Gallant(54)

He looks down at her, bored.

Behind her, the master sighs.

“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia,” he chides, and the sound of her name in his mouth sends a shiver through her. She scrambles back, turns toward the hidden door only to see the third soldier leaning against the wooden post of the bed, armored plate shining on their chest.

She is surrounded. Trapped.

But not alone.

Help, she thinks, and the man who is not a man must be able to hear her thoughts, because his mouth twitches, amused. But she is not speaking to him.

HELP ME! she calls again, the force of the words shuddering through her.

And they come.

Five ghouls rise up through the rotting floor. Among them, she sees the one who helped her escape. It glances at her now, a sadness sweeping across its half-there face. The ghouls form a circle around Olivia. They have no weapons, but they stand, backs straight, facing out. And for a moment, she feels safe. Protected.

Until the monster laughs.

“What a quaint little trick,” he says, taking a step toward her. “But I am the master of this house.” Another step. “And here, the dead belong to me.”

He sweeps his hand through the air, as if brushing away smoke, and the five ghouls twitch and waver. They dissolve, crumbling back into the floor, and she is alone again.

The three soldiers close around her.

Olivia fights.

She fights the way she did back at Merilance, when Anabelle’s friends held her down, fights with every ounce of strength and every dirty trick she knows, fights like a girl set loose on the world with nothing and everything to lose. But it’s not enough. A gauntlet closes over her wrist, flinging her into a plated chest, and the last thing she sees is the gleam of an armored shoulder as the third shadow looms.

“Mind the hands,” says the master, right before pain explodes on the side of her head, and the strength goes out of her limbs, and the world gives way to black.





Chapter Twenty-Six




It died.

The cat Olivia saw that summer on the tin roof, the grouchy old stray that reminded her of Matron Agatha. One day she escaped across the gravel moat to the garden shed and found the animal slumped on the ground nearby.

It was so rangy, so thin.

Olivia could feel its bones beneath its fur as she crouched over the body, ran her hand down its soft side, petting the creature as if it were simply asleep. As if she might be able to bring it back.

Wake up, she thought, tears sliding down her cheeks, even though she hadn’t liked the stupid cat.

She buried it in the garden shed, hoping it might haunt her. Hoping that one day she’d catch sight of it out of the corner of her eye, another body in the dark.

She forgot. Isn’t that strange? She forgot.

The world comes back in pieces.

The brittle crack of pages turning. The silver light against the crumbling walls. The moldy fabric against her cheek.

She is lying on a sofa. It takes her a moment to realize it is the one in the sitting room, where Hannah brought her that first night at Gallant. Where she sat, tired and confused, as Edgar and Hannah argued about what to do with her, and Matthew came charging in and tore the letter from Hannah’s hand and cast it into the fire.

There is no fire now, just a splintered stone hearth. A velvet chair. A low table with an object perched atop it: a helmet. The same polished metal as the pauldron and the chest plate and the gauntlet. She frowns at it, her thoughts too slow.

Her hands are bound together with a length of dark gray rope. She pushes herself up, even though the movement makes her head ache and her vision swim. When it steadies, she sees that she is not alone.

The soldiers stand around the darkened room.

The broad one waits by the door.

The thin one leans against the wall.

The short one rests her elbows on the back of the sofa.

And the master of the house sits in the velvet chair, a blue-black rose balanced on the arm and a book open in his lap.

“Olivia, Olivia, Olivia,” he says, and a shiver rolls over her skin as she glimpses the G curling across the front of the book.

“I have been whispering the name into your hair,” he goes on, and then she is on her feet, lunging toward him, toward her mother’s journal, only to feel a large arm catch her around the waist.

The broad soldier hauls her back, and a second later she lands on the sofa again. The short one brings her hands down on Olivia’s shoulders, gauntlet rattling as she holds her in place.

“They say there is love in letting go,” the master continues, his voice rolling through the room, “but I feel only loss.” He flicks ahead as if bored, skipping to the final page.

“Remember this,” he says. “The shadows are not real.”

His milky eyes float up.

“The dreams can never hurt you.”

His mouth curls into a smile.

“And you will be safe as long as you stay away from Gallant.”

He closes the journal.

“What would your mother think if she were here?”

He tosses the book onto the low table, where it lands beside the helmet, sending up a plume of dust. “Good thing she’s not.”

He takes up the rose, and it’s one of the blooms she brought back, its head massive, its petals velvet.

“Leave,” he says, and for a moment, Olivia thinks he’s talking to her, that he’s giving her permission to go. But then she realizes the order was given to his soldiers. The broad one retreats. The short one follows. The thin one hesitates, only a moment, before vanishing into the hall.