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A shadow fell across the grass. A pair of black dress shoes, polished to a shine, stood in front of me. Slowly, my eyes tracked up to the black slacks, the tailored jacket. The delicate queue of bell-shaped flowers pinned to the lapel. To the face obliterated behind a hooked sliver of broken light, like a migraine occlusion. I didn’t need to see his face, though, to know who he was.
Leopold Vaughan.
Maybe I was still asleep, still dreaming, I thought, in my normal life, far from here. But, of course, that wasn’t true. I was wide awake.
“No. You aren’t,” my grandfather said, and I couldn’t tell which he meant—dreaming or awake. No matter how hard I tried to focus on his face, I couldn’t see it, that fishhook of fractured light concealing all but a wedge of jaw and throat.
“What do you want from me?” I asked. I tried to step back, but I couldn’t move. The taste of damp earth filled my mouth.
“You cannot escape this place by running,” he said.“The only way out of the spiral is through its center. Find the heart of Harrow, or it will devour you.”
I’d always been able to hold on to a scrap of belief that the things I saw were only my imagination. That they weren’t real. But this...
“Find the heart of Harrow,” my grandfather said again, his voice shredding apart with every word until it was only the low moan of the wind—then even that was gone.
All that remained of my grandfather was a sprig of foxglove, lying where he had stood.
5
I STUMBLED FROMthe woods, my heart hammering and my mind spinning, and stood for a moment, dumbfounded at the sight of Harrow towering before me, its cold gray stone radiating indifference. I’d come back here without meaning to, my steps carrying me surely, inevitably, back to the house.
“Helen?”
I almost screamed, managing a ladylike yelp instead, and rounded on Desmond. He was sitting at the base of a tree right beside me, writing in a notebook, a silver pen hovering just above the page. The paper was covered with small, precise script, but not in any language I knew—tiny symbols, dots and dashes and curlicues. “Sorry,” I said. “You startled me.”
“You’re good. I mean, you’re a complete mess, but no harm done.” He took a closer look at me, brow creased. “Areyou good, actually? You look...” He was polite enough not to finish his sentence.
“I don’t know. I just—there was—” I gestured helplessly at the woods. It already felt less real. Maybe because Desmond seemed so grounded in reality, as if in defiance of this place.
“Harrow can be a bit unsettling,” Desmond said carefully. “People say they see things.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, hoping and fearing that I would recognize the answer.
He seemed reluctant to say. “You hear stories, that’s all,” he said. “Didyousee something out there?”
I almost answered. Then I thought of how insane I would sound, babbling about vanishing girls and spectral voices and a strange woman collecting grave moss and handing out magic charms. “Nothing. Just spooked,” I lied.
He nodded slowly, as if deciding whether he believed me. “Can I ask you something?” he said. I gave the tiniest dip of my chin. “Did you really hurt that girl at your school?”
I flinched. He knew then. And any hope I’d had that he might be a friend withered. “They told me I did.”
“But did you?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. All I remembered was the sound of screaming. The blood on my hands. I looked away, fingers curling into fists. “I don’t want to have done it, but I can’t be sure that I didn’t.”
“I’m sorry to bring up bad memories,” he said, and I looked at him in surprise. He wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t looking at me in horror. If anything, there was sympathy in his eyes. “I only ask because I feel like I should know what kind of person you are. If you’re going to be Mistress of Harrow and all.”
“You know,” I said. It came out as more of an accusation than I meant.
“About the will? Yeah, I overheard my mom and Caleb talking about it.”
“Do you think everyone knows?” I asked.
“I doubt it. Roman would not have been able to keep quiet about it, at the very least,” Desmond said.
“I haven’t decided if I’m going to accept,” I confessed.
Desmond looked surprised. “Don’t you want to be rich?”
