live, tops. We’re in over our heads. We need help.”
Was that movement behind one of the onyx windows? She thought she caught it in the corner of her eye, a glimmer. Then nothing.
“You don’t know me, and you don’t owe me anything,” she said. “I get that. But a lot of people are counting on me right now, and a lot of people, good people, are dying up there. So I’m not leaving. Open the door or don’t, that’s your choice, but I’m not going anywhere.”
She rapped her knuckles on a wooden pillar. Then she leaned against it and crossed her arms.
“Comfy porch. And I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
The door clicked. With a groan of old, stiff hinges, it swung open.
50.
Seelie stepped into the dead-house.
The door glided shut at her back. She turned, and it was gone. Hallway in front of her, hallway behind, the narrow walls adorned with dark crown molding and Victorian wallpaper. Yellowed ivory and green stripes, and empty cameos for decoration. Wrought-iron wall sconces shed cold pools of gaslight. A scent hung in the chilly air, cedar mixed with potpourri, a forest bouquet. Voices broke the silence: a distant children’s choir, singing with no music, their voices too soft to make out the words. The sound was coming from somewhere above her.
She picked a direction and started walking.
She turned a corner, and the world turned around her. She felt the house move, shift, twisting like a Rubik’s Cube in the hands of a curious god. Now she stood in a classroom. Chalk dust clung to a faded green slate, and child-sized writing desks lined up in ordered rows. Paper shutters shrouded the tall windows along one wall, fingers of moonlight drifting in around the edges.
She wasn’t alone here. There were hazy figures all around her, less than shadows. Voices whispered in her ears, soft as fingernails rustling against silk. A fleeting pressure brushed against her arm. Another touched her hip before sliding off and slithering away.
Ghosts. The Sisterhood’s dead were with her now.
“Is…is one of you Aislin Kendricks?” she asked. “I need to talk to her.”
The feather-light scrabbling in her ears went on, insistent. Faint fingers tugged at her shirtsleeve.
“You’re trying to communicate, aren’t you? But…”
But Patty had warned her: she didn’t have a dead woman’s eyes, a dead woman’s senses, and her perceptions were muddy. A three-dimensional person trying to understand a four-dimensional world. She couldn’t hear them, and they couldn’t make themselves be heard.
There had to be a way. There had to be a trick, a tool, something she could use. She thought back over her talk with Patty. Her warnings, her admonitions—
“The blood of the living gives strength to the dead. They know it, too. They’re always thirsty for it.”
“Strength,” Seelie said. “Need to boost the signal. I can’t give myself the power to hear you, but maybe I can make your voices louder.”
Her fingers traced the hard line of Patty’s straight razor, snug in her jeans pocket.
“This is really going to suck,” she said.
She took hold of the razor and opened it, catching moonlight on the stainless-steel blade. She touched it to her forearm and gritted her teeth.
She knew she wasn’t there—that her body was slumped against the table in Patty’s dining room while her spirit went on a journey—but spirit skin cut just like the real thing. She hissed, jaw quaking against the pain as the blade bit into her arm and blood welled in its wake. She drew a long scarlet line, the cut burning like a lit trail of gasoline. Then her other arm, her whole body shaking now, tears blinding her eyes.
Her arms fell limp at her sides. Droplets rained down in slow motion from the bloody razor, sounding like muffled cannon shots as they splashed onto the wooden slats at her feet.
Hungry mouths latched onto her skin. Wet and suckling, tongues lapping at her wounds. Patches of haze became shadows became fish-belly-white flesh and long, matted hair, naked bodies clinging to her. Greedy fingers clutched at her shirt, her hands, tugging at the straight razor as they fought to devour every last ruby drop.
A torrent of voices washed over her, overlapping and confused, as if someone was wildly spinning a radio dial across a dozen stations at once: who is she is she one of ours? she can’t hear us she wants Aislin where is Aislin I think she’s meditating this little one still can’t hear us someone go get Aislin? no call the headmistress she’ll