Gallant, page 13
If she could scream, she would.
But she can’t, so she fights, tries to force the ghoul off, fingers sinking through tattered cloth and hollow ribs, but the ghoul only twists her round and leans in close, its ruined face inches from her own, and in the silver dark, there’s no menace in its filmy eyes, only a silent plea to be still.
Past her pounding heart, Olivia tries to listen to the room beyond the wall. She hears the splinter of the door, the steady beat of the soldier’s boots as it crosses the study, passing from the wood onto the thin rug. She pictures its narrow, wolfish frame as it stalks around the desk. A knee touching down, and the metal gauntlet scraping the ground, and then—no. The soft drag of something being freed, the flutter of loose paper. Her mother’s journal. Olivia’s hands ache and her lungs burn. She has to go back for it, but she can’t, she can’t, so instead, she breathes against the rotting fingers, inhaling dead leaves and ash.
Until at last, the steps withdraw.
The silence drags long and flat.
The ghoul’s palm falls away.
It retreats a step, and in the eerie almost-light that permeates the house, she sees it is—or was—a man, her uncle’s age, perhaps, the same strong jaw and deep-set eyes she’s come to know as Prior.
Its hands drift up in surrender, or perhaps apology. She doesn’t understand, not until the fingers trace through the air, in something that is not sign language—not the kind she learned—but the gestures are slow, readable.
You . . . asked . . . for . . . help.
Olivia stares at the ghoul. She did, when she was hiding in the hall. But it was only a thought, a prayer, a silent plea, neither spoken nor signed.
How did you hear me? she asks, but the ghoul’s attention twitches back toward the hidden door. Its face contorts, and then it gestures down the darkened passage.
You must go, it says. The shadow is coming back.
The shadow? she asks, but the ghoul turns her round to face the narrow hall. The dim silver light doesn’t seem to reach more than a foot. Beyond, the darkness is a wall.
A ruined hand drifts past her as it points.
That way.
But her eyes hang on the withered hand. Olivia turns back. The mouse. The flowers. Twice she’s touched the dead and brought them back to life, and so she reaches out to touch the ghoul’s broken chest, but it catches her wrist and shakes its head.
Why not? she thinks.
Its other hand drags through the air. Not yours.
She doesn’t understand, but the ghoul doesn’t give her time to ask again. It turns her away from the hidden door and the wolf lurking beyond, and even though she cannot see it now, she can feel the warning in its touch. Go.
Thank you, she thinks, and the ghoul’s fingers tighten on her shoulder. A single, brief squeeze, and then she is nudged forward. Down the corridor.
Ahead, the darkness is as thick as paint, and she half expects to feel it hold against her fingers. But when she takes a step, the wall draws back, the silver light moving with her, reaching only a few inches ahead. She brings her hand to the walls, the passage narrow enough that she can touch both sides with elbows bent.
She looks back, but the ghoul is gone.
Step by step, she feels her way forward, hands skating over old stone, hoping nothing else reaches out of the dark.
At last, she finds the other door.
She hesitates, unsure where it leads, if she’s about to step out into the ballroom or the foyer. She presses her ear to the wood and listens for something, anything, on the other side, and hears nothing. A soft push, and the door whispers open onto the narrow alcove just outside the kitchen.
Like everything else in this house, it is the same, and not at all.
A deep crack runs across one wall. The floorboards rise and fall, as if roots are pushing up beneath them. There are no pots on the stove, no bread on the table, no smell of stew or toast or anything but ash, as if a heavy layer has settled over everything. A single apple sits on the splintered counter, withered and dry, the ghost of long, thin fingers left in the dust beside it.
Fear prickles up her spine.
In her mind, those same fingers tap on the edge of a chair, bone showing through torn white skin. Those fingers catch a dancer’s wrist and draw her in. Those fingers brush her death away like dust.
Olivia drags her gaze to the small side door by the pantry, a glass insert looking out onto the night. Not the garden unraveling behind the house, but the front drive, the fountain, the road beyond.
She rushes toward the narrow door, and in five steps she is there, bursting out of the house and into the night like a body coming up for air. She doesn’t know where to go, back to the impossible wall or down the empty road, but one has already refused her, so she decides to try the other. She starts across the drive, the gravel biting into her bare feet. Shh, shh, shh, it says, too loud, as she hurries past the fountain, where the stone woman looms, her outstretched hand broken off, her billowing dress in tatters, rocks littering the empty pool and—
But it’s not empty.
There, on the floor of the fountain, lies a boy.
Chapter Twenty
A boy.
Not the ghoul of a boy, but a real one, flesh and blood and whole, his edges firm. He is Olivia’s age, perhaps a year or two younger, with tawny hair that falls across his face. He looks as if he simply climbed into the fountain, curled up on the cold stone, and went to sleep. If it weren’t for the silver cast to his skin, the way his wrists are bound together with dark ivy, the tendrils coiling around the statue’s feet.
If it weren’t for the fact he isn’t moving.
She saw a dead body once. It was in the road, two winters back, a husk of a woman who’d folded in like a leaf in the frost and never got up. She looked like she was sleeping, too, but her limbs were stiff, skin sagging over bones, the spark of life so clearly gone.
No, the boy in the fountain isn’t dead.
That is what she tells herself as she leans forward. As her fingers skim the air over his ankle, where the weedy ropes bind tight. But she can’t quite reach. She is about to swing her leg over the stone lip of the fountain when she feels movement, hears the grind of gravel underfoot, and looks up, hoping to find another ghoul, before she remembers—ghouls make no noise.
There is a soldier standing in the drive.
The whip-thin one, armor plate gleaming on their chest. Their eyes are dark, almost mournful, but there is no mercy in them. Light twitches on the crumbling front steps, and she sees the second soldier sitting there, the brick of a man with the shining pauldron on his shoulder. He slouches, bored, elbows on knees and hands hanging loose and large as spades.
Olivia takes a step back, away from the fountain and the boy curled at the statue’s feet, as something moves to her right and she catches the glint of a gauntlet as the third soldier steps out from behind the stone woman, smiling like a wolf.
The broad one stands.
The other two drift forward.
Metal glints on their hips, but they draw no weapons.
Somehow, that makes it worse. Their bare hands twitch. Their black eyes shine.
You asked for help, said the ghoul in the study, even though she only thought the word. Now, she thinks it again. Help.
It feels so small, unspoken, unsigned, less a word than a whisper, a breath.
Help, she thinks as the shadows stalk toward her. Help, help, help . . .
And then, they come.
Three ghouls emerge, not from the house or the garden or the dark. They rise straight up through the ground itself, sprouting like weeds between the gravel: a young man and a weathered woman, and then the one she saw in the music room, the first of the Priors. And though their bodies are broken, cleaved apart by darkness, and though there is no shine of metal on their clothes, she can tell they were dressed for battle, once.
They come, as if summoned, their bodies arranging into a shield before her.
The soldiers frown, the broad one perplexed, the thin one annoyed, the short one sneering as the young man’s ghoul steps forward, empty hands spread wide. And though the ghouls say nothing, she can feel their order ringing through her bones.
Run.
Olivia lunges back toward the boy in the fountain, but the ghoul of the weathered woman catches her arm and shakes its head, pushes her away.
And then a blade sings through the ghoul’s back, and it staggers, and Olivia knows the ghoul cannot die, knows it is already dead, but the sight of the metal spilling out of its chest, its knees buckling silently to the dirt, still sends a shock of horror through her bones.
The ghouls are no match for the soldiers. They have only bought her time.
And so, she runs, the only way she can, not down the empty road, but back toward the garden. A desperate sprint, driven only by the need to get away. Away from the house. Away from the soldiers with their glinting armor. Away, her blue dress snagging on bramble and thorn, her bare feet singing over the carpet of dead grass that runs between the withered garden and the barren orchard.
Away and back to the wall that will not end, the door that will not open. Almost there when a jagged root catches her toes and sends her tumbling, pain lancing through her hands and knees as she hits the ground. The fall knocks all the air from her lungs, but her pulse is a drum inside her head. Get up, get up, get up. And as she digs her hands into the cold damp earth to push herself up, she feels the poke of tiny sticks beneath her palms, and realizes too late that they are not sticks, but bones, the littered remains before the wall. Too late, she feels the prickling pain, the twitch of movement against her skin. Too late, the ground beneath her becomes a writhing carpet of paws and fur and wings, all of them alive.
Olivia scrambles back, a cold chill rolling up her arms.
Get away, she thinks, get away, and the crows take flight, and the mice scatter, and the rabbits bolt, and she forces herself to her feet, a sucking cold flooding through her limbs as she staggers to the garden door and throws herself against it.
The iron shudders, but doesn’t give.
She pounds on it again, but the sound goes nowhere, ending right where her fists meet the metal, swallowed up like a scream into a soft down pillow.
Olivia sags against the door, breathless. And then she turns and puts her back to the cold metal and trains her eyes on the dark. Perhaps it is some primal need to face her fate, the same force that drives a girl to look beneath her bed, the knowledge that what you can’t see is always worse than what you can.
She turns and looks at the house that isn’t Gallant.
And sees him, looking back.
The master of the house stands on the balcony, elbows draped over the rail, his black coat billowing in the cold night air, and even from here she can see his milk-white eyes, watching her. Even from here, she can see the smile that parts his ashen face, can see his hand drift up and his too-thin finger crook into a single, chilling gesture, wordless but clear.
Come here.
There is no moon, but down in the garden, silver light shines on a shoulder, a chest, a hand. The soldiers are coming. They amble toward her, wild but silent, stalking her through the dark, and Olivia decides she is not ready to face her fate. She turns to the door in the wall and slams her fists against it again and again, until debris flakes away from the surface, exposing the iron beneath.
Open, open, open, she thinks, pounding until she can feel the searing heat of the cut on her hand as it reopens, can feel the blood welling on her skin, the pain ringing through her palm as it hits iron, and then there is a sound, deep inside the metal, like the end of a music note, more hum than noise. A lock groaning free.
The door in the wall swings open, and Olivia stumbles through, out of one night and into another. Out of the dead garden and onto damp green grass that soaks her knees as she collapses to the ground on the other side, gasping for air. Air that tastes like summer rain instead of ashes. Air that tastes of flowers and life and moonlight.
Footsteps race through the garden, and Olivia drags her head up in time to see Matthew running toward her, knife in hand. For a second, she thinks he means to kill her. There is murder in his eyes, his knuckles white on the weapon’s hilt, but then she sees the blade’s damp edge, the blood already dripping from his fingers. He surges past her to the open door.
She twists round and sees the shadows coming, sees darkness spilling through the open door and over the ground like oil, staining the dirt, before Matthew slams the iron shut, metal clanging over his voice as he says, “With my blood, I seal this door.”
The door hums, the bolt groans home.
Olivia looks down at her aching palm, the cut split open, a fresh and angry line of red.
With my blood.
Matthew’s hand is pressed flat to the iron, head bowed against the door. He breathes heavily, shoulders heaving. Olivia stands, about to reach for him, when he turns and grabs her shoulders, fingers digging deep enough to bruise.
“What have you done?” he demands, voice shaking.
And Olivia looks from her cousin to the wall and back again, wishing she could answer.
Wishing she knew.
It is all so loud inside the house.
Beyond the wall, everything was made of whispers, the eerie quiet magnifying every breath or step. But here, Hannah crashes about the kitchen, boiling water and gathering gauze, and Matthew won’t stop shouting, even though he looks like he’s about to faint, and Edgar drags up a stool and orders him to sit. The noise is like a tide, and Olivia lets it wash over her, grateful for the sound after so much silence, even if none of them are talking about what she saw, about the fact there is another world beyond the wall.
“How dare you,” demands Matthew, and for once the words are lobbed at Hannah instead of her.
“I was only trying to help,” she snaps back.
“Sit down,” says Edgar.
“You drugged me.”
Olivia startles, realizes that is why his bedroom door stayed closed, why she didn’t see him.
“Better drugged than dead!” shouts Hannah, and Olivia cannot blame the woman. She saw his face the night before, the exhausted slump of his shoulders, the deep hollows beneath his eyes. “You needed rest.”
“There is no rest!” he screams. “Not in this house.”
“Sit down,” orders Edgar as Matthew paces, a dishtowel wrapped around his hand, the cotton soaking red. He cut too fast, too deep, a vicious wound across his palm, and despite the cloth, a few fat red drops still find their way onto the kitchen floor.
With my blood, he said.
Olivia’s own palm is in a sorry state, but Edgar has wrapped it in clean gauze (he would not even look at her), and her mind is not on the dull ache of her hand or the pain in the soles of her bare feet from running over gravel and broken earth, or the chill that lingers beneath her skin. Her mind is not here in the kitchen at all, but a hundred yards away at the garden’s edge. Behind her eyes, she sees the corpses of small creatures rising at her touch, feels herself dragged into the darkness by dead hands, watches two dozen dancers turn to ash, bits of bone rattling on the ballroom floor as they skitter back to their master.
Edgar finally gets Matthew to sit.
“You had no right,” he seethes at Hannah, but his eyes are fevered, his skin at once sallow and too pink, and she cannot help but think that despite his size, a decent wind would knock him over.
And Hannah is having none of it.
“I saw you born, Matthew Prior,” she says. “I will not watch you kill yourself.”
“You watched my father do it,” he says, such venom in his voice that Hannah flinches. “You let my brother—”
“Enough!” shouts Edgar, decent, soft-voiced Edgar, the word landing like a blow on Matthew’s cheek.
“Some days,” says Hannah, voice brittle, “you are still such a child.”
Matthew’s eyes go dark as pitch. “I am a Prior,” he says with a defiant scowl. “I was born to die in this house. But I’ll be damned if that death is for nothing.” He rounds then, leveling the full force of his anger at Olivia. “Pack your things. I never want to see your face again.”
She recoils as if struck. Anger floods like heat beneath her skin.
I am a Prior, too, she wants to tell him. I belong here as much as you. I have seen things you cannot see and done things you cannot do, and if you had told me the truth instead of treating me like a stranger in your house, then maybe I wouldn’t have gone across. Maybe I could have helped.
She lifts her hands to sign the words, but Matthew doesn’t give her the chance.
He turns his back on her, on Hannah and Edgar too, and storms out of the kitchen, leaving only blood and silence in his wake. Olivia lashes out, swipes her arm across the table and sends the tin box of gauze and tape crashing to the floor. Matthew doesn’t look back.
Tears burn behind her eyes, threatening to fall.
But she doesn’t let them. When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.
So she holds them in as somewhere, deep inside the house, a door slams shut.
Hannah does not assure her.
Edgar does not say that it will pass.
They do not tell her to ignore her cousin, to get some rest, that it will all be better in the morning. Olivia has so many questions, but she can tell by the weight of the air, the horrible, held-breath stillness, that no one plans to answer them.
Hannah sinks into a chair, head bowed, hands disappearing into wild curls.
Edgar moves to comfort her, and Olivia goes upstairs to pack.
Chapter Twenty-One
Olivia moves through the house like a ghoul, feeling half-there, half-gone, dazed and sore and uncertain.
On the stairs she stops, remembering the eerie silver light that swept through the other house. In the hall, she sees the door to Matthew’s room shut fast, the mottled shadow of moving feet beneath. Her uncle’s ghoul stands guard outside and will not meet her gaze. In her mother’s room, she turns the gold key in the lock, remembering the hum of iron under her hands, the door answering to blood. Hers and Matthew’s. Prior blood.
But she can’t, so she fights, tries to force the ghoul off, fingers sinking through tattered cloth and hollow ribs, but the ghoul only twists her round and leans in close, its ruined face inches from her own, and in the silver dark, there’s no menace in its filmy eyes, only a silent plea to be still.
Past her pounding heart, Olivia tries to listen to the room beyond the wall. She hears the splinter of the door, the steady beat of the soldier’s boots as it crosses the study, passing from the wood onto the thin rug. She pictures its narrow, wolfish frame as it stalks around the desk. A knee touching down, and the metal gauntlet scraping the ground, and then—no. The soft drag of something being freed, the flutter of loose paper. Her mother’s journal. Olivia’s hands ache and her lungs burn. She has to go back for it, but she can’t, she can’t, so instead, she breathes against the rotting fingers, inhaling dead leaves and ash.
Until at last, the steps withdraw.
The silence drags long and flat.
The ghoul’s palm falls away.
It retreats a step, and in the eerie almost-light that permeates the house, she sees it is—or was—a man, her uncle’s age, perhaps, the same strong jaw and deep-set eyes she’s come to know as Prior.
Its hands drift up in surrender, or perhaps apology. She doesn’t understand, not until the fingers trace through the air, in something that is not sign language—not the kind she learned—but the gestures are slow, readable.
You . . . asked . . . for . . . help.
Olivia stares at the ghoul. She did, when she was hiding in the hall. But it was only a thought, a prayer, a silent plea, neither spoken nor signed.
How did you hear me? she asks, but the ghoul’s attention twitches back toward the hidden door. Its face contorts, and then it gestures down the darkened passage.
You must go, it says. The shadow is coming back.
The shadow? she asks, but the ghoul turns her round to face the narrow hall. The dim silver light doesn’t seem to reach more than a foot. Beyond, the darkness is a wall.
A ruined hand drifts past her as it points.
That way.
But her eyes hang on the withered hand. Olivia turns back. The mouse. The flowers. Twice she’s touched the dead and brought them back to life, and so she reaches out to touch the ghoul’s broken chest, but it catches her wrist and shakes its head.
Why not? she thinks.
Its other hand drags through the air. Not yours.
She doesn’t understand, but the ghoul doesn’t give her time to ask again. It turns her away from the hidden door and the wolf lurking beyond, and even though she cannot see it now, she can feel the warning in its touch. Go.
Thank you, she thinks, and the ghoul’s fingers tighten on her shoulder. A single, brief squeeze, and then she is nudged forward. Down the corridor.
Ahead, the darkness is as thick as paint, and she half expects to feel it hold against her fingers. But when she takes a step, the wall draws back, the silver light moving with her, reaching only a few inches ahead. She brings her hand to the walls, the passage narrow enough that she can touch both sides with elbows bent.
She looks back, but the ghoul is gone.
Step by step, she feels her way forward, hands skating over old stone, hoping nothing else reaches out of the dark.
At last, she finds the other door.
She hesitates, unsure where it leads, if she’s about to step out into the ballroom or the foyer. She presses her ear to the wood and listens for something, anything, on the other side, and hears nothing. A soft push, and the door whispers open onto the narrow alcove just outside the kitchen.
Like everything else in this house, it is the same, and not at all.
A deep crack runs across one wall. The floorboards rise and fall, as if roots are pushing up beneath them. There are no pots on the stove, no bread on the table, no smell of stew or toast or anything but ash, as if a heavy layer has settled over everything. A single apple sits on the splintered counter, withered and dry, the ghost of long, thin fingers left in the dust beside it.
Fear prickles up her spine.
In her mind, those same fingers tap on the edge of a chair, bone showing through torn white skin. Those fingers catch a dancer’s wrist and draw her in. Those fingers brush her death away like dust.
Olivia drags her gaze to the small side door by the pantry, a glass insert looking out onto the night. Not the garden unraveling behind the house, but the front drive, the fountain, the road beyond.
She rushes toward the narrow door, and in five steps she is there, bursting out of the house and into the night like a body coming up for air. She doesn’t know where to go, back to the impossible wall or down the empty road, but one has already refused her, so she decides to try the other. She starts across the drive, the gravel biting into her bare feet. Shh, shh, shh, it says, too loud, as she hurries past the fountain, where the stone woman looms, her outstretched hand broken off, her billowing dress in tatters, rocks littering the empty pool and—
But it’s not empty.
There, on the floor of the fountain, lies a boy.
Chapter Twenty
A boy.
Not the ghoul of a boy, but a real one, flesh and blood and whole, his edges firm. He is Olivia’s age, perhaps a year or two younger, with tawny hair that falls across his face. He looks as if he simply climbed into the fountain, curled up on the cold stone, and went to sleep. If it weren’t for the silver cast to his skin, the way his wrists are bound together with dark ivy, the tendrils coiling around the statue’s feet.
If it weren’t for the fact he isn’t moving.
She saw a dead body once. It was in the road, two winters back, a husk of a woman who’d folded in like a leaf in the frost and never got up. She looked like she was sleeping, too, but her limbs were stiff, skin sagging over bones, the spark of life so clearly gone.
No, the boy in the fountain isn’t dead.
That is what she tells herself as she leans forward. As her fingers skim the air over his ankle, where the weedy ropes bind tight. But she can’t quite reach. She is about to swing her leg over the stone lip of the fountain when she feels movement, hears the grind of gravel underfoot, and looks up, hoping to find another ghoul, before she remembers—ghouls make no noise.
There is a soldier standing in the drive.
The whip-thin one, armor plate gleaming on their chest. Their eyes are dark, almost mournful, but there is no mercy in them. Light twitches on the crumbling front steps, and she sees the second soldier sitting there, the brick of a man with the shining pauldron on his shoulder. He slouches, bored, elbows on knees and hands hanging loose and large as spades.
Olivia takes a step back, away from the fountain and the boy curled at the statue’s feet, as something moves to her right and she catches the glint of a gauntlet as the third soldier steps out from behind the stone woman, smiling like a wolf.
The broad one stands.
The other two drift forward.
Metal glints on their hips, but they draw no weapons.
Somehow, that makes it worse. Their bare hands twitch. Their black eyes shine.
You asked for help, said the ghoul in the study, even though she only thought the word. Now, she thinks it again. Help.
It feels so small, unspoken, unsigned, less a word than a whisper, a breath.
Help, she thinks as the shadows stalk toward her. Help, help, help . . .
And then, they come.
Three ghouls emerge, not from the house or the garden or the dark. They rise straight up through the ground itself, sprouting like weeds between the gravel: a young man and a weathered woman, and then the one she saw in the music room, the first of the Priors. And though their bodies are broken, cleaved apart by darkness, and though there is no shine of metal on their clothes, she can tell they were dressed for battle, once.
They come, as if summoned, their bodies arranging into a shield before her.
The soldiers frown, the broad one perplexed, the thin one annoyed, the short one sneering as the young man’s ghoul steps forward, empty hands spread wide. And though the ghouls say nothing, she can feel their order ringing through her bones.
Run.
Olivia lunges back toward the boy in the fountain, but the ghoul of the weathered woman catches her arm and shakes its head, pushes her away.
And then a blade sings through the ghoul’s back, and it staggers, and Olivia knows the ghoul cannot die, knows it is already dead, but the sight of the metal spilling out of its chest, its knees buckling silently to the dirt, still sends a shock of horror through her bones.
The ghouls are no match for the soldiers. They have only bought her time.
And so, she runs, the only way she can, not down the empty road, but back toward the garden. A desperate sprint, driven only by the need to get away. Away from the house. Away from the soldiers with their glinting armor. Away, her blue dress snagging on bramble and thorn, her bare feet singing over the carpet of dead grass that runs between the withered garden and the barren orchard.
Away and back to the wall that will not end, the door that will not open. Almost there when a jagged root catches her toes and sends her tumbling, pain lancing through her hands and knees as she hits the ground. The fall knocks all the air from her lungs, but her pulse is a drum inside her head. Get up, get up, get up. And as she digs her hands into the cold damp earth to push herself up, she feels the poke of tiny sticks beneath her palms, and realizes too late that they are not sticks, but bones, the littered remains before the wall. Too late, she feels the prickling pain, the twitch of movement against her skin. Too late, the ground beneath her becomes a writhing carpet of paws and fur and wings, all of them alive.
Olivia scrambles back, a cold chill rolling up her arms.
Get away, she thinks, get away, and the crows take flight, and the mice scatter, and the rabbits bolt, and she forces herself to her feet, a sucking cold flooding through her limbs as she staggers to the garden door and throws herself against it.
The iron shudders, but doesn’t give.
She pounds on it again, but the sound goes nowhere, ending right where her fists meet the metal, swallowed up like a scream into a soft down pillow.
Olivia sags against the door, breathless. And then she turns and puts her back to the cold metal and trains her eyes on the dark. Perhaps it is some primal need to face her fate, the same force that drives a girl to look beneath her bed, the knowledge that what you can’t see is always worse than what you can.
She turns and looks at the house that isn’t Gallant.
And sees him, looking back.
The master of the house stands on the balcony, elbows draped over the rail, his black coat billowing in the cold night air, and even from here she can see his milk-white eyes, watching her. Even from here, she can see the smile that parts his ashen face, can see his hand drift up and his too-thin finger crook into a single, chilling gesture, wordless but clear.
Come here.
There is no moon, but down in the garden, silver light shines on a shoulder, a chest, a hand. The soldiers are coming. They amble toward her, wild but silent, stalking her through the dark, and Olivia decides she is not ready to face her fate. She turns to the door in the wall and slams her fists against it again and again, until debris flakes away from the surface, exposing the iron beneath.
Open, open, open, she thinks, pounding until she can feel the searing heat of the cut on her hand as it reopens, can feel the blood welling on her skin, the pain ringing through her palm as it hits iron, and then there is a sound, deep inside the metal, like the end of a music note, more hum than noise. A lock groaning free.
The door in the wall swings open, and Olivia stumbles through, out of one night and into another. Out of the dead garden and onto damp green grass that soaks her knees as she collapses to the ground on the other side, gasping for air. Air that tastes like summer rain instead of ashes. Air that tastes of flowers and life and moonlight.
Footsteps race through the garden, and Olivia drags her head up in time to see Matthew running toward her, knife in hand. For a second, she thinks he means to kill her. There is murder in his eyes, his knuckles white on the weapon’s hilt, but then she sees the blade’s damp edge, the blood already dripping from his fingers. He surges past her to the open door.
She twists round and sees the shadows coming, sees darkness spilling through the open door and over the ground like oil, staining the dirt, before Matthew slams the iron shut, metal clanging over his voice as he says, “With my blood, I seal this door.”
The door hums, the bolt groans home.
Olivia looks down at her aching palm, the cut split open, a fresh and angry line of red.
With my blood.
Matthew’s hand is pressed flat to the iron, head bowed against the door. He breathes heavily, shoulders heaving. Olivia stands, about to reach for him, when he turns and grabs her shoulders, fingers digging deep enough to bruise.
“What have you done?” he demands, voice shaking.
And Olivia looks from her cousin to the wall and back again, wishing she could answer.
Wishing she knew.
It is all so loud inside the house.
Beyond the wall, everything was made of whispers, the eerie quiet magnifying every breath or step. But here, Hannah crashes about the kitchen, boiling water and gathering gauze, and Matthew won’t stop shouting, even though he looks like he’s about to faint, and Edgar drags up a stool and orders him to sit. The noise is like a tide, and Olivia lets it wash over her, grateful for the sound after so much silence, even if none of them are talking about what she saw, about the fact there is another world beyond the wall.
“How dare you,” demands Matthew, and for once the words are lobbed at Hannah instead of her.
“I was only trying to help,” she snaps back.
“Sit down,” says Edgar.
“You drugged me.”
Olivia startles, realizes that is why his bedroom door stayed closed, why she didn’t see him.
“Better drugged than dead!” shouts Hannah, and Olivia cannot blame the woman. She saw his face the night before, the exhausted slump of his shoulders, the deep hollows beneath his eyes. “You needed rest.”
“There is no rest!” he screams. “Not in this house.”
“Sit down,” orders Edgar as Matthew paces, a dishtowel wrapped around his hand, the cotton soaking red. He cut too fast, too deep, a vicious wound across his palm, and despite the cloth, a few fat red drops still find their way onto the kitchen floor.
With my blood, he said.
Olivia’s own palm is in a sorry state, but Edgar has wrapped it in clean gauze (he would not even look at her), and her mind is not on the dull ache of her hand or the pain in the soles of her bare feet from running over gravel and broken earth, or the chill that lingers beneath her skin. Her mind is not here in the kitchen at all, but a hundred yards away at the garden’s edge. Behind her eyes, she sees the corpses of small creatures rising at her touch, feels herself dragged into the darkness by dead hands, watches two dozen dancers turn to ash, bits of bone rattling on the ballroom floor as they skitter back to their master.
Edgar finally gets Matthew to sit.
“You had no right,” he seethes at Hannah, but his eyes are fevered, his skin at once sallow and too pink, and she cannot help but think that despite his size, a decent wind would knock him over.
And Hannah is having none of it.
“I saw you born, Matthew Prior,” she says. “I will not watch you kill yourself.”
“You watched my father do it,” he says, such venom in his voice that Hannah flinches. “You let my brother—”
“Enough!” shouts Edgar, decent, soft-voiced Edgar, the word landing like a blow on Matthew’s cheek.
“Some days,” says Hannah, voice brittle, “you are still such a child.”
Matthew’s eyes go dark as pitch. “I am a Prior,” he says with a defiant scowl. “I was born to die in this house. But I’ll be damned if that death is for nothing.” He rounds then, leveling the full force of his anger at Olivia. “Pack your things. I never want to see your face again.”
She recoils as if struck. Anger floods like heat beneath her skin.
I am a Prior, too, she wants to tell him. I belong here as much as you. I have seen things you cannot see and done things you cannot do, and if you had told me the truth instead of treating me like a stranger in your house, then maybe I wouldn’t have gone across. Maybe I could have helped.
She lifts her hands to sign the words, but Matthew doesn’t give her the chance.
He turns his back on her, on Hannah and Edgar too, and storms out of the kitchen, leaving only blood and silence in his wake. Olivia lashes out, swipes her arm across the table and sends the tin box of gauze and tape crashing to the floor. Matthew doesn’t look back.
Tears burn behind her eyes, threatening to fall.
But she doesn’t let them. When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.
So she holds them in as somewhere, deep inside the house, a door slams shut.
Hannah does not assure her.
Edgar does not say that it will pass.
They do not tell her to ignore her cousin, to get some rest, that it will all be better in the morning. Olivia has so many questions, but she can tell by the weight of the air, the horrible, held-breath stillness, that no one plans to answer them.
Hannah sinks into a chair, head bowed, hands disappearing into wild curls.
Edgar moves to comfort her, and Olivia goes upstairs to pack.
Chapter Twenty-One
Olivia moves through the house like a ghoul, feeling half-there, half-gone, dazed and sore and uncertain.
On the stairs she stops, remembering the eerie silver light that swept through the other house. In the hall, she sees the door to Matthew’s room shut fast, the mottled shadow of moving feet beneath. Her uncle’s ghoul stands guard outside and will not meet her gaze. In her mother’s room, she turns the gold key in the lock, remembering the hum of iron under her hands, the door answering to blood. Hers and Matthew’s. Prior blood.
