sort it out.
Seelie was floating, fading, the world dissolving into icy, searing pain. She was losing too much blood, too fast. The suckling mouths and the wet red tongues feasted at her wounds and devoured her by the drop. Smeared blood coated her arms from her elbows to her fingertips, gloving her in shades of rust.
“That’s too much,” she said, her voice sounding a million miles from her own ears. “You’re taking too much. You’re killing me.”
They didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. She was a desert oasis; she was food in a famine. She felt the house going dark around her, the gaslights fading with her sight. Seelie dug for her last reserves of strength, one last push.
“That’s enough,” she shouted, shoving back with her hands, her voice, her force of will. The room ignited.
The shades flew in all directions, flinging back, throwing up hands to block her light from their gemstone eyes. She could see them clearly now. They scrambled up the walls, crouched behind overturned desks, their bodies pallid and naked and glistening with blood. She caught flashes of jet-black mouths and scarlet razor teeth, and glittering eyes like flawless emeralds.
Two of them lunged for her. They took her by the wrists and ran, dragging her until she ran too, the three of them headed straight toward an open doorway that hadn’t been there a moment ago. Nothing but darkness beyond, a murky void that clung to the threshold. The dead women let out a shrill, throat-rattling ululation, their voices rising, cascading to the rooftop.
Then they shoved Seelie through the door and sent her tumbling into the dark.
* * *
The world returned, bathed in sepia, as if Seelie had stepped into a vintage photograph. Another classroom. The cuts on her arms had closed, leaving long welted lines. The pain of the cuts gave way to a fresh, throbbing ache: her arms were extended at her sides, palms up, a heavy hardcover book balanced in each hand. Another hardcover perched precariously on her head.
Her nose itched. She held perfectly still.
A corpse stood at the chalkboard. The woman was tall, refined, dead, in a beautiful black dress with a hoop skirt and ivory ruffles at her throat, lace dripping from a monochrome brooch. Her moldering hands clung to a silver-tipped walking stick. Her eyes were the only thing alive about her, bright and sharp, set into a thin, mottled face. One of her cheeks had rotted through, exposing the curve of her bare jaw and her yellowed teeth.
Even in this state of decay, Seelie recognized her from her portrait. She’d seen her in Patty’s scrapbook.
“Ms. Bowen?” she said. “That’s…that is you, right? You’re Eliza Bowen.”
The woman raised her hands and brought the cane down, the silver tip rapping hard against the wax-polished floor.
“A proper young lady,” the dead woman said, “pays full attention to her lessons.”
Seelie fought to ignore the aching in her arms, the maddening itch at the tip of her nose. The books wavered dangerously in her outstretched hands.
“No, listen, I’m not one of the orphans. You’ve got me confused with—”
“Oh?” Eliza’s voice cut like a whip. “You have parents, then?”
“Well, I mean…I think I’m pretty much disowned at this point, but that’s not—”
“You have a home? Speak up, girl. Where is your home, exactly?”
“I…I don’t have one. But it can’t be here because this is the land of the dead and I’m, you know, alive, and can I please put these books down?”
Eliza’s rotten nose wrinkled with distaste. “You may not. Good posture and poise is a mark of good breeding. For you, we’ll start with the fundamentals. The three keys to success.”
“I’m sure that’s really important and all,” Seelie said, struggling to hold her balance, “but I’ve got to talk to Aislin Kendricks.”
Now another woman sat in a chair off to Seelie’s left. She wore widow’s weeds and heavy lace veils that shrouded her face from sight. A little girl ran into the classroom, maybe seven or eight, her eyes bright with the thrill of discovery. She cradled an emerald-shelled beetle in her cupped palms, presenting it to the widow.
“Very good,” the veiled woman said, her voice tinged by an Irish brogue. “And can you make it dance?”
The little girl curled her fingertips. The beetle rose up on its hind legs, antennae twitching as it bounced in a spasmodic circle.
“That,” the woman said, “earns you a toffee.”
She handed over a piece of candy in a twist of wax paper. The little girl skipped out of the room,