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.