Whichwood(34)

Wordlessly, faces full of expectation, Benyamin and Oliver turned to look at Alice. They three had discussed the possibility of this exact situation just hours prior, and it was hard to believe the occasion was already upon them. No one had dared to imagine things would fall apart so horribly in such a short period of time.

No matter.

This was it, the moment Alice had been primed for. It would be an arduous, exhausting job—Laylee’s revival would be slow and steady, the kind that might take hours or days, depending entirely on the depth of the wound—and Alice could only hope she would do it right. So she fell to her knees without a word and, drawing in a deep and careful and nervous breath, took the mordeshoor’s cold, gray hands in hers and began to push color back into Laylee’s body.




Meanwhile, the whole of Whichwood was celebrating in the streets, sharing food and drink and dancing to the songs they found in their hearts. The people had no idea what sensations were still in store for them, or which four children were to blame for their impending troubles. No one—not even Benyamin—knew the desperate state of the dead Laylee had left behind. And though there were three friends who might have cared, they were so preoccupied with saving Laylee’s life that they couldn’t be bothered to think of saving her corpses, too.

At present, said children clasped hands in a train carriage, the glass windows shimmering in the moonlight, as roaring winter winds shuddered against the doors. Even from their carriage the children could hear the cheers of thousands of happy voices: It was a joyous, rollicking crowd still celebrating life and all its glory—but it was what the children could not hear that night that was so important. Back on the peninsula, dear reader, in a shed dark and oft forgot, the spirits of a neglected lot seethed at the injustice of their unremembered deaths.

Laylee had gotten their days wrong, you see.

In fact, her mind had been so lost of late that she’d confused days and months altogether. The truth was that her dead had reached their expiration dates several weeks ago—which meant they could’ve gone rampaging for human skin several weeks ago. It was only out of respect for Laylee that the spirits had remained amenable. But she’d now been gone both day and night, and her sad souls, feeling fully forgotten (you will remember that a ghost is a terribly sensitive sort of creature), could be obedient no longer. They shook their chains until their shackles broke and trees bent sideways to let the spirits pass. They had big plans for tonight, the specters did; they would howl and rage against the machinations that kept them fettered to their molting, festering skin, and they swore on the graves of those they passed that they’d wear new faces by morning.

The troubles of the evening had only just begun.





Alice had been doing the best she could, but Oliver was not satisfied.

He tried to be gentle—to express himself delicately and with consideration for Alice’s feelings—but he wasn’t quite able to cut the sting of his words. He didn’t understand the processes necessary to saving Laylee in this moment, and he couldn’t see the level of concentration and careful effort it took for Alice to help the mordeshoor.

It was a delicate dance, you see, to recover Laylee without Alice expending too much of herself in the process. And reviving Laylee could have other side effects, too. Namely: Alice had to be careful not to leave too much of herself—her own heart, her own spirit—in her fading friend. She tried to explain as much to Oliver, but he was too overcome by emotion to be persuaded to think rationally. Though his respect for Alice encouraged him to be patient, he’d secretly hoped Alice would be able to fix Laylee right away. Instead, to his great dismay, at least half an hour had passed and Laylee looked much the same.

The damage, Alice was realizing, was deep indeed.

Laylee’s hands were still gray—though Alice was convinced they were at least a shade brighter than before—despite her careful and gentle infusions of color.

Still! There was no need to panic! Not yet, anyway.

Alice was not giving up on Laylee—not so long as the mordeshoor’s heart was still beating—and for the first half of their journey home, Alice’s steady, unrelenting perseverance and Laylee’s gently kicking heart were the only comforts the friends had to hold on to. Benyamin, who was checking every few minutes for signs of life, celebrated each affirmation with a sigh of relief and a triumphant announcement that her heartbeats were getting stronger.




This was how things went on for a while—Alice working, Oliver worrying, and Benyamin doing his best to deliver good news in the interim—until they were just over an hour into their journey (with thirty minutes to go), and Benyamin abruptly ceased checking Laylee’s pulse.

His many-legged friends had been worrying at his ear for some time now, but he’d been doing his best to tune them out, determined to focus on the task at hand. The problem was, his insects often worried about him too much—and Benyamin had learned to occasionally disregard their overly protective instincts. Tonight, he suspected they took issue with his recent unusual behavior. (It was strange, after all, for Benyamin to be spending so much time with two strangers and a dying girl, and they were right to be concerned.) But he’d no time to address their questions at present, and so he’d relegated their clicking sounds to the back of his mind until, eventually, they subsided altogether.

At first, Benyamin took their silence as a sign of progress. But there was another part of him—much like a parent made suspicious by the unexpected obedience of a child—that suddenly worried if everything was okay.