Surprise widened his eyes before he shuttered them, hiding his emotions behind a mask.
Hurt, anger, and grief welled in me, and I was about to light into him, but he raised a hand to silence me.
“You need time to think.” He adjusted the strap on the bag slung over his shoulder. “You have decisions to make.”
“I want Ma—Cletus—to stay with me.” I kept hold of the wraith. “I don’t want to let her—him—go just yet.”
“I understand.” He eased past me, careful not to brush my shoulder. “Lethe is waiting for you in the kitchen with Corbin. Hood is on patrol.”
“Linus?”
He took the steps but hesitated in the grass. “Yes?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The Cletus you first met is the only Cletus I had ever known until you. Wraiths are spirit and bone. They follow orders, they don’t make their own decisions. They don’t think, they don’t feel. They exist. That’s all.” He almost glanced back, the muscles in his neck twitching, but he wouldn’t look at me. “I would have told you if there was anything left of her, but there wasn’t, there still might not be, and giving you hope would have been cruel.” His head came up when lights splashed over the driveway. “I broke your friendship rules.” No more lying, no more omissions, no more skulking, no more attempting to get in the basement. Those had been my rules. “I omitted the truth about Cletus. It was a choice within my control, and I made it. Punish me however you see fit. I accept your ruling without question.”
Punish.
Of course, he would expect me to hurt him. Tit for tat. That’s what he had been taught. That’s all he knew. And I had warned him if he broke my trust again, I was done.
The urge to follow through with my threat, to cut him off cold turkey, was there. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to be better than this. But I was heartsore. And I was so very tired of being hurt by those I cared for most.
That didn’t stop me from following him to the gate, taking his hand, and drawing the protective sigil on his wrist.
I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He was out of words, and I had yet to find mine.
A crimson sedan pulled to a stop at the curb, and the driver got out, nodding to me and then Linus.
I turned away, unable to watch him get in the car, unable to bear him leaving, unable to ask him to stay.
Tires crunched as the sedan pulled back into the street. A wrenching pain in my chest made me wonder if this was how Maud felt having her soul ripped from her body.
Lethe met me halfway to the porch, tackled me with a bone-crunching hug, and we sank onto the grass in a tangle of limbs. Collapsing against her, my head on her shoulder, my tears soaking her shirt, I let the grief sweep me away, right up the stairway into my head, where there was no pain.
A long time later, when I was down to hiccups, Lethe gathered me in her arms and lifted me against her chest. She carried me to my room, laid me on the bed, and then climbed in behind me. She held me until I stopped trembling, her grip unbreakable, like she might hold me together through sheer will alone, but there was nothing to be done for my heart. It was breaking, shattering into a million glittery pieces, each edge sharpened with a memory that cut. I should have bled to death from all the tiny slices, but death was easy, and nothing in my life had ever been that.
Six
When I jerked awake from the first full day of natural sleep I’d had since my release from Atramentous, Linus wasn’t back. I didn’t have to check with Woolly to be certain.
I had never felt alone in Woolworth House. Not really. Not like this. But his absence was a hollow ring in my ears.
The door to his bedroom stood open—he’d left it that way—but the welcome was absent without him.
A brush of Woolly’s presence across my senses forced me to uncurl from the tight ball of limbs knotting the center of his mattress. His, not mine. I must have found my way in here sometime during the day.
“I feel better.” I stretched my fingers through the slats in his headboard to brush them along the wall. “How are you coping?”
The floorboards groaned—no. That was a moan.
Cletus drifted into the room from the hall and came to hover at the foot of the bed.
Sadness radiated from Woolly, overlapping my own melancholy, but she had let the wraith in.
“Can you tell?” I put the question to the old house. “Do you sense…?”
Maud.
Woolly reeled in her emotions, blocking me from her thoughts, and that was answer enough.
She would have seen beyond the cloak, through its bones, to the soul animating the creature when it first crossed her wards. Had there been anything of Maud left in Cletus, Woolly would have rejoiced to find her mistress, however diminished, had returned.
But there had been no celebration.
Woolly had allowed the wraith in for my benefit, because that’s how she viewed Cletus—as a generic manifestation of necromantic will—not as Maud. Not as a creature with its own identity. And with her silence, she wanted to spare me that final nail in the coffin of my hope that Maud was still in there, somewhere.
“No one can know,” I warned them both. “No one can ever discover what I’ve done.”
A bolt of fear thrown by Woolly struck me in the heart.
“I’m not worried for myself.” I rubbed my chest. “I’m worried about what this might mean for Linus.”
Eidolon was not a designation I had heard until it started getting tossed around about him. He might not be a dybbuk, but dybbuk were hunted, their hosts executed or sentenced to the grave of Atramentous. He walked a fine line even his mother might not be able to smudge if the Society learned the truth about her son, and about Maud.
“I hate to do this. It feels like I’m erasing the only scrap left of your identity, but I can’t call you Maud.” I wet my parched lips. “I’ll have to keep calling you Cletus. It’s the only way to protect us all.”
The wraith nodded, a low moan escaping its maw, and Woolly’s consciousness bolted from the room.
Tremors shook the house, her heaved sobs shifting the structure on its foundation, but I let her grieve.
“She’ll adjust,” I promised Cletus, uncertain if he had the capacity to understand what I had told them, or Woolly’s reaction to the news. “She just needs a little time.”
Maud would never have violated Woolly the way Cletus had the night we met—when he stole Keet, who she never would have touched, and left the Grande Dame’s invitation in his place. Maud wouldn’t have had to stoop so low. Woolly would have flung open her doors to welcome her home. Instead, she still smarted from that stark breach of trust, even if she had forgiven Linus. Learning her former mistress, the person she trusted above all others, had done that to her…was hard.
The wraith gave no indication how it felt about Woolly adapting to its presence, but it did drift to me, its hand tucking into the depthless void of its robe. It withdrew the ark shell it had given me at Odette’s and the knife I had forgotten at the property on Abercorn.
The property Linus bought for me, to give me back some of what I had lost.
“Thanks.” I set both on the bed, dressed in jeans and a tee, pocketed the items, then ducked my head into Oscar’s room. His bed remained empty. With a sigh, I set out for the kitchen. Lethe sat on Amelie’s old stool, hunched over seven takeout boxes with a familiar logo on the lids. “Do I smell bacon?”
“You had a rough night. Ordering in was the least I could do.” She nudged a box toward me. “I charged the food to your account, so don’t thank me too much.”
“Still, I appreciate it.” I went to the fridge and found exactly what I expected—a smoothie rich in Vitamin L—waiting on me. There was no card this time, no note, but I didn’t need one. Even when Linus expected the worst, he gave his best. “How much did you hear?”
“The wraith is your adoptive mom, Linus is something called an Eidolon, and he bound Maud Woolworth to him after you called her soul from her body in a failed resuscitation.”
Mouth hanging open, I cranked my head toward her. “Anything else?”
“I also heard Linus tell Woolly to keep you safe and to call if you ever need him.” She tossed a wedge of buttered toast aside with a frown then crammed a sausage link in her mouth. “Ever implies he won’t be here to hear if you call. Ever implies he’s not coming back. Ever implies last night was goodbye.”
A tremble started in my fingers and spread into my palm. The spasm released the smoothie from my grip, and it spilled across the tiles. “He’s staying on Abercorn to give me time to think.”
“He’s the Potentate of Atlanta, Grier. He put off his responsibilities while he was tutoring you, and that’s fine, but you haven’t polished his apple in weeks.” She grinned with chipmunk cheeks. “And yes, I know exactly how that sounds.”
“He wouldn’t lie about that.” He had never outright lied to me. Omission was his greatest sin.
“He told you he was spending the day there. He never said what he was going to do after he woke up.”
Quick as I could, I mopped up the mess then washed my hands. “I need to get to Abercorn.”
Corbin entered the kitchen on autopilot. He pulled down a bowl and filled it with cereal without looking at me or talking to me. I wasn’t certain he was aware I was there. His eyes weren’t all the way open yet.
“Keep an eye on him,” I told her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“I’ll text Hood,” she mumbled through a full mouth. “He’ll meet you at the gate.”
“Cletus.” I lost precious seconds waiting on the wraith to appear. “Come on. We’re leaving.”
The wraith followed, his bony fingers curling over my shoulder when we reached the front door.
A second later, Woolly alerted me to the presence of a guest. No, not a guest, a vampire.
Great.