I stole across the room and peered out the window, blinking against the darkness. The blackened rows of the barren fields were still, sparkling with frost.
A pale figure stood in the middle of them, palms raised high to the starlight.
Merry must have been out praying again.
In the days after the fire, she’d doubled down on her fervor, slipping out to the fields for meditation whenever she had a spare moment.
I once asked what she was asking for, but she only smiled and said it was between her and God.
But praying in the middle of the night was new.
How had she even snuck from—
A soft murmur from the bed broke my thoughts. Merry rolled over, murmuring in her sleep.
I snapped back to the window. The figure who was definitely not my sister was still there, frozen in such a static pose, I almost convinced myself it was a scarecrow.
But no scarecrows had survived the fire…
Then, slowly, as if feeling my gaze upon it, it moved, lowering its arms as it turned toward the house.
I jerked back from the window, feeling sheepish. There was no way it could see me through the tiny, dark windowpane.
Even as I tried to reassure myself of this, the figure lifted one hand, reaching high up into the night sky, and waved at me.
There was something…not right with its hand. The fingers were too long and twisted. They reminded me of the stag the McNally brothers had brought into town, its antlers braiding around themselves, spindly and misshapen.
I stilled, remembering Cyrus’s jumbled mutterings at the Judgment.
But…her hands…they were awfully funny, though. Not like…not like they were supposed to be.
This was her.
This was Cyrus’s silvery woman.
The one he’d seen at the tavern, the night of the fire.
The one only he’d seen.
And now I had too.
In a flash, she cut across the field, moving far too swiftly to be human, like a bit of gauze caught in a sharp wind. When I blinked, trying to focus on her, she was gone, as though she’d never been there at all.
I stared into the dark, willing myself to see her once more.
But the field remained empty.
I rubbed my eyes.
Squinted.
The night stayed still.
“You’re tired,” I whispered. “It was just a trick of moonlight. An illusion.”
Nodding to myself, I joined my sisters back in bed, grateful for the warmth they offered. I settled in and tried to drift to sleep.
But as I closed my eyes, I saw her, saw the longer-than-they-should-be fingers fluttering at me as if I ought to recognize her. As if I knew her. As if we were friends.
I buried deeper into the mattress, a chill descending over me.
“It wasn’t real,” I muttered into my pillow. “Your mind is playing tricks on you.”
But Cyrus had seen her too.
“He was drunk.”
But I wasn’t. Not now. Not ever.
I froze, remembering the night I’d lit the Our Ladies. A woman in a pale dress had come out of the wheat field. I tried to recall what her hands had looked like, but it had been dark and she’d been so far away.
Who was this mysterious woman, and why hadn’t anyone else in town seen her? The Falls wasn’t very big, not like the cities out east, where every person you met on the street was a stranger. There was no place here for outsiders to hide.
The wind picked up, racing past the window to rustle through the woods and set the Bells to chiming.
The pines.
Was she out there, hiding in the woods?
For what purpose?
Cyrus had seen her, and the next day he was dead.
Did she mean to harm me as well?
I flipped onto my back, picking faces out of the gnarled wooden knots in the beams above me as I wondered through my options.
I wanted to hope, wanted to believe, that she wasn’t real.
But it seemed unlikely, given that Cyrus Danforth had not only seen but engaged with her.
So if she was real—and hiding away somewhere in the woods—what was I supposed to do? Ignore her? Confront her?
I wanted to laugh.
The pines went on for miles, spreading across five different mountains—that I knew of. Trying to find anything in that dark and tangled mess would be nigh impossible.
But…
Whitaker.
He knew the forest better than I ever would and was far more skilled at tracking.
He could help me, I was certain of it.
I nodded, feeling more settled now that there was a plan.
I closed my eyes again, praying sleep would come.
But something still nagged at me. There was a heaviness at the back of my neck, poking and prodding. I couldn’t shake the notion that I was being watched. I rolled over to face the doorway, and a bit of the tightness in my chest lessened when I saw its emptiness.
My gaze fell on Sadie and the rag doll she clutched in the crook of her arm. In all the chaos surrounding her birthday, I’d forgotten about the chocolate cake and Abigail’s gift.
Not Abigail, I clarified in the sleepy depths of my mind. Abigail wasn’t real.
But someone had made the horrible little thing and left it for Sadie. Why?
Again, the unbidden image of the woman waving at me entered my mind.
Was she behind this?
The dark red stitches seemed to glower in my direction. No matter how much reason screamed that the Xs were only bits of thread and cotton, I knew that the doll was staring at me.
Without thinking, I stole it away from Sadie and tossed it beneath the bed. It landed on the wooden floorboards with surprising heft, making far more of a thunk than any doll ought to, and I sank back into the mattress with caution, certain I was about to hear skittering noises as the monstrous thing pulled itself to freedom.
But the noises never came, and when I next opened my eyes, the sun was up. Its golden rays pushed back and discarded the terrors that had consumed my night.
I knew without a doubt that Samuel had left. The house already felt lighter without his stewing presence.
I padded downstairs, then stopped short in the kitchen, staring in horrified confusion at an absolute disaster. It took me a moment to realize what Samuel had done, but when I saw the super frames—the combs cut away unevenly with jagged slashes—it all sank in.
He’d stolen out in the middle of the night and pilfered the bees’ winter reserves. I counted the wooden frames, quickly doing the math.