His car was already peeling away on a cloud of dust and rubble.Fuck.Goddamn him!
She went right to bed, stopping only long enough to hang up her key. The exhaustion of the evening weighed on her, made it feel as if her bones had been filled with lead.
After a few minutes, she heard a stealthy sort of shuffling outside her bedroom door, like Jessica was lurking out there and hoping to be invited in for a bit of girl-talk. But Nikki was a fan of that ploy, too, and Nadine didn’t feel like talking. She rolled away, staring at the wall in the dark as the footsteps gradually faded away, and the walls began to peel away into darkness.
She dreamed, then. She was running in the woods, batting oaks and pine branches out of her face. Sharp twigs and roots stabbed at her bare arms and feet as moonlight poured through the canopy like pale milk, washing everything in a gleaming silvery light.
Something was coming after her. She couldn’t hear it, but she could feel it, and knew with the heart-clenching certainty of dreams that it was getting closer.
That it would find her.
Suddenly, there was a burst of pain in her ankle that felt like a red-hot iron, and she dropped like a bird from the sky. Sobbing, she groped at her foot and her fingers closed around an arrow with black fletching that gleamed with the blue iridescence of raven feathers.
“I have thee now.” Boots crunched over leaves and topsoil. “Thou art fairer than I didst imagine.”
The man standing over her could have been Cal, if Cal were stouter and had a fondness for brown tweed and knee-high boots the color of motor oil. She cowered from the man, who looked like Cal but was not, as he dropped down to one knee, his cruel smile shaded by his mustache.
“P-please,” she stammered. “H-help me.”
“Assist thee I will, if thou wilt live to rue it.”
“What?” she gasped. “No. I’m hurt. And I—I don’t know where I am.”
“All thou seest is Cullraven land. What resideth here is mine own from the dawn of its initial stride, be it on twain legs of four—” his cold eyes dipped “—or in possession of a fine maidenly bosom.”
Terror quaked through her at that cold and carnal glance.Heshot me, she realized. She tried again to run, but the arrow seemed to have pierced through bone, because she felt the pang of it throughout her entire body. The man let out a low laugh. “With mine arrow, I have struck thee down,” he said, gripping the skirts of her dress and yanking hard, so the tissue-fine fabric was rent down the middle. “And now that my blood is risen, thy snow-white thighs shall cool my ardor.”
Nadine screamed, but he was strong and his hands were like iron as he held her down to the earth, forcing his way inside her in the cold blue shadows of the silent trees. His midnight horse huffed in icy plumes that rose to the cloudy sky, and as she looked closer, desperate to distract herself from the man who held her in his violent embrace, she noticed pelts clipped to the saddle.
Kills. Rabbits and quail and even a few young deer. But it was the one draped over the English saddle that captured her attention: cold and marble-pale, lips and fingers tinged an unnatural cyanotic blue. Only the hair was untouched by death, and was as long and brassy now as it had been in life, when Noelle would toss it laughingly over her shoulder and say, “Come off it, Nad.”
“The first Cullraven bride,” the man panted. “And far less pleasing than thou.”
“Oh god!” Nadine cried. “You killed her? Youkilledher? She’s—dead?”
“Becalm thyself, little sparrow, and cease thy cheeping, lest I strike thy beak or slit thy throat.” He shuddered inside her with a groan, wearing Cal’s stolen face, and sneering at her through Cal’s mottled eyes, his dark handlebar mustache gleaming with threads of silver.
“All Cullraven brides bleed on their wedding night.”
C H A P T E R
F O U R
? silver and secrets ?
The morning sun speared through the ruffled curtains like pale blades. For a moment, Nadine wasn’t sure where she was,whenshe was, and her first thought was:he’s got me, he’s got me—
Then the light stabbed at her eyes, causing the dreamlike specters that had felt so real only moments before to recede.A dream, she thought, blinking. Her heart was still beating hard enough that it deafened nearly everything else. She could feel her pulse throbbing in her throat and between her legs.It was only a dream—a terrible, awful dream.
She went to her duffel and changed into jeans and a t-shirt, knotting a faded Paramore hoodie around her waist. Jessica wasn’t awake yet so Nadine used the Nespresso machine, popping in a pod that promised to taste of caramel and cookies as she paced around the smell and messy kitchen. At one point she even caught herself limping, guarding against the injury that wasn’t really there.
(With mine arrow I have struck thee down)
It was this town. It was getting to her. Caledon Cullraven’s sinister portrait in the parlor, the story of his dead first wife, the warnings from Helena Peters—all of it.
Down the hall, a toilet flushed. Jessica was awake. Since Nadine didn’t feel like talking to Jessica any more than she felt like eating at the diner, she scurried back to her room with her chipped cup of coffee and ate the pretzels she’d bought yesterday even though they were stale.
I need to figure out what I’m going to do today.She stared at the ugly wallpaper, as if for inspiration. Taking advantage of Nadine’s absence, Ms. Frizzle had reclaimed the bed, curling up in the warm spot left by her sleeping body.
