Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil — Chapter no 44

III

As they head down the block, Ezra digs a plaid scarf out of his coat pocket and loops it around his neck.

He catches Alice staring. “What? It’s cold.”

She frowns. “Is it?” She’s only wearing the black hoodie and jeans, but she doesn’t feel cold, realizes she hasn’t, not since she came to in the shower, icy water soaking through her clothes.

“Not to us, maybe,” says Ezra, nodding at a huddle of people across the road, shuffling, heads bent, against the wind, “but to them.”

Alice shrugs. “I’m Scottish,” she says, “maybe we’re just more resilient.”

“Maybe, but the fact is, when Boston winter rolls around, they’ll notice if you’re going about with a thin sweatshirt and no hat. So it’s better to blend in.”

As he says it, he drags air into his lungs, exhales a thin plume of fog, rubs his hands together, as if trying to get warm. A convincing pantomime. He’s clearly had a lot of practice, and even though he looks twenty, maybe twenty-five, there’s an ease to his stride, as if he’s had a long time to settle into his skin.

“How old are you?” she asks, wondering as soon as the words are out if it’s rude to ask, but Ezra doesn’t seem to mind.

“Older than I look and younger than I feel,” he says, “especially for being

so long in the midnight soil.”

Alice frowns. “What’s that?”

“The midnight soil? Oh, just a turn of phrase.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and spins so that he’s walking backward, facing Alice as he recites the words from memory.

“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,

plant them shallow but water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose,

soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”

Something about the words makes Alice shiver, and yet, she finds herself turning them over and over in her mouth as Ezra falls in step beside her, hooking his arm through hers.

“For warmth,” he says, and she doesn’t pull away.

They walk side by side in silence for a while, Alice’s head spinning, and her heart a still weight in her chest, and every time she blinks, she sees Lottie, ghosted on the inside of her lids.

Lottie looking back, and smiling.

As if she knows exactly what she’s doing.

Exactly who she is.

Alice squeezes her eyes shut—

Until the image fades— And the cold wind picks up in her ears— And just like when she looked into the shining black surface, her mind goes somewhere else.

The air whistles around them, as if the night is full of ghosts.

Alice has always had a love-hate relationship with Halloween. Most places take it to a foolish place, all shop costumes and cheap scares, but here in Hoxburn, the holiday holds on to a shade of its old witchy self.

A reminder that Scotland was a pagan place before it was a Christian one, a land that still rings in the changing of the seasons and the years with lanterns and bells and wooden effigies burning off the dark. Sure, jack-o’-lanterns grin on porch steps, and paper ghosts sway from the trees, but there is a somber air to it, and even the children usually dress up not as astronauts or fairies, but ghouls and witches and ghosts, guising as spirits let loose for the night.

Alice is thirteen now, too old for all the candy and knocking on doors, but the night still has a power over her. The wind is full of whoops and howls, and even though the only ghosts are kids in sheets, eerie eyes cut out of cotton, the air smells like woodsmoke and dying leaves, ripe with mischief, and magic, and more than a little menace, and if she were alone, it might get to her, but she’s not.

Catty’s there, one elbow hooked through hers as they march together down the moonlit road. Catty, like an anchor and a buoy all at once; like a bonfire, burning back the dark, so Alice feels only a pleasant thrill, a

fun kind of fear, like watching a scary movie from the comfort of the

couch.

They’re on the way to a party.

It’s at Catty’s secondary school, to be fair, but Alice still can’t believe Dad and El agreed. She thinks it’s probably because they feel bad, that Catty’s been spending so much time at Granddad’s place over the pub instead of home, ever since baby Finn was born, while Catty says it’s because they’re too tired to care—which is true, they’re not even up for handing out sweets, just set a bucket on the step and a sign warning people not to knock or they will set a banshee loose.

It doesn’t really matter why.

The point is that Dad and El said yes. (With instructions, of course, to be back before midnight, and a weighted look at Catty as they said it, as if Alice isn’t more than capable of keeping time.) Someone’s smashed a jack-o’-lantern on the curb, and Catty kicks a piece that might once have been a nose, or eye, down the road. They take turns punting it as they walk, the lump getting smaller and smaller as it skates along the concrete until it’s not worth kicking anymore, which is fine because they’re almost there.

Up ahead, the school’s lit with amber lights, orange balloons painted to look like pumpkins bobbing in the breeze. But instead of heading up the steps, Catty nudges Alice on, past the school and its chaperoned dance, shooting Alice a wicked grin, as if that was the plan all along.

“Where are we going?” she asks, trying to sound like the answer doesn’t matter, like the thrill isn’t turning to cold dread in her gut. Catty offers a cheeky look, made slyer by the feline whiskers slashed across

her cheeks.

“To a party.”

Catty’s elbow is still hooked through hers, so Alice doesn’t have much choice; when Catty keeps walking, so does she, until the school’s nothing but a lump of light behind them, the sounds from the town’s center fading, too, and Hoxburn isn’t that big, and they’re running out of roads, and for an awful second, as they near Friar’s Way, Alice thinks they might be heading for the graveyard.

But Catty wouldn’t do that to her. Not ever, but especially not tonight.

Two years back, a boy in Catty’s class dared her to go in, on

Halloween of course, and Alice can still remember the horrible creak of the old iron gate, the shape of her sister growing smaller between the graves. Alice counted to seventy-two before Catty came back again, her eyes red with tears and black with rage.

“What’s the matter, Catty?” the boy had drawled. “You see a ghos—”

Only he never got to finish because as soon as she was through the gate, she split her knuckles on his face. And on the walk home, blood tracing between their locked fingers, Alice didn’t ask Catty what she saw, if she saw anything, but she always wondered, still doesn’t know, if she was sad because she saw Mum’s spirit, there beside the grave, or sad because she didn’t.

And sure enough, they turn off before the graveyard, onto a narrow lane called Maple Cres, and Alice thinks how strange it is that they live in a town so small, and yet there are still roads she’s never really been down.

Soon new sounds start creeping in, music being played too loud over shitty speakers, and voices tangling with shouts and laughter, and then they reach the house where the party is.

The front door hangs open like a mouth, full of silver streamer teeth, the edges of the building traced with orange light, like there’s a fire burning somewhere beyond.

Alice tightens her grip on Catty’s arm, or tries, but she slips free,

jogging up the steps.

Alice follows.

Inside, the music is more bass than sound, heavy as a pulse, the front room full of zombies and witches and devils, and she feels suddenly silly in her blue dress and white apron, dressed as that storybook Alice, curious and bold. She would have been a witch but the other party, the one at the school, had a bookish theme, and Catty was supposed to be her Cheshire cat. But with only the whiskers drawn on her face and a tail pinned to the hem of her jeans, her sister looks effortless amid the other costumes.

While Alice just looks like a kid, tagging along.

There’s an old slasher film playing on mute on the TV, and Alice watches a man with a saw silently prowling through the dark while Catty beelines for a table littered with open bottles. The whole walk, something in her bag made a glassy thump every time it hit her hip, and

now she knows why. Catty produces a full bottle of gin, nicked from the pub, and adds it to the lot on the makeshift bar before pouring two cups of punch from a bowl ringed by empty bottles of vodka and rum and half dancing her way back to Alice.

“Where are we?” she shouts over the beat, and even though the song picks right then to get louder, she can see Catty shaping the name,

tongue against the roof of her mouth.

“Derrick’s.”

Alice wants to roll her eyes. Derrick. Of course.

Catty met him at school (only met is the wrong word because in a town as small as Hoxburn, everyone is already tangled up) and Derrick is two years older and only one grade ahead, but he plays the drums in a friend’s band and has a tattoo of a compass in the center of his chest, and the one time he met Alice, he called her a wee lass nipping at her sister’s heels, so as far as Alice is concerned, he can go get fucked (which is a thing she heard her classmate Eddie say, and she likes the way it sounds, even in her head).

“Relax!” Catty mouths, handing her a plastic cup.

Alice takes a sip, only to discover it’s more water than whatever alcoholic punch Catty’s downing as she scans the crowd.

Stay here, she mouths, gesturing with her hands. I’ll be right back.

And then she and her empty cup are gone, ducking through a doorway into another room, obviously looking for Derrick.

Someone knocks into Alice, a guy with a face painted like a skull, made creepier by the fact he’s somehow stained his whole mouth black as well. Alice scrambles back, presses herself into the wall to get out of the way. Decides to stay there as a trio in hooded black cloaks drift by.

She takes another, smaller sip of her drink, the sweet burn somehow going both down her throat and up into her head. She closes her eyes and leans into the wall, feels the bass beat against her spine, hum along her ribs, tells her body to relax, and it’s starting to listen when a hand jerks her back into the room, and there’s Catty’s whiskered face, her tilted grin, her fingers like a bracelet on Alice’s wrist as she drags her

off the wall.

“Come on, barnacle.”

She leads Alice through a kitchen—past another skeleton, a girl painted like a porcelain doll, a guy with fake blood running down his

face—and then out, into the cool night of the backyard, where the music isn’t deafening and a bonfire blazes in an orange peak against the dark.

Alice sighs in relief, fills her lungs with the fresh air as Catty tugs her toward the flames.

A group of teens stand ranged around it, chatting and sipping from their own red cups, the light splashed against their faces, and for a moment, neither of them talks. Catty’s attention has disappeared into the flames, the way it does when she’s looking through something instead of at it, so Alice copies her, stares right into the fire even though it’s hot and bright, and burns her cheeks. She closes her eyes, can see the whole

thing ghosted on her lids.

“Let’s get out of here,” says Catty.

Alice blinks, hopes rising for a moment because she thinks Catty’s talking about the party, but then she adds, “Once you finish school,” and Alice knows she means after. After, that weird nowhere word that can mean an hour or a day or a year or never but not now.

“Where?” asks Alice.

Catty keeps her eyes locked on the blaze. “London. Madrid. Tokyo,” she muses, listing all the places in Mum’s photos. “What about America?”

“How will we get there?” asks Alice. “What will we do?”

Catty shrugs, as if the questions aren’t important. “You’re smart, Bones. You can go to one of those big fancy schools, and I’ll—I dunno, I’ll take photos. Or make drinks. Be a bartender. Or a model. You always hear those stories about girls getting discovered. That never happens here. But out there, it could.”

She stares into the fire, and Alice can see the future taking shape in Catty’s mind, the way it plays like light across her face. She tips her head, just so, as if she’s already on some fancy set, limbs gracefully arranged like she’s waiting for someone to snap her photo.

That’s why Catty likes Derrick. Or at least, that’s what she claimed, when Alice asked. She didn’t insist he was handsome, or clever, or even kind. She just shrugged and said, “He sees me.”

As if he’s the only one, or even the first.

As if Alice didn’t come into this world with both eyes focused on her sister.

Catty catches her staring, so Alice makes a camera of her hands, and

Catty rolls her head toward the imaginary lens, and winks, and Alice clicks her tongue and prints it on the back of her mind, and then Catty brightens, and Alice smiles, till she realizes it’s because Derrick has shown up, a piece of gray plastic perched on his dark hair.

Alice cocks her head. “What are you supposed to be?”

He flicks the plastic down over his face, smug expression vanishing behind a wolfish mask, spreads his arms as if waiting for applause, then says, “But wait, there’s more,” and pulls out a red umbrella, opens it

over his and Catty’s heads.

“See? Now we’re raining cats and dogs.”

Alice rolls her eyes because wolves and dogs aren’t even the same thing, but Catty cackles with delight, and Alice can’t help but wonder which one of them she dressed up for, and the whole thing leaves a bad taste in her mouth, and then as if on cue, Derrick reaches behind his back and produces a bottle of something neon blue.

He spins the cap off and takes a swig, then points the lip toward Alice, as if to say, You want a sip? And she would have probably shaken her head, scrunched up her nose, half because it’s the kind of booze their granddad wouldn’t even stock on the lowest shelf of the pub, and half because he’s just had his mouth all over it. But before she can, Catty waves him off.

And Alice knows there’s no malice in the gesture, but something about the way her sister does it, the look in her eye, like Alice is still a kid who needs protecting, makes her snatch the bottle from Derrick’s hand and take a long swig.

She nearly chokes as the liquor stings her eyes, and strikes a match inside her throat, going down like a mouthful of hot tea.

Derrick whistles, and Catty swipes the bottle off her.

“Whoa, slow down,” she says, and isn’t that ironic, given all the times Alice has said those same words to her big sister.

Slow down, slow down.

Alice doesn’t know she’s laughing until Catty frowns, sends Derrick to fetch a glass of water.

Catty turns to Alice, hands on her hips. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing,” she says, because how can she explain this pit inside her, the way she wants to either shrink or grow, go back to when they both were kids, or fast-forward to when they’re both grown up, that either

one’s better than this feeling, like the gap between them’s somehow growing, and Alice can’t catch up.

“I just—” She falters. The swig was two shots, maybe three, but her head is already spinning. The sounds around her rise and fall like she’s on a roller coaster instead of standing, boots on grass. “—I want to be like you.”

She wants Catty to smile, to hook an arm around her shoulders and say You are, say We’re two of a kind, or some silly shit, but she doesn’t.

Her expression changes, like someone pulled a curtain down.

“No, you don’t,” she says, cupping Alice’s face. “Don’t be me, Bones.

Just be you.”

The bonfire crackles. Alice swallows. “But I don’t know who that is.”

“That’s okay.” Catty cracks a smile. “You’ve got all the time in the world to find out.” And maybe that’s true, but Alice can’t help but think about the fact that Catty’s always known exactly who she is. And then, her sister shrugs and says, “But I know who you are.”

And it’s probably a joke, a trick, but Alice feels her heart lift anyway.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” says Catty, light playing in her eyes. “Want me to tell you?”

Alice nods, and Catty leans in close, puts her mouth right against her ear, and Alice holds her breath and listens as Catty starts to speak, but just then someone lobs a firecracker into the fire and it goes off with a sudden, deafening shriek, and then Derrick is back, putting a glass of water in her hands as he pulls Catty away, And Alice is left standing there, alone—

With no answers— Only a ringing in her ears, and— Her toe hits a jutting piece of sidewalk, forced up by a nearby tree and —

Alice lurches, and her eyes fly open, and there is Ezra, his arm looped so casually through hers, his head tipped back as if considering the night, but there is a studied air to it, like a head turned tastefully away to give a person privacy, and she can’t help but wonder if somehow he felt or heard what she was thinking—if her mind, her memories, are just spilling out, painted on the air around her, and the thought makes Alice queasy, she wants to pull

them back, tuck them under the collar of her shirt with the little golden pendant, but he just clears his throat and says, “It’s not far now.”

They are almost to the Commons, the park stretching like a shadow up ahead.

Ezra slips free of Alice, and tugs a flask (of all things) from his coat pocket, and when he opens it she can smell the penny scent of blood. Her throat tightens as he takes a swig, teeth aching as he hands it to her. She drinks, and it doesn’t even touch the edges of her thirst, knows that she could drain a dozen flasks and it wouldn’t make a dent, but can’t stop herself from swallowing, feels guilty for how light it is when she hands it back.

But Ezra just slips it back into his coat.

“Where does it all go?” she asks, exasperated. “No matter how much I drink, the thirst is always there.”

“That,” he says, “is one of the great questions. The bigger one is, if you know that it won’t fill you, why bother drinking at all?”

“Don’t we have to? Won’t we starve?”

“Starving,” he says, “is far harder than you think. Go on,” he says, as if he can hear her racing thoughts, the way they trip and tangle. “I’m sure you

have more questions.”

“How long can you go?”

“Some go months. Others years.”

“Years?” She can’t seem to go more than a day without unraveling.

Ezra nods. “Madness will take you before hunger ever will.”

Alice chews her bottom lip, as gently as she can. There is so much she wants to ask. So much she doesn’t know or understand, but the question

that pushes to the front is this.

“Why a coffee shop?”

Ezra laughs, clearly expecting something else. “The coffee shop’s fairly new. Before that it was a bar. And before that, a bookstore. And back during Prohibition it was a speakeasy. I change it around every ten to twenty years, to keep from standing out, or ending up on a historic registry.”

“Why bother, then?”

He considers. “After a while you learn, it helps to have a purpose.

Besides, keeps me from getting lonely. I get to meet all kinds of people.”

“Like angels and demons and psychics.”

He snorts. “Exactly. But normal people, too. After all, if I only catered to

a certain clientele, I’d be out of business. There’s not that many of us.”

Us. The word feels like an ill-fitting coat. She resists the urge to shrug it off. Instead asks, “Why not?”

Ezra exhales another plume. “Fickleness, I suppose. And folly.”

He lets his head fall back, and she follows his gaze up, past the buildings to the night sky, amazed that there are stars. Alice knows that there are always stars, but before, they would have been too faint, her eyes too weak to make them out, and now, she can see them, scattered like diamonds in the sky, and for the first time, she makes a new column in her mind, of things that maybe aren’t so bad.

The lack of fear—that one goes at the top, but right beneath it, she puts this.

But then she starts to wonder how many stars she’d see if she were back in Hoxburn, and then she remembers that if she were back in Hoxburn, she’d never have crossed paths with Lottie, she’d still have a future, a life, a pulse, and that’s enough to tear the mental paper from her mind as Ezra clears his throat again.

“Here is something you should know. We think ourselves immortal, but we’re not. All things get hollowed out by time,” he says. “Including us. For some it will take centuries, for others only a mortal life, but one way or another, eventually, pieces of us die. The parts that made us human. Till all that’s left is hunger, and rot.”

Alice swallows. “What happens then?” she asks.

Ezra’s head drops, his eyes pale but bright. “One way or another, we meet our end.”

“Sounds pretty grim,” she says, wondering if that’s what he thinks happened to Lottie, if that’s why he’s coming with her now.

To save his old friend—or bury her.

She scuffs her boot. “You don’t seem rotten, Ezra.”

He flashes her a crooked grin. “Don’t be fooled. I’m just going slower than the rest.”

There is so much more she wants to ask, but at that moment, his steps slow to a stop, the Commons to one side and a row of buildings to the other, and Alice looks up to find the entrance of the Taj Hotel.

Suddenly, her limbs go heavy. She feels rooted to the pavement, torn between the urge to go in and the urge to turn and run—until she remembers that she can’t go back, not far enough, not to her old life,

because it isn’t there anymore, because Lottie took it from her, and that is enough to break loose.

Ezra holds the door and Alice forces herself over the threshold, through the entrance, and into the hotel.

Inside, a marble floor stretches through the lobby, and the perfume of fresh flowers fills the air, so strong it’s almost cloying. To the right, there’s a candlelit bar, but to the left, the stairs—the same bright blue ones she saw in her vision.

Alice starts toward them, only to be interrupted by the appearance of a concierge in a trim black suit.

“Can I help you?” he asks, hands spread slightly in a way that could be a welcome or a wall, and before Alice can think of what to say, Ezra is there, fingers resting gently on the concierge’s sleeve.

“We’re visiting a friend,” he says, his voice steady, and there’s moment of tension, when the concierge looks like he might pull away, but then his eyes flick up to Ezra’s and he sees something there that makes the rigidness go

out of him.

“Shall I call up for you?”

“No need,” says Ezra cheerfully. “We know the way.”

He drops his hand, but the effect seems to linger, because the concierge stands there, like a puppet waiting for someone to tug on his strings.

“Anything else, sir?”

Ezra smiles. “No, thank you,” he says, “but you have a wonderful night,” and the way those words wash over him, they might as well be an order, a spell, because the man smiles in genuine pleasure and assures Ezra that he will.

The concierge drifts away across the lobby.

“How did you do that?”

“Conviction,” he says, as if it’s that simple. As if Alice hasn’t struggled with that all her life, as if she didn’t have to hide in a bathroom and dare herself just to be a little bolder for one night, as if that need for false bravado didn’t lead her here. To this.

“You know,” he muses, watching the concierge drift out of the lobby and into the bar, and order a drink. “One thing you learn when you live as long as we do, is that nothing’s permanent. Who you were isn’t who you have to be.”

With that, Ezra nods toward the stairs. “After you.”

He trails behind her now, instead of leading.

But she is glad he’s there. A shadow at her back. A steady hand.

Alice puts her foot on the first step. She runs her fingers along the rich blue paper on the wall, feels her boots sink into the soft blue runner on the stairs.

There was a moment, when her plane hung suspended over the vast Atlantic Ocean, nothing but blue below and blue above, when she looked out at the in-between, stomach in knots, and told herself that her heart was pounding with excitement instead of fear.

This is your life, she thought as the plane sailed on.

This is how it starts.

There are eighteen stairs between the hotel lobby and the landing. Alice counts them as she climbs—eighteen moments of before and after, then and now, eighteen chances to go forward, or move back. Only there is nothing behind her anymore, nothing ahead, the whole road has been erased, and

she wants to know why.

She needs to know why.

Alice passes a mirror on the stairs, an ornate thing in a gilded frame, and as she locks eyes with the girl in the glass, she is back in the bathroom at the Co-op party, makeup smudged and body coiled stiff with nerves, trying to make a deal with herself, a bet, a game.

Old Alice for New Alice. Just for one night.

She touches the surface of the glass, her fingers no longer warm enough to leave a mark, then drops her hand, and forces herself up, and up, and up, until she’s standing in the hall. Until she’s right there at the door.

The numbers stamped into their small gold seal, just as she saw them in

the vision.

139.

Alice looks down at the placard looped around the doorknob—Do Not Disturb—and she doesn’t even have to press her ear to the wood to hear the sounds beyond, bubbles of soft laughter, mouths on skin, whispers of pleasure and— She grits her teeth and raps her fist against the wood, waiting for the poetic moment when the door will swing open, and the girl who came into

her life (and left with it, like a prize), will have to look her in the eyes, to see what it’s like when your past comes back to haunt you.

But the moment doesn’t come.

The sounds of pleasure don’t stop, even though there’s no way they didn’t hear the knocking. Alice stares in disbelief at the door, and Ezra waits for her to try again, but she’s apparently used up all her nerve, because her hands are now hanging limply at her sides, all the strength gone out of them.

Ezra doesn’t knock, just clears his throat and leans a little toward the door and says, “Lottie, it’s me. We have a problem.”

And even though he didn’t raise his voice, the movement in the room shudders to a stop. Alice can hear a murmured Stay there, and then the weight of a body rising off a bed, bare feet across the floor, and this is it, the lock turns with a soft click, and the hotel door swings open, and there she

is.

Lottie.

The same girl who perched at the edge of the bed in the dark, who danced with Alice surrounded by colored lamps and saved her from the stampede of bicycles and ran with her through the rain, and made her come apart.

Lottie, standing in the doorway, her blouse unbuttoned and her heels cast off, curls wild and cheeks flushed as if her heart’s still beating in her chest.

“Ezra?” she says. “How did you—”

And then she finally sees Alice.

She sees Alice, and those eyes of hers, those candle-bright brown eyes go wide, and at least she has the decency to look surprised. That part goes to plan. But not what happens next, not Lottie stepping into the hall and catching Alice’s arm, her whole face twisting with concern as she says, “Alice?”

Her name on Lottie’s lips, her voice, so sad and sweet, so full of caring that it makes her reel.

“What happened?” she asks, as if she can’t feel the lack of heat, the absence of a pulse, the silence pooling inside Alice where there should be sound, and the worst part is that even now, even now, Alice feels the pull, like gravity, the urge to lean into Lottie’s touch instead of wrenching back, away, so she does, lets it carry her forward, until her hands connect with Lottie’s front. She shoves her back as hard as she can.

“What happened?” snaps Alice as they both stumble back into the room.

“You should know.”

“Char?” comes a dreamy voice, and another woman appears, the one with the warm skin and the autumn nails, wearing nothing but the bedsheets.

“What’s going on?” she asks. “Who are these people?” and Alice can’t drag her gaze from the thin ribbon of blood running down the side of her neck, the wound itself already healing, but she can taste the pulse from here, like a penny on her tongue.

Lottie—Charlotte—Char, whatever she’s calling herself, goes to the woman and cups her face and says, in that too-steady voice Alice is starting to recognize, “Go into the bathroom. Take a long shower. I’ll join you when I can.”

The woman manages a sleepy nod, and goes, closing the door behind her, and Alice feels like a tightening spring. “Is that what you did to me?” she

snaps.

Lottie turns toward her.

“No,” she says. “I wouldn’t.” And she has the nerve to look wounded by the accusation. Alice watches as she sinks onto the edge of the bed, fingers actually trembling as her hands go to her mouth, and she looks like she might cry, and Alice bristles because this isn’t right, it isn’t fair. Where is the wicked grin, the monstrous smile, the villain’s monologue? Lottie doesn’t deserve to look so hurt when she’s the one who did this.

She’s the monster here.

“I didn’t compel you, Alice,” she insists. “I didn’t have to.”

“Bullshit.”

“You wanted me there,” she says softly, almost to herself. “It was just a bit of fun.”

“Fun?” snarls Alice. “Was that before or after you killed me?”

Lottie flinches. “I didn’t,” she says, and Alice grabs her by the shoulders, forces her to look her in the eyes.

“Then how do you explain the fact I’m dead?”

Dead. The word gets stuck halfway up her throat. She has to tear it out like roots, leaving the taste of rot behind.

But Lottie only shakes her head. “It wasn’t me.”

She says that last part to Ezra as much as Alice—Ezra, who’s leaning, arms crossed, at the spot where the hall becomes the room, as if his opinion somehow matters more, as if he’s the one whose life is over.

“It wasn’t me,” she says again, tears now sliding crimson down her

cheeks. “It’s not my fault.”

“Then whose is it?” demands Alice, and Lottie whispers something, a single word, too soft for even her to hear.

“What did you say?”

Lottie clears her throat and says the word again.

“Sabine.”

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