“But that thing slaughtered my brother for nothing. Only a Prior’s blood can open the door, but it has to be willingly given. Now it knows, and every night, I dream that he is still alive, still there on the other side of that godforsaken wall, calling out, pleading to be rescued and—what are you doing?”
Olivia has rounded the desk. She pushes him aside and pulls open the drawer, searching for a pen, even though she knows there isn’t one, nothing but the little black book filled with places she might be. She pushes off the desk and plunges past Matthew out of the study and into the hall, hurrying toward the foyer, to her suitcase, because she knows, she knows, that she has seen him.
She kneels and throws it open, dragging out her sketchbook and her pencil. Doesn’t even bother standing, just crouches there on the foyer’s patterned floor and starts to draw.
Matthew’s footsteps sound nearby, and then he’s there, bracing himself against the banister as her pencil hisses over parchment, carving out a scene.
A boy, lying at the bottom of an empty fountain, bound to the feet of a broken statue. Folded in as if sleeping, his face half-hidden by curls.
She shoves the sketchpad into Matthew’s hand, tapping it with the butt of the pencil.
“I don’t understand,” he says, looking from the paper to her and back. “What is this? Where did you . . .”
Olivia lets out an exasperated breath, wishing people would stop and think sometimes, fill in the words so she doesn’t have to. She takes the sketchpad from him and turns back to the drawing she did of the wall. And it seems impossible for Matthew to get paler, but he does.
And then he grabs her wrist and pulls her up the stairs and down the hall, to the room she has only seen once, in the dead of night, when the screams drew her to the door. His bed is made now, the covers smoothed, his nightmares erased, at least from the sheets. But the cuffs peek out from under the bed, and he absently rubs one wrist, the bruises still bright against his too-pale skin.
Matthew goes to the far wall, the shape propped against it, covered by a white sheet. He pulls it back, revealing a picture frame. A family portrait.
The one missing from the downstairs hall. In it, her uncle stands in the garden, stern-faced but human and whole, one arm wrapped around his wife, Isabelle, holding her close. And there, before them, a pair of boys seated on a stone bench. Matthew, thirteen maybe, already long and lean, tawny hair swept half across his face. And a smaller boy, looking up at him with adoration.
“Is that who you saw?” asks Matthew, his words tight and small, as if they’re caught inside his chest.
Olivia sinks to her knees before the portrait, studying Thomas Prior, laying this image over the one in her mind. He is younger than the boy she found in the fountain, but not by much. Here his eyes are bright and wide, there they were closed; here his curls look light brown instead of gray. But everything is gray beyond the wall. And there is no denying the slope of his cheek. The line of his nose. The angle of his chin.
“Is that him?” presses Matthew.
Olivia swallows and nods, and her cousin folds into the nearest chair, his bandaged hand pressed to his mouth.
“It’s been two years,” he says, and she doesn’t know if he’s thinking that the boy in the fountain can’t be his brother, or about how long he left him there. How long he thought him dead.
All the movement in the halls has drawn Hannah. She stands in the doorway, uncertain.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
Matthew looks up. “It’s Thomas,” he says, eyes bright with fear and hope. “He’s still alive.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I have to find my brother,” he demands. “I have to bring him home.”
They are standing in the kitchen, the only four people in the too-large house. Edgar scrubs the garden from his hands, and Hannah twists a kitchen towel between her fingers, and Matthew paces, the color high in his cheeks, and Olivia wonders if she’s made a terrible mistake.
Back at Merilance, she learned about life. The way it started, and the way it ended. It was always talked about as a one-way street, first alive and then dead, and even though she knew it was more complicated—because of the ghouls, who had clearly been alive, and then dead, and now were something else—the truth is, she isn’t sure what to make of the boy in the fountain.
She doesn’t think the boy was dead, but she also didn’t see the rise and fall of his chest, the subtle stirrings of a body just asleep. If it is a spell, she hopes it’s one that she can break. Hopes that she will touch his hand and he will wake.