Her mother reaches for Olivia.
“In your hands, the house will mend. The gardens will grow. You will be happy. You will be home.”
It would be a lie to say she doesn’t want it.
A lie to say she isn’t tempted.
A drop of blood for this. For a family. For a home.
Wouldn’t it be worth it?
You belong here.
She looks down at herself, the way she blends into the grays of this world. This world, where no one but the master speaks, yet everyone can hear her. This world, where she would never be alone again.
Her mother smiles, and she can imagine the color flooding back into her cheeks. Her father looks at her with love, with pride.
Her palms begin to burn.
But they are not her parents.
Her mother was flesh and blood and human, and she is a ghoul in her family’s house. Her father may have started out like this, born of ash and shadow, but he became more. And even though she never met him, she knows he would not have wanted this.
This is a dream.
It would be so easy to climb inside, to stay until it felt real, to never wake up.
But somewhere in this house, Thomas is waiting.
Back at the wall, Matthew is waiting.
Inside Gallant, Hannah and Edgar are waiting.
And even if Olivia could live in this cold gray world, she doesn’t want to. She wants the vivid colors of the garden at Gallant and the sound of the piano spilling through the halls, Hannah’s kind hands and the way Edgar hums whenever he’s cooking.
She wants to go home.
Olivia turns to the soldier at her back. She reaches up, touches her fingers against their face, takes all the heat gathering beneath her skin, and pushes it into the shadow.
“NO!” snarls the master of the house, and a second later ash spins around her fingers, forming itself into a pair of silken gloves.
But it is too late. The soldier staggers back a single step, and then looks up, light flooding in their cheeks, and fire in their eyes. Alive.
Olivia shivers, overcome by a sudden, awful chill, the cost of her own magic. But there is no time.
Fight for me, she thinks through chattering teeth, and the soldier draws their blade, and charges past her. The room plunges into chaos, then, as the dancers jostle, and the other two soldiers draw their weapons, and the master stands at the center of the storm. In the chaos, Olivia breaks out of the circle and runs across the ballroom to the wooden molding, gloved hands groping for the hidden door.
She is still shaking violently as she finds the latch, and the tiny door swings in, and she looks back only to see the master’s long sharp fingers tear the soldier’s armor off and plunge into their chest, and for a terrible moment she thinks she will see the master drawing out a heart. His blood-stained hand comes free, but there is no beating heart, only a single rib. Still, the soldier shudders and collapses, and the master spins round, looking for Olivia, but she is already dropping through the hidden door into the dark.
She crouches, knees scraping the stone stairs. It is too low to stand.
Her whole body shivers as she claws at the gloves, but she can’t get them off. They wrap around her hands like a second skin. The chill finally begins to ebb, leaving her breathless on the steps.
Down in the cellar, something moves. A whisper of motion—the quiet rasp of a body sliding over dirt. She twists, almost losing her balance as she looks past the six steps into the cellar below.
Her shoes slide on the damp, slick stone as she climbs down. There are no windows, no open doors, no cracks for the light to slip in, if there were any light outside—and yet, when she reaches the packed dirt floor, she can almost see. The silver glow that seems to come from the house itself seeps like damp from the wood and the stone. She blinks, eyes adjusting.
The floor is littered with broken jars and empty crates.
A small shape twitches in the dark. A ghoul hiding in the corner between boxes.
Show yourself, she thinks, but the ghoul doesn’t drift forward, and as she takes a cautious step, she sees it is not a ghoul at all, but a boy, head bowed, and arms wrapped around his narrow knees.
Thomas.
The master of the house has had enough.
He crouches over the body of his second shadow, the red of their blood staining the floor as he fits the rib back into his own chest, paper skin closing over the bone.
His tongue drifts, as it always does, to the hole in the back of his mouth. The one piece he will never get back.
He presses his hand to the shadow’s body, and it withers, life flooding like a current beneath his skin as the corpse turns to dust on the ballroom floor.
The blood dries, too, crumbles, blown away by a stale breeze.
It is only a taste of what he will do.
Hunger gnaws inside him, unyielding, insatiable.
“There is a mouse in my house,” he says to the remaining soldiers and the dancers and the ghouls. “Find it.”
Part Six
Home
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Thomas Prior stares up at her, his blue eyes gray in the silver light.
He looks tired and hungry, but he can sleep and eat when they are back beyond the wall. All that matters now is that he is alive, and Olivia has found him. She wants to throw her arms around his narrow shoulders, but he looks as if the force might break him, so instead she kneels, her face inches from his, hoping that he can see the echoes in her brow, her eyes, her cheeks, and know that they are family.
Thomas frowns and opens his mouth as if to speak, but she clamps a gloved hand over his lips as the voice rings out through the house overhead.
“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia!” it calls. “Do you really think you can hide in my house?”
Thomas shivers at the sound of the master’s voice, and she draws her hand from his mouth, holding just a finger to his lips. She scans the cellar. There are two sets of stairs, the one down from the ballroom and the one up to the kitchen, and she is about to guide Thomas to the second set when he rises on unsteady legs and begins to drag a crate across the cellar floor.
It makes a horrible sound, like nails on stone, and she lunges forward, pinning him still, holding her breath and hoping the thing overhead didn’t hear. And then her eyes go to the crate, not where it is now, in the middle of the room, but where it was before, in front of the shelves. Beyond the metal racks and behind the empty jars is a piece of wood, the size of a very small door.
My brother made a game of it, finding all the secret places.
Olivia kneels in front of the shelf and shifts the jars, one by one, careful not to rattle them. And then she crouches low and slides the wooden panel out of the way. She peers through, hoping to see night, to see the dead grass and winding thorns of the garden.
But all she sees is black.
She turns and finds Thomas staring up at the ceiling, eyes wide with fear as the master of the house rants and rages overhead.
Olivia holds out her hand, and his gaze drops to meet hers.
It’s okay, she thinks, even though he cannot hear her. We are almost there, she thinks, and your brother is waiting.
His hand slides into hers, thin fingers clutching at the strange silk gloves, and she draws him forward into the dark. They crawl on hands and knees through the pitch-black tunnel, and she tries not think of a grave, of a tomb, of being buried here, under the house that is not Gallant.