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Grandpa Leopold at the gates, watching us drive away. Mynose pressed against the glass, just a little girl, the knowledge of what I was fading as Harrow vanished behind us.
It was true. I was the monster in the labyrinth. I was the ghost that haunted Harrow. I was the beast among the black stars, and I was Helen. My whole life was unraveling in my hands.
Your mother isn’t even your mother, I thought.
God, what had I done to her? Made her think that I was hers? Tricked her into leaving home, into giving up her whole life to take care of me?
She didn’t really love me, I realized, and the thought made me stagger. My mother didn’t love me. Her love was a delusion I’d forced on her.
Whatever Bryony said, how could I be anything but a monster if that were true?
“If I’m not Helen, who am I?” I asked.
“YouareHelen,” Bryony said. She cupped my hands in hers. Her skin was warm against my frigid fingers. “Listen to me. I am the Harrow Witch. You cannot fool me. You have no power over me, no influence. You cannot trick me with illusions or alter my memories or make me see what isn’t there. I see you, Helen. I see the soul within you. There’s no difference. You are Helen Vaughan. You are the dark soul. And you’re beautiful.”
“But—”
She caught my cheek in her hand, and with a kiss, she silenced me. Her lips met mine—mylips, her hand onmycheek,mybody alight with warmth, entranced with the sense and taste of her. “You’re Helen,” she promised me, pulling me close to her, and this time I kissed her. “I see you. I know you,” she promised. Herhand trailed down my neck—real—and pressed flat against my sternum where my heart beat fast—real—and nothing in her touch or mine was a lie.
At some point, I remembered how to breathe again, remembered how tobeagain, but I didn’t let her go. We stood beneath the impossible sky, our brows pressed together, my arms around her neck.
I let my hands fall and looked up at the sky, at the stone. I tried to feel the darkness within me. But I just felt like myself, small and stumbling. “I tried to get away from this place, but I couldn’t,” I said. “Part of me was still stuck here. I’m still part of the Other, and it’s still part of me. I can’t get away by myself any more than your heart could escape your body.”
“Then we find a way to free all of the dark soul,” Bryony said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world.
“It’s dangerous,” I objected.
“Everyone is dangerous,” Bryony snapped. “I’m dangerous. Celia could pick up a gun and shoot someone tomorrow, but we don’t lock her in a cage.”
I wanted to agree with her or argue with her. I didn’t have the strength for either. “We still don’t know how to escape. Or what to do about... well, me, I guess.”
“We will find a way to get you out of here,” Bryony said. No one else could have said those words and made me believe them, but Bryony was fierce as the sun itself.
But believing her didn’t fill me with hope. There was no room for hope—only wretched guilt and confusion. My whole life was a trick I’d played on myself. On my mom. On Simon. They’d loved me because I’d forced them into it, bent them to my will to be myprotectors. I’d robbed them of choice and of the lives they might have lived.
“If Iris and Eli find out we know, we won’t have the chance to try,” I said. “We need to pretend this never happened. And I have to get home before the sun comes up.”
“That door should lead back to the house, right?” Bryony asked.
I hadn’t even noticed it before. On the opposite side of the chamber was a sliding door, and I’d bet anything it led to the corridor where I’d found the lost charm. “I think so.”
“If you go through there, you should have time to get cleaned up. No one will be the wiser,” Bryony said. “I’ll go back through the tunnel. Come to my house as soon as you can.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
She held my face in her hands, forcing me to look into her eyes. “Rabbit. You did what you had to so that you could survive. Never, ever feel bad for that.”
I couldn’t answer. I kissed her instead, a half-wild kiss that tasted of anger and of farewells. Her eyes were troubled when I pulled away, and I feared she wouldn’t let me go at all, but she turned back to the tunnels.
My thoughts kept catching. I’d get halfway toward forming a coherent idea and it would snag. But one thought surfaced and held. These girls here had died. They’d been murdered. They’d been sacrificed for power and legacy, and they shouldn’t have been.
“Helen Beaumont,” I whispered. “Edith Grayson. Margaret Bell. Susan McConnell. Lara Pearson. Haley Cotter. Jessamine Vaughan.” I shut my eyes, committing their names to memory. And then I turned and left their bones to the spiral.
31
I STUMBLED THROUGHthe door and into the hall. The door slid shut behind me, closing seamlessly so that it seemed like part of the wall. I walked with plodding steps toward my room, but I’d hardly gone twenty feet when Caleb stepped around the corner.
I froze, startled. I was still covered in dirt without any good explanation. I couldn’t very well say I’d been sleepwalking when I was fully dressed with my shoes on. I opened my mouth, scrambling for a plausible lie, but then I saw the gun in his hand. Why did Caleb have a gun?
