Girl One(123)

Bellanger coughed out a laugh. “You? You can’t manage your own daughter.”

I saw the wince pass over my mother’s face. There was grief there: I felt it too. My mother and I were both part of Bellanger’s legacy, always, forever, implicated in the world he’d created. “You don’t know anything about what’s between my mother and me,” I said to him. “All this way, I fought to find her.”

Bellanger was retreating, eyes clouding. A man half caught inside a dream. From outside, the screams spiked and rose, the fire surely pulling closer to us.

“Josie—” my mother said, a warning.

“I know. We’re leaving.” I looked right at Fiona. I’d given her everything I had—every reason that she should walk away from him—but it had been just the two of them for so long. Their bond ran so much deeper than whatever I’d spun in my own head. “When we first arrived, I saw that sign in the sky,” I said to her. “The bird. I didn’t know what it meant at the time, but I think you sensed that we were here.” Something fluttered behind her gaze. “That was a warning, wasn’t it? You know what Bellanger’s planning to do to us. And I think you understand, deep down, how dangerous he can be if he wants something from you.”

Bellanger’s eyes shifted, a quiet witness as we decided what would happen next.

“Mother Eight told me that Bellanger was giving Lily-Anne medications,” I said. “Your mother died not long after that. It’s no coincidence. Bellanger killed your mother.”

It was the first time I’d said it aloud, and I had to stop for a moment, letting the words expand. I’d felt it for a long time—but I hadn’t understood it with this confidence until I’d seen Bellanger standing next to a reincarnated version of Lily-Anne, young and pregnant and under his spell. Her death hadn’t been summoned by a heart issue, and it hadn’t been childbirth.

Fiona’s face broke, a deep grief and rage beneath the surface. She looked at Bellanger, who didn’t move. Around us, the candle flames spiked upward in long, ragged stripes, escaping the neat confines of the glass holders. “Is it true?” she asked Bellanger.

He was silent.

“Is it true?” she asked, and I heard the desperation for it to be a lie.

“Answer—” I began.

“No,” Fiona said, and it took me a second to realize she was talking to me. “He needs to tell me himself.” I hesitated; lying to Fiona had been Bellanger’s natural state for the past seventeen years. But the intensity in her eyes convinced me. Slowly, I released my grip over Belanger, like relaxing a clenched fist. I felt him slip from my grasp, opaque to me again.

“Did you kill my mother?” Fiona asked.

Bellanger turned his gaze toward her, slowly, painfully. “You have to understand—it was for you. It was all for you. Your mother was—she couldn’t give you a good life—”

“You killed her,” Fiona said, her face too still. “You killed her and my sister.”

He had a look of sour astonishment, like this was a shock to him too. I wondered if he’d ever admitted it to himself this openly, or if he’d wrapped it under layers of justifications and half-truths. “She was standing in the way of everything,” he whispered.

The candle flames spiked higher again, too high, nearly reaching the ceiling now before receding. My mother flinched. “And the Grassis?” Fiona asked. “The fire?”

“Everything I did was because of you—” His voice dipped lower. “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll spend my lifetime making it up to you. I promise.”

Fiona didn’t answer. Her expression was almost peaceful now, like she hadn’t heard him. She stood there, half swaying. I knew what she was experiencing, everything twisting out of her understanding, taking on a new shape. I flashed between triumph and guilt, triumph and guilt. I’d gone looking for the truth. She hadn’t. I’d brought it to her, thrust it into her arms.

The candle flames pulsed upward, slowly, slowly. This time, they didn’t retreat. The flames twisted together, braiding and intertwining like fingers. They crawled up toward the ceiling, more and more strands joining together. The flames edged overhead, spinning together deftly until the entire chapel was wreathed all over in this frozen fire, flickering above our heads. For now, the flames were suspended, but I knew what would happen when Fiona let go. The blaze would devour this place in a second, join up with the fires slowly building outside, and eat us alive.

My mother called my name. “If we don’t get out of here now…” she said, not finishing the sentence, letting it hang there as a frantic warning.

Bellanger was struggling to remain standing, his face ashen, skin slack, as if something integral had been siphoned out of him. If the pills could kill Lily-Anne, if they could subdue the sheer power of Fiona, then I wondered how they would affect Bellanger. “I want you to come with me,” I said to Fiona.

“Tell me to go.”

I hadn’t expected this. “What do you mean?”

“Tell me,” she said fiercely. “Tell me to leave him. Make me. Or else I won’t go.” Her voice dipped to a whisper. “I can’t leave him. You know that.”

The flames twisted slowly overhead. I opened my mouth, the words ready on the tip of my tongue. Fiona was right. I could force her to escape. The smoke and the heat distorted everything—the world too clarified one second, smudged the next—and all I could see was Lily-Anne staring out at me, a ghost enduring inside her daughter’s DNA.