The crow clicks its beak, one black eye finding hers, and for a moment, she marvels at the feat of it, the power in her hands. And then—
Attack, she thinks, and the crow bursts into the air and dives for the creature in the chair, and Olivia is on her feet, racing toward the door, even as she hears him pluck the bird from the air, the brittle snap of its neck, even when he says, “My dearest niece, I confess, I do not know exactly where you are.”
Her steps slow. Her uncle’s letter.
“You were not easy to find. Your mother hid you well.”
Go, she thinks, even as she finds herself turning back to face him.
“We must thank Hannah,” he says, and Olivia flinches at the sound of the woman’s name, wishes she could steal it back. “She made the list of all the places you might be.”
The notebook in the study drawer. But Olivia checked the desk in this study. There was no journal there.
“The two houses are bound. The walls are thin. And I have a way of reaching Prior minds when they are inside Gallant.”
Olivia’s heart sinks. Matthew.
“A body needs sleep. Without it, the heart gets weak. The mind gets tired. And tired minds are pliable things.”
As he speaks, the images float behind her eyes like waking dreams. Matthew, rising from his bed. Moving slowly through the house, his eyes half-open, no longer blue-gray but milky white.
“Speak to the tired and they listen.”
I don’t remember falling asleep, her mother wrote.
“Whisper to them and they move.”
But I woke up and I was standing over Olivia.
“A tired body doesn’t care. It’s like a seed, designed to carry.”
She sees Matthew moving down the darkened hall into the study, sees him draw the little black book from the top drawer, even though he cannot read, those borrowed eyes tracking over the list of homes that were not homes.
“I have sent these letters to every corner of the country,” recites the master of the house. “May this be the one that finds you. You are wanted. You are needed. You belong with us.”
Behind her eyes, Matthew’s face collapses in anger. He casts the letter into the fire. “I don’t know who sent you that letter. But it was not my father.”
The master rises from his chair.
“Come home, dear niece. We cannot wait to welcome you.”
He smiles, that eerie, rictus grin. But Olivia shakes her head. He said that Prior minds were his, so long as they were bound to Gallant. But her mother left. And still he followed her.
“Grace was different,” he says. “It didn’t matter how far she went. So long as she carried a piece of me with her.”
He turns his head, and she sees the rent in his cheek where the skin pulls back, exposing jaw and teeth. And that is when she sees the hole. The dark hollow in the back of his mouth.
When you came apart, I found the cursed bone. It was a molar, of all things, his mouth hiding inside yours.
She sees him standing in the ballroom, his skin, tattered with so many missing bones. The ash-born dancers, how they collapsed to dust, and how he called the slivers back, the borrowed fragments of himself. How the skin only healed when the bones returned home.
I ground the tooth to dust, her mother wrote. And threw the filings on the fire. He will never have the piece that was you. I hope he rots while worrying the hole.
The tooth is gone. The piece of him. Her mother made sure of that. How did he find her then? How—oh. Oh no.
At least I have Olivia.
She is the reason her mother could not escape the dreams. The reason he could get into her head, no matter how far they fled. Because half of her is his.
“And here you are. Where you belong.”
She backs away from the words, from him.
There is no one between her and the door and she throws herself against it, expecting him to lunge for her before she makes it, expecting to find it locked. But it gives, swinging open, and she plunges out into the darkened hall.
She rounds the corner only to find the narrow soldier waiting at the end. She staggers backward, turns down another hall, trying to orient herself in the dark.
She sprints through the maze of crumbling walls.
Too loud, too loud, she thinks, every step, every breath, every cracking board beneath her feet. Her bones tell her to hide. Her heart tells her to run. Every inch of her screams to get out, get away, get back to the wall, but she has to find Thomas. She scans the open doors, the rooms beyond.
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? she pleads, skidding around the corner.
That horrible voice echoes through the silent house.