Gallant(41)

Chapter Twenty




A boy.

Not the ghoul of a boy, but a real one, flesh and blood and whole, his edges firm. He is Olivia’s age, perhaps a year or two younger, with tawny hair that falls across his face. He looks as if he simply climbed into the fountain, curled up on the cold stone, and went to sleep. If it weren’t for the silver cast to his skin, the way his wrists are bound together with dark ivy, the tendrils coiling around the statue’s feet.

If it weren’t for the fact he isn’t moving.

She saw a dead body once. It was in the road, two winters back, a husk of a woman who’d folded in like a leaf in the frost and never got up. She looked like she was sleeping, too, but her limbs were stiff, skin sagging over bones, the spark of life so clearly gone.

No, the boy in the fountain isn’t dead.

That is what she tells herself as she leans forward. As her fingers skim the air over his ankle, where the weedy ropes bind tight. But she can’t quite reach. She is about to swing her leg over the stone lip of the fountain when she feels movement, hears the grind of gravel underfoot, and looks up, hoping to find another ghoul, before she remembers—ghouls make no noise.

There is a soldier standing in the drive.

The whip-thin one, armor plate gleaming on their chest. Their eyes are dark, almost mournful, but there is no mercy in them. Light twitches on the crumbling front steps, and she sees the second soldier sitting there, the brick of a man with the shining pauldron on his shoulder. He slouches, bored, elbows on knees and hands hanging loose and large as spades.

Olivia takes a step back, away from the fountain and the boy curled at the statue’s feet, as something moves to her right and she catches the glint of a gauntlet as the third soldier steps out from behind the stone woman, smiling like a wolf.

The broad one stands.

The other two drift forward.

Metal glints on their hips, but they draw no weapons.

Somehow, that makes it worse. Their bare hands twitch. Their black eyes shine.

You asked for help, said the ghoul in the study, even though she only thought the word. Now, she thinks it again. Help.

It feels so small, unspoken, unsigned, less a word than a whisper, a breath.

Help, she thinks as the shadows stalk toward her. Help, help, help . . .

And then, they come.

Three ghouls emerge, not from the house or the garden or the dark. They rise straight up through the ground itself, sprouting like weeds between the gravel: a young man and a weathered woman, and then the one she saw in the music room, the first of the Priors. And though their bodies are broken, cleaved apart by darkness, and though there is no shine of metal on their clothes, she can tell they were dressed for battle, once.

They come, as if summoned, their bodies arranging into a shield before her.

The soldiers frown, the broad one perplexed, the thin one annoyed, the short one sneering as the young man’s ghoul steps forward, empty hands spread wide. And though the ghouls say nothing, she can feel their order ringing through her bones.

Run.

Olivia lunges back toward the boy in the fountain, but the ghoul of the weathered woman catches her arm and shakes its head, pushes her away.

And then a blade sings through the ghoul’s back, and it staggers, and Olivia knows the ghoul cannot die, knows it is already dead, but the sight of the metal spilling out of its chest, its knees buckling silently to the dirt, still sends a shock of horror through her bones.

The ghouls are no match for the soldiers. They have only bought her time.

And so, she runs, the only way she can, not down the empty road, but back toward the garden. A desperate sprint, driven only by the need to get away. Away from the house. Away from the soldiers with their glinting armor. Away, her blue dress snagging on bramble and thorn, her bare feet singing over the carpet of dead grass that runs between the withered garden and the barren orchard.

Away and back to the wall that will not end, the door that will not open. Almost there when a jagged root catches her toes and sends her tumbling, pain lancing through her hands and knees as she hits the ground. The fall knocks all the air from her lungs, but her pulse is a drum inside her head. Get up, get up, get up. And as she digs her hands into the cold damp earth to push herself up, she feels the poke of tiny sticks beneath her palms, and realizes too late that they are not sticks, but bones, the littered remains before the wall. Too late, she feels the prickling pain, the twitch of movement against her skin. Too late, the ground beneath her becomes a writhing carpet of paws and fur and wings, all of them alive.

Olivia scrambles back, a cold chill rolling up her arms.

Get away, she thinks, get away, and the crows take flight, and the mice scatter, and the rabbits bolt, and she forces herself to her feet, a sucking cold flooding through her limbs as she staggers to the garden door and throws herself against it.

The iron shudders, but doesn’t give.

She pounds on it again, but the sound goes nowhere, ending right where her fists meet the metal, swallowed up like a scream into a soft down pillow.

Olivia sags against the door, breathless. And then she turns and puts her back to the cold metal and trains her eyes on the dark. Perhaps it is some primal need to face her fate, the same force that drives a girl to look beneath her bed, the knowledge that what you can’t see is always worse than what you can.

She turns and looks at the house that isn’t Gallant.

And sees him, looking back.