The boy had laughed and grinned at the wind. It had blown steam onto the subway window, and the boy had traced a swirling circle in the fog, wiping away the condensation.
Now, the woman was tiptoeing up another flight of stairs, and when the battle-hardened brother sprinted past, a defibrillator in his hands, the woman flattened herself against the wall and held her breath until he’d passed and his footsteps had faded.
Finally, after climbing the zigzagging steps toward the hated rooftop, the woman veered down the hallway of the highest floor. It was quiet. Dark. Not even the wood floors dared to creak under the woman’s careful steps.
She paused at a wooden door and looked left, then right. The hallway was empty. There were no Smiths on this floor. The rooms were filled with weapons. That was how the Smiths were—every room that didn’t hold a person held weapons instead.
While weapons did have feelings—especially the ones that were named—there weren’t any feelings here. The wind was glad. Sometimes, weapons shouted so loudly it was hard to block out their boasting, their thirst, or their wails. The more blood-soaked a weapon was, the louder it shouted. But this floor was quiet. It even smelled quiet, like a book that was closed.
The woman shuddered as she closed her hand over the cold brass knob.
The wind laced through her fingers.
She turned the handle and opened the door to reveal a long, narrow set of wooden stairs. Then, stepping inside, she closed herself and the wind into the dark of the Smiths’ attic.
There was something in the attic with them.
At first, the wind had thought the woman was the only being tiptoeing through the dark, but ever so slowly, like the creeping of frost covering a window, the wind had become aware of another presence.
It tinged the air with a pungent, decaying smell that held whiffs of bonfire.
Centuries ago, when millions of mummified animals were untombed, the living had used their petrified corpses as kindling. The scent of resin-wrapped crocodiles, cats, and scarabs had hovered over cities for years. The unearthed mummies weren’t only used in bonfires. They were ground up and used in plaster, so the devotion of the dead was coated in the walls of thousands of homes. They were stacked into ships and used as ballast. They were . . . desecrated. But the pungent smell of their burning was what the wind remembered.
The thing in the attic smelled like death untombed, scarred by merciless fire.
The wind wrapped itself around the woman’s hand and shuddered against the throbbing of her pulse.
She crept through the shadows, visible again, her firefly lights floating above her. Earlier, when she’d climbed the narrow, creaking stairs and stepped into the attic, she’d let out a stunned breath. It was illusion. The ceiling was peaked, with dark wooden beams that looked like the charred bones of a behemoth’s picked-over carcass. The attic appeared endless. After a long stretch, the rows of story-high wooden shelves disappeared. The wind knew it was an optical illusion, like a dirt path hitting the vanishing point in a Renaissance painting, but all the same, it looked as if it went on for eternity.
The wind had nudged her thin wrist, and the woman had stiffened her shoulders and stepped into an aisle between a row of shelves.
The shelves were stacked with cobweb-covered boxes, trunks, and crates. The sort of useless, forgotten things that beings didn’t want to throw away but didn’t want to keep where they could be seen.
As soon as the woman had stepped into the aisle, the shelves had shifted and closed around her. She’d swung back around and gasped as the aisles moved. There was no way back, only forward.
So she’d lit her fireflies and cautiously crept down the narrow aisle. As soon as she turned a corner, the shelves shifted again, blocking the path backward.
She’d laughed to herself. It was a maze. An attic maze.
The boy loved mazes. He was a Ward after all, and Wards loved nothing more than traipsing through the mazes of their own minds or trapping someone else in a maze they could never escape.
But the woman wasn’t a Ward, and she wasn’t laughing anymore.
The shelves shifted again, spraying dust. The woman stepped through the motes and then looked behind her.
The smell was back. It reached through the shelves and bit at the dusty air.
Then the thing spoke.
The woman spun around, holding her hands high.
It hadn’t used words. Not all things spoke in words. But it had made a noise that any being could recognize. It was a fingernail tapping against a coffin lid from the inside. It was an inhuman moan, the hiss of a mouthless thing. It was the rattling knock of death come to seize you and carry you away screaming.
The wind squeezed itself against the woman’s thundering pulse. Her hands shook, and goose bumps rose over her arms and the back of her neck.
The woman’s frightened breaths were avalanche-loud in the silence that followed the thing’s wordless threat.
The woman turned in a slow circle, flaring her blue firefly lights. Her irises darkened to brown, and her hair shifted to black. Her fear made her let go of her illusion. She was herself as she faced the dark.
