Vespertine (Vespertine #1)(65)

I veered into another hallway and found it looked familiar—I had traveled down it before. The stair leading up to the graveyard lay at the end. My heart leaped with hope.

Then the mace slammed to the ground behind me, cracks racing through the flagstones beneath my feet. The dreadnought swung again; shards of stone went flying. I threw myself away, and didn’t recognize my error until too late. A statue’s patient half smile filled my vision. Metal glinted in the dark.

“Careful!” the revenant shrieked as I dodged the blade: a misericorde clasped between the saint’s folded hands, sharpened to a deadly point.

I skidded, rebounded off the wall, and lunged for the stair as the dreadnought’s next impact narrowly missed my head. Pieces of what had once been a statue hailed down, throwing powder and fragments of rock across the steps. I scrambled over them, ignoring the bruising gouge of the stone pieces, dizzily chasing the spiral upward.

There, at last, stood the door. But we weren’t safe yet. My survival hinged upon whether Leander had left it unlocked behind him. He might not have bothered, trusting the dreadnought to finish me off. Or he might have left it unlocked deliberately, granting me one last chance to escape, like a cat toying with a mouse.

I flung myself against the door, and it sprang open, tumbling me out into the graveyard’s damp. I didn’t have time to feel relieved. I threw my weight back against it, trying to force it shut.

Metal clashed against the other side. The dreadnought’s helmet appeared in the gap. It pushed relentlessly as the revenant fed an answering burst of power into my body—the best it could do, I guessed, without alerting the entire city to its presence. The armor’s joints squeaked, then groaned, but the extra strength wasn’t going to be enough. I was weakening. The nearness of the door’s consecrated iron blazed against my face like heat radiating from an oven.

Suddenly there were hands braced on the door beside me, muscles straining as they pushed. Another pair, much smaller, joined them on my other side. Inch by torturous inch, the door creaked shut. It thudded into place.

I looked up, meeting Jean’s and Marguerite’s wide eyes.

“What was that?” Marguerite bleated. I clapped a gloved hand over her mouth.

“Dreadnoughts are too stupid to tell a door apart from a wall,” the revenant hissed into the ensuing tense silence. “If it loses sight of you for more than a few seconds, it will think you’ve escaped.”

I stood there waiting, barely breathing, until I heard metal scrape against stone, ponderous steps moving away—the dreadnought retreating.

I dragged Marguerite down with me as my legs wobbled and gave out. Jean reached to catch us before we hit the ground, then suddenly balked. He backed up skittishly, his big hands held uselessly aloft as though he feared they might betray him.

A pang of sympathy shot straight to my core. I knew what that felt like—the horror of your own body turning on someone without your permission. In Jean’s case, he hadn’t merely hurt people. He had killed them. It would take him a long time to regain trust in himself, if he ever did.

Marguerite was glaring at me. I took my hand away. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve before saying, “I saw the priest on my way back to the infirmary, and I knew you were going to get into trouble.” She looked uncertainly at Jean, who had curled into a huddle against the wall. “I didn’t know who else to ask for help.”

“It’s good you chose him. I don’t think anyone else in Bonsaint would have been strong enough.”

“Strong enough for what?” she demanded. “What was that? What was the confessor doing?”

Reflexively, I glanced up at the graveyard, wondering if he was about to come swooping down on us.

“The priest is gone,” the revenant said. I got the impression that if it had its own body, it would be collapsed beside us against the door in an attitude of stunned exhaustion. “Next time, nun—not that I expect there to be a next time—remind me not to call a dreadnought an antique.”

My spine prickled. In the ivy-draped darkness of the stairwell, Marguerite was watching me.

“You’re doing it again,” she said. “You’re listening to it.”

My stomach turned over. “If you tell anyone—”

“I wasn’t going to.” She frowned, avoiding my eyes. “You obviously aren’t possessed.”

“How do you know?”

I could tell she was frightened; she was gripping her pocket again, the one she kept her amulet inside. But she said defiantly, “I shared a room with you for almost seven years. You’re just as weird and creepy as you were before. Being possessed by a Fifth Order spirit would probably make you less weird.”

“Astonishingly,” the revenant said, “I find myself agreeing with this pink human a second time.”

“And anyway,” she muttered, “you know things that only you would know. Like how much I hate spiders.”

She was taking this much better than I had expected. “Thanks,” I said after an awkward pause, also avoiding her eyes.

In a sudden decisive movement, she clambered to her feet, standing over me. She took a deep breath, then extended her hand. I stared at it. In all the years I’d known her, I couldn’t remember her ever willingly offering to touch me.

“Will you tell me what you’re doing? I want to know. I promise I can keep it a secret.” She stubbornly lifted her chin. “And I might—I might be able to help.”