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“But the shadows can’t hurt me, can they? I have Vaughan blood. Could I have stopped them?” Would Roman still be alive if I’d tried to help him?
“It’s not a good idea to test the limits of Harrow’s rules,” Caleb said gravely. “Please try not to feel guilty for what happened.”
“What about your illness?” Iris asked.
“I feel fine now. Whatever it was must have passed.” I fidgeted, scratching at the scabbed-over gash on my forehead. Could they tell I was hiding something?
“Curious,” Iris said softly, frowning. “I would feel a lot better if we knew the cause.”
“We know the cause,” Caleb said angrily. “Father chose playing games with the inheritance over keeping the Other properly caged, and it’s leaving Helen vulnerable. When she got away, it went after Roman instead.”
Mom’s fingers gripped the arms of her chair until her knuckles turned white. “I’m sorry, but what exactly are we doing here?She’s been going through all of this—risking herlife, apparently—to protectyourinheritance. If it weren’t for the family, you know we wouldn’t be here. The least you could do is find a way out of this ridiculous Investiture.”
“It isn’t a simple matter of amending a contract, Rachel,” Caleb said. “We don’t even understand some of the forces in play. We need to be cautious.”
“Cautious? Helen’s getting sick. Now I hear she’s been sleepwalking outside.Outside, where something justkilledRoman. Whatever Dad thought he was doing, this is dangerous, and it’s out of control.”
“That we can agree on,” Caleb said. “Rachel, listen. I am doing absolutely everything in my power to make sure Helen gets through this year. And then I’m going to figure out how to free our family from Harrow and all of this madness for good.”
He had no idea what was really going on in this place. What it had already cost him. Harrow had taken his daughter. Not just Harrow—his father, his own mother. And god knew who else might be involved. I wished I could have told him everything, but I knew I needed proof if I was going to convince him of something so awful.
Proof, like Nicholas Vaughan’s journal spelling it out. I had to find it.
“Then I think that’s all,” Caleb said. He got up and stepped around the desk.
“That’s it?” I asked. A man was dead. Shouldn’t there be more?
“Just hang tight, Helen. The year will be over before you knowit,” Caleb replied. He put a hand on my shoulder comfortingly as I stood. “We’ll be able to put all of this behind us.”
“Thank you,” I told him, grateful for the sentiment even if I didn’t believe it—and then, on impulse, I hugged him. He seemed startled at first, but then returned the embrace.
I pulled away after a moment and winced. The gash on my forehead had opened up, and there was a smear of blood on Caleb’s cheek. “Sorry,” I muttered, embarrassed, and retreated, struck with the feeling that this was not a good omen.
—
By the end of that day, Victoria and Celia had left for home. Desmond went back to school. Roman, like all of Harrow’s other secrets, was tucked into the seams and forgotten.
Sandra drove back to Connecticut. It was strange to me that no one ever talked about how she and Caleb didn’t live together. They said Caleb was staying at Harrow for my sake, but even when Sandra was here, she slept in a separate room. Still, sometimes I saw Caleb looking at her with a kind of pained hope in his eyes, and when he wasn’t paying attention, she looked at him the same way.
I kept to my room, making the Willows my refuge and my cage. And so the days went, hour by hour, sinking deeper into the spiral not of Harrow but of my own mind. I hardly ate, hardly slept, only sat running my fingers over a dead girl’s bones, wondering who she’d been and who she was to me. Fragments of memories snagged at me but refused to spin themselves into sense.Rough hands and gentle ones, my mother’s face and my grandfather’s, daylight and the darkness of a tomb.
The bells rang. I woke, I paced the floor, I stared at the bones. I appeared when I was summoned, I vanished when I would not be missed.
Every spare moment, I spent with Bryony. I felt like I was drowning, but every time I saw her, I broke the surface. Long enough to catch a breath of air. Nothing could silence the cacophony of my thoughts but her kiss, her touch.
And all along, I was hiding things from her.
The dark soul she loved so much was a terrible thing, but I didn’t say as much to her. I didn’t tell her what I had realized: that my only options were to escape the dark soul or destroy it. That doing one might require doing the other. I listened to her speak rapturously of walking the grounds at night, calling the shadows by name, and watching them dance among the trees, and I said nothing.
Days passed relentlessly. The bells rang. I woke. I paced. I whispered to the bones as if they could hear. The bells rang. I woke—and I was not alone.
Leopold stood at the foot of the bed. I could see the edge of his jaw and his left eye; the rest was a haze. “What are you doing?” he asked me.
I sat up, pulling my knees up in front of me. “What do you want from me?” I asked.
Silence. “We are scattered,” he said.“We wish to be whole.”
“You murder people. People have died here—people fromEston, people who had nothing to do with you or with Harrow or any of it.”
