Page 57 of House of Hearts
He shakes his head. “I’m late.”
“Calvin!”
He’s running now, taking off like the spooked hare in the maze. “Sorry, I’m late! Can’t talk!”
His silhouette retreats hastily in the distance, farther and farther until he’s a lost speck in the landscape.
Rain has returned to Hart. It rampages against the windows and summons the worms up from the earth, where they lie waiting and writhing.
That’s how I feel, too. The mattress groans beneath my weight, and I pull the duvet up to my throat. Birdie might be a typhoon at the best of times, but there’s something comforting about hearing her toss and turn.
“I can’t believe he didn’t even show up to our last meeting,” she gossiped while slipping into pajamas before bed. “He’s taking everything really, really hard…which is fair, but…I don’t know. Sadie still comes to meetings.” She shook her head and turned to me. “What do you think?”
“I think…” What did I think? That his mind was a mess after the graveyard? That he was still revolted from our almost-kiss? “I don’t know.”
But neither of these feels like the reason for this behavior. There’s a puzzle piece missing from the board, a gap in the equation rendering it unsolvable. Something is wrong, and for the life of me, I don’t know what.
It’s still on my mind as Birdie mumbles into her pillow. I can’t say how long I lie there, staring up helplessly at the ceiling, before exhaustion finally catches me. Sleep sinks into my bones, dragging me under the second I least expect it.
I dream of a woman in white.
She’s a young bride opposite my easel, her beauty captured on canvas with each stroke of my brush. Her lacy sleeves billow against her wrists, and her train hangs behind her like a gauzy blur of lake fog. She looks achingly like Calvin. The same Cupid’s bow lips and firefly eyes, the same chiseled jaw and prominent cheekbones. I know who she is immediately.
Helen Hart.
Which makes the man beside her Oleander Lockwell. He’s an indiscernible shadow of gray, his dream-self a murky smudge in my mind’s eye. Helen’s the only one in total clarity here, her forced smile wavering in place on her lips as I paint.
I dip my paintbrush in fresh color, but before I can paint her bouquet, she shakes her head. “Violet.”
What?
I open my mouth, but it’s not my voice I hear. I’m merely a spectator in someone else’s skin. “Pardon, miss?”
“Paint me with violets instead.”
“Whatever for?” Oleander’s disembodied voice asks.
She doesn’t dignify his question with an answer. Her voice is pleading when she returns to me. “Violets, please.”
I do as she asks, swishing my brush in vibrant purple rather than the orange of the marigolds she’s holding. It’s only as I finish the last petal that the windows shatter in a sudden spray of glass. The couplesits unfazed even as the wind rips their portrait off its easel and the rain melts their image away. Helen’s still speaking, but her words are riddled and strange as the storm drenches me down to the bone. “There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me.”
Rainwater trickles down my cheek, slipping a path off my brow and down my nose until it finds its way to the crack of my lips.
It tastes like rust and salt.
The dream fades with the very real feeling of droplets splattering against my skin. Sleep crusts in the corners of my eyelids, and I whine as I wake up to the sensation of something wet.
Likely a leak. We’d get those back at home all the time. I rub my eyes and blink into the darkness, anticipating the next drop.
Except it’s not rainwater.
A bloodied woman hovers in the air above me. Anastasia in the flesh, a waking nightmare from the dream that was her sister. She’s a fury of curls, her hair as dark iron red as her blood. It drips from the horrible hollow in her chest, the tip of a knife piercing through her rib cage. The hilt of the blade appears to be decorated with a cursive initial, but the letter itself is shadowed and indistinguishable in the dark.
She stares down at it, aghast as the blade sinks deeper and deeper yet. Pushed in by an invisible hand, frighteningly close to my own skin. Her thin, featherlight brows lift in terror, and her mouth gapes like a fish on dry land. I make a soft noise in the back of my throat. The start of a question. The rest of it dies on my tongue.
I clatter around for the lamp on the bedside table, unsure if I want to see this woman—this ghost—in full, horrifying detail but knowing I can’t face anything in the dark. Yellow light floods the room, chasing her image away like a sputter of smoke.
With a cupped hand to my mouth, I muffle my scream before it can fully leave my chest. Birdie is still blissfully asleep on the opposite end of the room, her arms flung up to the headboard and her chest rising and falling in measured beats. I could wake her. I should wake her. Except when I open my mouth again to call out her name, nothing comes out.
