“It does not matter,” he says. “You cannot take our blood by force, and we will not give it to you.”
The master does not seem surprised.
“Your honor is charming,” he says, approaching the wall. “And wasted. You say you refuse to open the door for me.” He smiles, fingers dancing over the stones. “But you already have. Or rather, you failed to close it.”
Matthew’s head jerks toward the gate, the sheen of his blood visible even in the low silver light. Olivia saw him seal the door. She heard him say the words.
Those long fingers lift to the old iron gate. The master’s hand hovers over the door.
“The thing about old houses is the upkeep. How quickly they fall into disrepair.” He speaks as if to the gate itself. “Everything decays. Iron rusts. Bodies rot. Leaves dry and break. And all of it turns to dust and ash. No wonder it’s hard to keep any surface clean.”
He brings a single bony finger to the surface of the door.
“Blood on iron,” he says. “Not blood on earth. Not blood on stone. Not blood on ivy. Blood on iron. That is the key.”
The master drags his nail down the bloody mark on the door, and the surface flakes away, debris crumbling to reveal the iron beneath, untouched.
“No,” whispers Matthew, the last color leaching from his face.
“And now,” says the monster, “for my final trick.”
He presses his hand to the door and gives it a gentle push.
It swings open.
Open onto a summer night. Onto a sprawling garden, a riot of blooms and leaves.
Onto Gallant.
“NO!” roars Matthew, lurching against the soldier’s blade, which cuts a shallow line along his throat. The soldier clucks her tongue, and Olivia watches, horrified, as the master of the house steps through the garden door. Even in the dark, she can see the shadows spill around him, can see them sprawl across the grass, can see them eating through land and life.
The master’s head falls back, chin tipping up to a sky with a moon and stars. He inhales deeply, as all around him the grass withers and dies, and as it does, his hair curls like night against his cheeks, and his skin looks less like paper than marble, and his tattered cloak turns to velvet, rich and smooth over his shoulders.
He is no longer wasted, but beautiful, horrible.
He is not a monster, not the master of the house, not a demon trapped behind a wall. In that moment, he is Death.
He glances back through the door, eyes as bright as moons, and looks at Olivia with something like fondness before he smiles and says, in a voice as rich as midnight:
“Kill them both.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The soldiers smile.
The broad one tightens his arms around Olivia’s chest, crushing the air from her lungs, and the short one threads her hand through Matthew’s hair and wrenches his head back as Death vanishes beyond the wall.
She writhes and tries to breathe, tries to think as time slows down, the world slows down, reduced to light and shadow, to the blade on Matthew’s skin and the moonlight beyond the wall. She slams her head back into the soldier, hoping to hit his head, but he is too big, she is too small, and instead, her skull bangs against his armored shoulder.
Pain bursts behind her eyes. Pain, followed by a thought.
The armor.
It seemed so random, the way it was shared between the soldiers. A helmet here, a chest plate there, a gauntlet, a pauldron. But it’s not random at all.
Everything the master conjures, he forms around a bone.
Her father had his molar. The wisp-thin soldier had a rib.
The armor shields the borrowed pieces.
And without them—
Olivia writhes with all her strength, kicks her legs back into the soldier’s body, forcing just enough distance between them that she can free a hand, reach for the blade at the soldier’s hip.
She draws the weapon, drives it blindly back into the soldier’s side, and though it doesn’t seem to hurt him, it is enough of a surprise that he loosens his grip.
Olivia scrambles free, taking the blade with her, but doesn’t run.
Instead she turns back and brings the sword down on the armor, metal on metal ringing like a bell.
The short soldier looks up, the blade still kissing Matthew’s neck, but the broad one only flashes a bored smile at Olivia. Until she strikes again, this time hitting the leather that binds the metal to his shoulder. It breaks. The pauldron slips and falls away, and so does the soldier’s smirk as there, in the silver light, she sees the white curve of a collarbone.
The soldier rears back, but Olivia is already swinging, bringing the sword down a third time, carving deep into his shoulder. The collarbone comes free. Fury crosses his face, brief as a passing shadow, but he is already falling, body collapsing back into dust as the bone hits the grass.
She rounds to find the last soldier staring, wide-eyed, a feral anger etched across her face as she lifts her sword and drives it down toward Matthew’s chest. But she wasn’t the only one watching. Matthew catches her sword hand, gripping the gauntlet with the last of his strength. He tries to rip the armor off, but the soldier tears free and dances back out of reach, a shadow blending into the dark, and then Olivia is there, pulling her cousin up, away from the shadow and toward the open door. Ten steps, five, one, and then they’re through.
Through, into warmth, into soft earth and the smell of rain and the airy night.
Through, into Gallant.
She stumbles to her hands and knees, the gloves crumbling from her fingers, leaving only a streak of ash on barren ground, the magic lost beyond the wall. But the master of the house looks more alive than ever. He makes his way up the garden, fingers trailing over flowers, and rot spreads along the petals and the stems, consuming everything like fire, leaving a ruined black tide in his wake.
In the moments since he stepped through the door, ivy has spilled out, woody vines that force the gate open like a mouth. There is no way to lock the door, not without closing it first. Two spades lie on the ground nearby and Matthew presses one into her hands.
“Start breaking it free,” he says as he hefts the other spade and surges up the slope toward Death.
Olivia hacks at ivy, and when that doesn’t work, she pulls at it with her bare hands, feels the thorny bark tear open the skin on her palms. Steals a look back over her shoulder, up the slope to the garden as Matthew reaches the grim shadow and swings the spade at his back. But the tool never touches him. It grazes the air around his cloak, and the iron rusts, and the wood rots, and all of its crumbles.
Matthew stumbles back as the monster turns, his eyes a glowing white.
“You are nothing,” he says, in a voice like frost.
“I am a Prior,” answers Matthew, standing his ground. He has no weapon, nothing in his hands but blood. It stains his palm as he lifts one hand, like the statue in the fountain. “We bound you once, and we will bind you again.”
A laugh like thunder rolls through the night.
Olivia keeps hacking at the ivy, even though it’s not working, and the door is jammed open, and even if Matthew finds a way to force the monster back, her heart pounds in her chest, warning that there is no hope, no hope, no running from death, no hiding from death, no conquering death. But she doesn’t stop. She will not stop.