I get to my feet and rush across the hall. His bed is empty. His room is empty.
I turn back to the doorway. It’s gone. There’s a solid sheet of darkness across the wall. The shadows creep toward me as I stagger back, cold with terror. The thought of that darknesstouching me, of being lost beneath it, fills me with a desperate panic.
It moves forward, pushing me farther and farther into the room, until I’m scrambling back on Arien’s bed. The hard plane of the headboard is behind me, solid against my spine, and the icon is a leaden weight in my hand. My heartbeat thunders panic in my ears and pulses hard at the edge of my throat.
I curl my fingers closed, remembering the cold iron of the front door, how it slowly warmed beneath my touch. This beautiful house, with its carved flowers and faded wallpaper and neglected ivy-wreathed loveliness, would ithurtme?
From above comes a rhythmicdrip drip drip. I look up. The ceiling is ink black. Rivulets of thick, dark liquid ooze down from the cornices and streak across the walls. The floor ripples and the shadows become a pool of water. The new, wet darkness covers the floor.
The air in the room thickens, until everything sounds hollow and muted. It’s like the damp stillness of the well house. That silent air above the water’s surface. I am there, waiting in the breathless dark. I want to cry out, but all that comes is a whimper.
I think of Rowan, his hands on my arms as we stood beside the trees, the roughness of his voice when he saidI can’t promise you safety. My heart twists desperately in my chest. I’m not afraid. I’mnot. It’s just light, just the wind. It’s a dream—surely. Arien’s shadows never hurt me, and these won’t, either.Only dreams.
But Arien’s shadows aren’t dreams. They’re a darkness. A darkness that Rowanwantsfrom him, and I—
Another wash of air stirs over me. The cold is a kiss against my cheeks. The water rises, higher and higher. I’m in the lake. Strands of sedge grass start to wrap around me, and I scrape my hands against my throat as they wind tighter and tighter, cutting into my skin. Water washes over my face, and the world turns to a blur of opaque ripples.
I open my mouth to scream, and the black, icy water fills my lungs.
Chapter Six
I wake up breathless, alone in Arien’s room. Crimson sunset spills through the window; it’s the next evening, almost an entire day has passed while I’ve slept. And the nightmare… I can still feel it. Stillseeit. The shadows that crept over my bed, the blackened water that dripped down the walls.
It was a dream, that’s all it was. There are no shadows in the corners. The walls are smooth, faded paper, and the bare floorboards are dry.
I kick my way free of the tangled quilts and get out of bed. Arien has unpacked. The handful of things he brought from the cottage sit neatly on the dresser: his brushes, his paints, a roll of parchment paper. His shirt from yesterday is crumpled in the corner, the same careless way he always leaves his clothes.
I smooth down the wrinkled fabric of my dress and combmy fingers through my snarled-up hair, trying to reason with myself. What must have happened was this: I had a nightmare, I slipped into Arien’s room. I slept deeply while he woke up this morning and went off into the house. That’s all.
When I step out into the hallway, everything feels just as empty as it did last night. No voices. No movement in any other rooms. The only sound is the echo of my footsteps. On the landing, the arched window is lit up brilliantly by the sunset. I’m so high up that when I look outside, I can see down over the entire estate.
The grounds are cleaved into a strangely narrow shape by an enormous, ivy-wrapped wall. The space is completely neglected, full of tangled weeds and flowers that have sprawled their way past once-tidy borders.
And beyond the wildflowers and the weeds… is the lake.
The water is black. Black as ink,darkerthan ink. It’s the same. Exactly the same as the water that filled my room last night, in my dream.
The shore is black, too, and torn. A sharp-edged wound all along the ground. It makes me hurt to look at it. I feel like someone has cut my skin and left behind the same jagged scars on me as on the earth below. This is the glass in my knees, the bruises on my wrists, the shadows in the night.
And down at the lake, three figures move across the shore. Clover and Arien, with Rowan beside them. I watch as he puts his gloved hand on Arien’s shoulder and leans close to speak to him. Then they all move forward to the edge of the blackenedearth, the line where grass becomes mud, where mud becomes water.
No no no.
I shove myself back from the window. Rowan Sylvanan wants the darkness in Arien, wants his shadows that are more than dreams. And now he’s taken my brother to the lake. The lake where he drowned his family one by one.
I run.
I run down the stairs, through the kitchen, where pots clatter and steam on the stovetop, boiling over, out of the back door, and into the garden.
The Summerbloom twilight is heavy, air that smells burned. As I run along the path, branches scrape my arms and tear my skirts. Gravel scatters. My knees burn with a bright pain, like there are coals under my skin. The cuts reopen; blood washes over my legs.
I run until the garden becomes a forest. Pale bark. Dead leaves crushed under my boots.
“Arien!” My voice is lost in the trees.
I reach the shore. Up close, the lake is so much worse. Dark water that swallows the remaining sunlight. When I step onto the mud, I feel the cold through my boots as if it’s pressed against my bare skin. The darkness feels alive. It feelshungry.
My feet sink deeper with each step. My breath comes out in hard, short gasps as I fight my way across the mud toward my brother.
