Oh, it is like seeing her mother’s coffin go into the ground again.
For a moment, her mother was alive. She could hear her – not the coarse sound of the ghost but her real mother, her soft, mad, generous mother.
It is too much to bear.
She sobs again, skin raw from tears. They will hear her, they will find her, but she cannot control herself. She is cracked open, guts spilled around like confetti; she is a corpse already, she is a live nerve of agony.
The cold arms of the ghost settle around her.
‘Get up,’ the voice hisses. ‘You are not done here.’
No. No she is not.
Odette wipes her face on her sleeve, folds the letter and putsit in her pocket. Shakily, she stands, testing the weight on each of her too-human limbs. She will be equal to this task. She must be.
First, the gun. Then – the rest.
She eases the door open, and when she is sure it is safe, she darts from Lydia’s room down the hall to Claudine’s, opening the door just enough to slide through—
She is inside, but she is not alone.
Leo – with the gun – is staring at her, wide-eyed, his own hand on the door, about to leave.
A moment hangs between them, all the world in it, all possible worlds.
Then his face twists into a snarl, and he points the gun, at the same time as Odette grabs at his arm, his wrist, wrestling him back with all the weight of her.
There is one brief, frantic struggle, his hot breath on her cheek, the cold barrel of the gun grazing her temple, wavering back and forth between them.
The gun fires.
9
Odette
ODETTE IS PAINTED IN BLOOD.
It is hot and copper-smelling – tasting where it fills her mouth and spills over her lips – hot against her throat and wrists. Gunpowder is sharp in the air, and the shot has briefly deafened her.
Leo lies dead on the floor.
She does not know how it happened. The angle, the moment, whether it was her or him – she does not know.
The bullet has caught him under the jaw and burst out through his eye, like the bloom of a flower.
He slumps across the floor, wilted and limp, snuffed out so thoroughly. The carpet beneath him soaks through with red, and red stains his cheeks, his collar. He will not smirk again, not flick his cigarette ash in an empty teacup, or crack his neck or complain Lydia has made him too short in another painting.
Not Leo, no, not Leo. Do not let this be. She loved him once, and still, her brother-not-brother.
Where once there was light, there is now darkness.
Each star snuffed out one by one, till Odette is left all alone in the black.
How many dead bodies has she seen now?
How many her fault?
The ringing in her ears is so loud she cannot think.
