Page 113 of The Shadow Bride

No.

With fear.

“Thereyou are!” With a little shriek of relief, she wrings my hand between us before attempting to drag me toward the staircase with all her strength. “Célie, you must hurry,hurry—”

“Guinevere? What is it?” Hastening behind her, I reach back to seize a bewildered Odessa’s hand, but Guinevere has escalated past the point of coherency. Whatever has happened, she seems unable to articulate it—she simply pulls on my hand with increasing desperation, spluttering wildly between sobs, until Michal blocks her path halfway across the grotto.

“Slow down, Guinevere, and tell us what happened.”

“It’s—it’s—Mathilde!” The name bursts from her on a wail, and I nearly stumble as a jolt of shock kindles straight to foreboding. Somehow, I know exactly what Guinevere is going to say before she says it, though I never expected Death to find her so soon. “Her cottage—oh, Michal! Her cottage is—it isdying, and the revenants—D-D-Death—” She wrings her hands again, dragging me and Odessa forward once more. “She told him no, and he—he—oh, you must come! Comenow—”

“How many revenants, Guinevere?” Odessa asks sharply.

Though I do not know if ghosts can swoon, Guinevere looks in danger of doing just that. “D-Dozens and dozens, perhaps more!”More?My eyes narrow on her pale face in disbelief—at the thin rivulets of water streaming down her cheeks. Are those—tears? Michal stares at them too, jaw clenched, before reaching out to touch one.

His finger comes away wet.

But—no.No.What ishappening? Ghosts cannot cry; they do not have a body with which to produce fluid, yet there is no denying the moisture on Michal’s fingertip. Behind us, the ocean thrashes as if laughing, and three more revenants emerge in the eye of the maelstrom. The current is much too strong for them to escape, however; it drags them back down again with brutal force.

“It’ll take too long to reach the other side of the isle.” With a deep, steadying breath, I pull my hand away from Guinevere, who seizes her neck and continues to weep. “Both Filippa and Death can—pleat the veil, somehow, to travel great distances.” I screw up my face in concentration. I try to remember his exact movement, but the memory of Mathilde’s withered face keeps intruding, her cackling laugh as she served us café. I shake my head hastily to clear it. “The depth of the pleats must correspond to the distance between locations, but he—he never explained it properly.”

Odessa squeezes my hand, her dark eyes alight with apprehension. “You think you can do it too?”

“Only one way to find out.” Though Michal speaks to me, his gaze flicks back to Guinevere, who still clutches her neck as if pained. “Mathilde’s cottage is on the northeastern corner of the isle.” Then, unable to help it, “Guinevere, are you—?”

“I am fine—fine!” She flaps her free hand hysterically. “M-Mathilde—”

Right.Right.

I’ve never been keen on arithmetic, however—geography, yes, but my interest always lay in the locations themselves rather than the science of cartography. Those details belonged with Filippa, who understood numbers in a way I never could.Filippa.Her name acts like a spark to kindling, burning through the panic in my chest. Did she help Death learn how to travel through the veil? Is she with him now, terrorizing Mathilde, or—or harvesting herblood?

You should’ve taken a leaf out of my book, petal, and stayed hidden.

“Célie?” Odessa crushes my fingers in hers, shaking them slightly in frustration. “Is anything happening—?”

Determined, I seize a fistful of the veil at random, ignoring Guinevere’s strange behavior and focusing with every fiber of my being. The veil seems to ripple between my fingers in response, and—when I close my eyes to focus onthatinstead—a peculiar sensation travels up my wrist to my arms. Atingling. No. My brows furrow as I contemplate the sensation, which is more... awareness than anything else. Or perhaps pressure?

My eyelids flutter as I rotate the veil in my hand, considering the heft andfeelof it like I’ve never done before. My concentration narrows to the individual filaments, each translucent thread, but instead of constricting to that point of focus, the veil seems to spread and diffuse under my attention—up my arm now, across my shoulders and down my chest, my stomach, my legs. It settles upon my body—no,intoit—like a diaphanous second skin, light as air but tainted with an inexplicable sense ofwrongness.

The veil feels sick.Verysick.

The holes in the fabric—they are wounds, weeping gently, spreading disease throughout the realms and poisoning all they touch. So many injuries,toomany for us to ever heal. The veil hangs in tatters around me, yet still I attempt to fold the fabric as I watched Death do. I clamp the pleats tightly between my fingers. Perhaps each one holds ten miles of the spirit realm.Or perhaps it holds fifty.Like Michal said, we cannot know until we try, so I pierce the bundle with a single finger, imagining Mathilde’s cottage and ignoring the slice of pain as I slash downward to open a window.

Dark water meets us on the other side.

I close the window quickly, murmuring, “We went too far.”

Too late, I realize Michal has stepped in front ofmenow, his eyes rapt and anxious on my face. They blaze silver. “How do you know?”

“It didn’t feel like Requiem.”

Feelingshave never been enough for Odessa, however, so when she opens her mouth to argue, I point to the sky beyond the grotto and say, “We’re facing due west, which means I just opened a window somewhere in the waters between Requiem and Cesarine. I need to turn clockwise to reach Mathilde’s cottage—northeast, remember?”

“Wait.” Michal touches my cheek before I can turn. “Are you all right?”

And I cannot lie to him. “No,” I whisper.

Then I adjust my angle, and I try again with less fabric—five pleats less, this time, and folded with more precision. Fresh pain sears my senses as I tear through the veil again, revealing the ruinsof an ancient city.Less sickness here.I force myself to breathe.Fewer holes.Though I’ve never seen these crumbling structures on the island, they stillfeellike Requiem. Indeed, waves crest and crash in the distance, and faint traces of the breeze smell of brine, of algae, of—

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