And lands inside a house. Except there’s daylight now, and instead of Raelean sitting at the kitchen table, it’s Adaire. She hovers over a scrying skillet. Her thumb mindlessly rubs that bone-tooth key; her eyes lost to a vision. When I look into the black glassy surface of the water, I watch my mother cry as she reads a letter. I lean closer to see what the letter says, and tumble forward into the skillet—
Splash, through a ceiling, I land with a thud on the floor of an empty room. Not any room, a bedroom at the farmhouse. Adaire scoots a wobbly chair into the closet and disappears. When she steps out, the brown button tin of my mother’s is in her hands. Eager to see what’s inside, I cross the room toward her. A thickness in the air slows me. I strain to push through—
The tension releases and I flounder into a grand office. I flail my arms to balance myself. A gorgeous oriental rug lies under my feet. A stern bookshelf stacked with law books. Adaire sits in front of a massive mahogany desk. The tension in her nerves so visceral I can feel it, like static electricity in my mouth.
From over her shoulder, I see her gripping a handwritten letter. It’s loopy swirls from the hand of a woman. Stone Rutledge, with his knitted brows and talking hands, attempts to reason with her. Her anger spikes a bitter metallic on my tongue, and she abruptly stands. The mixture of her and I in the same space, dizzying. I gasp as our souls collide. Determination pushes her out of the mansion. She turns back at the harsh call of her name—
My knees give way into a run. A spinning, churning motion that speeds the grass beneath my peddling feet—not my feet, but Adaire’s. Decaying granite juts from the ground like rotted black teeth. Tombstones. Adaire’s ramped heart, like the racked wings of a thousand humming birds caged in her chest. Her terror spikes as the metallic gold beast chasing her gains ground. She peddles faster. A deft nudge from behind sends her flying, head over feet into the ground. A crashing, crunching disjointed impact that blackens the world around us.
The smell of grass heavy in my nose as we lie broken on the ground, staring at the sky. The copper of a thousand pennies fills my mouth and dribbles red down my chin as we gasp in wet breaths. A greedy tugging at my waist causes me to look down. Gabby Newsome pillages our pocket—plucking free a blue droplet of rain. A recipe to see. Her grin an excited dance upon her face. The letter in our hand flutters away in the wind.
The pain.
Dear God, the pain. A blinding white-hot throughout my body. The blackness drinks me in. My eyes flutter in slow blinks. I give in to death as the sinking ground swallows me whole—
Wide-awake, I stand—or rather fall in reverse until I’m upright again. An endless field of grass surrounds me in all directions. I spin in a dizzy circle until a jarring stop lands me directly in front of Stone Rutledge. His gaze blank. His coloring a thinned version of what it should be. Flint eyes tip up to meet mine, and then he turns and walks away.
Just as with Adaire, I follow the dead—
Into a dim, smoky room. Red wool rug back underneath my feet. Fresh vanilla smoke and leather clouds around me as Stone Rutledge steps through me with an icy chill and into an office. Vibrant and alive and much younger than the man I ever met. A broken man. The heaviness of his sorrow like an anchor dragging at the bottom of an ocean.
At the head of the desk, the family lawyer, the same one that helped Stone get the charges in Adaire’s case dismissed. Stone scribbles a signature on the documents pushed at him, then leaves. His bitterness the taste of an acrid pecan shell. I follow as he storms out and past Grandmama, waiting by the office door. My heart stops at the sight of her, causing me to trip backward—
Into a grand bedroom. Stone Rutledge stalks over to the window, intently watching down below. I look past his shoulder to catch a glimpse of Aunt Violet’s rickety green Ford Pinto as it eases down Sugar Hill’s driveway. The sweet face of eleven-year-old me in the rear window, peering back up at Stone. An ache—like none I’ve ever felt—stabs my heart. I clamp my hand over my chest at the longing—
In my hand is a glass of whiskey. Not my hand but a man’s. Stone’s. Looming over the mahogany desk before me, a raging Lorelei. Her anger a scorching bonfire against my face. Exhaustion. To my very bones, I am exhausted. The disappointment I feel for her tastes like soured milk. Abruptly, Stone stands and hurls the whiskey glass against the wall, yelling—
A panicked sound lures me down a darkened hallway until I face Ellis. Soft and muted, the eyes from which he gazes upon me are vacant. A gray version of the boy he was in life.
Just as the two before him, Ellis turns and I follow the dead—
Behind a dark doorway, we peer through a crack and watch Lorelei and their father argue. Whatever they are saying ignites my fear. Ellis leans too far into the door and falls—
My feet gain footing and I duck under a tree branch as he runs through the woods. I chase him—or whoever’s body this is that I’ve fallen into does. Anger sets in my blood, threatening to rage. I can’t let him get away. I can’t let him tell. I clamp a desperate hand upon Ellis’s arm. Disgusted by my touch, he wrenches free and swings around to face me. I see an opportunity to stop him, and I can’t control myself. I shove him, angry and hard. He trips, a flailing, twisting motion. Horror slashes across his face as he grasps at the air. His hand catches at my neck—then snap! He falls backward and impales himself on the stick jutting from the ground. He lets out a scream that could wake the dead and I—
I wake up.
Me.
Wholly me.
What the hell—?
The real world a throbbing echo around me. Those blurred black edges of the Sin Eater Oil haze fade. The hushed sound of rain tamps around me. The tree canopy above an umbrella.
I lie there a minute. Those foggy moments in time that the dead showed me swim around in my head, bobbing up and down, telling me a story. Telling me the sins of others.
It was Lorelei. She chased Adaire down, ran her over with her car. She chased Ellis, after he found out. Pushed him right onto the branch that pierced his neck and killed him. It was all Lorelei. Because Adaire found out something that was worth killing for.
I sit up, trying to get my bearings. These woods look about the same as any other woods around here. It’s morning now, the sun rising over the east—at least my sense of direction is still intact.
When I stand, a bitch of a headache pierces behind my eyes, about as bad as when I’ve had too much to drink. I hold still until the pounding subsides.
It doesn’t take me more than a second or two glancing around to realize I’m where death and Ellis met. The sharp branch he pierced himself upon only a few feet in front of me.
Scattered on the rain-mucked ground lies Lorelei’s bouquet of flowers, now rotting. A small glint of gold catches my eye. I bend down, riffling through the leafy debris to retrieve it. A dainty gold chain, something snapped in half. Instinctively I reach up to my neck, that yanking snap from the hazy dream still lingering. Lorelei’s necklace.
The scales of Libra hung around her neck from a flimsy ribbon. That was why she came back out here. Not to leave memorial flowers at her brother’s death site. But to find her necklace that Ellis snapped off her neck the day he died. She didn’t shove dirt in her pocket; it was the gold pendant. The scales of justice.
It had to have been Lorelei who chased her brother in the woods that day. That urgent need to not let him get away still heavy in my chest.
She doesn’t want me to tell.
Ellis knew. He knew Lorelei killed Adaire. He knew his father covered for her. A sin Ellis wasn’t willing to keep quiet about, so Lorelei killed again. I think Stone must have figured it out. You could see it in his face that day at the Lathams’. A lost and broken man who realized he had raised a monster. A Bad Seed. Stone couldn’t live with himself over it and the part he played.
The sky starts wringing out the clouds like a wet rag, so I get the hell out of there.
It takes me a solid hour of walking before I find a passing farmer to drive me back to Raelean’s trailer. The cold rain—rude and relentless—spills from the sky as I step onto her front porch. My urgent fist pounds on her door.
It rips open. “Where in the hell did you go?” Raelean’s face is pained, her hair a sloppy bun on top of her head, smudges of yesterday’s mascara and eyeliner darken her eyes. Even early in the morning she’s pretty. “You vanished—actually vanished—into thin air. One minute you’re sitting across from me at the table, about to drink that awful liquid, and then next you’re gone. Like I blinked and made you disappear.” She snaps her fingers as she says this last bit, emphasizing the quickness of my exit.
“I’m sorry,” I urge, but she knows it isn’t my fault. I hope. The tension in her shoulders relaxes a little. Her tiny front porch doesn’t have a roof, and I’m getting soaked. As soon as she realizes this, she steps aside, tugging her robe up around her neck.
“I need you to drive me home.”
I take the towel she hands me and dry off as best I can. Then I tell her what I saw in the hazy Sin Eater Oil dream, where it took me—though I have no idea how—what I think it means, and why I need to go home.
Her face fills with dread, but she exhales a resigned sigh. “Let me get dressed.” I’m grateful she doesn’t feel the need to question me any further for now.
