“No. No, it’s…Sorry. I’ll let you sleep.”
She gives me a thin smile and trails her fingers along my cheek, her hand dipping back toward my ear before falling to her side. “Tomorrow,” she says again.
I have no choice then but to take myself back up the stairs to the room and that horrible book still lying discarded on the floor, the pages all bent now and the smell of Alex’s perfume still pungent in the air. I refuse to touch that cursed thing. I leave it where it lies and grab a handful of dried dandelion from my stash of herbs, sprinkle it in a circle around the book, as if that could keep her ghost at bay.
I can’t sleep in here.
I grab my pillow and duvet off the bed and head back downstairs, this time into the common room, where I make up a temporary bed on the sofa and curl up there, facing the hearth. Even here, I’m afraid to have my back to the room.
Eventually I rock to an uneasy sleep. In my dreams I’m chased by monsters with long, reaching hands, flickering lights, and blood on ice.
I lurch awake hours later with my heart in my mouth and cold sweat damp on my lower back. But it’s already daylight, the sun streaming in through the east-facing windows. Leonie and Kajal are in the kitchen. I can hear their voices chattering as they clang about with pots and pans; that must be what woke me.
I drag a hand through my sweat-salty hair and press my brow forward against bent knees.
Maybe I dreamed what happened last night. Maybe it was all some horrible nightmare. Maybe—
“There you are,” Ellis says, standing over me. “I was looking for you. You wanted to show me that book, right?”
She’s already dressed, in a jacket with elbow patches, like some absentminded professor. Still in the couch, in my wrinkled yesterday’s clothes, I feel like a child caught out-of-bounds.
“Right.” All the terror of last night seeps up like groundwater—diluted now but still nauseating, still potent. I shove the duvet aside and bundle it and the pillow under my arm, carrying them up with me to the third floor.
Ellis trails behind like a tall shadow. I find myself glancing back, as if to make sure my Eurydice still follows.
“I still can’t explain it,” I tell her as we turn onto the landing. “I don’t know how it got back here. And we both…we’ve beenhere.We did leave it there, right? I’m not imagining things?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ellis says, firm and confident, as usual. More confident, I note, than she’d sounded last night.
I push open my bedroom door and step inside, and the duvet falls from my arms.
The book is gone.
The circle of dandelion petals is still there, a ward against evil spirits, but the book itself has vanished. The only thing left is the hellebore, fallen in the middle of my ward like an ill omen.
“It wasright here.It was right—”
I’m breathless, light-headed. It’s a feeling like being eviscerated.
Ellis moves into the room behind me, cutting past the bundled-up blanket to gaze down at the herbs littering my floor. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. The thin line of her mouth says enough.
I round on her, heat rising in my cheeks. “I swear it was here. Last night, it was on my shelf. And here—I dropped itrighthere. You believe me, don’t you?”
Ellis’s eyes flick sidelong to catch mine.
“It was here!”
“I believe you,” Ellis says, too slowly.
I shake my head, catch a lock of my hair, and start twisting it around my knuckles, tugging until it hurts. “Someone must have taken it,” I say. “Someone came up here, someone…”
“Who?” Ellis asks. She’s infuriatingly calm. “Who would have come into your room and stolen this book? What would anyone want with it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—”
I shove past her, banging the door open and darting down the hall toward the stairs. Ellis is on my heels almost immediately, calling my name; I ignore her and clatter down the steps, spinning around the bottom landing fast enough the banister rattles under my grip.
I burst into the kitchen. Leonie is by the stove, an omelet sizzling in a skillet, Kajal cutting up a fresh bell pepper at the island. “Did you take it?” I demand.
