding Asher’s gaze. Lysander can see her looking anywhere but at the watchdog, her eyes darting along the wall’s peeling varnish. “I couldn’t,” she finally says. “I mean, I could, but she’s— Well, it’s complicated. She and Camellia fought. Badly.”
“When?” asks Asher.
Poppy stares down into her lap. “The day before she disappeared.”
The shower water washes away most of the blood.
Shea stands in the tub with her forehead against the tile and watches the drain turn red, then brown, then eventually clear. When it’s done, she towels dry and dresses slowly. Her school uniform is soaked through, the stockings ripped, and she fishes through the bag of clothes from home in search of something dry.
She pulls on a wash-shrunk top and her father’s old flannel, a shredded pair of jeans gone soft with wear. The water was kettle hot, and a gray condensation has collected along the mirror. Rising up onto her toes to wipe the glass clear, she catches sight of her neck. Two deep punctures gorge the soft underside of her throat, the bite red and angry and careless.
Her first thought is this: If Lys had Turned her, last night wouldn’t have gone the way it did.
Gingerly, she presses a clean bit of gauze to the wound, taping it in place. She feels strangely arthritic, her joints ground down and her knuckles throbbing, and it makes every task take twice as long. When it’s done, she braids her hair into two messy plaits and slips on the pendant necklace she’d found nestled among her things.
It isn’t anything special—just her grandmother’s cross and a flat, silver ring slung on a chain.
Just another piece of home Asher knew well enough to bring along.
As if she summoned him just by thinking of him, she finds Asher waiting when she exits the bathroom. He’s seated on the edge of her bed, his injured eye the exact color of a boysenberry. An immediate and immolating panic consumes her as she realizes what he holds in his hands.
A cookie tin.Hercookie tin. The lid is off and paper juts out in every direction. Pink stationery and serrated notebook shreds. Sticky notes and torn-out pages and even a napkin or two. Most damning of all are the letters. There’s a half dozen at least, neatly folded and tucked into unsealed envelopes, the same name neatly penned on every last one:PVT Thorley, Asher.
Her mouth goes dry. “Where did you get that?”
“Zahar,” he says plainly.
Panic wars with relief. “You’ve seen her? She’s okay? I haven’t been able to find Lys anywhere and Cyrus said—”
He cuts her off. “Why didn’t you tell me you and Ellie fought?”
The question plunks like a stone between them. Every last answer seems like the exact wrong one. She watches from somewhere outside herself as he pries loose a ripped bit of paper from the tin. Camellia’s curling handwriting stares up at her, scribbled in code:I don’t think I can be friends with someone who makes blood pacts with the devil.
“You can understand that?”
“Zahar gave me the cipher,” says Asher. “But it’s not exactly advanced encryption.”
The look on his face wrenches an admission out of her. “I didn’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t—” Asher’s face falls. “Parker, I don’t hate you. It’s not like you had a road map to Ellie hidden away. It’s just that—” He seems to be considering his next words carefully. “Iaskedyou if anything happened with Ellie before she disappeared. You could have told me then. It would have been nice to know.”
“She saw the bites on my wrist.” Her voice comes out thin, chewed up by guilt. “She wouldn’t talk to me all day. I went by your house after school, and your mom said she never came home. I figured she must be with Poppy—that maybe they wouldn’t want to be friends with me anymore. The next morning in school, they told us she was gone.”
“That’s not your fault,” says Asher.
“How do you know?”
He’s quiet. Hedoesn’tknow, and neither does she. Clearing his throat, he places the note back into the tin. “We leave in four days. In the meantime, Lysander has sent scouts ahead to see if they can find any trace of Ellie. They’re going to ask around some of the other nests in the area.”
He says it with disdain.Nests.Like the thought of his sister being holed away with something less than human disturbs him beyond words. Like she’d be better off dead. And maybe she would. Maybe death, to him, is better than being like this. Like Shea, yoked to the devil and waiting to Turn.
