The Blood Spell (Ravenspire, #4)(65)

She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit on the packed dirt floor again, pulling items from the chests as if the thing that lived in her nightmares wasn’t pressing into her skin.

“It’s past bedtime,” Blue said, her voice shaking. She pushed the last crate back against the wall, her hands like ice, her breath clogging her throat as the room started collapsing in on her.

“There will be no sleep until we finish searching this place.”

Blue tried to stand. Tried to find her balance as the walls rushed toward her and darkness loomed at the edge of her vision.

Her heart was thunder trapped in her chest.

A noose of panic was tightening around her throat, cutting off her air.

She closed her eyes, and wintermint saturated the air. The ladder twisted away from the wall. And Mama . . .

Blue’s eyes flew open.

“I can’t stay here.” She choked the words out as she stumbled past Dinah, her vision going gray at the edges.

“Blue!” Dinah reached for her, digging her fingers into Blue’s arm, but panic was a monster with teeth and claws, and Blue wrenched herself out of Dinah’s grip.

“You come back here this instant. We have to go through those chests.” Dinah’s voice was full of fury.

Blue rushed for the ladder, smacking her knee into one of the chests and nearly toppling to the floor.

“No, no, no.” She breathed the words under her breath. Latched on to them as if the litany could save her from the nightmare that was closing in on her.

Mama lying at her feet, broken and bleeding. Blue screaming for help that never came. Magic in her blood that couldn’t do a single useful thing on the day she needed it most.

Mama trying to smile at her. Singing for her one last time.

And then Mama’s chest falling silent, and her face going slack until she barely resembled Mama anymore at all.

“I will punish you in ways you can’t even imagine if you leave this cellar!”

Blue’s hands found the ladder’s rungs. Hung on with desperate strength, though her palms were slick with sweat.

She moved up a rung, her body trembling like a leaf caught in a rainstorm.

The darkness pressed closer, and there was a strange ringing in her ears.

She couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t stay in the root cellar another instant.

Dinah screamed at her as Blue scrambled up the ladder and burst through the door into the kitchen. Her knees gave out, and she collapsed onto the floor, but the panic that owned her wouldn’t let her stay there. Climbing to her feet again, she ran out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the front door, Pepperell at her heels.

The house was dark and quiet. Halette and Jacinthe had long since retired for the night. Kellan had made it clear to Dinah that Blue should have her bedroom back again, and Dinah had grudgingly told Blue she could sleep on the floor while Halette took the bed, but Blue couldn’t stand the thought of being inside. Of having walls around her or other people close by.

Snatching her summer cloak from the hook beside the door, she let herself onto the porch, closing the door after Pepperell, who hopped down the front steps and began sniffing the puffer bloom bushes, whose flowers were slowly opening to the moonlit sky.

Blue intended to escape into her garden, but her legs refused to hold her. She sank onto the front steps, pulled her cloak tight, and focused on breathing.

In.

Out.

No walls collapsing in on her. No memories waiting to swallow her.

In.

Out.

The delicate scent of puffer blooms, Mama’s favorite flower and the source of Blue’s nickname, wrapped around her, and the soft, salt-washed air pressed close.

She didn’t think about Dinah. About the price she’d pay for running away. Didn’t think about the cellar and all its awful memories.

Instead, she thought of Papa. Of his warm hands and big smile, and the love in his eyes when he looked at her. Grief bubbled up, drenched in the residue of the panic that had driven her out of the cellar, and she let it take her. Let the hot, sharp thing inside her burst into sobs that shook her entire body.

As the stars spun slowly across the night sky and the sea crashed against the not-so-distant shore, Blue curled up against the porch rails and cried herself to sleep.





TWENTY-EIGHT

THE QUEEN SENT guards to notify the other head families of Marisol’s death so that extra precautions could be taken for the daughters and nieces who were vying for the betrothal, but Kellan couldn’t rest until he’d seen for himself that all of them were safe.

He’d sworn to keep this betrothal period free of bloodshed, and he’d failed.

Not that he took responsibility for someone choosing to kill Marisol. That was on the shoulders of the killer. He knew that. But knowing that didn’t stop the horror of Marisol’s death from leaving a wash of sickness in Kellan’s stomach. And it didn’t stop the weight of guilt that sat on his shoulders like a stone. He’d been going back over his every action, his every word for the past few weeks, hunting for a misstep that could have led to this.

Had he paid her more attention than anyone else? Looked at her too often at the expense of the other girls?

He didn’t think so, but maybe his actions hadn’t mattered. Maybe it was simply a matter of narrowing the field of potential queens, and nothing Kellan said or did would’ve changed the intentions of the killer.