by Teri Terry
“How about dry clothes for all, then, for now?” Zak says, and brings in the packs that we’d left by the door. “Are there any towels?”
Quinn nods, finally moving from where she’s stood motionless since she lit the fire. She reaches into one of the cupboards under the sideboard and throws him a towel. Zak fishes in his pack for some clothes, then leaves the room.
I walk over and rummage in the cupboard: towels, but not as we know them—thin, patched, and darned. I toss one at Quinn and keep one myself. “Come on, frozen girl. Towel your hair and strip. I’ll find you some clothes.”
Her pack is, as she said, mostly full of food, and I go to Zak’s instead for some of my clothes. There—a heavy sweater. Pants. Sneakers. I throw them at her; she catches them, hesitates, then starts shucking her wet clothes off while I do the same.
Quinn’s skin is so white, so pure, in the firelight. Goose pimpled. She’s shy, turns away, pulls the jumper over her head. She turns back, and she is—as I did with her—studying my skin, the same wonder in her eyes as in mine that everything is so alike.
There’s a knock.
“Decent?” Zak’s voice calls at the door.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” I say. “But you can come in.” I pause, wait until the door opens to slowly pull a shirt over my head.
Quinn turns to hide a look of shock. Zak grins and shakes his head. “Don’t start something I’m not allowed to finish.”
I walk over to him and slip my arms around his waist. He’s uncomfortable; is it because Quinn is in the room, or because of what he said to my father?
I nestle against him and whisper, “Promises were made to be broken.” Like the ones you made to me before you kissed my sister.
Quinn
Once we decide to sleep where it is the warmest, I set blankets and cushions, gathered from different rooms of the house by candlelight, around the fire. Piper dances excitedly around me all the while like she’s on some adventure; Zak more usefully ferries things back and forth.
Piper disappears out into the hall again and then calls back to me, “Quinn, this door won’t open.”
I was wondering how long it would be before she noticed. I get up and go to the hall.
“No. It’s locked.”
“Well, have you got the key?”
I shake my head.
“What’s in there?”
I shrug, hesitate. “I don’t really know. I’ve only ever been in it once, and that was a long time ago. It’s Gran’s reading room, where she sees clients. She has the only key.”
“Wouldn’t she have left the key here?”
“No. She always wears it around her neck.”
“How intriguing.” She tries the door again, rattles it a little. It’s a heavy, thick, wooden door, hung so the hinges are inside the room. No easy way in.
Yowl!
Piper jumps, looks at the front door. “What the hell was that?”
“Probably Cat.”
Piper hands me her candle, outrage on her face. “You left your cat on its own all this time?” She turns for the door.
“Be careful, it’s more feral than friendly. And it’s not our pet, or anyone else’s; it just comes by now and then when it feels like it.”
Piper opens the door. He is sitting in front of it and stares back at her in that regal manner cats have. A big black cat with battle scars from fights. “What’s his name?” Piper asks.
“Cat.”
“How imaginative.” She bends down, holds out a hand, croons to him, starts to move closer, and I’m expecting her to get a few well-aimed scratches.
“Be careful,” I say again.
“Ah, he’s just an overgrown kitten, isn’t he?” Cat looks cautious but doesn’t move, sniffs her hand. She pets him, and he leans into her hand, then winds round her legs, purring so loudly I can hear even from a safe distance.
I shake my head. This is the cat I tried over and over again to make my friend when I really needed one, but he’d only ever accept my company if I came bearing food. Even then he drew blood if I got too close.
Later the three of us are full of sandwiches and snuggled up around the fire. Cat moves from the hearth to Piper, and Ness slinks away from her to me. Smart dog. Cat meows imperiously until Piper pets him, then drops down on the blanket next to her, curls up, and goes to sleep.
“How do you do that?” I ask her.
“Do what?”
“Make friends with the unfriendly.” I gesture at Cat, who opens one eye enough to glare at me, then goes back to sleep.
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
“She’s soft about animals,” Zak says, tapping on his skull as he says it, and Piper throws a pillow at him. Cat protests grumpily at the movement. “Even to the point of not wanting the dogs that killed your mother put down.”
I stare at her, surprised.
“It didn’t matter what I wanted,” Piper says. “They still had them put down.”
“Weren’t they dangerous?”
“What is dangerous? I’m dangerous. So are you. So is this cat to the unwary, but I wouldn’t have him put down, either.” Piper’s eyes glint oddly in the firelight, Cat’s yellow eyes close to her own, and I shiver. Dangerous? Her and me both?
Zak yawns. “Good night, danger girls. Time for some sleep.” He leans across and tries to kiss Piper good night, but a flash of Cat’s claws makes him retreat. “I think that cat is a secret agent of your dad’s,” he says.
Ness alongside me, I’m warm at last. The lack of sleep the previous night, the warmth, and the exercise all combine to make me drowsy, but something doesn’t want to let go. My eyelids do that fluttering down thing, then open again. The flames blur as my eyes focus in and out, then seem to take over until the flickering, dancing light is all there is.
Flames flicker and dance, bringing both beauty and pain. I’m caught in their searing heat, and there is nowhere to run. The house is razed to the ground.
Bare, dead ground is left behind: only ruined stone marks the burning place, outside Gran’s front door.
It is forbidden, like so many other things and places.
But then it shimmers and changes. The flames are gone, and I’m crouched behind Gran’s chair. It’s too late to run; if they find me now, I’m in deep trouble.
“Where is she?” Isobel says.
“I’m pleased you are so eager to see your daughter. Be patient.” Gran’s voice is mild, but it stings me. I know Isobel doesn’t want to see me; she just wants to know where I am.
“You need to keep closer track of that girl now that she’s aware.”
Aware of what? I listen harder.
“Careful who you speak to in that tone,” Gran says. “You know what is at stake.” The warning is clear in Gran’s voice now, and even Isobel must hear it.
“I’m sorry, Mother. I didn’t mean to question you.”
“Fetch me some tea, and I’ll let it go.”
I make myself small behind the chair. Isobel walks past, heads for the kitchen. The kitchen door shuts.
“Quinn!” I spin around. Gran stands behind me, face like thunder. “Go. Get out before she sees you.”
I scamper out into the sunshine and hide behind the chicken shed, unable to believe that Gran knew I was there and let me run. Maybe the punishment will come later.
The sun is warm. I lie in some straw, wondering what they are talking about now. What did Isobel mean about me being aware? Aware of what? I wish I could listen.
I close my eyes . . . and drift.
I’m floating out of myself, back inside the house. Gran and Isobel are below; I can see and hear them.
Then Gran looks up. She sees me, although there is nothing to see. She throws something into the air that fills me with pain—pain that increases when I slam back into my body.
Uneasy dreams shift to wakefulness. I pull the blankets close; the temperature has dropped.
What brought those memories into my d
reams tonight? Piper had said something about us being aware; maybe that is it. Then Zak arrived with our lunch, and I didn’t have time to ask her what she meant by it.
Traveling to eavesdrop without my body happened not long after I’d been sick. Later on, I decided that it must have been another hallucination from the fever, like the ones that had me in our ancestor’s house as it burned down. I frown. Perhaps I was wrong, and it really happened. I thought Gran was being uncharacteristically nice when she let me go after catching me behind the chair. Perhaps she let me go to tempt me, to see if I could come back to listen without my body.
Or to see if she could prevent it.
This is all completely crazy. It must have been a hallucination, or a dream.
I shiver; the fire is down to embers. I sigh, and slip out of the covers to put more coal on before it goes out, moving slowly and carefully to be quiet. Ness stirs, opens a sleepy eye, and burrows back into the blankets.
Somehow I don’t want to look at Piper and Zak. Have they shooed Cat away and met in the middle? Do they lie in each other’s arms? But I can’t not look, either.
In the faint glow of the fire Zak’s face is a dark promise. He smiles in his sleep, but he is alone.
Where’s Piper?
Arrroooooooo!
My skin crawls. Dogs, or worse, faint, in the distance—like in my dream this afternoon, but I’m standing here, wide awake. There’s a cold draft along my feet; a chill whisper pulls across the room to escape up the chimney. It’s coming from the door to the hall. The door is ajar.
I walk slowly across the room to the hall door and pull it open a little more. The front door is wide open. I step into the hall, teeth almost chattering with the cold. Is Piper out there? Late at night in the dark on the moors, when Wisht Hounds are howling?
I want to run back to the fire, wake Zak, let him look for her. But something makes me walk to the door: one hesitant step, another. I reach the door and look out into the night.
The sky has cleared, and the stars are out. The moon is almost full; it will be in a few nights.
Piper stands in the moonlight by the gate. She’s dressed only in pajamas, but she’s not shivering. Cat is curled against her feet. Both she and Cat stare off into the moors, as if their eyes can penetrate the darkness, transfixed and not moving.
I should call out to her. I should draw her in, latch the door, shut the night and dark things out.
But there is something about the way she is standing, the curve of her neck—something wild. Whatever her thoughts, she won’t welcome interruption.
Or so I tell myself, but is there something else about her that makes me back away, afraid?
I slip back inside, unobserved.
Piper
“Let’s make a plan for the next few days,” I say.
“What do you want to do?” Quinn asks, and takes another bite of her jam sandwich. Breakfast of champions.
“Well, I want us to go visit our gran, of course. But how about today we just hang here?”
Quinn readily agrees. She’s not looking forward to seeing Gran; that is clear.
The three of us step outside. The sun is shining, and there is no sign of yesterday’s mad weather.
Cat trots up and deposits a dead rat at my feet—a sizable rat for a cat.
“Oh, aren’t you clever?” I bend to pet his head and check out the rat. “Good job, but I’m not much into rat. How about you keep him for your breakfast?” I straighten up again. “Zak, I think we need more of our stuff from the car. Maybe you and Quinn could empty the packs and fetch some of it?”
“Right away, Princess Petal,” he says in a fair imitation of Dad.
I stick out my tongue. “There are only two packs anyhow, and I want to explore the house. And could you call my dad, tell him we got here OK? There’s no signal here.”
Quinn looks uneasy—at going alone with Zak, or leaving me on my own in the house? Either way, they soon go, Ness at their heels.
I should have at least two uninterrupted hours.
It’s hard to look for something when you don’t know what it is. I know there is something in this house—something only a Blackwood can inherit. Mum took care to make sure I remained Piper Blackwood; she did it for a reason. Even though she wouldn’t answer my questions, she must have meant for it to be mine.
Gran’s bedroom upstairs seems the likeliest place to begin.
I open the door, and there is something about being in here on my own that makes me uneasy. “Don’t be silly,” I tell myself, out loud. “It’s only a room.” With my words, the tension eases, and I step inside.
The light is dim; I hold up my candle. A large room. Square. A four-poster bed in the middle of it, a chair, a dressing table, and a chest of drawers.
There are hangings on three walls of this room. There are hints of patterns on the fabric, stitches that outline symbols I cannot quite see in such dim light.
Behind the hangings are bare stone walls—no plaster or anything—and no matter how tightly the stones interlock, the walls radiate cold. I look behind each hanging, careful to keep the candle away from the fabric. Hidden behind one of the hangings is a window.
There’s a candle holder on the dressing table. I fix the candle on its spike and leave it there, then slip behind the hanging to look out. It falls around me, heavy on my back, and I have to fight a sense of enclosure that makes me want to get out, and now.
The walls of the house are so thick it is hard to see out the window. The wide window ledge is like a seat. I hoist myself up and sit on it with my back against one side, knees drawn up.
It looks out over the front of the house. The way down the hill that we must have walked in the rain yesterday is indistinct; no path can be seen on the uneven slope littered with rocks. Quinn knew the way; she’d barely looked at her feet, her eyes fixed on the house once it was in sight.
Below, between the house and the ancient wall and its sentry trees, the pattern on the ground made by crumbling rock is more definite. It outlines the walls of a small ruined house. The ground is bare between its boundaries; nothing grows there.
When I went outside last night, I walked around the edges of the ruin, like we did when we got here, without questioning why I’d go the long way around—it seemed somehow wrong to cut through. And I stood by the gate for hours, staring into the night. There was something out there—something calling to the wild places inside me—despite whatever weird dream Quinn was having that prickled at the edge of my awareness. When Quinn woke up and came out looking for me, I didn’t turn or acknowledge she was there, and she soon went back inside.
I drop back down to the floor and push my way past the hangings and into the bedroom. Now the air seems too dark and stuffy. I’m all for being warm, but that is the largest window in a house lit only by candles—forever closed and obscured.
The chimney breast from the fireplace downstairs is along the only bare wall, the bed close to it. I touch the stone there; it’s warm.
Next to my candle on the dressing table is a hairbrush, a few white hairs caught in its bristles. No perfumes or lotions. What looks like a very old carved wooden jewelry box has odd things inside: a feather with a darkened end, a small knife, a few shells.
The chest of drawers is half empty. There are random bits of clothing, mostly worn and darned. There are a few fine things also, and I hold up a colorful skirt and shawl. I’m not sure of the fabric; it feels both light and warm.
Sparse at best, Gran’s room doesn’t take long to search.
Next, I go to Quinn’s bedroom. It is on the other side of the chimney breast, but her walls have no hangings or windows, and despite the warm stone from the fire below on one wall, it feels markedly colder than Gran’s. There is a hard, narrow bed, a small chest of drawers. I can’t imagine that what I’m looking for could be in here, but I can’t stop myself from going through every drawer, touching everything that Quinn must have touched over and ove
r again—as if clues to who and what she is could have seeped into her things.
She has more clothes than Gran, nothing nice. There are jeans that look beyond vintage, and work-type clothes—blue tunics and trousers. She worked as a cleaner at the hotel, didn’t she? So probably had this stuff for that.
On top of the chest of drawers is a chipped china dish with dried flower petals in it, a pretty but cracked empty photo frame, a strip of velvet trim that doesn’t match any of her clothes.
There is so little here, and what there is says next to nothing about who Quinn is. Seeing her room now, I understand why she was awestruck by my house, my stuff. But there must be more; there must be something.
Impatient, I feel under the mattress, and my hand connects with something hard. I lift up the corner of the mattress. Books? But they’re the boring variety. Novels and plays. Nothing interesting, and they look years old—decades, even—and secondhand. Why hide them under a mattress? Wuthering Heights may be a favorite—it looks like it’s been read and reread a hundred times. And Romeo and Juliet, too.
And that’s it.
There’s a small third room upstairs, next to Quinn’s—the place where we’d got extra blankets by candlelight last night. It has a little uncovered window letting in natural light and is kind of a workroom, with a table and a half-made quilt that Quinn said she was working on. I stroke the joined-up squares, the tiny stitches, and the intricate pattern that is emerging from scraps of fabric. Next to it, there is a trunk full of odds and ends, fragments of material, clothes with bits cut out—the source of the squares.
I head downstairs, back to the massive front room where we’d slept. I’d pretty much covered it last night, but go through it methodically again. The cupboards of the sideboard have odd bits of crockery and towels. There are a few ancient books and odd-looking ornaments on the shelves above. Nothing looks valuable or interesting enough to be an inheritance.
The kitchen across the hall is next. It’s cold, with a bare flagstone floor. There is a smaller fireplace with a cooking arrangement of sorts, dark and chill. I rattle through the pots and pans. Nothing is interesting, unless you are an antiques collector.
