A sound fills the room, like rattling, like rain, as more bones skitter over the floor. They rise from the ashes of each fallen body, fragments no bigger than a knuckle, a thumbnail, a tooth. The master stands at the center of it all, waiting as the slivers shudder and draw toward him, fitting themselves back into the places where his skin had peeled away.
It is like a cup breaking in reverse. A hundred brittle shards returning to their porcelain surface, rebuilding the pattern, erasing the cracks. Olivia watches, half in horror, half in awe, as paper-white skin closes over the bones, watches as the man who is not a man rolls his head on his shoulders as if working out a kink, watches as he spins on his heel, turning toward the armor-clad soldiers on the platform, the only ones still there.
“Anyone care for a dance?” he asks with a flourish.
They stare back at him, one grim, one sad, one bored. But they say nothing.
His face flickers, quick as a candle between anger and amusement. “None of you are any fun these days,” he says, marching across the ballroom to the balcony doors. He flings them open and steps out into the dark.
This whole time, Olivia has been holding her breath.
Now, at last, she lets it out. It makes almost no sound, just a small exhale, the faintest whoosh of air. But the dancers are all gone, the other sounds gone with them, and in the silence, even a breath makes too much noise.
A head twitches toward the open door.
It’s one of the soldiers. The short one balanced on her haunches at the platform’s edge. Her head swivels, dark eyes shifting to the ballroom door just as Olivia retreats into the safety of the hall. She presses herself flat into the pool of dark behind one of the doors, squeezing her eyes shut and hoping that she was fast enough, that when the shadow looked her way, it saw nothing. That by the time it scanned the open doors, she was already gone. She clutches her mother’s journal and tries to disappear into the wall of the house.
Olivia has never been the sort to pray.
Back at Merilance, she was told to kneel and knit her fingers and speak to a God she couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t touch. She didn’t want to get her knuckles rapped, so she knelt, and she knit her fingers and pretended.
She has never believed in higher powers, because if there were higher powers then they took her father and mother, they took her voice, they left her in Merilance with nothing but a book. But there are lower powers, stranger ones, and there in the dark, behind the door, she prays to them.
She prays for help—right until she hears the sound of boots, loud as bells on the ballroom floor. The clank of a hand flexing inside its gauntlet, the scrape of a blade sliding free of its sheath. Right until she sees the shadow cut across the moonlit floor.
And then, she runs.
She goes the wrong way. It isn’t her fault—she knows she should have run for the front door, but she’d have had to step right into the soldier’s path, so instead she flees farther down the hall, away from the door, and into the heart of the house.
Her steps are too loud, her breath is too loud, everything is too loud. And there is a wolf on her heels.
She reaches the room at the end of the hall, bursts into the study, slamming the door shut behind with a deafening crack. She drags a wooden chair before the door and manages to wedge it there, then spins, scouring the study for somewhere to hide, knowing there is nothing, knowing she is trapped. She has chosen the room without windows, without exits.
Nothing but broken shelves and the old wood desk.
The sculpture lies against the wall, as if someone flung it there. The rings are warped, the houses trapped beneath the twisted metal. Olivia starts toward it, hoping to pry away a piece of steel, anything to wield. She tucks the journal under her arm and kneels, picking at the ruined sculpture. Her wounded palm aches as she takes hold, trying to free something, anything, from the heap to use against the coming soldier.
Only, it doesn’t seem to be coming anymore.
Her pulse pounds in her ears, and she strains to hear around it. She rises from the mess of metal, creeps back to the door, presses her ear to the wood and hears . . . nothing. Olivia sags, hoping that it is gone, that it was never there, that it didn’t see her in the doorway, didn’t follow her into the hall and—
A boot slams against the door, rattling the wood.
Olivia staggers back and turns, toes catching on the edge of the threadbare rug.
She trips and falls, knocking the wind from her lungs and banging her knees hard against the wooden floor. She throws out her hands to break her fall, and the journal tumbles and skids beneath the desk. The door rattles and shakes, and she scrambles toward the desk, reaching her arm long beneath it, fingers skimming the cover as the wood begins to splinter at her back.
A door groans open.
Not the study door but another, a small one hidden in the wall, where the bookshelves give way to curling paper. Olivia doesn’t see the door swing open, doesn’t see the ghoul that steps out of the hidden room until it wraps its rotting arms around her waist and hauls her back, away from the journal and the desk and the study and the splintering door.
Olivia kicks and twists and tries to fight free. It is no use.
The ghoul holds tight and drags her out of the study.
Into the dark.
Chapter Nineteen
Once upon a time, Olivia Prior was afraid of ghouls.
She was only five when she first began to notice them. One day the shadows were empty, and the next they weren’t. The ghouls didn’t appear all at once. It was like stepping out of the sun into a darkened room—her eyes had to adjust. One day she dropped a bit of chalk beneath the bed, knelt down, and found an open mouth. The next, a half-formed hand drifted past her on the stairs. A few days later, an eye floated in the black behind the door.
Over time, they took shape, knit themselves together from bits of skin and bone into the rough shapes she came to know as ghouls. They were the stuff of nightmares, and for weeks she didn’t sleep, her back to the wall and her eyes on the dark.
Go away, she’d think, and they would, but they always came back. She didn’t know why they followed her, didn’t know why no one else could see them, was afraid that they were real and afraid that they weren’t, afraid what the matrons would do if they found out that she was haunted or mad. But most of all, she was afraid of the ghouls themselves.
Afraid that they would reach out of the dark and grab her, ruined fingers closing over skin. And then one day she flung her hand out in frustration, expecting to meet dead flesh or at least the eerie brush of cobwebs, the mist of something halfway formed. But she felt nothing.
Gruesome as they were, they were not there.
Sure, she could see them from the corner of her eye, an unpleasant echo, like staring at the sun and having to spend an hour blinking away light. But she learned to ignore them because they could not touch her.
They could never touch her.
And yet, now, pressed back against a moldering wall in a hidden passage of the house that is not Gallant, she can feel the ghoul’s hand over her mouth. And it is not the hint of a hand, not spider silk or mist, but long-rotten fruit and too-dry sticks, a bone-dry palm forced tight over her lips.
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.