Gallant(14)

Her gaze drops to the bottom of the page.

You will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant

She squints at the word, for years a mystery—still a mystery.

She flings off the covers and gets to her feet.

For so long, Gallant was nothing but that word, the last one her mother ever wrote. Now she knows it is a place, and she is here, and if she is not allowed to stay beyond the night, well then, she wants to see as much of it as possible. To learn the contours of the house where her mother lived, as if knowing one will help explain the other.

The key turns with a click, and she steps silently into the hall. Every other room is dark, save one, a narrow strip of light beneath the door. She shields her candle and sets out, slipping barefoot down the hall.

Olivia has always relished sound, but she knows how to be quiet.

Some nights, back at Merilance, she’d creep out of bed and wander through the darkened house, pretend it was a kind of conquest. She’d twirl down the empty halls, just because she could. Count the steps from one side to the other, fog the windows with her breath and draw shapes in the steam, the only witness the ghoul that sat on the stairs and peered at her between the railings.

There, in the dark, she could pretend the place was hers.

But for all she tried, the grim gray building never played its part. It was too cold, too hollow, too much itself, and every night when she climbed back into bed, she was reminded that Merilance was a house, but it would never be a home.

She tells herself that Gallant won’t be one either, not if Matthew has his way, and yet, as she makes her way down the stairs, the polished banister beneath her palm, it all feels so—familiar. With every silent step, the house leans in and whispers hello, whispers welcome, whispers home.

She retraces her steps, crossing the foyer to the sitting room, the fire nothing but a handful of ticking embers now, the broken vase swept up from the floor. From there, she wanders deeper into the heart of the house. She discovers a dining room, the table long enough to seat a dozen; a lounge with furniture that looks untouched; a kitchen, still warm.

As Olivia crosses the house, the candle wavers, and so does her shadow. When she shifts the light from hand to hand, it leaps unsteadily around her, so it takes her a moment to realize she is not alone.

The ghoul stands halfway down the hall.

A woman—or at least, the pieces of her, hanging in the air like smoke. A curtain of dark hair. A narrow shoulder. A hand, drifting out as if to touch her.

Olivia jerks backward in surprise, expecting the ghoul to disappear. It doesn’t. Instead, it turns its back on her and moves swiftly down the hall, drifting in and out of sight like a body between lamplights.

Wait, she thinks, as it plunges away from her, as it reaches the door at the end and passes straight through. Olivia hurries after it, feet pounding across the rug, candle nearly guttering as she throws the door open onto shallow darkness. As she steps inside, the taper reveals a study, high-ceilinged and windowless. She turns, searching the corners, but the ghoul is gone.

Olivia lets out an unsteady breath. She always wondered if the things she saw were bound to Merilance. Whether the building was haunted, or she was. Apparently, it wasn’t the school. She turns to go, and the candle wavers in her hand, light dancing over bookshelves, a dark wood desk, before catching on the curve of metal resting there.

Olivia frowns, stepping toward the strange shape, nearly as tall as she is.

If there is a word for it, she doesn’t know.

It looks mechanical. Half clock and half sculpture. A kind of . . . orb, made of concentric rings, each set at a different angle. Up close, she sees that there are two houses set inside the piece, each one balanced on its own metal ring.

Her fingers twitch. She cannot shake the feeling that the slightest push would set the whole thing off balance and bring the model crashing to the floor. And yet, she cannot help herself. Her hand drifts up, and—

The door groans behind her.

Olivia turns, too fast, and the candle in her hand goes out, plunging the room into black.

Fear grips her, sudden and sharp. She abandons the study, blinking furiously, willing her eyes to adjust. But the shutters are all latched, and the darkness in the house is thick as syrup. She feels her way back down the hall, reminding herself she is not afraid of the dark, even though she has never known a dark like this. The house seems to grow around her, the hallways branching, multiplying, until she is sure she is lost.

And then, to her right, her vision lifts, the darkness thinning until she can just make out the edges of the space. Somewhere, there is a light. Not bright, but watery and white. She turns down a narrow hall and finds another, smaller foyer. And there, at the back of it, a door.

There are two kinds of doors in a house.

The kind that lead from room to room, and the kind that lead from inside to out—and this is one of those. Thin light spills through a small glass pane set into the wood. She has to stand on her toes to see through the window, and when she does, she finds a crescent moon hanging in the sky, showering the garden below in strands of silver.

The garden. The one she first glimpsed when the car pulled around the drive, the promise of something lovely tucked behind the house.

Even in the dark, it is a sight. Trees and trellised roses, gravel paths and groomed flowers and a carpet of grass. She wants to throw the door open and spill out into the night, wants to walk barefoot through the blades, wants to feel the velvet petals of the roses, lie on a bench beneath the moon, wants to breathe in the beauty before she is sent away.