Page 36 of Darkest at Dusk (Revenant Roses)

She put out her free hand to the wall to steady herself and touched sweat instead of plaster. A bead swelled and dripped down the wall like a tear. An instant later, steam filmed there, pearled, and vanished as though swallowed.

“Show yourself,” she said, and hated the tremor that turned the command to a plea.

The girl obliged.

She stood three strides off, nightgown straight from narrow shoulders, pink satin at throat and cuffs, hem singed black.

Not a child any longer. She had the face of a young woman now, her cheekbones high, her chin round.

Her hair hung in lank ropes that might once have been glossy. A halo of shadow surrounded her.

“Who are you?” Isabella whispered, though she knew now the shape of the name from the letters. Catrin. Cousin. Kin.

The wraith’s mouth softened, as if at a memory. Then her lips parted on a breath that was not air and stretched wider…wider…grotesque, inhuman.

Her lips peeled back with a wet, tearing sound, pulling away from her teeth and gums like the flesh of a rotting fruit peeling from its pit.

Threads of flesh clung, then snapped. A fathomless dark seam split her face, widening, a yawning chasm, tearing a gaping strip along her forehead and down her chin with a pop of gristle that made Isabella’s stomach churn.

With a brittle snap her jaw unhinged, gaping like a serpent’s, as though she would swallow herself, swallow the shadows…swallow Isabella whole.

An oily, black substance oozed free and dripped over her unhinged jaw, the air heavy with a carrion-sweet stink.

With a gasp, Isabella stumbled back.

Dark streaks leaked from the girl’s eyes, oozing down her cheeks in sluggish crimson-black trails.

Where it dripped to the floor, the carpet hissed and smoked.

Her head snapped back, the tendons of her throat bulging, her flesh moving and writhing as though something was trapped beneath her skin, trying to wriggle free.

Then, from deep in girl’s chest came a piercing, keening wail that tunneled through Isabella’s skull, clawing at her sanity, gouging at her emotions.

Pain. Terror. Hopeless agony. She clamped her hands over her ears, her candle clattering to the floor.

But the sound was inside her. Ripping. Splitting. Screaming.

Her own cry joined it before she could stop herself, ragged and raw. The corridor spun. For one terrible moment she thought she might break apart entirely, body and mind unspooling under that sound.

“Stop,” she rasped, but her voice was swallowed by the relentless wail.

The girl surged forward, limbs jerking and snapping at unnatural angles, knees and elbows twisting…

Wrong. Wrong.

Isabella staggered back, stumbled. Her ankle twisted with a sharp wrench, and she fell hard to her hands and knees, the impact jolting along her limbs. Head hanging forward, stomach churning, she tried to push herself upright.

The cold hit her like a blow.

A presence closed around her, smothering, choking. The air was sharp, jagged, slicing into her chest as though she inhaled shards of glass.

Something coiled around her wrist. A ribbon, smooth as silk, strong as iron.

Slick and endless, it unspooled from the wraith’s unhinged mouth, holding her fast, hauling her forward.

Isabella set her heels in the carpet, pulling against the inexorable drag.

Another lash struck, winding her other arm, searing cold through flesh and bone.

“What do you want of me?” she cried.

And Catrin answered, not with words but with an image that flooded Isabella’s thoughts, dark and terrifying. She saw herself bound in ribbons of shadow, mouth open in a silent scream, dragged down into a pit where Catrin waited. Not to kill her. To keep her.

The ribbons wove around her ankles now. She jerked against them, frantic, but they bit deeper, looping tighter and tighter still, pulling her forward inch by inch. With each crushing coil, the whispers rose, a frantic cacophony.

The wraith wanted them. Wanted to drink from every soul that lingered within that ethereal place not quite of this world. And Isabella was the gateway between worlds.

“Stop,” Isabella rasped, though there was no stopping to be had, not for either of them. She stared up at the thing that inched closer, closer, horror congealing in her veins.

“Enough,” said a man’s voice, Rhys’s voice.

Relief reared so quickly she nearly sobbed. The air lost its frigid edge. The knife-prick chorus at the periphery of her hearing shivered and then withdrew.

The girl froze. Not stilled. Froze, as if pinned.

The ribbons slackened, shuddered, and fell away, retreating like severed arteries into the wraith’s shadowed body.

Rhys stepped between Isabella and the thing. He stood as a man who understood what he faced and did not mistake it for less.

Isabella pressed her back to the wall, feeling as if the world shifted, a door she’d braced shut all her life tearing open.

He saw it. Rhys saw it.

“Look at me,” he told the wraith.

The girl’s unhinged jaw clicked back into place with a small, revolting sound. The black seep stuttered and thickened and stilled. She turned that fathomless gaze to him.

“Not her,” he said. “Not in my house. Not while I draw breath.”

He spoke to it as though it were a living thing, as though one could reason with a nightmare. And it listened. The hush that fell was like a held breath, but not theirs. The house’s. The wraith’s.

Rhys reached a hand back toward Isabella, never taking his attention from the wraith.

Heart slamming a frantic rhythm, Isabella took one long breath and another. She put a trembling hand in his, reassured by the warmth, the strength.

He did not look back at her. In a voice that was quieter than she would have believed and steadier than she had ever heard, he said, “Catrin. I name you. I dismiss you. Go.”

For an instant, one sliver of an instant, the wraith’s mouth made a small shape Isabella recognized from her time at Miss Trevisham’s school: The pout of a girl who wanted a sweet and had been denied. Then the shadow slid under the door and was gone.

Silence followed. Not the crushed, wrong silence. Ordinary quiet, with a draft and the strain of old timbers and the tick of a far-off pipe. Something in Isabella’s chest loosened and something in her throat hurt as if she had swallowed a stone.

Rhys turned. He set the lamplight between them and looked at her.

“You—” She could not put the sentence in order. She tried again as he drew her to her feet. “You saw her.”

His breath shook once on the way out. It steadied. “Yes.”

“You heard?—”

“Yes.”

Never say it. Never show it.

She had spent a lifetime making her face a mask, every action, every glance a shield. Now, she could set it aside. Now, she could breathe. Relief surged through her, fierce and reckless.

Because she understood at last. Rhys had been condemned for the very thing she had buried in herself. He had been locked away in St. Jude’s not for madness but for vision.