Page 66
Story: These Fleeting Shadows
“Hush, dear. It will be all right.” Eli pulled a blanket over me. I was back in bed. To someone else he said, “Perhaps we should let her mother in to see her.”
“Not like this,” Iris replied. “Give Rachel something to help her sleep. Keep her away.”
“Am I going to die?” I asked, but time had skipped again. I was alone. The ring around my wrist was scabbed over, but fresh blood wept from the edges. I struggled up from the bed. My body felt wrong. When I moved, something in my torso ground like an arthritic joint, hard and rasping where no bone should be.
My legs gave out. I collapsed two feet from the bed.
“Help,” I rasped out, trying to shout. “Please, I need help.” I twisted, trying to brace myself against the floor so I could work my way toward the door.
My grandfather lay before me. Crumpled, as I was. Hand reaching out, his face broken by the cracked-glass haze, mouth open in a scream choked into silence by the bloom of foxgloves.
But he wasn’t reaching. He was pointing to the window.
A hand snagged my hair and yanked backward. Jessamine. She hauled me back with all her childish strength. Scrabbling on her knees and one hand, the other tangled in my hair, she dragged me toward the window, wailing out a rasping cry. I reached thewall and clawed my way upward, Jessamine collapsing against me, collapsing further still, rabbit bones clattering against the floorboards as she vanished.
I leaned my brow against the cold windowpane. My breath made no fog against it, and I realized I wasn’t breathing at all. I squinted, and the world outside came into reluctant focus. The dark sky, the trees. The light among the trees, pale white. Not Bryony’s warm lantern light.
Roman was outside again.
I turned. Leopold was gone. The fox’s skull sat grinning in his place, and in its teeth, fringed with foxglove, was Bryony’s healing charm. I staggered to it and crushed the pouch into my palm, and for the first time since I’d started paying attention, I took a deep breath. My limbs seemed to stabilize—not much. Enough to move.
I stumbled to the door and turned the knob, but it was locked. Of course. Eli always locked me in. But when I dreamed, I got out. “Show me. Please,” I said.
Muddy footprints seeped up from the floor. They led from the bed to the wall beside the door. I pressed my hands to the spot.Let me out, I thought, and imagined it giving way before me. It parted in filaments. I angled my body through them, keeping my eyes squeezed shut. The wall gave, stringy and dry, and then there was air on my face again and I was in the hall.
I couldn’t stick around and wonder at what had just happened. I was dying. And I did not want to die. It seemed so obvious, but I’d never felt it before, this terror, this absolute rage at the idea—I didn’tdeservethis. I didn’t ask to be here, and I shouldn’t be, andI wouldn’t let it beat me. I wouldn’t surrender to this place, to these people, to this fate.
I stumbled down the hall, leaning heavily against the wall. Where my palm dragged against the wallpaper, moisture bubbled, leaving blisters that burst, oozing clear liquid that smelled like algae bloom. That spot in my belly kept up its bone-click feel with each step.
One step after another, I told myself,and don’t let that desperate fear tear you apart because your body has gone soft beneath its brutal teeth.
What was this place doing to me? My breath stopped and started again, my shoulders wrenched as if straining to rearrange themselves, and even my teeth swam in my mouth, uncertainly rooted to my warping jaw.
I reached the stairs. I half hung myself over the banister and let gravity carry me. By the time I reached the bottom, I was mostly myself again, except for the strange sucking hollowness in my chest I didn’t want to think about. Roman was up to something, and whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. I had to stop him. It was the only thought that mattered.
The hall—the door—the cold open air. I blinked, not entirely sure how I’d crossed the distance, not entirely remembering why I’d done it. I stood under the stars and tried to think. I was coming undone, some unnatural force rearranging me.
Or maybe it was an entirely natural force. Reality is randomness. To be organized and static is an unnatural state—it’s the change and decay that is natural, entropy the only inevitability.Every pattern is constantly tumbling toward its own undoing and—
“Helen.” A name. My name. The name for the set of rules I was, the name for this collection of limbs, digits, organs, features, neurons in this particular order. I was still me.
“Helen,” the voice said again, and only then did I realize itwasa voice. Bryony’s voice, and there was Bryony, walking toward me with an expression of deep concern. “It’s after dark. You shouldn’t be—”
I opened my mouth. I meant to ask for help, I think, but what came out was a sound no human throat could make. It was a flurry of moth wings in the dark and a rasp of stone and the startled shriek of a rabbit caught in a snare. I came apart again—bones shifting beneath my skin, throat crumpling, lungs blooming with unseen cilia. My vision went blank for half a second and then returned, the colors wrong, glimpsed from too many eyes that blinked along my cheekbones before receding into my skin again.
I expected Bryony to run. She lunged forward instead, catching me around my waist before I realized I’d started to fall, and she pulled me against her. “What’s happening to you?” she asked, startled but not afraid. Not afraid ofme, at least.
I tried to speak again, but my trachea had folded itself into a corrugated mass—but that was all right since I was pretty sure I was breathing through my skin. I would have laughed, if I could, as if that notion could be comforting. My arm, slung over her shoulder, sprouted tiny growths like the fringed antennae of silk moths.
Bryony seized me by the shoulders. Her thumbs pressed against my clavicles, and she stared into my eyes—just two of them now. “You need to calm down,” she said.
Calm? I was calm. No, I was panicking. The sensation was hard to pick apart from the wrenching violence of the changes in my body, but there it was, corrosive, toxic.
“Listen to me, Helen. Listen to my voice and calm down. You’re Helen. Be Helen,” she said. She was saying whatever came to her mind, I knew, but that arch, confident tone that had so fooled me when we met, convincing me that she knew every secret in this place and how to use it, swept over me just as effectively now. And that was something I could surrender to. I gave myself to it, believed it, embraced it.
Helen. Be Helen. Collector of bones. Rachel’s daughter. Loner. Awkward. The girl who loved chocolate ice cream and couldn’t sit still. The girl whose heart beat harder because Bryony Locke was holding her. But for that to be true, she needed a heart, not a tangle of thorns.
I built myself from the inside out, anchoring each piece of me. It wasn’t perfect—bits of me still felt wrong—but from Bryony’s relieved expression, I must at least have looked more human when I was done.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
- Page 2
- Page 3
- Page 4
- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
- Page 21
- Page 22
- Page 23
- Page 24
- Page 25
- Page 26
- Page 27
- Page 28
- Page 29
- Page 30
- Page 31
- Page 32
- Page 33
- Page 34
- Page 35
- Page 36
- Page 37
- Page 38
- Page 39
- Page 40
- Page 41
- Page 42
- Page 43
- Page 44
- Page 45
- Page 46
- Page 47
- Page 48
- Page 49
- Page 50
- Page 51
- Page 52
- Page 53
- Page 54
- Page 55
- Page 56
- Page 57
- Page 58
- Page 59
- Page 60
- Page 61
- Page 62
- Page 63
- Page 64
- Page 65
- Page 66 (Reading here)
- Page 67
- Page 68
- Page 69
- Page 70
- Page 71
- Page 72
- Page 73
- Page 74
- Page 75
- Page 76
- Page 77
- Page 78
- Page 79
- Page 80
- Page 81
- Page 82
- Page 83
- Page 84
- Page 85
- Page 86
- Page 87
- Page 88
- Page 89
- Page 90
- Page 91
- Page 92
- Page 93
- Page 94
- Page 95
- Page 96
- Page 97
- Page 98
- Page 99
- Page 100
- Page 101
- Page 102
- Page 103
- Page 104