How to Wake an Undead City

by Edwards, Hailey

  Without another trip to Atramentous, to the Athenaeum, we had no way to be one hundred percent certain I had retained all the information. Likewise, we couldn’t be certain without a page by page comparison that I had transcribed all I had retained. But I had gotten this far using my gut as the gauge for my goddess-touched powers, and it said the sigil had done the job.

  The lock on the basement door was thirsty, so I fed it a few drops of blood to ease the way.

  As we descended into the black void cloaking the stairs meant to deter uninvited guests, Woolly nudged me with her consciousness, the planks popping with a demand we stop and explain what had us so grim-faced.

  When I hit the bottom and Maud’s personal library came into view, Woolly killed the lights and pitched us back into darkness.

  “We found a way to make Lacroix vulnerable.” I hooked my hands on my hips. “We need Mom’s heart.”

  A spark lit in the vicinity of Maud’s office, her real one, not the dummy office upstairs.

  “Yeah.” As much as the light beckoned, I couldn’t get my feet to budge. “Linus?”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  He strode right to the office without stumbling or tripping a million times like I would have if I had tried to navigate the clutter, and he went straight where the golden box holding Mom’s heart had rested in a place of honor, on a shelf that had been eye-level with Maud when she sat at her desk.

  Wrapping my arms around myself, I waited with Woolly as precious metal scraped when he cracked the hinged lid. I shut my eyes, pretending this wasn’t happening, that we weren’t desecrating my mother’s remains because my psycho grandfather refused to allow her peace, even in death.

  Linus’s utter stillness jerked me to attention, and I craned my neck to see better. “What is it?”

  “Woolly, enough with the theatrics.” The bite in his voice gave me shivers. “Turn on the lights.”

  A haunting moan drifted down from the ceiling where the old floorboards buckled and warped.

  “Now,” he ordered, and she obeyed without another peep.

  Light flooded the space, but I wish she had kept me in the dark. Whatever put that ravaged look on his face guaranteed I would be wearing a matching expression soon. I hurt, and I didn’t even know why yet.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t unstick my feet. They were glued in place.

  For that reason, Linus brought the box to me. He hadn’t shut it, which saved me from fumbling it open, but I found the paralysis had traveled up my legs into the rest of my body.

  “Grier.” He gentled his voice. “There’s nothing to see. You can look.”

  “No.” Shock ricocheted through me, and I snatched the box out his hands. “It can’t be.”

  This was Maud all over again.

  No heart, no heart, no heart.

  Knees buckling, I crumpled before Linus could scoop me against him.

  “I don’t understand.” I looked up at him. “Linus? I…I…don’t understand.”

  Slowly, he joined me on the floor and reached for the box, which I hadn’t wanted to touch but couldn’t seem to let go of now that I held it. “Check the lid.”

  Expecting an inscription, I almost recoiled from the note pinned there. “Read it to me.”

  With gentle fingers, he pulled it free. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” I cradled the box to my chest. “Please.”

  The care he showed as he unfolded the message both moved me and tempted me to snatch it from his hand and devour it with my eyes the way I had the books in the Athenaeum.

  All this time, the box had been a decoy, a trick the Grande Dame must have learned from Maud.

  Goddess, I was tired of no one ever telling me the truth. All these empty gestures were just that—empty.

  “My darling girl,” he began. “I never wanted a child.”

  A knife to the heart would have hurt less than hearing him read those words, Maud’s words, to me.

  About to let the paper collapse into its creases, Linus asked, “Should I keep going?”

  Unable to find my voice, I nodded then wrapped my arms around me as tight as they could go.

  “I didn’t understand why your mother pined for one. I had never been around them, and I had no wish to surround myself with miniature people who had yet to learn the art of conversation or personal hygiene.”

  A broken laugh escaped me, and it felt better than the hurt.

  “I can’t say I would have stepped in when your mother passed had you been anywhere other than here when it happened. I could dismiss the charm of a smiling photo tucked into an envelope, or the drawing of a young hand that already showed promise, but I couldn’t shore up my heart against you from the moment you walked into my home, looking every bit like your mother, and offered me a yellow dandelion with a milky stem.”

  The memory, so hazy around the edges, drifted on the edge of recollection.

  “I was tempted to send you away after Evie died. You were her spitting image, and I saw her looking out at me from your face. That is perhaps why, in the end, I couldn’t bear to part with you. You were all that remained of my dearest friend, and I told myself I could let her go if I kept you, that she would live on through you.”

  Tears ran hot and slick down my cheeks, but there was no point wiping them away when there was no end to them.

  “But I fooled myself, darling. And I fooled you too. Until you opened this box, which means I am dead and you are looking for answers to questions you never knew to ask. I am sorry for how I raised you. I did my best, but I am no Evangeline. That is why I preserved her, as much as possible, for the both of us.”

  Dread pooled in my gut. “Preserved her?”

  Linus skimmed the page again. “Do you want me to keep reading?”

  “No.” But I gestured him on.

  “I wanted you to grow up in a house filled with love, and I feared I wouldn’t be equal to the task. To ensure you never felt the lack of your mother, I surrounded you with her. Four walls, a floor, and a ceiling make a house, but her spirit made this our home.”

  The room began spinning, slowly at first, then gathering more speed.

  “I was never prouder than the day you took my last name. I never wanted a child, but I wanted you.” Linus tore his gaze from the paper. “Love eternal, Maud.”

  “I don’t understand.” I rested the back of my head against the wall. “I don’t understand anything anymore.”

  Woolly cocooned me in her presence while the pages of books on the shelves rustled a hushing sound.

  Then I understood.

  And what Atramentous had failed to do, Maud’s letter accomplished.

  It broke me. Shattered me. Smashed my sense of self to dust and scattered it to the four corners.

  Mom was…

  Mom was…

  Woolly.

  “How could she?” I sobbed against Linus when he pulled me onto his lap. “How could she?”

  There wasn’t so much difference between what I suspected Maud had done to Mom and what I had done to Maud. Both of us had damned someone we loved to a half-life.

  “She should have told me.” I pounded on his shoulder. “Why didn’t Maud tell me?”

  Rather than answer my question, Linus addressed the house herself. “Evangeline?”

  The whirl of cool air from the vents overhead sounded like a sigh held too long gusting free.

  “This is too much.” Tired of taking it out on him, I curled in a ball against his chest. “I just—I can’t, Linus.”

  Woolly slid into my head with ease and began flipping through the pages of a photo album that existed nowhere except in her memories. Snippets of video interspersed the stills, all viewed from Evangeline’s perspective. A lifetime cobbled together in fits and starts, stops and pauses, and that was her proof and her confession.

  Maud, impossibly young, dancing the tango with Clarice while Mom cackled in the background.

  A dark-haired man with eyes the exact shade of m
ine smiling down at her. When his rich voice promised, “I will love you always,” I could tell she had believed him.

  Grief, as vast and endless as the ocean swallowing her when those same eyes closed for the last time.

  Maud opening the front door of Woolworth House, taking one look at her best friend, and wrapping her arms around her while Mom sobbed her heart out against Maud’s bony shoulder.

  Maud staring down at me with hard eyes that softened when I passed her a weed I picked from the lawn because I thought it was pretty and she thought it indicated gardening potential.

  Mom’s hands covered in blood where she gripped the wheel of her car, the sound of tires pealing on asphalt.

  The next clip showed Maud’s face, red and splotchy and slick with tears, screaming at her.

  “Live, damn it.” She shook Mom. “Evie. Think of your little girl. Think of Grier.” Her voice broke. “Think of me.” The scene went dim. “What will we do without you?”

  Finally, Woolly showed me the moment she awakened, not as a person but as a place.

  “Forgive me, old friend.” Maud stood in her library. “I couldn’t let you go.”

  The spirit of Evangeline Marchand stretched out her senses, testing the boundaries of her new body.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Why did I think I could raise your child? She needs you, not me.”

  Evangeline went to comfort her friend but found only the rustle of curtains and creaking of floorboards for a voice.

  “You warned me.” Maud leaned her forehead against the wall. “I didn’t listen. I never do. Not even to you. You told me one day I would go too far, and you were right.”

  The rest were snapshots of my life, as seen through Woolly’s eyes, proof she had watched over me every single day, until Atramentous, and after. And then she withdrew, giving me space to think without the past clogging my mind.

  “I don’t remember a time when Woolly wasn’t Woolly,” I said softly. “I assumed she had always been…herself.”

  Since Mom died the day after we arrived in Savannah, she always had been this way for me.

  “The first time Amelie stayed over, she asked me why our house was haunted,” I told him. “Until she mentioned it, I figured all necromancers lived in haunted houses. I didn’t realize Woolly was special.”

  “You were young, and you moved around a lot.” Linus stroked my back. “You had no reason to know any different.”

  “It made me curious.” And a little bit scared, if I was being honest. “I asked Maud the next night.”

  “What did she tell you?”

  “That Woolly wasn’t a ghost, that our house wasn’t haunted. That Woolly was a gentle spirit who looked over us, like a domovoy. And when I asked what that was, she gave me a book on Slavic folklore and told me to read up on them.” I slanted him a look. “Maud named her Lady Woolworth. Do you remember that? But never Lady for short. The title was a mouthful for a kid. Over time, I started calling her Woolly, and it stuck.”

  “A benevolent household spirit guarding its descendants sounds closer to the truth than the version she told me.” Linus grew pensive. “She claimed she once had a lab assistant who asked too many questions. One night, he showed up for work, pulled a book down off a shelf without permission, and it hit him in the head, killing him instantly. That it was his spirit haunting the house.”

  I fought off the laugh that wanted to surface. “How old were you?”

  “This was right after you arrived, so ten or eleven. Old enough to not quite believe her, but young enough to acquire manners overnight. I never asked her about Woolly or took a book without asking from that day on.”

  “She was a good mom.” I pressed my face against his chest. “She wasn’t a mom-mom, but she was good to me. I always felt loved. I never felt unwanted or like a burden. She was the best not-mom a kid could ask for.”

  “Maud loved you, very much. Anyone could see it. Even Lacroix gave her a wide berth.”

  “Imagining him scared of her does make me feel better,” I admitted, gathering my resolve around me. “She raised me. He’s going to learn to fear me too.”

  “We’ll figure another way to take out Lacroix.”

  “This can work,” I insisted. “We still have a chance.”

  The old house lingered on the edge of my perception, giving me space as a withered shadow cloaked in tattered fabric appeared before me.

  Cletus reached for me, stroking my cheek with cold fingers, and I took his bony hand.

  The violent spike in my emotions had summoned him to me sure as the goddess made green apples, and his presence scraped my already frayed nerves raw.

  Maud and Mom.

  Mom and Maud.

  Best friends trapped in separate eternities neither ever imagined nor wanted for each other.

  “Maud…” I swallowed once, tried again. “Do you remember where you put Mom’s heart?”

  The wraith tilted his head, thinking on the location or questioning what I meant, I couldn’t tell. But when he continued to drift, offering no insight, I accepted what I had known all along.

  Maud wasn’t in there. Not really. Her memories and thoughts had been erased, leaving vague emotions, faint instincts, an echo of who and what she had been in life.

  “It’s okay if you don’t know.” I squeezed his fingers. “You can go back to Corbin now.”

  Cletus lingered seconds longer, staring at me from beneath his cowl, but whatever he wanted to convey, he lacked the faculties to communicate.

  All I could do as he vanished was hope one day that might not be the case, that I might recover more of Maud during my life, or, failing the discovery of a miraculous cure to wraithism, learn how to lay her to rest when Linus and I ran out of days to walk the earth. She deserved that peace, and I would see she had it before I had mine.

  Once I was certain my voice wouldn’t wobble, I screwed up the nerve to ask Woolly, “Where did Maud put your heart?”

  Woolly showed me a picture of herself, as viewed from the driveway. That was it. Just…the house.

  “Your essence was absorbed by Woolworth House,” I realized. “Maud must have made a paste with your heart instead of using your blood for ink in the binding.”

  “The severity of the accident, and its public nature, must have limited what Maud could collect without human interference.” Linus considered me. “That, or at the time of the accident, she hadn’t yet decided to take such drastic measures. She might not have gotten the idea until she brought the heart home with her after it was presented to you. With Evangeline’s blood unavailable, it would have been Maud’s only source for a tissue sample at that point.”

  “And if Maud used the heart for ink, the mixture would have dried on the wood.” I drummed my fingers on the wall. “Can you show me where the sigil was drawn?”

  A warped bookcase groaned, and several leather-bound journals toppled onto the floor.

  I got to my feet and gave an experimental tug then glanced back at Linus. “Help me move it?”

  Together we lifted the sagging wood and hauled it into the middle of the room. Behind it, painted on the wall, in ink too viscous to ever fade, throbbed a dark crimson sigil that beat…like a heart.

  “Mom,” I whispered, still unable to believe, and the sigil thumped harder in recognition.

  Maud truly had made Mom the heart of our home, and I wasn’t sure if I hated her or loved her for it.

  All those times I let humans pay to spend the night in a haunted house, I had been pimping out my own mother to the supernaturally devout. I had gotten money in exchange for giving them a chance to gawk at her.

  Make no apologies for surviving.

  Those visitors might have gawked, but they also coughed up money that kept her lights on and ramen in my pantry.

  Warmth curled around me, air blowing from a vent clear across the room, and Woolly offered one last image: a wooden stake.

  “I won’t disrupt the sigil,” I told her, and Linus f
rowned as he pieced together what I meant.

  “Your mother is the house. This is her heart, but she is present everywhere.”

  Relief shuddered through me. “Do you think a piece of trim would work just as well?”

  “Yes.” He studied the rhythmic pulsing a moment longer. “We need to conceal this first to protect her.” He gripped the bookcase. “One smudge could break the sigil.”

  And Mom would die, for real this time.

  Maud hadn’t asked her permission, and Mom hadn’t given her consent. Mom might not want—

  The question hadn’t fully formed before Woolly plucked it out of my head and tossed it aside to make room for all the nursery ideas I suspected she had been collecting from the home improvement shows Lethe had been bingeing lately.

  “All you have to do is ask,” I forced out, hoping I never had to make good on the offer.

  “You offered to set her soul free,” Linus surmised. “She declined.”

  “I think…maybe I’m the only one who can.” I studied the sigil one last time, its design echoing through me, resonating with a half-forgotten sketch drawn on a paper in red crayon. “This design…” I had to fight through the guilt threatening to sink me. “It’s familiar.”

  “Do you think Maud asked for your help?”

  “Yes.” The harder I concentrated, the brighter the memory shone. “I’m not sure, but…I think she asked me to imagine Mom hadn’t died, that we were bringing her home, where she would be safe always. I…” I shook my head. “Maud wanted a sigil that would prevent Mom from leaving the house ever again, and I gave her enough, even then, to do this.” Another thought occurred to me. “What are the odds she used my blood to create the ink? It would explain why Woolly and I are tied so closely to one another.”

  Maud had treated Woolly with such respect, like she was a person, a member of our family. I had grown up doing the same, taking for granted that she had always been how I remembered her from the start.