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He looked at her, his surprise and awe dripping down into confusion when he saw her face. “What is it?”

“It’s something I didn’t tell you. About your mother’s heart. And?—”

She looked away, but he took her chin in his fingers and gently pulled her back to meet his eyes. “It’s all right.”

“It’s about my migraines. I think— I think I saw Lauren Kennedy die before it happened. And I saw your mother in my room, laughing. Then, I saw her dying.”

A thousand emotions passed over his face. Fear, anger, astonishment. “I don’t understand. Like a— Like a medium?”

She hadn’t considered the word for it. Hadn’t had time to even think of what the connection was. “I don’t know.” She scrubbed at her eyes. “A faerie medium?” A wild laugh popped out of her. “Maybe.”

“What about my mother’s heart?” Sonder ventured, switching gears.

“I see it still intact, only blackened.”

Sonder’s eyes went vacant, then there was a flash of something she couldn’t decipher. “That’s impossible.”

“They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible—these creatures of whim.”

-W.B. Yeats,Irish Fairy Tales & Folklore

Atta

Sonder had their newest thieved body open on his makeshift examination table in the solarium.

They’d had to hurry, digging as quickly and as quietly as they could manage under the cover of night in Trinity Cemetary. They’d dumped a corpse from Gallaghers’ into the empty grave, but they’d only been able to fill the dirt back in hastily, without nearly the precision they would have liked. If anyone came in daylight—presumably the same person whose light they’d seen on the grounds at night—it would be obvious someone had tampered with the grave.

On the drive to Sonder’s manor, Atta had the idea that they should have made it look like an animal had gotten to the grave. Maybe it would appear that way, anyway. After all, who would dig up dead bodies? What was done was done, and they’d hauled the body into Sonder’s laboratory.

After they’d run between the lab and the atrium, clear across the house and grounds thrice to tell one another something regarding their separate research, Sonder moved his endeavours to the hawthorn solarium with Atta.

Sonder cursed, wiping black blood on his leather butcher’s apron. He said the leather kept the blood from seeping onto his clothing so he didn’t have to wearhospital-grade rubbish.

“What is it?” Atta asked, glancing up from her inspection of aunipinnateleaf.

He was wiping in between his fingers, having not bothered with gloves. “Damn. I’ve gotten some on my sleeve.” He had them rolled all the way up his forearms and she wondered how deeply he’d reached into the chest cavity. “See, this is why I always wear black at Achilles.”

“Did you find anything of significance?”

“No.” He sat on a chair they’d dragged in, brushing the hair out of his eyes with the back of his wrist. “I don’t understand why some of the bodies flower and others don’t. The presence of the flora must be why Agamemnon is burying them.”

“Planting them,” Atta clarified and Sonder tipped his head to one side, considering.

“I suppose you’re right. But why? Why the flowering, why the possession at all? Is the flowering happening as a failure of the possession?”

Atta stood up and brushed off her plaid trousers. “In my. . .visions, let’s call them, I’ve seen glimpses of a strange place. It’s beautiful with all manner of flora, but there is always decay slipping in.”

Sonder scrubbed at the stubble on his jawline, and for a split second, Atta was distracted by the thought of what it might feel like against her fingertips, her lips. “Are you suggesting that their world is crumbling?”

She hadn’t been suggesting that, but now her mind spun with the idea. “And now they want ours?” She poised it like a hypothesis to gauge his reaction.

He was silent for a long moment, lost in contemplation. “Are they trying to inhabit humans tobeus, or. . .”

Atta let out a small gasp. “‘Humans in the crucible.’”

“Come again?”

“‘Humans in the crucible,’” she quoted again. “It’s a line from W.B. Yeats’s treatise on Irish Folklore. “It always stuck with me.”