I FOLLOWED MARK, AND EVERETT FOLLOWED ME. WE NEARED THE church, and I finally began to feel things. Seeping into my pores, into my bloodstream. Grief. The real kind. The life-altering, soul-crushing kind.
She wasn't in the sanctuary as I guessed it would have been logical for her to be. Was she in a casket? I wondered. Had they built one? The first for them, but certainly not the last?
In the elders' meeting room, Rebecca sat at the head of the giant marble table, alone, her fingertips pressed together, her lips pressed to them. She said nothing to us when we came into the room, simply rose to her feet to make the door to the apothecary appear for us, something none of us could do on our own.
My movements were robotic. I took a step when Mark did. I said nothing. I felt nothing. I touched no one. Somehow not even myself.
In the apothecary, there was still no Lizzie. Sarah was standing at the round table with the floating cauldrons and vessels, beneath the floating oil lamp chandelier. She said nothing either, but she came to me, her eyes filled with a sorrow I was fighting so hard to keep from feeling. She put her cold, ancient hands on either side of my face, and then she burst into tears. Real tears. Warm pink cheeks, red eyes, and salty water on her face. These were human attributes I did not possess, and for that — for once — maybe I was grateful. At least a little.
She walked to the corner of the room and put her hands to the front of a wardrobe, smearing a mercury-silver substance across them and muttering words to herself. It was the incantation that had been a particular source of contention between Lizzie and me: the Fateor.
The wardrobe opened to reveal another dirt-dug hallway, where it had once contained only old notebooks and journals of spells and incantations and other magic the elders had learned in their time here. I saw then that those had been discarded into piles on the floor to clear the way for this new secret passageway.
So many secrets. Always secrets.
This hallway was narrower, but it was lit by hanging pieces of fire Sarah and Rebecca and the others must have left here. For us? I wasn't sure.
My throat closed up when I could see the end of the hallway. The end was a haphazardly carved shape, a makeshift doorway, that was dark enough that I could see nothing beyond it. But once we arrived at it, somehow I was sure that we were there.
We crossed a threshold into a suffocating space, dirt ceilings so low my head nearly touched them and Everett had to crouch. Mark did something to make more light appear. Then I saw her.
It was so much worse than I could have imagined. The silence in the space was startling. I had never found myself in a room with three people and my mind silent. But here, I could read no one. Not Everett and Mark with their bulwarks. Not Lizzie who wasn't a person at all. At least not anymore.
Her body was laid out on a palette of coarse material on the ground, unceremoniously, in this dugout space barely large enough for the four of us — for the three of us and the body — to be in.
I sank to my knees, then dropped my forehead to the ground. I was overcome with a wave of grief and a solid, unfaltering pain so heavy that I couldn't lift myself. That I couldn't stand anymore.
That I couldn't exist anymore.
My breathing grew rough and uneven, and my chest heaved as my entire body began to shut down at the site of this: Lizzie, asleep. Lizzie, frozen. Lizzie, dead.
She looked so small! And so frail. How much did she weigh anyway—100 pounds? How had I never noticed this, how much smaller, how much more fragile she was than I? And had she always looked so old? Her skin was dull, gray, and so utterly dead. Her face looked papery and withered, with lines sinking deeply into her face that I had-n't noticed before. The bright pink splotches that usually covered her face were gone, and her freckles seemed like flecks of graphite stabbed into her skin.
She didn't look like Lizzie. She wasn't Lizzie. She wasn't the person I had known and loved, the woman who raised me, the only friend and confidante I'd had in the world.
She couldn't be Lizzie. Because Lizzie couldn't be dead. Because I couldn't have lost her and still survived. Because Lizzie was out there somewhere, alive and pink and breathing, and I would just have to find her. Find her and make things right.
She couldn't be Lizzie because the last words I ever spoke to Lizzie were spiteful. The last words she'd spoken to me were cruel. We had cared so deeply for each other for 145 years, and then, just weeks ago, we had one cross conversation, and now THAT was what I could hold onto?
No. It couldn't be. It was impossible.
This . . .
Wasn't . . .
Lizzie.
"It's not Lizzie. Impossible. It can't be," I said over and over again, though I didn't know I was saying it until both the Winter boys dropped to the ground next to me.
"Not . . . Can't . . . Isn't . . ." I trailed. I cried. Cried. Tearless and cool and lifeless, but I cried. I sobbed. I broke in half.
Everett pulled my face to his chest and cradled my body against his. "Shhh . . ." he cooed. "Just breathe, princess. Just breathe."
Mark hung back for a second and then tentatively laid one hand on my head, stroking my hair. "It is her, little one. It is. I'm so sorry."
This was the way they handled me, of course. Everett like I was broken and shouldn't be pulled from my fantasy worlds. Mark like I could handle it and needed to be brought to reality.
"Can't . . ." I whispered.
Then it got worse. The silent sobs escalated until I truly couldn't breathe, until my entire body was stricken and then convulsing. Everett held tighter, and Mark stayed close. Breaking. They were watching me
Break.
Shatter.
Come undone.
I DON'T KNOW HOW LONG WE STAYED THERE. I DIDN'T REMEMBER KNOW WHAT day or time it was when we came in, or when we came out. Time had stopped at the entrance of this cave, and I had a feeling it wouldn't start again once I left.
I had just stared at her for so long. I had to, didn't I? To be sure? There wasn't a mark on her except for unsettling through-and-through wounds on her hands that made it look as if she had been crucified. But as disturbing as the wounds were, they weren't lethal, and they were the only evidence of trauma. I checked. Double checked. Triple checked. And so I let my mind think again it wasn't real. I waited, eyes fixed on her, for a tiny muscle movement, a subtle breath. Hours into it, I began touching her more, and her skin felt even more dead than it looked. It was cold and clammy and heavy, like clay on a spinning wheel. She wasn't real! She couldn't be . . .real.
I put my hands to her forehead and tried in vain to pull thoughts from her mind. Then I laid next to her, talking to her, willing her to wake up. No marks except for those on her hands. No cause of death. No nothing. Surely she was still there! I held her against me, whispering about why she must come back, about why I was sorry, about why I couldn't do it without her. About why she was my lifeline. About why I was nothing without her.
But nothing.
Everett and Mark mumbled to each other, and Mark departed, leaving a kiss in my hair. And then Everett Winter laid on the ground behind me, holding my whole body while I held Lizzie, and after kissing my ears and hair and anything he could reach, he whispered: "Why don't you try saying goodbye?"
I saw it then. That's why they'd brought me to her. To say goodbye. Hours and hours in the tiny room, and I'd never thought about goodbye. I couldn't make it to goodbye.
My voice all cracked and raw, I managed, "I can't."
"Okay, my love. Okay," he said. "Then we'll just stay."
And we did stay, until my pain melted into anger, and anger into uncertainty. Uncertainty into fear. Fear into exhaustion. Exhaustion into oblivion.
IT WAS WINTER AGAIN. SNOW HEAVY ON THE GROUND, THE THICK COLDNESS enveloped my bare feet. I was in another gown — thick and intricately woven, rough embroidery scathing against my skin as another train dragged the ground behind me, growing heavier with each step as it absorbed the snow. The sky above me was murky and inky, thickened by smoke. To my left, a giant circle of people surrounded a bonfire. There was drumming, shouting, and chanting. Somehow none of them saw me here, barefoot and freezing in a ball gown in the snow. They were too entranced by their fire, their celebration.
To my right, there was a deep forest that grew dense not far from its edge so I could not see into it. There was only blackness.
I looked back and forth between the two spaces, not sure which way to go. As I watched the people at the fire sway and dance, losing themselves in the moment, I felt even lonelier. Why couldn't I lose myself in something, especially now?
But then someone was behind me. I sensed the presence. Behind me, above me. Then there was a breath on my ear and I jumped. It felt too real.
"You don't want to join in the festivities?" the harrowing voice of Alexander Raven rang in my ears.
I turned to face him. He wore a suit and fur coat, dressed just as he was when I met him. I began to realize this look he wore on his face, the one of malevolence, of an air of ease and a slash of seduction, would wear on me quickly, even in my dreams. Alexander Raven would always be there to taunt me, to destroy things I loved, and he would do it all while crushing me under the strain of unwanted advances.
"What are they celebrating?" I asked, surprised by my dream self's confidence and even ease. The real me was too terrified of him to know how I'd act, should we ever meet again.
"Something they've awaited for centuries," he said, lifting a lock of my hair away from my chest. His hand trailed along my bare décolletage as he did this, and I shivered uncomfortably at the contact. He held the hair close to his face and then inhaled it.
"Do you ever wonder what the vieczy smell when they smell us? Or when, say, that lover of yours smells your hair?" he asked.
"No," I said. A half-truth. I didn't wonder—thanks to my extended trips into Noah's brain, I knew. And what I didn't know—say, how my hair smelled—I didn't want to.
"You look sad, Sadie," he said.
"I am sad, Alexander," I said.
He smiled. "And yet what makes you sad makes so many others happy," he said, gesturing to the circle. Why was I here in my dream? Here where Alexander Raven would say one thing and mean another, no one thing connecting to the thing before it? Why would my dream self do this to me? I wondered.
He faced the people and the fire, but then turned on his heels and walked toward the forest. For whatever reason, I followed him. The trees seemed to consume us, pulling us into spaces so tight that my dress pulled and ripped against the bark of the frozen trees. Snow fell off branches as Raven's tall stature rattled them in front of me. As clumps of it hit my shoulders, I shivered as they took just too long to melt. After all, I was the same temperature as the snow and air around me. Frozen.
Raven seemed to move faster and faster, adeptly navigating the spaces between trees, making it hard to keep up with him. Soon he was entirely out of sight, and as I wove through the trees in search of him, I got more and more lost.
Raven's voice echoed in the air around me, a maniacal laugh that rang in my bones as much as in my ears. "So happy. They're just so happy!" he'd said.
I called out to him, but he didn't appear. I caught a glimpse of him to my right and went after him, only to see him disappear between two trees on my left. I ran faster and faster, until I was nearing my top speed, and the artwork I was wearing began to lose layers of fabric, whole sections of the skirt. Branches and bark grabbed out at my arms, tearing at my skin, as if I were as vulnerable as a human.
Eventually I had to stop, breathless, cold, and covered in tiny wounds. I reached a clearing different from the one where we were, or so I imagined because there was no sign of the fire anymore. The sky above was clear and unmarked by smoke. The darkness was pure. The woods, silent.
Then he appeared in front of me, laughing still.
"There's my Sadie. Always chasing," he cackled. "Always chasing something she's not even sure she wants to catch."
"What are they celebrating, Raven?"
He reached his ice-cold hand out to my face and stroked my cheek. There was a light in his eyes that haunted me. "The rarest thing in the world, dear girl," he said. "The death of a Sorcerer."