Page 13 of Blackwicket (Dark Hall #1)

Moments after William departed, Mr. Farvem reappeared, hunched, his years more evident.

“This way, Ms. Blackwicket. Everything’s prepared.”

We walked through a wide wooden door, its stain so dark it appeared almost black in the dim light.

The hallway beyond was papered in a rich blue, reminiscent of the sea at dusk.

This color was for the fathomless feelings that a heart risked drowning in.

We passed several doors, muffling movement and low voices.

Mr. Farvem’s revelation about the number of families he was attending entwined with my knowledge about the Authority investigating disappearances.

This dreadful line of thinking was difficult to disengage from, but the dead were the dead.

I would mind my own and leave others to mind theirs.

We ventured farther into the funeral home, along a narrow hall, unadorned with decorative paper and carpets, the windowless walls washed in lifeless white, the floor’s wooden planks scored with long, wavering gouges—traces made by wheels ferrying the weight of loss.

I was regretting my stubbornness. I’d welcome waiting for another date, the opportunity to confront what was inevitable in a viewing room, designed to mute grief in subdued shades and soft fabrics.

But we’d already arrived at the end of the hallway, to the one remaining door.

Mr. Farvem paused here .

“This area is for receiving, please be comforted in knowing it’s not where I perform my work.”

His work of preserving the remains of the departed until their internment, of tending the shells of those who’d lost their personhood in the careless pass of a moment.

I couldn’t reply.

“Would you prefer I accompany you, Ms. Blackwicket?” he offered. Despite our previous unpleasant interaction and the slight indignity he’d experienced, he remained compassionate, his well of empathy infinite. “In my years, I’ve learned no one should suffer this sort of thing alone.”

Mr. Farvem’s kindness was the courage I needed.

“Yet many people must.” I said, thickly. With a nod, he opened the door.

Other than the silence, I noticed nothing of my surroundings but the metal table, and there upon it, my sister.

She was covered for decency in a crisp white sheet up to her shoulders, only her face exposed.

I didn’t want to approach, to know without a doubt that it was my Fiona.

If I took no closer look, I could continue to hope there’d been an incredible error.

But even from where I stood, I saw the sweet shape of her nose, its slight upturn, her golden hair gleaming and well cared for.

With regret and unrelenting love, I closed the space separating us, something I’d not been able to accomplish while she was alive.

I’d expected the ruin of her, the hollowing of the body, skin puckered and mummified by tainted magic run amok, but my expectations were not met.

Though she appeared thin, empty, she still resembled the woman I’d spoke with a mere month ago.

I’d anticipated a person made a thing by death but saw only my sister and everything that made her beautiful: the small scar at her temple where she’d lost her footing on the slick rocks and taken a tumble, the delicate freckles across her nose, the bow of her mouth, tinged blue, once so ready to smile.

I’d thought I wouldn’t be strong enough, but now that she was so close, I touched her pale cheek with the gentlest of caresses. Cold.

“Fiona?” I whispered, as though I were standing over her bed in the deep middle of the night to wake her for company following a nightmare.

Something shifted beneath my fingertips, and I recoiled, sight fixed on the spot in horror. As I was convincing myself I’d imagined it, more movement near her collarbone disturbed the sheet, a vague rising and lowering. I grasped the edge and lifted it, startling a Drudge.

It scuttled around Fiona’s clavicle, the size of a mouse and barely more than a mouth and four spindly limbs.

With a strident whistle, it leaped at me.

Driven by reflex, I caught it in hand, inches from my face, biting back a shout.

The contact with this tainted magic triggered an instant reaction.

The scrap of the Drudge in me wrenched, recognizing its brethren, diseased creatures calling to each other.

“Ms. Blackwicket?” Mr. Farvem inquired, voice muted. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes.” My reply was strangled. The undertaker couldn’t find the curse my sister’s body had been harboring.

He’d throw us both onto the street, regardless of the impropriety.

Unlike the curse I’d handled a mere week ago, this Drudge had nothing to eat, no magic to grow on.

I’d have no trouble smuggling it out, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.

I exhaled as the borders of my magic opened, preparing to draw the curse in.

But the creature thrashed, slipping from my grasp and landing with a damp rustle, like a clump of decaying autumn leaves.

It vanished below the cadaver table, merging with the shadows as the door opened and Mr. Farvem leaned in .

The buzz of the corrupt energy had already vanished as the curse fled, a thing it did only when bigger monsters lurked nearby—an unpleasant possibility.

In my flailing, the sheet had been tossed up, half covering Fiona’s face.

This, combined with the way I’d clasped my hands to my breast, created a convincing picture.

“I apologize for the interruption,” he said. “I thought I heard… I’ll check on you in a moment.”

“No.” I looked back at Fiona’s body, which lay still, vacant. “That’s enough.”

“I understand.”

Mr. Farvem ushered me out and took his position between me and yet another room set to haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

I struggled to maintain control of my turbulent emotions as we returned to the parlor, the piece of Ms. Rosley’s curse eager to gorge itself on my horror and grief if I allowed it.

“Your sister,” Mr. Farvem said, his voice a calming harbor in the storm. “She was special. She had the spark. Magic recognized her, responded to her call. There are so few like that anymore.”

I focused on his voice, and the compliments paid to someone I cared for.

“When I was a boy, a century or so ago.” He offered a self-deprecating chuckle.

The sound should have been jarring, but it belonged here, as a reminder that laughter existed “magic wasn’t so hard to come by, but it was fading.

We did too many bad things, my generation, set too many awful things in motion. ”

“The war?”

A type of sadness forged from significant regret clouded his expression. I knew the look well.

“The war. If I were magic, I’d have abandoned us too.

I was infantry, you know. Top rank, because I could conjure a spell or two.

” He paused. “What they did to humans and magic alike in the name of power, well, the Authority tried to make sure it would never happen again, but I fear they’ve lost their way. ”

The undertaker’s ancient hand rested on my arm, a hand that had helped countless dead.

“Eleanora.” He grew hushed, worried someone might overhear.

“People are looking for ways to bring magic back here, somewhere it doesn’t want to be.

All it can do here is create monsters. Your sister, she got caught in the middle of this new, invisible war, and look what happened.

If you linger in Nightglass, it’ll come for you too. ”

My senses sharpened in alarm. The high, tart scent of formaldehyde invaded my nose, and I became conscious of every noise, every shuffle of feet and small groan of sorrow. When I looked into his green eyes, I noted something more than urgency. Fear.

“We’re not a world for magic anymore,” he said. “We should let it die. In pain or in peace, let it die.”

The house was no less foreboding when I returned to it, walking the hill slowly, focusing on the whip of the breeze, the snowflakes’ steady kisses on my cheeks.

My visit to the morgue had solidified my plans.

After Fiona’s burial in three days, I would run, and neither the Brom nor Inspector Harrow could stop me.

The Nightglass port no longer functioned, but surely at least one remained open somewhere.

An opportunity to escape to another country, though I knew nothing about nations beyond the sea, only that we’d once been at war with them, and that trade had been abruptly cut off when I was a child.

My mother had avoided discussing neighboring lands with us, and the Authority limited information and discouraged curiosity.

The Inspector’s car was absent, the door still locked, but that meant little, and I remained vigilant.

I needed to check for broken windows, worn latches, any other way the loathsome man might have weaseled his way inside.

This practical plan gave me purpose. The house opened to me with no struggle.

Of course. I was the only person left who could keep it alive.

My head ached.

When I entered, I noticed lights—a dull wash of yellow spilling from the parlor, illuminating the front hall.

A flash of outrage fueled me with fresh energy, propelling me toward a place I never intended to enter again, because stronger than my desire to avoid it was the wrongness of the intrusion, of someone invading a space full of painful secrets.

Blackwicket House inhaled my furor as I rushed past the stairs, the kitchen, down the hall and over the threshold of the family room.

It was deserted.