“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia.”
She catches her toe on a threadbare rug and goes down hard, pain shooting through her hands as she throws them out to break her fall.
Metal glints as the broad soldier rounds the corner. She scrambles to her feet.
“This is your home.”
Where is the nearest hidden tunnel?
“This is the only house that will ever welcome you.”
Where is Thomas Prior?
“Once you understand, you will not want to leave.”
She bursts through a set of doors and into the ballroom, sprawling and dark. She is halfway to the far wall and the wooden molding and the hidden door when she hears the skitter like pebbles thrown across the inlaid floor.
And the room surges to life.
One moment it is empty, and the next, the dancers rise up to every side, from ashes to flesh in a single breath. They twirl around her, skirts whispering and shoes hissing, a turning wall of bodies. They open their mouths and the voice that pours out is his, only his.
“You cannot run from me.”
The dancers part to let him through. Beneath his tattered coat, his skin is broken in a dozen places, one for every missing piece. The three soldiers follow in his wake, and the dancers close behind them and fall still.
“I know what they have told you. That this is a prison, and I am the prisoner. But they are wrong. I am not a monster to be caged.”
He catches Olivia’s bandaged hand.
“I am simply nature. I am the cycle. The balance. And I am inevitable. The way night is inevitable. The way death is inevitable.”
He runs a bony finger down the line of the cut across her palm.
“And you, my darling, are going to let me out.”
Olivia twists free, turns away, but there is nowhere to go. The dancers stand still as cell bars, the soldiers spaced between them.
“Do you want to hear a story?”
She turns back toward the voice as he tosses two bones onto the ballroom floor.
Olivia watches as the bits of bone twitch on the patterned wood and begin to grow. Each a seed, the ash twining up like weeds until it forms limbs, bodies, faces.
Until they are right there in the ballroom.
Her parents.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Even though their clothes are faded and their skin is pale, even though Olivia has just seen them conjured out of bone and dust, even though she knows that they are not really there, that they are dead, they look so solid.
So real.
Olivia stares up into another version of her mother’s face, not the girl in the portrait or the ghoul in the bed, but Grace Prior as she must have been when she first stole beyond the wall, in a summer dress that skims her knees, her hair braided up into a crown.
Look at me, thinks Olivia, willing her mother to meet her gaze, but she has eyes only for the other conjured shape. Her father. He stands several feet away, a helmet in his hands. He stares down into its metal face. And then his gaze drifts up and Olivia sees her own eyes staring back, her own charcoal hair curling across his brow, the pieces of herself she could never place.
“He was the first of my four shadows,” says the master of the house. “I made him. I made them all, of course, but he was my first. My favorite.”
Her father lifts the helmet and puts it on, the metal curving against his cheeks. And the master stares at him, anger etched across his face.
“The longer a shadow lives, the more it becomes . . . itself. The more it thinks for itself. Feels for itself.” He glances at the other three soldiers. “A lesson I’ve since learned.” His white eyes drag back toward her father. “He was stubborn, headstrong and proud. But he was still mine. And she took him.”
As he speaks, her parents begin to move like puppets in a play, drifting toward each other across the ballroom floor.
Why do you stay in that place?
Her mother lifts the helmet from his face. He takes it from her, sets it down. She pulls him close.
If I gave you my hand, would you take it?
Her father bows his head toward hers. She whispers in his ear.
Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing.
He glances back at the master as her hand finds his. As she draws him in her wake.
I don’t know what it feels like, but I want to find out.
Don’t you?
And there is no garden wall, no conjured set, but Olivia knows what happens next.
We made it. We are free. And yet—
“And yet, puppets cannot live without their strings. I could have told her that.”
Olivia does not want to see what happens next. But she cannot look away.
Something is wrong, her mother wrote. And it is. In the room, her father stumbles, unsteady on his feet.