With a rustle like a sigh, the tree dropped three walnuts into her hands. She cracked them open one by one.
The first held a green satin dress the color of moth’s wings.
The second held a pair of slippers with the black shine of petrified wood.
The third held a translucent stone the size of an eye.
When she held it up to her own, the world around her burst into life. The day was bright, the trees were blooming, and a carriage was bearing down on her. The driver couldn’t see her, but the horse did—he reared up, hooves high over Anya’s head.
She dropped the stone—and found herself back in the land of Death.
The stone was a window onto the land of the living.
Do with it what you will, the voice said, but don’t squander your sister’s gifts.
Anya waited until the green light had faded to murk, marking night in the land of Death. She put on the green dress and the black slippers. She combed back her heavy hair. Then she raised the stone to her eye.
She saw her home as she once knew it, when she was a girl with a mother and a father and a sister named Lisbet. She held the stone in place like a peephole as she rustled around the house’s edges, peering into its windows.
She saw a beautiful woman playing the piano. Her father drinking a glass of sherry, his hair lined with white. And a boy just older than her. He was tall and narrow, growing into manhood but not yet there.
Anya’s father looked at him proudly, clapped a hand to his shoulder. The boy’s eye roved idly over the furniture in the room, his mother at the piano, and landed on Anya.
He stood up straight and came to the window. Anya shrank back as her father joined his son. The boy pointed at her, but her father just frowned and looked past her, shaking his head. Finally he pulled the curtains over the window.
Anya waited in the garden, in her dress the color of will-o’-the-wisps. When she lowered her arm, she stood in a place of rotting bowers and bone. When she raised the stone back to her eye, she could see the soft green of grass and the brief starlight of fireflies. She could see the boy walking toward her, his step tentative but his eyes eager.
You may ask me one question, she said. But it has to be the right one.
Who are you? he asked.
Anya said nothing.
Why can’t they see you? he asked.
Anya stayed silent.
You are very beautiful, he whispered finally, reaching out to touch her. Why do you hold your hand so high?
Anya smiled at him the way she’d seen her stepmother smile. She let him bend close to her lips, closer, before dropping her arm and returning to the dead garden.
It took him many nighttime meetings to ask her the right question. By then his eyes were hollow with sleeplessness, and he looked at her with a love like hunger.
How can I get you to stay? he asked, at last.
She smiled and moved her mouth to his ear.
She told him how they could be together. How he could remake the world just enough so she could reenter the land of the living.
It would take blood.
She taught him the words to say, repeating them three times so he would remember. She pressed her bone knife into his hand. And she watched as he slid his bleeding wrist over the wall of her father’s house, using it to paint a door. He swayed as he spoke the words, his face, a mirror of their father’s, going pale.
The blood turned into a door that glowed with ugly green light at the seams. Anya dropped the stone from her eye as it swung open.
The boy disappeared, and the light turned into the warm golden lamplight of home. As Anya walked through the door, she could feel the faintest brush of her half-brother, stepping past her into the land of Death.
Then she was standing in her father’s house, alive and alone, and Death didn’t feel cheated because she’d traded a life for her own. She lifted the stone to her eye just long enough to peep through at the boy standing in her place in Death’s green light, his face terrified, before putting it into her pocket.
She went to the kitchen and ate spoonfuls of honey, ripped up fistfuls of meat, and let wine run down her chin.
Then she climbed the stairs to her father’s bedroom, where he lay sleeping next to his wife. She felt the bone knife twitching where it lay against her breast.
She didn’t cut his throat. She cut his wife’s. And she lay the stone in the dead woman’s hand, where her father would be sure to find it. And lift it to his eye, to see the dead world that awaited him, and the son who would call to him, always, but whom he could never retrieve.
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17
As Finch spoke, I stared into the woods. His voice was soft and soporific, relaying distant horrors.
The light began like a trick. He spoke about the sisters walking through their blood door, and I blinked, blinked again, but I couldn’t blink it away: a thin line of white, like the trail of a sparkler pinned between tree trunks. When Finch finished the story, I put a hand to the glass.
“Do you see that?”
He leaned over, peering past me to where the ghost light wavered. “Is that another jogger?” he murmured.
As I made room for him, my elbow hit the power window button. The glass whirred down a few inches, letting in a scent like smoke and metal.
Like fire and blood.
A heady flash of déjà vu froze me in my seat. Chicago. Ella’s scream. White light.
“Finch, drive. Drive, drive, drive!”
He slammed the car into gear and squealed onto the road. “What happened? What is it?”
Chicago. Ella’s scream. White light and a smell like death. A girl’s narrow fingers curling around the edge of a door.
“Nothing! I don’t know. Just … just drive. Okay?”
He stopped asking. A few miles down the road he followed signs for a rest stop. After we parked I followed him out of the car, leaning against the pump as he bought gas, then trailing after him into the greasy warmth of a McDonald’s.
“No more story time,” he said lightly. “It’s not doing either of us any good.”
“Stop talking.” I said it without heat, around a bite of cheeseburger. My mind was miles away, in the chill of a Chicago winter. The memories were coming faster now.
I’d been heel-toeing along the back of the couch like a tightrope walker. Until I fell, my chin catching the corner of our cheap glass coffee table on the way down.
There was blood. Lots of it. So much I thought I must be remembering wrong.
Then the memories fell apart into snapshots. Ella pressing a towel to my chin, using another to mop up the blood. The sudden light, the awful smell.
And the screaming. The shock of vicious cold as Ella carried me out the back door, shoeless and dripping blood in a dotted line.
We’d left everything behind. I’d needed stitches, but we didn’t stop at a hospital until we reached Madison.
What had we been running from?
Back at the car, I got into the driver’s seat before Finch could.
He looked in at me through the passenger window. “Are you okay to drive?”
I gave him a look, and he put his hands up. “Fine with me, I’ll sleep. Google Maps says three more hours to Birch. Drive straight through and find a motel?”
“Sounds good. Let’s look for something that’s not too close to the woods.”
The driving steadied me, gave me something to focus on, but I was still spooked. Our headlights ate up and spat out the dark as I strained to see past them, like whatever it was we were chasing might be just beyond my sight.