Slowly, Jane sank to her knees.
She needed to speak. She needed to understand. If Elodie truly stood before her, if Elodie was bleeding all over this cellar floor, then Jane had to save her. She had to rush to her, as surely as Augustine had rushed to Mr. Renton’s side. She could not hesitate.
She could not be the monster.
“What do I do?” she whispered, reaching out to touch the hem of Elodie’s stained gown with her free hand, the other still clutching tight to the candelabra. “What do you need from me? Tell me, please, what he did, and I will make it right.”
Elodie looked down at her, face pained, opening and closing her mouth without sound. She was still. Her chest did not rise or fall, and Jane felt sickly grateful, because if it had, the ribs would have spread and blood would have drained faster still from the wound.
“Tell me,” Jane begged. “They said you died before he ever returned, and that he only called your spirit forth, but what I saw—what I saw last night—is it true?”
Elodie grimaced, then reached down and seized Jane by the hair.
Jane swung the candelabra instinctively, its limbs striking the ghost’s shoulder. It rebounded, Elodie as immovable as stone. The candles tumbled from their iron holders, guttering, going dark, all but one that glowed feebly by their feet.
Her hand stung from the impact. The candelabra slipped from her grasp as she reached up, hooking her fingers around Elodie’s cold fist. Elodie moved, shifting her grip to cup Jane’s chin, thumb against her cheek. She bowed low over Jane’s prostrate form, and her eyes bored into Jane’s, the fine lacework of vessels within burst in a hundred places.
Her fingers slipped lower. They pressed hard to Jane’s pulse; there was no kindness in her touch.
Jane struggled but could gain no purchase. Her knees slid on the blood spreading beneath the both of them, her legs tangling in the fabric of her dress, tearing it. Her vision swam, and she remembered the burn of gas in her nose, the creeping darkness that had pressed in on her in the cellar of her mother’s house. She was going to die down here. Heavens protect her, but she was going to die. Would she be put in one of those chairs? Had Elodie…？
Her head pounded as her heart beat double-time. If Augustine found her down here, would he simply shrug? Or would he suffer? Would he miss her? Would he realize he had done this?
She felt a desperate kindling in her gut, a horrible certainty that she could not die, that she would not die. It was like a mass, pressing upon her stomach, her diaphragm. It forced a scream up out of her throat, and she surged upward, grabbing Elodie by the hips. She pulled herself along the spectral form, soft now, like rotten fruit beneath her fingers.
The pressure against her throat released. Jane shouted and threw Elodie from her, then scrabbled for the candle. It was almost dead, and she scooped it up, her frantic motions making the faint light flicker out for a moment before it blazed again. She brandished it before her with shaking hands.
Elodie was gone.
No blood coated the floor below her; the stone was no longer slick. Her other hand sought behind her. There—her fingers hooked around the doorframe. She backed through it, then felt along the wall toward the stairs, eyes darting around the darkness. She couldn’t see more than a foot on any side of her, but she came across no bloody ghosts, no lurking creatures.
She found the stairs and climbed.
She didn’t stop moving until she was in the foyer. Melted wax coated her fist, and her knees were bloodied, but she couldn’t feel the sting anymore, and the ichor that had soaked her skirts had disappeared. She fumbled with the latch to the front door, glancing back at the hallways, at the decaying grandeur of the staircases. The latch gave way, and she stumbled out into the sticky, humid brightness of midday, nearly falling down the front steps.
The front gardens stretched out ahead of her, tangled and half dead. Staggering, she made her way down the drive past withered trees and the desiccated remnants of old blooming vines. She could feel the sickness rolling off the edifice at her back, the lies clinging to the shingles of the roof, the menace rising up from the cellars. She could still smell old blood. Augustine had killed Elodie; Elodie would have killed her; Elodie was telling the truth; Elodie was lying. She could not sort one thought from the other, and it was all she could do to start off down the dirt lane, headed back to town.
She had to get out.
She had to escape.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SHE REACHED LARRENTON hours later, her feet aching, her house shoes in tatters. She held her skirts carefully, trying to disguise the tear across the front. The noises of town immediately pressed in on her from all sides and she flinched away from people who passed too close. She would have turned and fled, except that she had nowhere else to go.