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Desmond hopped down from his seat on the railing and headed in. Before I could follow, Celia grabbed my sleeve. She didn’t look at me, fixing her eyes on a point on the ground instead, and her voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear it.
“They say the witch knows the names of all of Harrow’s shadows,” Celia said. “If you want to know Harrow’s secrets, you should talk to her.”
“You know something, too,” I said softly. “Don’t you?”
She looked up sharply, her lips parted as if she was about to say something. But she only shook her head once. And then she was gone, scurrying toward the house with her shoulders hunched forward. I watched her go, and then I turned, looking back toward the trees, which rippled slowly in the wind.
“Beware, beware, the Harrow Witch,” I murmured. And then, to myself, I whispered her name. “Bryony.” Like an incantation, like a charm.
In the woods, something moved: a long and ragged shape that flowed unnaturally from tree to tree. As if the shadows had heard me and had stirred at her name.
But surely that was only a trick of the light.
7
SOME PEOPLE SAYhouses are like living things. It had never felt true in the houses we rented, with their dull brown carpets and popcorn ceilings. I understood it now, though, among the hallways splaying out like veins and arteries, the rooms like organs. When people began to leave Harrow, it was like watching an animal drained slowly of blood.
Roman went first; he had some incomprehensible but vitally important job in finance, and the way he talked, the global economy would collapse if he wasn’t there at nine o’clock sharp on Monday morning. Sandra vanished around the same time. Then the teens left, chauffeured back to their lofty private school, and then Victoria. That left me, Mom, and Simon, along with Caleb, Eli, and Iris. Eli and Iris were permanent residents of Harrow, and Caleb was staying to “ease the transition.”
The house felt dead with half the family gone, but you could learn a lot from a corpse. It was time for me to perform an autopsy. If I was going to spend a year in this house, I had to understand it. I had to know what Leopold had meant—what lay at the heart of Harrow.
So I set out to explore. There were an unfathomable number of rooms—studies and sitting rooms, libraries and bedrooms, storage rooms and rooms with no discernible function.
I kept getting turned around, finding my course folding back on itself so I was back where I started. Once I opened the door to what I was absolutely convinced was my own room only to find a tiny, closet-sized chamber, the walls covered with bizarre paintings: strange creatures rising behind mountains; a woman greeting a sunrise, the sky filled with writhing tentacles; six-legged hounds coursing after a distant fleeing figure. They were all signed the same way:Annalise Vaughan.
It would have been tempting to call the house random or mad or jumbled, but it wasn’t. It was precise in its confusion, careful as clockwork. The whole house felt like a machine, but what purpose it had, I couldn’t say.
I spent every day alternating between stiff, formal meals with Iris, keeping up with my homeschool curriculum, and exploring the house. It wasn’t getting me anywhere. I wasn’t anywhere closer to understanding why Leopold had left Harrow to me or what it meant to find Harrow’s heart. But the house had an obsessive hold on me. Every free minute, I found myself walking the corridors. Even when I wasn’t, I pictured their turns, counted doorways in my mind.
Find the heart of Harrow. Find the heart of Harrow.
Every time I thought I’d explored all of it, I found another room that I was certain I’d never seen before. One morning, wandering out of habit more than purpose, I came across a hall that Ididn’t think I’d been down before. I noticed it mostly because of the words painted in gold leaf on the lintel above the door on the left side of the hall.EX ALIIS MUNDIS VERUM.
I tried the knob. It turned only a quarter of an inch before stopping. Locked. I was about to turn away when the door suddenly opened, and Eli peered out at me. “Yes?” he said.
I blinked, feeling like I was trying to think through a fog. “I’m sorry. I was just exploring,” I said.
“And you’ve discovered the promised land,” Eli replied with a chuckle. I stared at him blankly. “The Vaughan family library. My preferred haunt,” he amended.
“Oh. Right.” Haunt was a good word for him. He didn’t seem much more alive than a ghost. I’d never met someone with so little presence. It was like he was a tissue paper tracing of a man. Colorless and thin, with a care to his movements, like he thought he might snag on something and rip if he moved too quickly.
“Are you all right, dear?” he asked.
I put a hand to my cheek. The skin of my palm felt shockingly cold. “I don’t know. I feel weird,” I admitted.
“Come in a moment,” he said, and stepped aside to usher me in. Beyond him was an expansive room covered floor to ceiling in packed bookshelves. I could make out a handful of titles on the shelves nearest the door.The Book of the Words,The New Revelation,The Sea of Stars,The Magus, andTranscendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual. They looked old—nineteenth century, at least.
My head was suddenly pounding, and nausea roiled in my gut. Eli herded me over to a leather armchair, and I sank down into it with a groan.
“I think I have a migraine,” I said. “It came on suddenly.”
“You said you’ve been exploring,” Eli said. He pressed a glass of water into my hand. I managed a sip, but my stomach rebelled. I pressed the glass against my forehead instead.
“Just a little bit each day,” I said, but that wasn’t quite true, was it? Once I actually thought about it, I couldn’t remember doing much of anythingotherthan exploring. “I thought I’d poke around for a few minutes after breakfast,” I said falteringly.
“And you’ve been wandering the house this whole time?” Eli asked. I looked at him blankly. “Helen, breakfast was at eight. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, but he held out his watch for me to check, and it was 3:07. I gave him a baffled look. “I thought it had been fifteen minutes.”
