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“I’m sorry, Helen. I should have noticed you were wandering the halls. It didn’t occur to me...” He sighed. “The halls of Harrow have unique properties. They’d giveanyonea headache, but some people are more sensitive than others.”
“You’re telling me that Harrow gave me a migraine?” I asked. I wished it didn’t make perfect sense.
“As I said. Some people are more sensitive. Annalise Vaughan herself wandered the halls obsessively at night.”
“Annalise Vaughan. I think I saw some of her paintings,” I said. The headache still had a solid grip around my skull, but the cool glass helped at least a little bit. “Who was she?”
“She was the wife of Nicholas Vaughan, the founder of Harrow,” Eli said. He stood with his hands behind his back in the pose of a history professor giving a lecture. “They wereoccultists—dedicated to their belief in the supernatural. Annalise Vaughan was a medium. She claimed to be able to visit other worlds via astral projection. Nicholas Vaughan believed that her abilities were the key to unlocking vast realms of knowledge and power. Thus, the words above the lintel:Ex Aliis Mundis Verum. From other worlds, truth. He believed that this valley was a place of particularly powerful connections between the worlds. That’s why he built Harrowstone Hall on this spot.”
“And made it into a maze?” I asked.
“A labyrinth,” Eli said. I couldn’t tell if he was agreeing with me or correcting me. “He worked with a friend of his, Dr.Samuel Raymond. Dr.Raymond had some unique theories about the brain. He believed that he could use architecture to influence the mind.”
“I see,” I said carefully, not sure how I was supposed to react. A medium—wasn’t that a kind of psychic? Maybe Annalise Vaughan had been like me, and my ability to see things that I shouldn’t was inherited somehow.
“Nicholas Vaughan believed some very strange things,” Eli said, not without humor.
“But there are strange things at Harrow,” I said, and stared at him, trying to see beneath that papery skin. But I had only the sense of old sorrows and bitter guilt, and then even that slipped away, leaving an old man in front of me with hooded eyes and an unreadable expression.
“These old houses will play tricks on you,” was all he said.
Eli helped me find my way back to my room after that. I dragged myself into bed, barely getting my shoes off, and pulled the blankets over my head.
I’d had migraines all my life, but rarely like this. The dimmest light sent a needle through my eye, and I felt like I was going to vomit if I moved at all. All there was to do was curl up inside the pain and wait.
Gradually, I became aware that I wasn’t alone. I sat up slowly, opening my eyes reluctantly.
My grandfather stood by the door.
I shrank back against the bed, fear fluttering like moth wings against the skin of my throat, before steeling myself. “What do you want?” I asked. He only glared at me from behind the fractured glass pattern that blurred out half his face.
“Bryony said that there aren’t any ghosts here.” Still no answer. “If you aren’t a ghost, what are you?”
The mattress sagged, weight settling beside me. The edge of my vision cracked, strobing with the crazed rainbow of migraine aura. Jessamine. She hummed softly, brushing her fingers through my hair.
“I’m lost in the woods. I want to go home. Help me get home. I want to go home.”
“Whatareyou?” I asked, desperate.
Leopold’s mouth opened as if to answer, but flowers burst from it instead of words, stalks of bell-shaped blooms that blackened and fell to the floor in a silent rain of decay. His whole body collapsed, spilling to the ground in a tide of earth and dying flowers and scuttling beetles, and I sat on the bed, alone, and the ghosts that weren’t ghosts were gone.
Only the pain remained. I shut my eyes and tried to breathe through it. Time would pass. The pain would fade.
I didn’t sleep, but the agony was a kind of unconsciousness—the rest of the world shut out, irrelevant. Time became a meaningless slurry. I couldn’t tell if minutes or hours were passing. My mother came in at some point—spoke to me; pressed cool, wet cloths against my forehead; tightened the curtains so no traitorous light could invade.
I must have finally fallen asleep because when I heard voices outside my door, they seemed to be in the middle of a conversation that I hadn’t heard the beginning of.
“Of course I am concerned,” Iris was saying—though she sounded as calm and composed as ever. “If it doesn’t accept her, we could be in a great deal of trouble. But I ammoreconcerned about the house sickening her.”
My breath was loud in my ears. I held still, straining to hear.
“We ought to have anticipated that,” Eli said. “She’s been gone a long time. Harrow is rigid, and she’s grown beyond its boundaries. Its attempts to fit her back into its patterns are proving too much for her. We should slow down.”
“And risk running out of time,” Caleb countered. “If Harrow is set against her and the Other doesn’t recognize her, she’ll be torn apart come the Investiture. Integration will be impossible.”The Other?Hadn’t Roman been about to say something like that when Caleb interrupted him? What wasthe Other?
And what did he mean, “torn apart”?
“Perhaps if we told her more...” Eli began.
