“Olivia!” shouts Matthew, voice ringing in the dark, and she is trying, she is trying. The ivy finally begins to snap and give.
“Olivia!” he calls again, boots pounding over ground as a massive wooden tendril breaks and the door groans free and she looks up in time to see the wolfish soldier inches from her face, in time to see her blade singing through the air.
She doesn’t close her eyes.
She is proud of that. She doesn’t close her eyes as the sword comes down. It strikes her hard, and she falls, hitting the ground. Waits for pain she doesn’t feel. Wonders why she isn’t dead, until she looks up at the open door and sees Matthew.
Matthew, standing in her place. Matthew, who pushed her out of the way the instant before the sword cut down.
Matthew, who leans in the doorway, the blade driven through, the point jutting like a thorn from his back.
Olivia screams.
There is no sound to it, but it is there, ringing through her chest, her bones, it is all she can hear as she pushes to her feet and rushes toward the door, toward him.
Too late, she reaches him.
Too late, she brings the spade down on the soldier’s gauntlet, severing the armored hand. Too late, the soldier sneers and crumbles, and so does the gauntlet and the sword, and Matthew takes a single, unsteady step back, and falls, Olivia sinking with him.
Her hands race over his front, trying to stem the blood as Matthew coughs and winces.
“Stop him,” he pleads, and when she doesn’t move, his hand digs hard into her wrist.
“Olivia,” he says, “you are a Prior.”
The words ripple through her.
Matthew swallows and says again, “Stop him.”
Olivia nods. She forces herself to rise and turn to the garden and storm up the path, ready to face Death.
Chapter Thirty
When Olivia was eight, she decided she would live forever.
It was a strange whim, sprouting up like a weed one day between her thoughts. Perhaps it was after the cat by the shed, or when she realized that her father was gone, that her mother was never coming back. Perhaps it was when one of the younger girls took ill, or when the head matron made them sit on the stiff wooden pews and learn of martyrs. She doesn’t exactly remember when she had the thought. Only that she had it. That at some point, she simply decided that other things might die, but she would not.
It seemed sound enough.
After all, Olivia had always been a stubborn girl.
If death ever came for her, she would fight, as she fought Anabelle, as she fought Agatha, as she fought everyone who got in her way. She would fight, and she would win.
Of course, she wasn’t sure how to fight a thing like death. She assumed that when the time came, she would know how.
She does not.
Olivia runs up the path, grass breaking underfoot as she passes withered blooms and ruined trees, rotting arches and crumbling stone. She reaches the man who is not a man, the master of the other house, the monster who made her father and killed her mother, and throws herself against him.
She presses her hands flat against his coat and tries to summon the power she felt beyond the wall, imagines herself drawing it back, prying the garden from his grip, the life he stole with every step, taking the marble polish from his cheeks and the shine from his hair. She digs her fingers into Death and tries to take it back.
His white eyes drift down to meet hers.
“Foolish little mouse,” he says, voice like a tree felled by a storm. “You have no power here.”
Cold steals up her hands where they meet his coat, a teeth-rattling tired, a dire need to close her eyes and sleep. She tries to pull free, but her hands only sink deeper, as if he were a cavern, boneless, bottomless, and there is something she has to do, but as the chill seeps through her, she cannot breathe, cannot think, cannot—
A gun goes off, the blast shattering the night.
Hannah and Edgar stand at the top of the garden.
Olivia tears free, staggers back, her vision swimming as Edgar aims at Death a second time and fires, the bullet melting in the air above his floating cloak. They cannot kill him, they know they cannot kill him, but they will die protecting Gallant, because it is their home.
They will die and haunt this place like—
Like ghouls.
Shadows skate up the garden path, thin as fingers, killing every leaf and stem as they reach for Hannah, for Edgar, but Olivia throws herself between Death and Gallant.
Help me, she thinks, the word reaching like roots beneath the soil. Help me protect our home.
And they come.
They rise up from the ground. They step out of the orchard and drift down from the house. Hannah and Edgar watch, eyes wide, as the ghouls pour into the ruined garden, edges lit by magic and moonlight.
Olivia watches, too. Watches her mother, hair loose and wild, stride through the roses, her uncle march forward, hands balling into fists, watches the old man and the young woman and a dozen other faces she never knew. They come, armed with shovels and blades.
Death glances down at her, amused. “We’ve been through this already, little mouse. Weren’t you listening?”
And she was.
The ghouls beyond the wall belong to him.
But the ones at Gallant, she thinks, belong to me.
The smile drops from his face.
He turns to the ghouls as they gather around him. Old and young. Strong and wasted. How many did he ruin? How many did he kill? Down at the wall, beyond the open door, the other Priors stand, waiting to drag him home. And there at the front of them, she sees the boy. The one who lived and died two years ago beyond the wall.
The monster cuts his hand through the air, and a few of them ripple, but none of them fade.
“You are nothing,” he sneers as they close in. “You cannot kill me.”
And he is right, of course. You cannot kill death. That is why you banish it.
They close over him like ivy, their edges dissolving into one teeming mass of shadow as they force him back through the garden, back through the open door, back beyond the wall.
They strike it like a wave crashing onto shore.
Olivia rushes in their wake, her hands slick with blood, some hers and some Matthew’s. She reaches the iron gate and slams it shut, presses her palms to the metal and thinks, With my blood, I seal this door.
The lock hums inside the iron.
The door seals itself against the wall, the other side swallowed up behind iron and stone. The garden falls silent. The night goes still. Hannah and Edgar rush through the dark, toward her and the shape lying on the sloping ground.
Matthew.
Olivia gets there first, sinking to her knees beside his head. He is so still, eyes gazing up at the sky, and she is afraid he is already gone, but then his lids flutter and his breathing slows, a body on the edge of sleep.
“Is it done?” he says, the words more shape than sound, and Olivia nods as Hannah crouches on the other side. Edgar stands, one hand on Hannah’s shoulder.
“Oh, Matthew,” she says, gently, stroking his hair.
Perhaps he will be okay. Perhaps he simply needs to rest. Perhaps, but as she kneels beside him, she can feel the blood, soaking into the ground, staining her skin. There is so much of it.
“Olivia,” he says softly, fingers twitching. She takes his hand, bows her head close. “Stay,” he whispers. “Until I fall asleep.”
She grits her teeth against tears and nods.