I shook my head as adrenaline rushed through my body. No. I was seeing things. Hallucinating. This must have been another play. Another game.
But the silver blade stayed crammed into Hudson’s neck. Nausea pulled me under. There was so much blood.
“It’s alright, Ezzie,” Hudson breathed, his voice hoarse as he forced the words out.Ezzie.Even now, he was elegant and powerful, like a knight. A broken knight.
My head kept shaking on its own. This was anything but alright. My knees gave out and I fell, vomit crawling along my throat. I edged closer to him, reaching out to help him, save him somehow, but his gaze was already elsewhere. Pale with a veil that didn’t belong to this world.
I was drowning.
Something other than blood flooded my veins, thick and heavy. Goosebumps spread across my skin.
Hudson fell back, the knife I had grabbed from Thornhill glinting in his neck like a candle.Final.
My throat ached. I couldn’t blink, couldn’t move. He was dead. I killed him. I had so many questions.
I killed him.
You murdered your own father.A new voice rang out. Not my mum’s, not Preston’s. It was ancient. Evil. Blood pulsed loud in my ears, the high-pitched ringing deafening me. Then silence. It felt eternal, time crawling backwards as I waited for him to sit up.
He was dead. Everyone was dead. My mum, Lilian, and now him. Even Preston was a cruel play. Everything was a lie.
I stared at the smile frozen on his lips. My smile. How did I not notice it before?
“That was quite poetic, pet.” The Monster’s voice rang through the forest shattering the silence.
Shadows swirled around me. Excited and welcoming, muting everything. They weren’t the Monster’s.
They were mine.
They were the ones that had followed me around, waiting for me to accept them. My mother’s warning rang in my head like an alarm.
Bad things lurk in the dark, bug. Never trust the darkness.
But I am the darkness, Mum.
“Miss.”
The voice was soft, warm, like butter left out in the sun for too long. I raised my eyes to Alistair as he stepped toward me, his hand outstretched. The weight of it was impossible to ignore. I wanted to look behind him, to see if Hudson had risen, but I couldn’t.
My gaze stayed on Alistair, on his grey mustache and the sad glimmer of encouragement in his eyes. I took his hand, and for the briefest of moments, I felt nothing but the familiar suffocating embrace of my own shadow. He was me, I realised at once. He was my shadow, following me, protecting me. Itwrapped around me, pooling into the gaping holes that had cracked open in my chest.
It wasn’t just watching anymore…it understood me now. And I understood it too.
My hands went numb, my blood thundering in my ears. A scream tore from somewhere, splitting the air, and the ground gave way beneath me.
I fell.Spiralling into the void.
Into nothing.
Intomyself.
And then the sound of footsteps hit my ears.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
AGNES
The autumn air is heavy with silence, thick like the fog that rolls in with the dusk. Thornhill is a ghost of itself, a mansion that once knew the warmth of living breath, now left hollow in its bones. I linger in the hallways, feeling the chill seep through the walls as if the house itself is trying to shake off the last remnants of dark.
