by Kelly Creagh
“Stephanie wants what I want,” I snarled at him. “And that is for her and me to be together for all time. She wants this because her heart has been poisoned to want it. My soul overshadows hers. And I have now come to be certain that, if my soul is allowed to shatter, hers will follow suit. Need I remind you, though, that she is alive?”
“You’re saying she’ll die?”
“That will be the least horrific fate to befall her,” I said.
“And the worst?”
“My greatest fear?” he said, shaking his head. “That she could become as I am.”
“If we destroy your heart,” said Rastin, “those two ends are stopped how?”
“Because the rupturing of my heart and its destruction by an outside force are two different things,” I explained.
“You’re saying if we destroy it while Rastin has the portal open, the bond will automatically be severed?” Cheney asked.
“It must be,” Rastin answered for me, his tone turning as bleak as his expression. “His soul, cut free of its anchor, will extract itself from her.”
“Think of a frozen flower,” I told the boy. “Crush it, and it shatters. Remove the ice, though, and—”
“It still won’t live,” he said, his word actually serving to silence me.
And so. It seemed I would have to change tactics.
“You made a promise to me,” I said to him. “One that, for her sake, you must now find the courage to keep.”
He shook his head at me. “She—”
“When Rastin opens the portal, my spirit, so long as it is bound by the curse, will revolt. My incapacitation means that you must do it. Now take the dagger.”
A long stretch of seconds passed. And then, surprising me once again, Mr. Cheney at last accepted Tumult’s blade.
EIGHTY
Stephanie
I broke from Charlotte, running ahead with a cry after I caught sight of movement through the broken windows of the conservatory—a fluttering of red rose petals.
Without stopping, I crashed into the rickety metal-framed door and pushed my way through only to find myself in a room of shattered nothing.
Shards of dingy glass littered the mud-caked stone floor along with dried brush and broken bits of wicker. I whirled under the domed ceiling, searching its exposed frame for some sign of night.
The sun glared down on me instead, its unwelcome heat drawing from me a sob.
A shout echoed it. One I heard partly with my ears and party—more clearly—within my mind.
Erik’s.
I sprang away from the center of the room, back to the open door through which Charlotte, Patrick, and Wes, standing at a distance, watched me unravel with helpless despair.
Grasping the doorframe, I hung my head and fought the urge to collapse. Instead, I passed through it again, imagining where I wanted to be—where I wanted this doorway to take me. To a place I made myself believe it could take me. To the other Moldavia. His. Ours.
When I looked up again, though, I found my friends still there.
I would have broken down then, if Patrick hadn’t stepped forward to point at me. Or rather, at the doorway behind me.
“Stephanie,” he said.
Turning, I saw that the scene within the doorway had changed.
Green tattered vines clung to the walls. Rose petals flew.
And there was Rastin. And Lucas.
And . . .
EIGTHY-ONE
Lucas
A breeze arose from nowhere to shake and stir the heads of the innumerable blooms, amplifying their already heady scent to a nearly noxious status.
The monster—who’d disconcertingly yet to behave like one—said I’d made a promise to him.
He must have been talking about something I’d said to him in the graveyard. Trying to remember what words I’d used, I wrapped a hand more tightly around the dagger he’d proffered to me. And as the cold metal of the handle bit into my flesh, I recalled exactly what I’d said.
I’d promised I’d be the one to send him to hell.
A glance toward Rastin showed him putting his hands out, palms up, like a sage preparing to raise the dead instead of a medium preparing to do the opposite. He closed his eyes. At the same instant, the monster—Zedok—doubled over, contracting into himself.
This was happening. All without my say-so. I’d taken the dagger. I’d taken it, but . . .
Another rush of air gusted through the waxy leaves of the roses, strong enough to tear whole heads free. Petals filled the air like confetti, funneling into a whirlwind.
At the center of the vortex stood Rastin, who murmured to himself, lips moving, voice silenced by the flutter of leaves and the whip of wind. Lowering one hand, the medium opened his eyes, a glower of determination setting his features as he extended the other hand toward Erik.
The windstorm, raging against him, sent the monster staggering backward several paces. A low roar of defiance emanated from him, growing loud enough to rise above Rastin’s whispered prayers and the blustering. The monster reclaimed surer footing, even as a white halo of light began to radiate around him.
Conflicted, still remembering that look on Stephanie’s face as I’d shut the door on her, I gripped the dagger at my side, its handle already slick with sweat. The light surrounding the monster expanded then, revealing itself not to be an aura . . . but a portal, one that would remove him from this world forever.
A glance to Rastin showed the medium’s focus locked on his target. Beads of sweat trickled down his temples. He’d widened his stance and now held out both hands. What would happen, though, if his strength failed him?
Still undecided, I spun back in the direction of the monster.
His black jacket began to disintegrate, the fabric thinning, then molting away to reveal tattered and time-yellowed skin and bony limbs.
The glowing white rift tore itself even wider behind the creature.
Then the mask itself dissolved, crumbling to pieces.
The monster screamed. Impossibly, he took a staggering step toward me, straining all the while against the portal that, like a vacuum, began to suck the loosened rose petals, leaves, and flower heads into it.
And then. Then the creature did something awful.
Lifting an emaciated, skeletal hand to its chest, it pried fingers between its own ribs—and ripped downward, tearing bone and papery flesh away to reveal the rose.
Again, I twisted the dagger in my grip, trying to make myself believe that I would do what Rastin needed me to. What Stephanie and her family and this monster did, too.
But now that the moment had come, the point of no return, something about it felt . . . wrong.
I peered again to Rastin, who gritted his teeth, his arms trembling against the creature, who took another step in my direction.
Then, with a roar of his own, Rastin shoved both hands forward, and the monster went flying back, straight at the portal. And, as if the portal was not an opening but a wall, the creature slammed against it with a demented cry of pain, his face distorted in rage and agony.
He began to claw at his own chest, at the heart that caused him so much pain. The heart that was now the only thing keeping him here, locked in his ruined body and caught in this warped existence. The only thing besides me, that was.
He couldn’t remove it, though. Even so, his hand fastened around it, he squeezed and screamed, dead muscles straining.
Do it. I should.
I’d said I would.
And I would have. If I hadn’t glimpsed within the centers of those two pits what Rastin had seen and perhaps now Stephanie, too. Not a monster. Not a creature. But a soul. A person.
God. He loved her.
He really loved her.
The truth of that came crashing around me, landing hard enough to break m
y own heart.
Why hadn’t it dawned on me before this moment—when it was already too late—that he wouldn’t have asked me to do this if that had not been completely and utterly true?
The light Rastin had summoned had now begun to shrink. The portal was closing. My chance—his chance—was fading.
Erik’s heart would collapse when the portal did. I had no doubt of it. Then his soul would shatter. Now that it was linked with Stephanie’s, what would that mean for her?
I shook my head and locked eyes again with Erik.
Tightening my hand around the dagger, I started forward. Then I ran right at him.
He uncurled his skeleton’s hand from around the rose, his arm falling away as I raised the blade.
And plunged it home. Into the target that had been too easy to impale: the rose.
As I used both hands to twist the knife, destroying the flower completely, several things happened at once.
The light inside those two pits for eyes went out. The portal holding him up closed with the sound of a snapping live wire. And, as the now lifeless corpse fell, dagger and all, to the petal-strewn floor, someone screamed.
EIGHTY-TWO
Stephanie
I gripped my chest as my eyes took in the scene before me. As if I had been the one stabbed.
Tears rushed down my cheeks, seeming to bring the silence with them.
Both Rastin and Lucas stared at me, but I didn’t see them. I couldn’t.
I only saw him. Lying crumpled at Lucas’s feet. Dead, but now also gone.
My breath abandoned me as my feet hurried to the form that, somehow, during the last moments, had been rendered a thing, lifeless and inanimate.
Someone said my name. Lucas.
I couldn’t hear him, though. I could only see. This thing he had done.
I fell to my knees beside my ghost. My hands then went to his chest but stopped short of the broken cage, which, in addition to the dagger, still held the remnants of the heart I’d given him.
“Oh.” The noise escaped my lips.
And instead of touching him, I drew my hand up to stifle the sob that burst forth.
Pain came with the sight of his face. His skull. His closed eyes.
He has lights for eyes.
Charlie’s words from that night swam from the black mire my mind had become while I watched and waited for those eyes to open and the lights to return.
“No,” I murmured when they didn’t. “No,” I whispered again as I took his face in my hands.
Bending over him, I pressed my lips to his forehead. “I mean yes.”
I shut my eyes, tears tumbling onto the face that I had realized too late I loved more than any other. “Yes, damn you.”
But now he wasn’t able to hear my answer. The one I should have given him before but had not been brave enough.
“Yes,” I whispered again.
He stayed still. Silent. And dead.
And, inside my chest, my own heart at last ripped itself in two.
EIGHTY-THREE
Lucas
No sooner had I done it than I realized it had been the wrong plan.
He’d been wrong. I had been wrong.
Seeing Stephanie draped over the now empty shell, I also understood the most important fact of all. Something I had overlooked perhaps because I simply had not wanted to believe it.
Stephanie loved him back.
Erik must have been telling the truth about wanting to keep Stephanie safe. But her current state told me he’d been wrong to think she had mistaken his love for her own. Would he have asked me to do what he had if he’d known?
“Stephanie, I’m sorry,” I told her as I neared her, still not certain if she would hear me. At first, she didn’t look at me. “He . . . told me to.” I touched her arm, but she jerked away, confirming what I’d feared. That she could now only hate me as deeply as she had cared for him.
The next instant, though, she pulled away from the body. She stood and, flinging her arms around me, she sobbed into my chest.
“He told me to,” I whispered again, my own voice cracking as I embraced her in return. “I didn’t realize.”
The truth was, I hadn’t wanted to realize.
But how did I apologize for that?
I looked over to where Rastin sat exhausted on the floor. But instead of watching me or Stephanie, his own stare roved over the walls of the conservatory, the mostly decapitated roses, the vines of which still clung to the glass.
He shook his head once, like something about that—the roses specifically—didn’t add up.
The others now filed in through the door of the conservatory that Stephanie had left open. The one that her link with Erik must have allowed her to open. Patrick frowned at Charlotte, who took the scene in with as much sorrow and shock. Wes’s eyes flicked to me and Stephanie.
Rastin started to rise, and Patrick hurried to help him to his feet.
As Rastin stood, he nodded once to Stephanie, then lifted a finger to his lips.
“Shhh,” I soothed Stephanie, rubbing her back and drawing her slowly away from the body, which Rastin approached with caution, his movements stiff and difficult, one hand over his own heart.
He knelt beside Erik. But, as if Stephanie had sensed something was amiss, she pushed from me, turning on the medium.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. Gently, I held her back. “Don’t touch him,” she snapped as Rastin lifted free the dagger that I’d thrust through the mummy’s heart.
She pulled from me again, and this time I let her go. She approached him—Erik—and retook her own kneeling spot next to Rastin.
“The vines,” Rastin told her. He gestured toward the glass walls with the blade, his voice marveling. “They live.”
“What is it?” I asked him. “Rastin, what’s happening?”
The medium turned toward me, expression lost. “His world. It should not still stand. The roses . . . this dimension . . . they should have ended with him.”
“Erik,” Stephanie whispered to the corpse. “Wake up.”
And though she did not see the limp skeleton’s hand twitch . . . I did.
EIGHTY-FOUR
Erik
Poppies crowded the field.
I stood knee-deep in the redheaded stems, surrounded on all sides by their beauty.
And the blooms stretched on forever, terminating in a horizon just above which peeked a hazy twilight sun.
Silver clouds hung still in a cobalt sky. Tilting my head back, I gazed up at them, but then shut my eyes to the sensation of the wind on my naked face.
Was this the breath of God that now stirred my hair?
Should I thank him when the two of us finally met face-to-uncovered-face? For the gift of seeing Stephanie one final time?
I had seen her push through the door just before the boy had plunged his knife through the rose. Though I despaired to know that the sight of my demise had brought her pain, I relished the final vision all the same.
That glimpse alone had all but erased the urge to unleash upon God the fury that had seeded itself in my nonexistent heart for nearly all of my earthly existence.
She, after all, was free.
I inhaled, long and slow, my lungs filling with the perfume of the poppies—so different from that of the roses. When I exhaled, I imagined myself releasing all that Rastin had always hoped I would.
The masks. My separated soul. My mistakes.
It was then, just before I opened my eyes, that I felt a small hand slide into mine.
I glanced down again, to the short figure now at my side.
She wore her Sunday hat, its yellow ribbon dancing in the gentle breeze.
“Myriam?” Her name left my lips as a whispered wish—a prayer that both asked for and knew it to be trul
y her.
My little sister, whom I had thought of and longed to see every day of my death, offered a small, close-lipped smile. She squeezed my fingers in hers, and then she spoke.
“The curse,” she said. “It’s not broken, brother. You cannot come home yet.”
A short laugh escaped me. Because, while the sight of her brought such happy tears to my eyes, her response struck me as absurd. I had existed so long under the impression that I would never see her again, let alone any other “home” outside of Moldavia. Rarely, as well, had I allowed myself to entertain the idea that there existed a future in which I could go on to something better—no matter what prattle Rastin spewed. My crimes. Had they not been too heinous?
“Yet?” I asked her.
“You can’t come home without your heart,” she said.
My face fell. Did those in heaven truly not know my fate?
“Myriam.” I lowered myself onto one knee before her, gripping her by the shoulders. “I haven’t a heart.”
“Yes, you have,” she replied, the smile returning to her lips, though sadder now than before. “Stephanie gave you one.”
I tilted my head at her, a hundred questions piercing my brain like so many arrows.
So. Myriam knew of Stephanie. My family. Could they see me from wherever their spirits now existed? Had they watched over me all along? From the beyond I had unwittingly sent them to?
Perhaps Myriam had not seen everything. Like the moments that had elapsed before I had arrived here—wherever here was. A dream that, this time, was not of my making.
“The rose—it was destroyed,” I told her. And I might have dreaded what this would mean for me. But I had already spent so long in purgatory that the prospect of more time in a realm of in-between held little horror for me.
“But you see,” said Myriam through a giggle. She took both of my hands in hers. “The rose—that rose. Brother, it never counted.”
“What are you saying?” I asked her. “Please. Speak plainly.”
“You’ve been lost so long,” she whispered, touching my cheek. “In a dark forest where all the trees were you.”