Where are you? she wonders, trying to keep her thoughts as quiet as her feet.
Something moves behind her, and she spins, heart lunging up into her throat. But it’s just a ghoul. The ruined echo of a young man, details drawing together and crumbling apart. She sees the slope of its shoulders, and the shape of its eyes, deep-set and dark in that familiar way.
The Priors all fought . . . they forced the creature back beyond the wall. . . .
And they never came home. The door was sealed. Their lives, a forfeit in the fight. The ghouls here, all Priors who died to keep the darkness in its cage.
Olivia begins to sign, then stops, remembering there is no need.
The ghouls can hear her.
Where is the boy? she asks, waiting for the ghoul to gesture to a room, a door, to show her which way to go. But it only shakes its head, and there is something in the rapid side to side, not a refusal so much as a plea.
Do not look, it seems to say.
But Olivia has no choice.
Answer me, she thinks, trying to make the thought an order. Where is Thomas Prior?
But the ghoul will not say. It shakes its head again, hand drawing through the air.
You must go.
But she can’t. She can’t go back without the boy. She can’t see the look on Matthew’s face. Can’t let her family down.
She leaves the kitchen and the ghoul behind, stepping through into the hall. The floorboards warp and sag and splinter. The air tastes like dust. The hall branches, some doors open, and others closed. The house is too large. He could be anywhere.
For a moment she has a mad idea.
She closes her eyes, imagines herself a part of this place, and tries to reach out and feel him, as if he were a patch of sun, a pulse. They are connected after all, two Priors, two living bodies in a house full of ash. So she reaches, and hopes, and feels . . .
Nothing. Just foolish.
Wherever Thomas is, she will have to find him the old-fashioned way. By looking. So she moves through the house, torn between keeping to the shadows, which might not be empty, and walking through the moonlit halls, alone, exposed.
She passes the ballroom, but tonight there are no dancers spinning silently across the floor, no soldiers ranged about, no white-eyed figure on his makeshift throne.
The study door hangs open, listing on its broken hinges, the chair turned away behind the desk. She holds her breath as she creeps forward, waiting to hear that eerie voice from the other side, waiting for the chair to turn and reveal those dead-white eyes, that paper skin, bone jaw shining through its face. But she reaches the chair, and it is empty.
Olivia lets out a slow, unsteady sigh, heart racing in her ears. And then she looks down.
She cannot help herself. She crouches and peers beneath the desk, hoping to find her mother’s journal where it fell. It is not there, but halfway to the door she glimpses a bit of paper in the corner, its left edge torn.
On it, her mother’s hand, already beginning to slant.
I am afraid it wasn’t my hand on her cheek wasn’t my voice in my mouth wasn’t my eyes watching her sleep
She shivers, letting the paper fall.
As it whispers to the floor, she hears footsteps overhead. The slow, easy stride of a man at home. Olivia holds her breath and listens until they fade.
Run, says her blood.
Stay, say her bones.
Olivia traces her way back down the maze of halls, not to the grand stairs, broad and bathed in silver light, but to the music room.
She circles the ruined piano, its black and white teeth piled in a heap, and goes to the corner. Her fingers trace the seams, just like Matthew showed her, until she finds the little latch. A gentle press, and the panel swings open onto steep, narrow steps. It is pitch black, and she climbs by feel, counts ten steps before reaching the top.
She turns in the dark and feels for the other door. For a second, it holds, unwilling to give. Fear twists through her, the simple, visceral fear of a body enclosed in a narrow stone space, and in her panic, she throws herself against the door too hard. It swings open, spilling her out into the room.
Olivia almost falls but catches herself on the wooden poster of the bed. She bites her tongue and feels the warm taste of copper in her mouth. Blood. She swallows it and steadies herself. She is in Matthew’s room, or at least, the room he lives in on the other side. Here, it is abandoned. The bed sits covered in a film of dust. The shutters are open, the window glass splintered, the tapestry that hung on his wall threadbare and leached of color.
She holds her breath and listens, but the footsteps she heard have stopped. She rounds the bed, goes to the door that leads to the upstairs hall, pressing her ear to the wood. Silence. Her hand goes to the knob, and she’s about to ease the door open when she feels as much as hears the sound of a body shifting, the sigh of limbs on a mattress.