In exchange for the adventure, Blythe had allowed Aris his doting.
Her husband had not shown his care in a way that Blythe was used to, but with gifts of sweets and rooms that could change at her heart’s desire. He showed it in every doctor he had taken her to earlier that afternoon, whether they relied on traditional medicine, plants and herbs, or something called hygienic medicine that she’d never heard of but required little more than a healthy diet and avoidance of overwork. He would scowl at the doctors as they led her through their tests, always looking over their shoulders and asking a million different questions without ever seeming satisfied with the answers.
No one had been able to pinpoint what was wrong with her. Blythe had her theories, of course, belladonna poisoning being the first, as she was intimately familiar with its symptoms, all of which she had. And yet the tests had shown none in her system.
Blythe sat for hours in her library, twirling the wedding ring on her finger. She hadn’t felt anything from the band of light since the two of them had kissed at the Christmas masquerade, as if their being close was keeping the magic of the ring quelled and satisfied.
Aris had sneaked away to his study an hour earlier, quiet and distracted. Blythe could see in the way his expression hollowed and his touch became firmer that he had not forgotten what she’d said about Chaos.
Aris was afraid, and as much as Blythe had wished to admit the truth of who she was as she’d laid her head against his bare chest, she hadn’t been able to get the words out. She needed more time, but to get that she first
needed to figure out what Chaos wanted with her.
Signa arrived at the library that evening, shadows slipping from her skin and promptly disappearing. Before so much as acknowledging Blythe, Signa’s head tipped to the sky, besotted as her eyes darted from one corner to the next, taking in the impossibilities of the midnight sky and the forever- dreary window. Out of all the impossibilities, it was the quiet hooting from the highest shelf that garnered the most curiosity.
“Is that an owl?”
“Of course,” Blythe answered coyly. “Every library should have one.” She hurried to her cousin, offering a quick embrace before pulling Signa to her favorite corner by the window and motioning for her to have a seat on the green velvet settee.
It was hard not to notice that Signa, too, was looking frail and haggard. She carried a bag with her, and at the top Blythe spotted one of Rima Farrow’s leather-bound journals.
A thousand words sat on the tip of Blythe’s tongue—pleas for help, admittances of her fears and all the truths she’d learned—but at the sight of her cousin she pushed every thought aside and asked, “Are you well?”
The question alone was enough to break Signa, who covered her face as she melted into the chaise. Blythe may not have been able to see her crying, but she could certainly hear it between her cousin’s sniffling.
“I am the most horrible person who ever existed,” Signa cried. “I’m supposed to be the one asking you that!”
Blythe slid closer to Signa, winding her arms around her cousin’s shoulders and trying to goad her upright from the depths of the couch. “It seems that we have more to discuss than I imagined.” Quieter, she asked, “What’s wrong?”
Signa made a face that was part scowl and part grimace before she leaned around Blythe and grabbed for her bag, plucking out the notebook. She tossed it onto Blythe’s lap. “Half of these pages are ruined, soiled by the ink or torn out entirely. I can’t make any sense of it, but it’s as I told you earlier. I do not believe that we are the first in this family to have run-ins with the paranormal.”
Blythe’s fingers curled along the spine of the journal. She worried that the books might catch fire from the way Signa’s bloodshot eyes burned holes in them. “Signa—”
“I think my mother was involved with someone.” She plucked the journal back from Blythe’s hands and flipped the pages open, erratic. “All I can decipher is that they were fast friends. I’m not certain that my mother knew the full extent of who she was dealing with at first, and from what I’ve gathered it seems maybe they were in a relationship that went awry. I think my mother was afraid when she called it off, but I don’t know why. Death told me there are likely other deities out there—Time, Dream.…”
“Chaos,” Blythe said, to which Signa nodded.
“Yes, Chaos. And perhaps more he doesn’t even know exist—”
“No, Signa.” Blythe reached forward to take hold of Signa’s fretting hands, easing them away from the book. “It’s Chaos who killed your mother.”
She told her cousin everything. Told her about Solanine cornering her in the stables. Of the visions she had seen, and how Blythe had been saved only because the woman somehow recognized that Blythe shared the same blood as Rima.
“She thought I was you,” Blythe told her. “I’m the right age, and have the right blood. It’s what saved me from being killed that night.” She thought of what Signa had said about believing her mother might have been in a relationship with the demon that was Solanine. Though she’d never voice the question aloud, she wondered just what type of person Rima Farrow must have been to be capable of being with someone like Chaos.
By the time she was through telling Signa all that she knew, her cousin was ghost white. Signa sat with her hands folded in her lap, trying to bury them within her skirts.
“I wanted to tell you the moment I found out,” Blythe explained, “but with all that happened at the ball—”
“When I believed that it was me with the power to resurrect, I made the mistake of threatening to bring Elijah back should he be hanged.” Signa cut her off, not meeting Blythe’s eyes. “What resulted from that conversation was the first time I’d ever seen Aris and his brother agree on something— using those powers in such a way would only invite Chaos. It was a rule I was not meant to break.
“My mother was trying to save someone,” Signa continued, her shoulders bowing with a great weight. “In the journals, she wrote about a friend of hers who had drowned by slipping beneath the ice of a frozen lake.
By the time they got to her body, her skin was blue and she was no longer breathing. That friend’s name was Amity, only I know for a fact that Amity did not die because I met her as a spirit who had perished the same night as my parents. On one page, the journal claimed that Amity had died. But on the next, my mother spoke of Amity as if nothing had happened. I read each entry three times before I noticed that there were pages missing between them. There was no sign that anyone had torn them; rather, it was like the pages had disappeared from existence. The only proof I had was that this journal had several pages fewer than the others.
“I believe that a week passed between the drowning and the next entry, where my mother wrote about someone new who had arrived at the finishing school she was attending. A woman with hair as red as flame, who she called Sol. That woman… she must have been Chaos. If my mother somehow brought Amity back to life when she was meant to die, then perhaps she summoned Chaos.” Signa leaned back in her seat, rubbing a hand over weary eyes.
Blythe’s stomach twisted tighter with each word, her skin clammy in a cold sweat that had her breathing harder, eyeing the nearest wastebasket in case she grew sick.
Rima Farrow had somehow summoned Chaos. Whatever might have happened between them after that, the result of that summoning was undeniable—all of Foxglove had perished.
Blythe could not afford for those around her to suffer the same fate. She rested a hand on her cousin’s arm, wishing she could soothe Signa’s tired eyes and fill her gaunt cheeks with life. She didn’t have to think about it for long, however, because with each passing second Signa began to look better than Blythe had seen her in months. Blythe withdrew her hand swiftly, knowing better than to use untested powers on her cousin.
“It seems I have work to do.” Blythe kept her voice gentle as she leaned back, drawing her feet beneath her and onto the couch.
“What work?” Signa spat, growing tenser as her anger rose inch by inch to the surface. “What does she want you to do, kill a horse? One horse hardly makes a difference in the grand scheme of the world.”
Blythe scratched one finger against the journal, wearing a groove into the leather. She didn’t care for the look in Signa’s eyes, or for the fire in her words. Blythe agreed that this was a lot of fuss for a horse she’d
accidentally brought back to life, and it pained her to think about taking away something so beautiful. But what choice did she have but to try?
“What happens if you let it live?” Signa asked. There was a dark intensity in her voice that made Blythe see the reaper within her cousin for perhaps the first time.
“Then she’ll kill me. And I didn’t get the impression that she’s a patient sort.”
Anyone who saw Signa in that moment might think her feral, a child spirited away from the woods, body hunched like a predator’s. Her hair was a dark curtain around her face, shielding murderous eyes.
“You’re not going to die.”
Despite Signa’s conviction, it was a hollow promise. “At least if I do, we know that I’ll keep reincarnating.”
“Do not make light of it! This woman killed my parents, and there is no world in which I could bear losing you. Nor could Elijah.”
“I’m sick, Signa. It’s just like last time—”
“Surely there must be a way to use your powers on yourself.”
Perhaps if Blythe were more familiar with her abilities, that might be possible. Mila seemed to have lived a long while, after all.
Blythe wanted there to be a world in which she could promise Signa that she’d be all right. But at this rate, she’d be lucky if she had a week left in her.
Blythe could cry, of course. Part of her wished she was like an animal and could escape into the woods to die in secret, leaving everyone uncertain as to what might have happened to her. But when it came down to it, Blythe had already been given a second chance at life that had been wonderful. After all, hadn’t that been what she’d wished for in her mother’s garden? To have had the time to make just one more memory with someone?
In that regard, she had been lucky. Blythe had made countless new memories. She had fallen in love—or at least she had started to, though it would take a good while before she’d be ready to admit that aloud.
Blythe took hold of her cousin after a beat too long. “You are the girl who cannot die, and I am the girl who will always continue to live. There will be periods of our lives when we may not have each other, but you and I are destined. No matter what happens, you will never escape me for long.”
Signa turned her head, and those strange eyes that hardly ever blinked
fluttered a dozen times as her bottom lip wavered.
“You don’t know that for certain,” Signa said. “How could you when you don’t even grasp the full extent of what you’re capable of? If you spoke to Aris, maybe he could help. Maybe he could teach you—”
“And maybe I could just end up devastating him again when I die anyway.” Blythe’s smile was faint, and when Signa refused to meet her gaze, she gently squeezed her cousin’s arm. “I’m not pleased with these possibilities either, but I’m not afraid. Not now that I know what’s waiting for me on the other side.”
For a moment, Signa looked as if she wanted to pull her arm away. Instead, she placed her other hand over Blythe’s and sniffled, her emotion heavy in her words.
“What if you forget everything again?” she asked. “What if you forget who I am?”
“Is that what’s worrying you?” Blythe laughed. “If that happens, then you’ll simply have to charm me again, just as you did before. Given how awful our first meeting was, it shouldn’t be too hard. But that won’t happen this time, okay? I believe I lost my memories because of how I died. It was a tragedy that Life had to forget just to be able to live with herself. That’s not going to happen again. Next time I die, Death will make sure of it.”
Blythe had already decided as much. He owed her, after all.
Only then did Signa draw away. “I tire of hearing you talk like this. I have saved you once, and I’ll do it again if I must.”
Blythe wanted to believe her. If anyone could get out of this situation, it was the two of them. But Signa did not know the terror that was Chaos, or how her bones had quaked when that woman locked eyes with her.
“Don’t worry.” The wonderscape stole Blythe’s whisper, carrying it upon the breeze. “I’m not giving up without a fight.”
“Good.” Signa reached forward, squeezing Blythe’s hands. “Then it’s time that we return to Thorn Grove.”
