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Harlow’s, Sadie’s, hand had touched her belly. “I-I had a child growing inside of me. Your child. Ada did something. Made you do it,” she spat.
His jaw tightened as he nodded. “We were reckless, needed to be put in our place.”
All of her lives since then would’ve agreed with him, but that dark part of her wanted to go back in time and shred her sister into pieces. Even after the suffering Harlow had caused, she had trusted Ada.
“What made it different this time?” Sadie whispered, her heart thundering in her chest. “Why didn’t you kill me? What goes on inside your head?”
River sighed, leaning on the crystal box that belonged to him. “In the previous lives, when the silence comes, everything inside of me shuts down, and the only thing left in me is the urge to see that you’re dead. It’s not me wanting to do it—it’s whatever lingering spell Ada cast upon us. I don’t know what was different this time unless the spell is wearing off, or maybe it was because you weren’t there yet, and I had time. There was this drive for me to take you to the woods when you got home, and something inside me somehow knew I would hurt you there. All I wanted was silence, so I wrote you the letter, then hung myself to protect you. I thought it would save you. But Ada’s spell still clutched my essence in the ashes, which is why, when you spread them, I got trapped in these woods with everything we created together.”
“The moths, the fiends…” Sadie started. “We did that together. The part of the fiends’ essences that we couldn’t use, we trapped down here until they became something far more deadly than the two of us had ever been.” Inside her head, it was as though multiple personalities were molding together, becoming one.
“That’s the thing,” River said softly. “They are no longer down here. They’re trapped in the woods.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Dark hearts make beautiful lovers.”
“You commanded the malevolent spirits to be out in the woods?” Sadie hissed, pushing up from the floor, her fingers biting into the edge of the crystal box to keep herself from trembling.
River shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
Hidden within all of Sadie’s memories, the spells she’d used to cast lingered, and it felt as if she were brushing off layers of dust to bring them closer to the surface. Until it was as though they’d never been locked away at all.
Sadie closed the crystal box’s lid, running her palm across the symbols, silently chanting to locate the spirits. She and River would use these beds to perform chants, rituals, see things from the past, drink the rage growing inside the malevolent spirits behind their closed door. And then they would lap up their bloody tears, tasting every bitter drop of them to keep her from fear.
“My location spell isn’t working.” Sadie whirled to face River.
“My spells and magic don’t work either. It has something to do with what Ada did to us.”
Ada… Sadie clenched her fists, her nails pressing in so hard she thought she would bleed. She then fled the room, remembering every inch of this underground place, her home, every door, every crevice.
Her heart pounded as she unbolted the door and peered inside at nothing but a stone room filled with iron chains and symbols to bind the spirits. That was the only way to keep them here, to prevent them from massacring everyone inside the village at one time. The chains that once held them were empty, as if they’d never been there. She lifted a cuff, finding it locked and unbroken.
“I told you they aren’t here,” River said, kneeling beside her.
Letting the chain slip from her fingertips with a heavy clang, she turned to face River. “You said they’re in the woods, but where? We have to get them back in here. We may have been monstrous, but they are even more so.”
“During the day they aren’t shadows like the rest of us. They are quiet inside the trees, even when darkness rolls in. But at midnight, they breathe, they whisper, yet they seem to be bound inside. As for how the trees are moving, I don’t think it’s them doing it.”
Sadie thought about how their whispers had been getting louder, raspy low screams. As for the fiends, they hadn’t come down with Sadie any of the other times because they’d been protecting her and River, keeping watch over the part of themselves that was evil.
In the past, the fiends always had minds of their own, yet they followed and listened to Jasper and Harlow as if they were their king and queen. Sadie thought about how the creatures had bowed their heads to her when she would come at night—even without her old face, they still knew who she was, who River was. But if the spirits somehow escaped their prisons, they wouldn’t listen. That was why she never would’ve unleashed them, and if they did find a way out, she was unable to use a spell to stop them.
Yet she tried again anyway. Sadie clasped her hands together, attempting to dip into a deeper spell, pull any energy she could as she chanted the words to bring them back here.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “Do we just hope for the best? That they remain hidden in there?” Sighing heavily, she ran her fingers over the cocoon symbols along the walls and tried to get them to light up the way the crystal box had when she’d been inside. But she hadn’t used her magic to see into her past—it must’ve been remnants of her old spells.
“I’ve tried to break Ada’s spell, reverse it, do anything I can think of. But I can’t ignite a lick of magic,” River said.
“Is this what she wanted?” Sadie snapped. “This macabre never-ending cycle of you taking my life, then your own. What would be the point of doing this? Why didn’t she just leave us dead like she—like she—” She couldn’t finish the rest as a choked sob came out of her. “Our baby…”
River wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close, and rested his chin atop her head. “I know you want to tear her apart, break the world into a thousand pieces to go back in time so you can do so, but you know why she did it. I know why.”
“That doesn’t make me any less angry. In all our lives since then, except for this one, I got pregnant, then had a miscarriage…” She trailed off as a horrified thought crossed her mind. “That’s our child, isn’t it? Every time. And it has something to do with Ada’s spell, doesn’t it?”
River took in a sharp breath. “I believed it was a hex put on us, and when our baby died, it would mean one would never be born. Your theory is making more sense, though.” His throat bobbed, and he drew Sadie up from the stone floor, bringing her out of the room. “You’ve been here much longer than the last few times, and I don’t know how much time you have left before you wake.”
Tears pricked her eyes, thinking of her child dying over and over again. An innocent… But the lives she’d taken had been innocent too. Was this her punishment for eternity? “I want to stay here with you and never leave. I don’t want to wake up.” She folded her arms around him and murmured against his shoulder. “I don’t care if you continue to have the urge to slit my throat.”
