The lamps lit.
Orren stood before her, tow-headed, blank-eyed.
Blood poured from his mouth.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
JANE’S SHRIEK ECHOED off the high ceiling of the foyer. She was fleeing before she could think. Halfway to the stairs, though, she stumbled, fell to her knees.
She was shaking too hard to stand up again.
“You always want to run,” Orren said behind her. His sweet boy’s voice was cracked from fever, muddied by blood, and brutal in its gentleness. “You would have left me to die, but you were too afraid of what they would think.”
Augustine had begged her to see the ghosts of Mr. Renton, Mr. Aethridge, the Maerbeck boy she had never met, and she had not seen them at all. Only faceless statues. She had thought him mad, or bewitched by the spirits. And yet here, now, it was Orren, little Orren, Orren who would have lived, perhaps, if Augustine had come to his sickbed instead of her. Not a statue; not something as inhuman, or as distant, as Elodie was to her.
She had killed Orren, and here he was, come to punish her.
She had to get away.
Holding up her skirts and praying that the rug would not trip her, she finally stood again. She ran. She heard nothing behind her, but she could feel the boy at her back, staggering to the stairs, dragging himself along the banister. The study—she would take refuge in the study. She had found Augustine thrice there in the dead of night; she had to hope it would keep her safe now.
Her lungs burned, but she felt it only dully through her panic. Jane rounded the corner at a sprint and threw herself against the study door, forcing it open with a loud crack. She fumbled it closed as swiftly as she could and shoved one of the armchairs against it, then backed away, shaking.
The skulls gazed down at her, shadowed and indistinct. The weight of all of Augustine’s assembled curiosities pressed in. She could hear Orren outside. She could hear faint sobbing, childish cries of pain. Her heart twisted with shame, with panic, with horror.
Was this what Augustine had suffered through, every night for months?
She forced herself to turn from the door, to go to the light switch. She cranked the gas lamps up as bright as they would go. Light, light would make her feel safer. More in control. The light meant Orren was not here.
The lights flickered.
The doorknob turned.
What if the study door did not hold? What if it could not stop a spirit? Jane staggered to the hearth, grabbing for the iron poker; she would fight, if she had to, if Orren tried to seize her as Elodie had. But he was just a child, and she had seen him die, and she did not know if she could strike him. Not even to protect herself.
She bit back a sob, looking around for any other option.
Elodie looked back at her from the window.
Jane fell two steps back, poker dropping from her stunned grasp. “No, not you as well,” she whispered. “Leave. Please leave. I know his secret now, and what he did to you, and I am sorry, but you must leave.”
Elodie did not respond.
She did not move, did not gesture, did not look pleased or contrite. In fact, Jane could not make out her expression at all; her face wavered and shifted, features arranging themselves differently every time Jane blinked. One moment, she was just a skull with red eyes; another, and she could have been Jane’s own sister.
“Are you happy, having him to yourself?” Jane asked, trembling. “A child is dead because Augustine is trapped in your crypt, and I … I…”
Footsteps shuffled in the hall, soft and rhythmless. Elodie, in the window, pointed down.
A book sat upon the blotter.
She crept closer, eyes darting between Elodie and the desk, afraid of another attack. Her ledgers and her mathematical treatise were all in Larrenton. The desk had been bare a moment before. But now there was a thick, old tome, lying open. A carefully inscribed circle took up the left-hand leaf, and close-printed text filled the right. Instructions; the text was instructions, step by step, in the casting of a protective circle made of chalk and salt.
“Why?” she whispered.
Elodie gave no response.
The door’s latch gave way. The wood pressed against the chair blocking it, pushing with a child’s strength.
Orren would soon be upon her. Last night, Augustine had not pulled her to the kitchen for a knife; he had gone in search of chalk and salt. The workings of magic. The workings, perhaps, of this very book.
Was she meant to do the same?
No. It made no sense that Elodie would offer help. She must turn and fight. And even if an iron poker was no use against a spirit, she had no chalk or salt.
But the book’s front cover was propped up, just a little, just enough that she hadn’t noticed in her earlier horror. With shaking fingers, she lifted the cover, and found beneath it a piece of chalk.