“And yet they let it go on,” Raven said in an icy voice. “Do you know what happens to a lampsprite’s spirit if her body isn’t allowed to disintegrate back into the air?”
I shook my head, but Raven wasn’t looking at me. He was opening one of the glass doors and gently unpinning a sprite. As he cradled it in his hands a tear dropped from his eye onto the creature. He crossed to the window, opened it, and brought his hand up to his lips so close I thought he meant to kiss the tiny creature, but instead he gently blew on it. The sprite fell apart into dust that swirled in the air. A bit of it landed on me and I heard a voice piping inside my head.
Thank you for releasing me, Darkling.
A translucent image of a sprite flickered briefly in the air above our heads and then vanished into the breeze. I felt a tremor, as if the earth below my feet was shaking, and then I was shaking, trembling uncontrollably. Raven turned to me, startled, then wrapped both his arms around me and pulled me tightly to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured into my ear. “I forgot the effect a spirit’s passing could have on a human. You’re feeling the space between the worlds. It will pass in a moment.”
His hands moved over my back and arms, brushing off the sprite dust and warming my skin. The chill vanished, but his hands felt so good on me that I didn’t tell him that. Instead, when he brushed his fingers across my face I covered his hand with mine and leaned my cheek into the bowl of his palm. I felt as though he held all of me in his hand—as he had gently cradled the tiny sprite—and as if I might as easily disintegrate at a touch of his lips.
Then his lips were on mine, and instead of disintegrating, I felt heat surge though me, from my lips to my toes, lighting up every molecule in my body. I’d never felt so . . . whole.
His hand moved to the back of my neck, gently cradling my head to bring me closer to him. I wrapped my arms around his back and felt the soft velvet of his wings straining against his smock, ready to burst through the thin fabric. I wanted them to; I wanted him to carry us away from here, back to his nest. But then I remembered why I’d called him here: the tenebrae lurking in the dungeons. I needed him to help me get rid of them.
Reluctantly, I pulled out of his embrace, put one hand on his chest and one on his lips. As I did I saw something flicker over his shoulder. Had his wings broken free?
But then the flicker resolved into a flash of steel—a knife blade slashing through the air toward Raven’s throat.
I screamed and struck at the blade with my bare hands. Cold steel sliced into my skin. Raven whirled around, his wings now splitting his smock and unfurling so fast they knocked me backward against the windowpanes. My vision blurred for a moment. When it cleared I saw Nathan holding a blade to Raven’s throat.
“You’ve taken enough of our women, fiend! You can’t have Ava—and you’re going to give me back my sister!”
“We don’t have your sister, frailing! She wandered into Faerie.”
“It’s true, Nathan. I saw her there on the solstice.”
“And you didn’t tell me?” Nathan shifted his eyes toward me without moving his dagger from Raven’s throat.
“There was no point. We’ve been trying to find a way to get her out—”
“We? You’ve been consorting with this monster? Listening to his lies?”
“They’re not lies, Nathan. Everything we’ve been told about the Darklings is a lie! There’s a book that tells the truth—A Darkness of Angels. I got a letter from the librarian in Scotland today saying he’s bringing it to New York. Raven says it will prove the Darklings aren’t evil—”
“Raven?” Nathan sneered, pressing the blade deeper into Raven’s throat. I saw him flinch and his wings flex. Why didn’t Raven knock the blade from Nathan’s hands? I knew he was strong enough. But then I noticed a trail of smoke rising off the blade and winding around Raven. “I didn’t know you monsters had names. But I have learned a lot about you.” He twisted the blade and the coils of smoke tightened around Raven, making him wince in pain. “I’ve even learned to use the shadows to entrap you.”
“Shadow magic is strictly forbidden, Nathan. Don’t you remember what Mr. Jager said?”
Nathan sneered. “Do you think I care about the rules when it comes to getting my sister back? You wouldn’t care either, Ava, if this monster didn’t have you under his sway.”
“He’s not a monster and I am not under his sway.”
Nathan turned to me, his gray eyes clouded over, something dark writhing behind them. “Then you’re a traitor. You’ve betrayed us,” he snarled, his upper lip curling away from his teeth, letting out a wisp of smoke.
“You stupid boy,” Raven said coldly. “You’re the one who has betrayed your kind. By using shadow magic you’ve let the tenebrae inside you—and let them into Blythewood.”
“Shut up!” Nathan cried, twisting the dagger. Raven let out a cry and sank to his knees. “You’re lying. You’re going to get Louisa back for me. Now!”
“Nathan . . .” I took a step forward but Nathan twisted the blade and snarled at me.
“Stay back. If you come any closer I’ll make him pay. I can’t trust you not to try your chime magic on me.” He looked wildly around the room, his eyes coming to rest on the glass specimen case. “There.” He waived the blade in the direction of the case. “Open it up.”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Stop lying! I saw you go in there one night. Open the case. You can stay down there until I get back with Louisa. Then we’ll see if you’re just this monster’s victim or a traitor. Open it, I say, or I’ll make this fiend wish he were dead.” He twisted the blade and Raven writhed in pain. I quickly ran to the case and opened it. A dark shape billowed out of it, filling my mouth with smoke. I turned to beg Nathan to reconsider, but he was already shoving me into the choking darkness. I fell to my knees and heard the door slam behind me, sealing me inside with the shadows.
33
I POUNDED ON the door, screaming for help, until I realized that no one was coming for me. Everyone was outside in the gardens, enjoying the spring sunshine, while I was trapped underground with the tenebrae and Nathan dragged Raven into the woods on a fool’s mission to save Louisa. If Nathan forced Raven to show him the door to Faerie it was likely he’d enter it—and never come out. The other alternative was that Raven would refuse and Nathan would kill him. I couldn’t bear to think of either scenario. I had to get out of here, find help, and go after them. But how?
I turned away from the door to face the dark stairs and immediately felt a wave of panic sweep over me. Without a lamp I was in complete darkness. I could feel the tenebrae writhing around me, pressing their way into my mouth and nose . . . and into my mind.
I was back in the Triangle fire, smoke billowing around me, choking me, forced between two choices—death by fire or by jumping. I had two choices here, too—I could let the tenebrae inside me or I could throw myself down the stairs and hope my neck broke. Those were the choices my mother had faced. I saw now that she had done the harder thing. It would be easier to
404 Blythewood let the Darknesses inside me. They were already whispering to me, telling me how easy my life would be with them at the helm. No more difficult choices. They would steer me toward a life of riches and power. I’d never have to worry about money or work again. And I wouldn’t have to choose between Nathan and Raven. Nathan was already with the tenebrae, and Raven—Raven was an illusion. What future could there be between a Darkling and a human? I only felt the way I did toward him because he had beguiled me, seducing me with his kisses.
But at the thought of Raven’s lips on mine I felt a warmth that beat back the tenebrae. No, that kiss had been real. The memory of it was like a sweet bell ringing in my head.
The bells . I had used them to break free of van Drood. I could use them now to fight the tenebrae—and I had the repeater to help. I took it out of my pocket and pressed the stem. The two tiny figures struck the bells, playing a tu
ne. At first the bells sounded tinny and faint, like funeral bells whose clappers had been muffled. I thought it was because the tenebrae were already in my head and they were muffling the bells, but as I focused on the sound it became clearer . . . and louder. As they rang I felt the tenebrae retreating down the stairs from me.
And as my mind cleared I remembered the passage that led through the candelabellum chamber to the special collections. If I could find my way there I could reach the library and get out through the trapdoor. Of course, it meant going through the candelabellum chamber by myself . . .
But I wouldn’t think about that now. I started down the steps, keeping one hand on the damp wall and one on the repeater, which now played a tune that was echoed by the bells in my head. When I reached the bottom of the stairs I felt panic rising as I realized I had no light to guide my way. It was pitch black in the tunnel—as black as the well I’d fallen into after the crow attack. Even now the tenebrae could be crawling inside me . . .
Unless they’re already inside you. The voice was an insidious whisper at my ear. Unless they’ve been inside you all along, making you mad.
“No,” I said aloud. “I’m not mad.”
Aren’t you? What kind of girl falls in love with a demon?
“Raven’s not a demon,” I cried. “He showed me the truth about the Darklings.”
The truth? In a teacup?
How did the shadows know about what Raven had shown me in the teacup?
I heard laughter.
We know because we were there. Inside you. We’ve always been inside you, just as we were inside your mother. We passed from her blood to yours. Tainted blood. That’s why you don’t fit in here at Blythewood. They all know your blood is tainted. If you don’t believe us, look . . .
Somehow I had found myself in a doorway. The tenebrae had led me forward. I should run back. But where to? Then I caught a whiff of gin and paraffin. I’d found my way to Sir Malmsbury’s study, where, I recalled, there was a lamp and matches on the desk. I felt my way into the room, dreading the thought of the cases full of tiny skulls leering at me in the dark, and found the lamp and matches just where I remembered them. With fumbling hands, I struck a match, lighting up a roomful of snakes.
I screamed and dropped the match, plunging me back into the dark with the horrible creatures.
Not snakes, I told myself, tenebrae. I needed to drive them back with the bells. The repeater was still playing in my pocket, faintly and slowly, as if the mechanism was running down. I reached into my pocket and pressed the stem. Focusing on the tune, I lit the match again. The tenebrae recoiled into the corners of the room as the match flared, still snake-like, but at least now they were retreating. I lit the lantern and braced myself to go back into the corridor. I would find the passage that led to the candelabellum and pass through it.
Where all those shadows dwell?
Just pictures on the wall, I told myself, just as these writhing coils were just smoke and shadow. They couldn’t get inside me if I kept listening to the bells. I held the lantern high and focused on the sound of the chimes coming from the repeater. The tenebrae shrank away and pooled around the desk, fingering the pages as if flipping through them, looking for something . . .
A page turned, and then another, and another, making a sound like dry leaves scraping over gravestones . . .
Over your mother’s grave. You wanted to know her secrets. You wanted to know who your father was? Look!
In spite of my resolve not to listen to the tenebrae, I couldn’t resist. I went to the ledger and held the lantern up to look at the page. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was a complicated chart, like an octopus with a hundred tentacles—moving tentacles. The tenebrae were swarming over the page, encircling a name at the bottom. Evangeline Hall. My mother’s name. What was it doing in Sir Malmsbury’s chart? Sir Malmsbury had disappeared twenty years ago. My mother would have been only a girl of fifteen, younger than I was now. I put my finger on her name and traced the line above it to where my grandparents’ names appeared: Throckmorton Hall and Hecatia van Rhys. Next to my grandmother’s name and my mother’s name were drawn tiny bells with circles around them—the icon for a chime child. Sir Malmsbury had drawn a line from one bell to the other. Tracing that line upward I saw that it connected circled bells from generation to generation. This was a family tree—of my family. A note in the margin read, “The chime child germ plasm travels through the matrilineal line, but may be strengthened by breeding to males descended from chime children.”
By breeding? Bile rose in my throat. Sir Malmsbury was talking about my family as if we were cattle. He had studied my family—and others, I saw from the other branching diagrams on the page—just as he studied lampsprites, to figure out how we came by the ability to hear an inner bell and use the power of the chime child. I saw other family names on the chart—Sharp, Driscoll, Montmorency . . . He was trying to determine which family produced the most chime children. There were a few in the Sharp lines, but there were also several crescent moon symbols. I looked around the page for a legend to the icons and found a small box at the bottom. The crescent moon, I read, denoted a “tendency toward lunacy.”
With a pang I saw that there was a crescent moon drawn next to my mother’s name. I scratched at it with my fingernail, wanting to strike it out, but as I did I scratched off a narrow strip of paper that had been glued next to my mother’s name—and connected to my mother’s name with a hyphen, as husband’s names were connected to their wives’. Beneath the strip was my father’s name! But why was it covered up?
Because your father’s name was stricken from the ledgers.
Perhaps because they weren’t married (I didn’t see the lowercase m that signified a marriage), but I didn’t care about that. I still wanted to see . . .
The name was written in stark black ink, darker than the other writing on the page, as if Sir Malmsbury had pressed the pen harder—or perhaps it looked darker because the whole world around the name had grown dim by comparison. The name written where my father’s name should be was Judicus van Drood.
“No!“ I said aloud, my fingernails digging into the page. “That monster is not my father!”
I looked closer at the entry. There was no date of marriage. Sir Malmsbury had disappeared when my mother was only fifteen, three years before she would have been married. The notation had been made because of a betrothal—a thought that still roiled my stomach—or because Sir Malmsbury thought they should marry.
Yes, that must be it. I looked over the chart again and understood. Sir Malmsbury was figuring out how to produce a chime child through breeding, and he’d come up with the pairing of Judicus van Drood and my mother. It didn’t mean they’d ever married.
But I had been born a chime child.
A coincidence?
Or my mother had fallen in love with someone else with the chime trait?
The answer to who that was might lie in this chart.
I ripped the page out. The tearing sound scattered the tenebrae. The repeater was chiming madly, as if it had grown as agitated with my discovery as I had. I stuffed the page into my pocket, muffling the sound of the repeater. Holding up the lantern I strode from the room, scattering tenebrae in front of me. They were fleeing . . . or perhaps they were leading me on. I found the passage to the candelabellum chamber easily enough. At the door I hesitated. I pressed my ear to the door and listened, but there was no sound inside. It was only a room with bells. Dame Beckwith’s warning not to enter the chamber alone—that those who had done so had emerged insane— echoed in my ears. But it was the only way out.
I turned the knob and entered the dark room, holding up my lantern, which cast the candelabellum’s shadow onto the wall and showed me the door on the other side. I had only to cross the room. I lowered the lantern, not liking the shadows it threw across the walls, and walked slowly over the stone-flagged floor, careful not to bump into the chairs and table, hardly daring to breathe. Hal
fway across the room, my hand brushed against my skirt, and the page I’d torn out of Sir Malmsbury’s crackled.
A crystal bell shivered in response. I froze and drew my shaking hand away from my skirt. The paper crackled back louder, as though it had caught fire. The bells of the candelabellum tinkled as if ringing an alarm. I gasped—and the intake of my breath stirred the delicate brass rings into motion. The bells began to play a tune that was different from the one they had played when Dame Beckwith had struck them.
The candelabellum plays a different story depending what bell is struck first. What bell had I struck? What story would it tell?
You don’t have to watch it, I told myself. I was only a few feet from the door. I could reach it with my eyes closed. I didn’t have to listen to the bells, which were playing a tune that sounded like the song my mother had used to sing me to sleep . . .
Could the candelabellum tell me my mother’s story? But how? It was made hundreds of years before my mother was born.
Because the candelabellum contains the pieces that all stories are made of. All it had to do was rearrange the pieces and it could tell every story that ever happened and every story that would ever happen. It knew my mother’s story.
I raised the lantern so fast the flame flickered. For a heartstopping moment I thought it would go out, leaving me alone in the dark, but instead the flame pulsed and shot up, bursting the glass case of the lantern. I dropped it and it crashed onto the table. The fire gusted over the wood as I remembered the flames bursting through the windows of the Triangle and pouring over the examining tables, hungry for fuel. The fire soared up and lit all the candles at once.
The rings moved faster, the bells rang my mother’s song, and the shadows leapt up on the walls and ceiling. A young man and woman. It might have been Merope and the prince, but it wasn’t. It was a young girl here at Blythewood, ringing the bells, learning to shoot arrows, flying a hawk, reading a book in the library. There was a young man with her in the library. He looked familiar, but just when I thought I recognized him his face would merge with the shadows, slipping in and out of the dark. I saw him walking with my girl, giving her a book, and then a letter . . . but she gave back the letter and the book. I saw her walking away from him, and then running away into the woods, where a great winged creature swept down and stopped the other man from following her. As the man turned away, shadows leapt up around him, twining about his feet, growing wings and plucking at his sleeves, his hair, his skin. I saw him retreating to his library, to his books, walling himself up behind his books. I saw another woman trying to pull him away from his books, looking on with a worried face, but there was a wall of shadow between the young man and her. I saw him going down into the dungeon and to the candelabellum, where he watched the shadows whirl round and round. I could make out the girl’s face among those shadows, and wings. As the shadows grew, there was less and less light to see them by. They swallowed the light, just as they were swallowing the young man’s soul. They were filling him up, pouring in through his eyes as he watched the shadows, through his ears as he listened to the bells, his mouth as he gasped his beloved’s name.
Blythewood Page 34
