We reach the cellar, and I help her sit on a crate. “Jules ran off with the flute and your bones,” I reply, and my jaw muscle hardens. “Marcel is with her.”
Ailesse gasps. “But the dead—”
“We’ll figure out what to do about them later.”
“I can’t hide down here while innocent people are in danger.” She makes a break for the ladder. I grab her and pull her back. She tries to fight me, but her strength is spent. I push her down on the crate again.
“You’re hurt, Ailesse—and you don’t have your graces anymore. For tonight, we rest. I promise to look for Jules tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m sure the other Bone Criers are doing something about the dead. It doesn’t all fall on you. Can’t they pen the dead in somewhere?”
She sits back. “I don’t know. Maybe.” She buries her head in her hands. “This has never happened before. At least not in my lifetime.”
I try to think of something comforting to say, but my mind runs blank. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before either.
I feel around in the dark for the tinderbox I’ve stashed down here. I finally find it at the back of a dusty shelf and light a lantern. The candle inside has already melted to a stub. I’ll have to get more soon, along with other supplies. I can’t remember how much I’ve stored in my hideout. I spent so much time here as a child, back before I met Jules and Marcel. This is the one place I never told them about, and here I am, about to show a girl I’ve only known for a couple weeks. A girl I’m desperate to keep alive.
I open a door leading off the cellar. Ailesse stiffens as I reach for her. Her pupils flicker and reflect the candle’s flame. “Does that lead to the catacombs?” she asks.
I nod. This entrance beneath Chapelle du Pauvre was built long ago for families who couldn’t afford burial plots above. Here, they were able to carry down their departed loved ones and place them in unmarked graves below. “Can you think of any safer place from the dead?”
She shakes her head slowly. “The dead don’t want to believe they’re dead. The catacombs are a reminder.”
I lean against the doorjamb. “They won’t stop chasing you, you know. You’re like a beacon to them.”
She twists her hands in her lap and gives me such a long look that my ears prickle with heat. “I won’t go in there as your prisoner,” she says, her voice iron.
I could make her. She’s lost her strength. It would be easy to bind her up again. “And I won’t show you the hidden place in there if you try to kill me,” I counter.
“I’ve proven I’m not going to kill you.”
I sigh. “I’m not going to take you prisoner again, Ailesse. We’re just going to have to trust one another.”
She shifts on the crate. Her dress and the ends of her hair are still caked with gray silt mud. I’m coated in a good layer myself. We’ve brought the old catacombs with us. “Why are you helping me?” she asks.
I give a little shrug, averting my gaze. “If you die, I die, right? So I figure we need to stick together.”
“And you promise to search for Jules?”
“I promise. I know everywhere she’d think to hide.”
Ailesse exhales. “Everything you saw tonight—all the chaos and danger—happened because my mother played the siren song on the wrong flute. I have to get the right one back to her by the next new moon, or else—”
“I know.” I want the ghosts of the dead ferried, too.
Ailesse bites her lower lip. It’s cracked and parched. Did I give her enough water to drink in our old chamber? I glance at her wrists, raw and bruised from the ropes I tied her up with.
She has every reason to hate me.
“Fine,” she says. “I’ll go with you.”
A rush of coolness washes through my chest. Relief? I don’t understand myself. “Can you walk now?”
“I think so.”
I flex my hand and reach for hers. As our palms slide together, my heart gives a hard pound. I briefly meet her umber eyes. They’re uneasy, but also warm.
They’re also damn gorgeous.
I swallow a lump in my throat and guide her past the door, then into the tunnel toward my secret hideout in the catacombs.
30
Sabine
AILESSE, WHERE ARE YOU? I’VE recovered my bow and quiver from the shore and have an arrow drawn