I close my hips to hers and crouch just enough to curve one arm around her abdomen, left hand splayed wide enough to pin her to me. Right hand commits to the underside of her dirt-slicked ass, finding flesh and muscle—and then I lift through quads and glutes as her weight travels up the length of me. She folds exactly where I want her, face in my neck and pelvis riding my hips.
Her jeans are soaked through with mud, but that’s the least of my concerns. I should hate the mess, but all my hatred is aimed at the way she’s trembling, like her body’s trying to wake itself up with little jolts of electricity. She’s whispering nonsense against my throat, and I feel the shape of every damp word.
Kai would laugh at me for the way I triangulate as I walk, keeping a sense of our surroundings. Heat trades between us, and I count the seconds between each shudder until I’m no longer worried she’s going to pass out. Every step involuntarily jostles her, the seam at her crotch catching against my belt buckle before I have to hitch her higher again. It’s an indecent amount of contact between two people not actively fucking.
Is this how I lose my morals?This is absurd.I’m probably the world’s worst gentleman, sharing the podium with the one and only Henry VIII.
Keep walking, fucker.
Keep scanning the treeline.
I see nothing, but something is watching.Someoneis watching. With each step, I wait for the needle to drop again.
It doesn’t.
I help her into the passenger seat, but I can still taste that song in my mouth. That sweet, impossible melody. With the way Francesca refuses to let go of my hands, I know Sheffolk has only just cleared its throat; it’s nowhere near done speaking yet.
19
WALLS THAT SING
FRANCESCA
Once, long ago, the lake fed me memories until my lungs were stuffed. My ribs became pews, and these ghosts sit there in silence. My breath carries incense only I can smell; I feel the press of their faces in the hollow of my lungs. My spine is the altar upon which they walk when they want to remember. When they wantmeto remember the words of what was lost. But I can’t, not fully.Only in pieces and echoes. And it’s that forgetting that blooms into the familiar pressure at the base of my throat.
Into that scream that’s lived inside my ribs for years.
Thatnon-sound.
Thatsomethingtrying to be born through me.
It doesn’t want to be released; it wants to be known. Some nights I’ve dreamt of walking back into the lake, dressed in a gown of pale silver as the moon reflects onto the surface of my hell. I always see them standing there—Mum, Papa, Luciana—rotten and waiting. They smile, but their mouths are too wide, their sockets eyeless and their skin all grey. Yet still they hum the song I’ve been trying to remember since I came back, coughing up water.
The song is gone from the air now, but it carves a hole into my chest and burrows there. Years without hearing it, and with a simple twist of the radio, I’m trapped in my oldest nightmare. My ears still ring with that sickly sweet voice.
Pretty little baby…
I didn’t even remember the damn tune until the radio breathed life into it. Only one note was fed into it, and then the entire orchestra was rebuilt. Mum’s screaming again as she lays eyes on the crushed leg of her husband. Inside me, the ghosts stir. They’re not frightened. Not in the way I am. Each one is hungry, drinking in the screams as they hum along to the deranged lullaby. Icy palms press against the inside of my skin as they whisper to me. They remind me that this body is theirs, and this morning their choir performs.
Not for the first time, I wonder if this is how it begins. If this is the point at which Nanna began to fray. She too carried ghosts within her ribcage, and they rattled her bones until it was crowded, until they were louder than her own voice. I think back to what she kept whispering that day I took Eric to meet her. ‘There’s blood in the water—there always was: our name, our secrets,’over and over, her favourite omen on her worst days. I once thought it was something leftover from the memories she got lost in; now I wonder if she’s talking about us and how there’s always blood in our story.
To be born a Sheffolk woman is to be cursed twice over—first with the burden of the name and then with the witchcraft. And how strange, how cruel, that the both of us were chosen for this particular ‘gift’. This vampirism that craves the blood of memory and thirsts for the violent veins most of all. Nanna turned her skull into a library, filling pages upon pages of journals with notes on Godwyn so we might survive.
Will I pour out my mind as well, bleed it all out in this last test so no daughter afterwards has to suffer?
Eric’s reflection flickers on the windscreen, and I try hard not to look at him. It doesn’t work, and every few minutes I feel the weight of his concern brushing against me. He doesn’t ask questions, though. Should’ve known. He’ll wait, watch and dissect whatever he gathers before saying anything.
When we reach the estate, Eric clicks the button on the keys, and we roll into the garage. He reaches out to cut the headlights, and the engine goes silent. I refuse to meet his stare; I might sob all over again if I do. This man is a living reminder that what happened in the woods was real. I can’t blame it on grief or trauma. He was there, and he remembers. Remembers how the trees sang with a throat full of history.
Remembers Godwyn’s first proper attack on me, even if he doesn’t realise it yet.
The skin beneath my eyes is raw, and I wince when I use the sleeve of my jumper to wipe at them. It’s futile, anyway. Lydia will clock my sadness in an instant. Eric unlocks the doors, and I force my legs to move. I don’t wait for him to catch up, already stumbling towards the doors.
Only to slam into a massive wall of wool and fury.Philip. His hands close around my biceps, taking stock of my expression. “Francesca.” My full name, no title. Bad sign. “Where the hell have you been?”
Shit, I’ve never heard him this angry before, not since I was ten and locked myself in the undercroft with a Ouija board. He had to use bolt cutters to get past the chains because I got a nosebleed and fainted after trying to summon Lucy. I woke up three days later with a priest at the foot of my bed. Housebound for a month after that, Gran told everyone it was ‘pneumonia’.
“I waited for you; I promise I did,” I counter, voice thin. “But you never showed. Eric…” I glance back to see the prince waiting by the car, the furthest thing from rattled whilst every piece of me unravels. “He offered to take me.”
