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.
There must always be a Prior at the gate.
With my blood, I seal this door.
Father calls it a prison.
And we the keepers.
I was born to die in this house.
What have you done?
Olivia’s head spins.
She looks down at her bare feet, caked with mud and dust, the shallow red scrape of thorns that wrap around her calves, too tired, too shaken, to feel any of it. She passes the suitcase and the bed, walks straight into the tiled bathroom, and runs a bath, as hot as it will go.
As it fills, she stands before the bathroom mirror, studying her face, her eyes, her dress, all of her coated in ash and blood and things she cannot see but feel, the ghoul’s hand on her mouth, the mouse twitching in her palm, the dead-white eyes hanging on her in the dark, and suddenly she wants to climb out of her clothes, out of her skin.
She strips away the stained blue dress and climbs down into the too-hot water, watching as it clouds. She works one-handed, scouring her skin, trying to scrub away the eerie chill, the dancers’ ashes, the boy in the fountain she couldn’t reach, the door that wouldn’t open, and the fear of what would have happened if the soldiers had caught up with her. She tries to scrub away the other side of the wall, the terror she felt with every step, but also the eerie sense of coming home. As if some part of her belonged in that dead, decaying house.
And of course, it did.
She is her father’s daughter, after all.
The tallest shadow.
She tries to imagine him as one of the dancers, turning like a puppet across the ballroom floor, but she knows in her bones he wasn’t one of them.
Death, with his four shadows and his dozen shades.
Four shadows, and she counted only three, ranged around the throne.
The water clouds, and in the swirling surface she conjures another soldier, not broad or thin or short but tall, standing dark eyed and armor clad upon the platform. She sees him hunting her mother through the ruined house. Catching her. And setting her free.
Olivia studies her hands below the water, the heat causing pink to bloom across her skin. The gray film she washed away still hangs in the bath, wrapping like tendrils around her fingers. A mother made of flesh and blood. A father made of ash and bone.
What does that make her?
The water has gone cold and fogged with all the things she’s washed away, and she climbs out and pulls the plug, watching it drain. Her mother’s blue dress lies ruined on the tile, and she leaves it there, opens the suitcase she never unpacked and pulls on the second gray shift she brought, the fabric stiff and scratchy and ill-fitting. Only a matter of days, but she can hardly stand the feel of it now against her skin. She strips it off and pulls on a pale green dress instead.
And then, she packs.
Not because Matthew told her to, but because she longs to find a place where she is wanted. And she is not wanted here. She stares down at the pile of pale fabric in her suitcase, then flings open the wardrobe and pulls out her mother’s clothes.
The case is too small, they’ll never fit, but she doesn’t care, she has lost enough and she is taking this. One by one the garments come free of their hangers, one by one they drop like flowers cut, until the wardrobe is empty, the floor strewn with cloth, and Olivia collapses, chest heaving, among the garden of her mother’s dresses, the bright yellows and bold reds and hazy blues, like summer blooms.
Something cracks inside her, a soft, hitching breath.
The tears come then, bitter and hot.
She hates them even as they fall.
She has only cried twice, once when she was old enough to read the book and realize that for all her games and all the lies she told herself, her parents were never coming back. And once after Anabelle tore the pages out. Not when she heard the horrible rip, but later, after she’d risen up to fill the jar with bugs, after she’d dumped them in Anabelle’s bed and crawled back into her own, she’d curled up in the dark and sobbed, the torn pages of the journal clutched against her chest.
Her mother’s journal. She keeps flexing her fingers, desperate to feel the familiar weight of the book. But it’s gone. Lost beyond the wall, and the grief hits her in a wave.
It is not the words she mourns—she has memorized them all—it is her father’s drawings, the ones she’d only just begun to understand. It is the object itself, the indentation of the pen on the paper, the grooves in the cover, the letter in the back, Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, her name written over and over in her mother’s hand.