“Shh.” He gave her a squeeze. “Go.”
“You’re going to use it to open the door?”
“No.”
No other explanation was forthcoming. He just shined the beam back down the staircase like an arrow he expected her to follow.
The staircase that led down . . . to Noelle.
Nadine took a halting breath and carefully made her way back down the stairs on shaking legs, gripping the splintering rail in a white-knuckled grip. Once at the bottom she tried very hard not to brush against any of the hanging carcasses or even look at them. She was afraid that some of them might still have faces. Or, worse—didn’t.
Just like Noelle, that awful voice in her head whispered.She hasn’t got a face anymore. They’ve burned it all off.
A wave of dizziness washed through her like a crashing tide and she nearly stumbled right into one of the deer.No, no, no, she thought, reeling from it, covering her face.
Blindly, she veered to the right and grabbed one of the cold glass bottles at random. Despite the preternatural chill, it warmed quickly in her hot and sweaty hands as she hurried back up the stairs, fleeing from the clawed fingers that were, in her imagination, getting ready to gouge her in the back and drag her back down to that unyielding darkness in pieces.
Come join your sister, Nadine. Stay in this house. Stay forever.
“No,” she cried out softly, when she felt a hand on her arm.
“It’s just me. Did you get the bottle?”
“Y-yes.” She swallowed hard. “Here.”
“Hold onto it.”
“But what are you—”
She flinched when he began to slam on the door, banging on it in a maddening fury. She thought he might actually knock the door from its hinges, because of how it thumped and rattled. But solid wood like that? In a house like this?
Maybe it was thick enough that no one would ever hear them again.
Somehow she managed to keep a hold on the bottle, despite her slippery grip. And eventually, after what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, someone opened the door. One of the house staff—a man who Nadine had never seen before—let them out, gripping his hurricane lantern tightly as he delivered a frenzied and apologetic excuse to a stony-looking Cal.
“Can a mannotgo into his own cellar for wine without being locked in?”
“I don’t know how it happened, Mr. Cullraven,” the man stammered, examining the latch, working it back and forth. “It must have blown shut and latched itself.”
“Latched itself,” Cal said skeptically, and the man flushed.
“I—I’ll check the mechanism right away.”
“Yes, you do that. God forbid any other guests find themselves locked in.”
He didn’t speak again until they had gotten to his room, and then he turned to her.
“That was not an accident. Someone thinks you know something and I suspect I know who. I suggest,” he added, “that you don’t prove them right by forcing me to compromise you more than I already have, Nadine.”
The thought of someone watching them disappear down the steps andwaitingmade her hair stand on end.They could have pushed us, she thought sickly.Broken our necks.
She shook her head as if she could shake that image from her mind. “They think you told me about Noelle,” she said.
“Yes.”
“B-but you tell your brides everything anyway, right?” she said. “Eventually? That’s what you said about Ben. You said he was supposed to t-tell Noelle everything and he didn’t.”
“You’re not a bride.”
