and muscles reappear, rounding the corpse out until it resembles the man she buried.
She claps her palm in front of her mouth and turns green as a seasick sailor. I’m expecting her to hurl all over her deceased hubby, but instead she screams. Could be because said-deceased-hubby bucks and wiggles like a worm.
“Putain de bordel de merde,” I mutter, backing up a little, at the same time as Adrien yells, “He’s in the bones!”
As though to demonstrate the professor is forever right, the corpse’s jaw widens and lets out a blood-curdling screech, Murderer!
Gaëlle tries to scramble up the walls of the hole but keeps skidding on mushy snow and softened soil.
“You must finish this, Gaëlle,” Rainier says. “Finish him, or he’ll forever haunt you.”
And incidentally, I’ll croak.
Gaëlle swallows, tears and snot running down her face.
Cadence crouches at the edge of the hole and takes Gaëlle’s hand. “I believe in you. We all believe in you.”
Gaëlle inhales a rickety breath, then wipes her face with the ends of her scarf and turns around, her hand slipping out of Cadence’s mittened one.
Murderer! the corpse says again.
“Quiet!” Gaëlle screams.
You killed me in cold blood. The jaw flaps open and shut, clicking with each word.
Eyes still glistening, she croaks, “I said, tais-toi!”
You’re going to hell for your crime, chaton.
“Stop talking, and don’t call me chaton! You lost that right the day you tried to murder our children.” Gaëlle unwinds the long scarf from her neck and launches herself on the writhing corpse. “You’re not real, so shut up. Just shut up!” She starts stuffing the yellow material into his mouth. All of it.
Mmmmfff.
“You’re . . . not . . . real,” she says between labored breaths. She shoves the last of her scarf between his broken teeth and releases one long, shrill cry that’s so full of pain and horror and regret that it makes my gut clench.
The corpse stops moving.
And then smoke wafts from his skin and envelops him and Gaëlle until their shapes are barely distinguishable in the thick grayness. A funnel of wind appears over the cloud and sucks up the smoke. Gaëlle crawls off her husband’s corpse, her long spirals whipping around. The wind rips apart Matthias’s skin, flesh, and bones, disintegrating the man until nothing remains but the moldy shroud and snake-like, curse-defeating scarf.
When the wind stops blowing, the gold leaf twinkles atop the yellow yarn.
She did it. She fucking did it.
I let out a gigantic breath, feeling suddenly warmer.
That’s two pieces.
We’re halfway there. And we’ve still got twelve days.
I might not die after all.
28
Cadence
As Gaëlle’s leaf clinks into the box Papa brought, Slate picks up her scarf with the shovel.
“Shouldn’t leave evidence at a crime scene.” His reasoning reminds me that he’s a man accustomed to infringing the law and not some happy-go-lucky kid with a mane of wild corkscrews.
“We should set it on fire,” I suggest.
“Gaëlle?” Papa slides the locked box back into one of the pockets of the snowmobile. “What would you like to do with the scarf?”
“What Cadence said. Burn it.”
Slate drops it back over the grimy shroud, and Adrien flicks a match.
As I watch the flames devour the fibers, it dawns on me that Papa helped her bury Matthias, which makes him an accessory to murder. If anyone finds out . . .
I can’t think like that. No one knows outside of the five of us. Gaëlle won’t talk since she has more to lose than he does. Adrien won’t either, since he’s almost family. And Slate . . . I study his sharp profile outlined by Matthias’s funeral pyre, watch him toast his hands over the flames. He hates Papa and blames him for everything bad that’s happened in his life, so he might just lord this over my father. I might need leverage to keep him quiet.
Oh, God. I hate these thoughts. I try hard to beat them out of my mind as Adrien, Slate, and I bury the ashes under thick layers of soil and snow.
Slate’s a part of this now. I have to trust him. There’s no other choice.
“You okay?” he asks as I upturn a bucket of fresh snow.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen someone die, so . . . not really.”
“That wasn’t someone, Cadence. That was a ghost.”
“Have you ever seen . . . a real person . . . die?”
He nods. It’s a slow nod. A careful one.
I swallow. “I know I didn’t kill him, but I feel like I did. Did you ever kill anyone?”
His dark