“Well, I didn’t, so effing sue me!” Kelly sobbed and hid her face. “I think Will Patrick might have killed him.”
“Holy hell,” Siobhan said.
“He didn’t do it,” I said, still confident. “Someone else”—the Shadowless—“did.”
I winced at the sound of my voice. It rang in my head like a church bell. My knees turned liquid. A droning noise filled my ears, and a rip opened in my vision—a series of alternating red and blue triangles, the aura of a migraine. Please, not a migraine, not before the All Saints game.
“Yo, Willie!” Siobhan snapped her fingers. “Stop zoning out and answer me.”
“Huh?” I said, trying to focus. “Answer what?”
“I said, where’d this poem come from? Kelly took one look at it and freaked.”
“What poem?”
“This one.” Siobhan turned my chin toward the table. In block letters I had written:
You cannot wake the Shadowless
When she sleeps within my bed.
Kiss the lips of the Shadowless
And the morning finds you dead.
I scrubbed it out with my sleeve, and the letters disappeared. “It’s dry erase.” I sighed, relieved.
“What’s with you and the slam tagging? Did you join a nerd gang behind my back?” Siobhan said. “What’s the Shadowless?”
“Just,” I said. “Just some poem.”
“Well, your poem scared Kelly, and she bolted. Again.” Siobhan slung her backpack over one shoulder. “I’m going on a shitburger hunt. Come with?”
“The dean said we had to wipe tables.”
She pointed at the full cafeteria. “Kids are still eating.”
“Hang on.” I stepped onto my chair and looked out the cafeteria window at the student parking lot, checking again for Will Patrick’s car. A guy in a hoodie was standing near the rich kids’ cars. He was tall, and even from a distance, I recognized his face. My eyes lingered for a second. We had met before—the guy who had bumped me on the sidewalk.
Then he looked up at the cafeteria window. He knows me. And I know him, I thought, and promptly puked on the floor.
CHAPTER THIRTY
WHEN they got me to the infirmary, I had vomit all over my shirt and in my hair as well. Siobhan told the nurse I was “wicked sick” and demanded she attend to me immediately. After she reminded Siobhan who the medical professional was, the nurse changed my soiled shirt, wrapped my hair in a towel, and gave me a quick exam.
My fever was 101 degrees, and my body was wracked with chills. I was muttering. The nurse decided I had the flu, but a while later, she did a more thorough exam and found my wounded thumb. The skin was inflamed, red and hot and full of pus.
When she tried to clean it, I sat bolt upright and screamed. “Stop! Stop it! Get out of my house!”
Siobhan caught me by the shoulders and gave me a hard shake. “Willow Jane,” she said, “you’re dreaming. Lie back down.”
I looked at her blankly. “I am?”
“Some dream, huh?” Siobhan guided me back to the thin mattress. “Want to tell me about it?”
I tried to recall the details, but the dream slipped from my mind like a fistful of sand. “I don’t remember.”
“Probably for the best,” she said. “You have some weird ass dreams.”
“Language,” the nurse said. “Come on, let’s have a look at that thumb. How did you hurt it?”
“Cut it on a pair of scissors.”
“Helping your ma, huh?” Siobhan said as the nurse coated my thumb with ointment and wrapped it in gauze. “You working on the Pilgrim costumes, too?”
“No,” I said. “She stuck scissors under my pillow to fight a headache.”
“Did she now?” The nurse scoffed, drawing the curtain around us. Her voice became a formless mass of sounds. “Never paid much mind to superstitions.”
Siobhan gave me a kiss on the forehead. “I’ll be back after geometry. I need my best defender for the game, so get better or else.”
“Love you, too,” I said, the words sticking to the roof of my mouth like peanut butter.
After Siobhan left, I lay still and quiet, hoping to rest, but my brain had other plans.
“It’s blood,” I whispered. “Blood’s the price of magic.”
A prick of pain stabbed my thumb, and I felt something warm ooze down my palm and tickle my wrist. I unwrapped the gauze and found that the wound had ruptured. A silver filament stuck out of it—two inches long and glittering in the fluorescent light.
“What the hell?” I said and squinted at it. Then my eyes fluttered, and I fell into a restless sleep.
“I’m ba-ack!” Siobhan threw open the curtain, and I stuck my hand under the sheet. “Got your ma on the phone,” she said. “Feel like talking? Geometry totally sucked, beeteedubs.”
I took the phone. “Hello?”
“The nurse called and said you threw up.” Ma wasn’t one to stand on ceremony in a crisis. “Are you sick?”
“Just something I ate.” I forced myself to sound perky. I was so not feeling perky: Perky was the vertically opposite angle of how I felt. “How the cafeteria passes health inspection, I do not know.”
“Can you finish the day?” she said. “The cast’s doing final fittings tonight, and I can’t get away.”
“No problem. We’ve only got two more classes left.”
“Ahem.” Siobhan pointed to the clock on the wall. “One more class. Fifth period’s almost over.”
Seriously? I mouthed. “Ma, I better run.”
“You’re okay?”
“I’m okay.”
“Really okay?”
“Trust me.”
“I do,” she said. “But a mother can still worry.”
I handed the phone back to Siobhan. “Have you seen my sweater?”
“Uh, it’s covered in puke?” She threw a sweatshirt on the bed. “I borrowed this from lost and found.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess,” I said and slid my arms into the sleeves, then glanced at the clock. Five till three. Only four hours left till Louie locked up his pawnshop.
“So that jacked-up thumb?” Siobhan said. “How’s it going to feel in hockey gloves?”
“I played with a broken thumb once, remember?” I said, wobbling from the bed. I was going to need a lot more armor than hockey pads to survive this day. “Where’s the nurse?”
“On break. I promised to watch you.” Winking, Siobhan pushed aside the curtain, then held the infirmary door open. “Glad you’re feeling better. You worried me.”
Except I wasn’t better. There was definitely something terribly wrong. And not just with me. There was something wrong with a boy getting killed in the cemetery. Something wrong with Will Patrick walking around like a stoner zombie. Something wrong with Kelly being scared of her own shadow. There was something wrong with the way things smelled. With the way light turned colors. With the voice in my head that was haunting me, whispering over and over, “The dead watch you while you sleep.”
PART THREE
SINNERS IN THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY GOD
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE world had been at war for three days when Remember Haverhill was born in Verdun, a village near Luxembourg and Belgium. She had learned to walk in trenches and wore a gas mask before she had cut all of her teeth. Her father was a Red Cross doctor from England, her mother a farm girl who turned to caretaking when there were too many wounded for the field nurses to keep up.
By the time Verdun was free of war, a million men had suffered there. The fields around Remember’s home were choked with their bodies, the night filled with their ghosts. She spoke to the dead, these boys come so far from home to die in muddy trenches, killed by men who were themselves just boys, and she learned how to eat their souls.
Her first was a horseman’s boy from Birmingham. There was a field hospital next to her grandfather’s farm. She had followed her mother to the tents one pretty spring day whe
n the fighting was at its fiercest. A boy called out to her, and she turned in time to see a mist begin to rise from him. Laughing, she toddled over, reached out a hand, and, as if her fingers were sipping straws, drew the mists into herself.
In later years she would try to find the words for what eating the first soul felt like. It was sweet, she would think, like fresh milk but powerful, too, like pale cognac. There was a smell, too, spun sugar or perhaps plums. Whatever it felt like, it was powerful, and it made Remember feel stronger than a grown-up. The next two months, she haunted the field hospitals, extending her fingers to all the dying boys. The hospital staff began to think of her as a death omen. When a soldier was about to go under, Remember was at his side.
It wasn’t until the war had ended and a new war spread throughout France that she had a chance again to feast. With Verdun destroyed, her family boarded a steamer out of Belgium bound for the United States. The promises of the New World were still music to the ears of war refugees, and her mother hoped to find a place where Remember could grow up, far away from the lines of white crosses that marked the western front.
Something else went with the family on the trip. It turned out to be the most deadly enemy of all, and it did not carry a knife or gun. It was so tiny it could not be seen, a virus called Spanish flu. It started out in the trenches, killing as many soldiers as bullets did, and after the war it spread to the survivors and then to the innocent civilians.
By the time the ship was halfway across the ocean, the passengers were overcome. Once again, Remember was surrounded by the dying. As before, she knew when a ghost was about to leave the body, and three times in as many days she drank. The souls gave her power beyond belief. Made her strong. Made her bold. And that was when she was found out—by an old crone, a toothless peasant dressed in rags who chased her to the ship’s deck to confront her.
“How did you do it, child?” the crone demanded. “Tell me your secret. Or I’ll tell everyone yours.”
There was something dangerous in the eyes of the old crone. She was bent, both her nose and her spine, and the skin on her hands was like yellow parchment. But she was strong. Remember tried to wrestle free, but it was the woman’s eyes that held her. Eyes that knew what Remember truly was, because she was a norn herself.
Remember couldn’t allow that. She stabbed the old woman with a pocketknife, then pushed her overboard. When the alarm bells rang, Remember just stood at the railing, sipping the old crone’s soul.
Her family settled in Andover, and she learned to hunt other norns, stalking them for weeks, sometimes months, before she took their lives—and their power. Their magic made her stronger. Made her beautiful. Kept her young. But it made her hungry, too, and Remember’s hunger was never sated for long.
She first saw the stone egg one night in a bar, where Michael Conning was bragging about it to his friends. She was working as a waitress, and when she served them, she’d felt the magic in the obsidian, like waves of heat rising from baked asphalt. She knew instantly that it was the most powerful artifact she had ever encountered, and she had to have it. She had always lusted for more magic, more beauty, but this stone of Michael Conning’s was more magical and beautiful than anything she could imagine. But before she could speak to him, the bar closed, and he was gone.
It took months to track Conning to his triple-decker in South Boston. It took even longer to ingratiate herself with the landlord, pretending to be her long-lost niece. When the landlord died suddenly of a fall on the slippery back stairs, Remember was bequeathed the property, and she began her long and winding attempt at capturing the stone. Norns were not disposed to come at things head-on, and magic was offended by directness. There were laws to follow, paths that had to be taken, and courtesies that had to be upheld.
Even before her “aunt” died, she had introduced herself to the family in 3A and confirmed that Michael Conning lived there. And as it turned out, he owned a curio cabinet covered in warding spells so potent, she was only able to come within a few feet of it. But she got close enough to see a box that held a powerful object.
One day she used chocolates and a simple hunger spell to coax the younger daughter into opening the box and giving her the stone egg. As she gloried in the alchemic possibilities, Michael Conning had come home and caught her in the act. He banished her from the apartment, and her hopes were dashed. Without his leave she could never enter 3A again. On that day Michael Conning had signed his death warrant. It had been a trifle for Remember to arrange for his murder, an end he had richly deserved.
Ding! Ding! The front bell rang, pulling Remember out of her memories. She jumped at the noise, and the potion sloshed out of the pan and scalded her hand. “Gods damn it.”
The bell rang again, following by a loud pounding.
“Hold your water!”
But the visitor kept knocking.
Wrapping her hand in a dish towel, Remember stalked out of her apartment and down the hallway. The scalding pain intensified with each step, and the house was suddenly filled with the odor of rancid meat.
The lights in the foyer flicked.
She faced the door, a tall, looming thing made from oak a hundred years ago with a lead crystal transom. It was four inches thick and had to weigh hundreds of pounds. When her burned hand finally found the knob, the strength to open it was gone, and she could only call through the open transom, “What do you want?”
“We would like to enter,” the caller said, a voice that made Remember’s blood run cold.
“You can’t—”
The knob turned, and the door swung open, easy as pie. But pie wasn’t easy, Remember thought, not easy at all. Cake from a mix, that was easy. She laughed, and pain bit her in the side.
A figure in a trench coat and a raggedy fedora stood on the porch, the collar turned up to hide the face. Behind the silhouette, a murder of crows had returned to the corner of F Street and Silver. They filled every free nook and cranny from the windowsills to the rooftops. They settled on power lines and wires, anything that allowed them to perch. The cable line that ran parallel to the triple-decker became so burdened, it had begun to sag with their weight.
“Do I know you?” Remember said.
“We are called by many names. The Shadowless will suffice.”
It’s her! Remember thought, gasping. The one that Harken feared! How did she find me?
“Will you give us leave to enter?” the Shadowless purred.
“Not on your life!” Remember slammed the door shut and turned to run.
The front door flew open, and a gust of gelid wind blew down the hallway. The walls seemed to breathe, and the floors convulsed, the subfloor popping loose from the floor joints and the wooden slats rippling like keys on a lunatic piano.
“If not on our life,” the Shadowless said, “then on yours perhaps?”
“Get out of my house!” Remember screamed, shaking the knob on her apartment door. It spun in her hand, and the catch refused to release. “I didn’t give you leave to enter!”
The Shadowless moved impossibly fast, her fingers closing on Remember’s throat. The air turned frigid. Remember’s breath froze in it, and her vision wobbled, drawing in and out of focus, until it turned white. Death was coming, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Please,” she gasped, “I’ve done nothing to hurt you. Leave me be.”
“You have lovely hands,” the Shadowless said, her putrid lips touching Remember’s cheek. “Would you like to keep your thumbs?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE Shadowless lifted Remember and shook her like a hollow doll. “Open it.”
“What?” Remember said, woozy from shock. The Shadowless had pulled her up two flights of stairs to the Connings’ apartment, and the stump that used to be her thumb was bleeding like a dripping spigot. “Open what?”
“The cabinet.” The Shadowless tossed her across the room. “Open the cabinet and give us the box inside.”
“If I do th
at, please don’t hurt me again.”
“Give us the box.”
“Master, there are wards that will scour my flesh.”
“GIVE US THE BOX!”
Remember did as she was told. The glass in the cabinet shook when she opened the door, her flesh burning from the wards that had been placed on it. She screamed, but the sound seemed to evaporate, and the Shadowless paid no heed to the bare bones and oozing blood on the backs of Remember’s hands.
“Here you are, mistress,” Remember said, holding the box aloft as if making an offering. Blood dripped on her face and ran down her cheek.
“Fool. If we could not open the cabinet,” the Shadowless hissed, “how could we open the box?”
“But the wards on the box are too strong. I—”
“The stronger the magic, the stronger the wards!” the Shadowless screeched. “That is how wards work, you prattling fool! Open it!”
“Yes, yes.” Skin searing even worse than before, Remember obeyed. When she saw the indentation in the velvet, she held the box up again. She swallowed hard. “It’s empty.”
“No!” The Shadowless slapped the box away. With a banshee scream, she snatched a dining chair and threw it into the cabinet. Wood exploded into thousands of splintered pieces, and glass shards scattered across the floor. A thick iron needle rose from the debris, spun wildly, then fell back into the pile.
“Conning! Deny us the egg, and we shall deny you every scrap of peace. You shall be ripped apart as Elizabeth flayed the Babingtons! You shall hang as we hanged the witches of Salem Village. No one you know, no one you love, shall live!”
She attacked the couch and chair, ripping the stuffing out like a butcher gutting a slaughtered pig. She rendered everything in sight, hell bent on bedlam, until she turned back to Remember and pulled the shears from her shroud.
“You! You know! It is written in your gaze! Where is the egg?”
“The Conning girl, she has it,” Remember whispered.
“Where is this Conning girl now?”
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