A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (15 page)

“You’ve seen the ghost before.”

“Many times now.”

“You didn’t tell Dane.”

“And you don’t tell him you love him.”

“Is it the same?” he asks with a faint smile.

“It is.” I twine my fingers through the long silver chain and the ring that’s too large for any of my fingers. “Love makes us liars, and we call it protection.”

“Are you still lying?”

I hand him the syringe with its milky remnant of poison.

He turns it over in his hands, a puzzled frown marring his features. “What is this?”

“The reason the Headmaster is a ghost.”

The breath rushes from his body as though he’s been struck. His hand closes around the glass so tightly I’m half afraid he’ll shatter it, but I can’t touch his clenched fist without the equal fear that he’ll drop it. “Who?” he demands shakily.

“Does it matter?”

“Ophelia!”

“Claudius.” I take the syringe back and slide it once more into my pocket. I wish I could give him this thing to carry, but Horatio will have enough burdens to bear after I walk away. For the first time in my life, I’ll be the one walking away. “There’s no proof. Except, perhaps, the word of a ghost, but while that might make for an excellent tale of blood and madness, there’s no good to come of it in truth. There’s no proof. Nothing to be done.”

“And so no good in making it known,” he finishes for me. He doesn’t agree, exactly, but he knows me.

“If a heart attack was impossible to get over, how much more so murder?”

He swears and rakes a hand savagely through his hair. “So I should never have brought up the ghost?”

“You thought it was for the best.”

The bean sidhe have stopped dancing. They’re gathered now around the stone chaise, their hands linked as they stare up at the roof and the ghostly figure who lectures a boy all too flesh and blood.

“Besides,” I add slowly, “I think he would have seen the ghost eventually anyway.”

“You know things I don’t.”

“They’re waiting.” I can barely hear my own voice, scared and small and little more than a wisp of sound in breath. “Everything is just waiting to see what happens. They shouldn’t care. We’re mortal; we die all the time. But they’re waiting.”

“He’s coming back.”

We both straighten and put our backs to the rail, watch the haunted young man tread carefully across the widow’s walk as if any step could send him plunging straight to Hell.

“We lie and call it protection, because the truth hurts so badly,” I murmur. “Just once, I have to be a good daughter. Take care of him, Horatio.”

He fixes me with a troubled gaze but has no chance to answer before Dane rejoins us, his dark eyes alight with a feverish glint. His face is pale but for two bright spots of color that burn high on his cheeks. “Well, hello.”

“What did he say?”

Dane considers this a moment, his head cocked to one side as he studies both of us in turn. “I think not,” he replies coolly. “I think you’d tell.”

“You know I never would,” retorts Horatio, his pride—or perhaps his love—stung by the accusation.

A small, bitter smile floats about Dane’s lips. “And Ophelia is incapable of telling, so perhaps there is some truth to that. But you must swear to me, both of you, that you will never tell anyone what you’ve seen or heard tonight.”

“I swear it,” Horatio says immediately.

I just shrug. To swear, to promise, they’re words, and words have loopholes. Intent means more than the vow. At least this promise I can keep.

The smile twists, deeper and stranger at once. His hands reach under his shirt for the crucifix on its plain silver chain. “Swear by the cross.”

A sudden bellow rips through the night, and we all flinch. “Swear it!” The ghost stands still at the corner, black holes where his eyes should be, hands curled into fists at his side. “Swear it!”

With shaking hands, Horatio lifts the cross to his lips. “I swear it,” he whispers.

Dane turns and lays the cool silver against my lips, the feet of the Savior digging into the tender skin. “Swear it, Ophelia.” My lips shape the words against the metal. Something savage flashes across his face, and he doesn’t even move the crucifix before his mouth crashes against mine. He tastes of toothpaste and tobacco and blood. The pendant’s sharp edges bite into my lips, my tongue, before the crucifix falls away to swing against his chest with a smear of blood against the dark fabric of his shirt.

“This is …” Trembling, Horatio wipes away the fine beads of sweat from his brow. “This is unlike any …”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He suddenly seizes his friend’s hand, grabs mine in a crushing grip. His skin burns with a fever no medicine will cure. “We have things to set right! But first … first we have to know. We have to have proof, even if it’s only knowledge.”

“Dane—”

“Don’t be scared, either of you. I may act … I may …” He shakes his head and tries again. “I’ll only be acting, I swear it, but you have to trust me. You can’t let them know it’s not real. Promise me!”

“We’ve already sworn,” Horatio points out dryly.

Dane gives him a manic grin and laughs so loudly—so suddenly—the entire night seems caught in it. “So you have, my truest friends.”

The bean sidhe drift back through the gardens to join the morgens at the edge of the lake. From the woods, dull shadows tramp from the trees, their shapes indistinct under the enormous basin they bear between them. They drop it to the damp earth with a heavy thud that echoes in the stillness like a muffled shot.

The morgens step up onto the shore as far as they can, just their toes still in the lake, and wring their hair out into the basin. Water splashes against the metal and slowly fills as they return to the depths and soak up more. Inch by inch, the basin fills. The morgens laugh as they go about their task, and softly—too softly to be called accompaniment—the bean sidhe begin to sing.

The grey shapes prove to be women dressed in tattered robes worn thin by time and repeated washings, their long legs flashing through rents and ragged edges. They look older than the bean sidhe, still peculiarly ageless in the way of all fae, but they wear the experience in their faces as so few faeries do. Their long grey hair is bound into sectioned braids that trail on the grass behind them. They brace corrugated boards within the basin and position themselves around it.

And wait.

The bean nighe have come to Elsinore Academy.

Dane may never tell us what the ghost made him promise.

He doesn’t have to.

The washerwomen wait to cleanse the blood of those soon to be slain.

Revenge, after all, is a very messy business.

PART III

CHAPTER 19

Dawn comes early in the summer. It’s not even five before pale, pearly grey streaks across the sky from the east. It isn’t dawn, not yet, but the sky slowly lightens to stretch a canvas for sunrise. We slip back through the trapdoor and the attics and the empty school, back to the house that trembles under the weight of something it doesn’t even know to fear yet. All day long, the students will be arriving for the year ahead. The grounds that have been quiet all summer long will suddenly explode with noise, with laughter and shouts and, from the youngest ones, perhaps some tears as they cope with truly leaving home for the first time.

I catch Dane’s hand as he starts to follow Horatio back into the house. “I need to talk to you,” I whisper.

He looks surprised, and I wonder if I’ve ever said that to him before, if I’ve said it to anyone. Little Ophelia, the living ghost in the corner of the room, never needs to talk, she just listens and remembers and never tells anyone what she hears.

Still, he follows me to the lakeside, where no amount of shouting will reach the house, to the stand of willows that sprawls across a stretch of shore between the dock and the midpoint. Here, he set me on fire and crafted the sun that burns inside my chest to bear his fury. Here he collared me with silver and sapphire and aquamarine, and bruised me with his pain. Now it’s my turn to do, to undo. I’ll still bear the bruises, but this time I won’t be the only one.

I open my mouth but don’t know where to begin, and then he’s kissing me, hard and consuming, and thought shatters beneath his touch. My back presses against one of the trees, a small knot digging painfully into my skin. He soothes the tiny scabs left behind by the bite of the crucifix, even as his hands trail over my body and light fire in their wake.

He laughs against my skin, his face buried in a mass of hair over my shoulder. “I like your way of talking, Ophelia.”

A flush scalds my cheeks. For the first time, I wonder if there’s a part of Father, a part of Laertes, that’s right. The comfort he claims to need of me, if it takes only this form, he could get from nearly any girl in school, but they’re not here yet and I’ve been here all along. Even the thought wounds; given voice, it might cripple.

“My father has forbidden me to see you.”

The words fall flat, and for a terrifying, tremulous moment, they have no meaning.

Then the pain pulls across his face, and I know he’s made them mean too much.

“You told him to jump in the lake, I hope.”

I wince. Even in my most rebellious thoughts, I’ve never sought to remind him of how Mama died.

It’s answer enough, though, because Dane spins away from me with a violent grace. His eyes flash with a fury that doesn’t quite hide the hurt. “You said yes! How can you—how could you—you said yes!”

“He’s my father.”

“But you’re your mother’s daughter. How can he mean anything?”

Because he’s the one who didn’t walk away. But Dane thinks that long ago day in the lake was an accident, a tragedy, so there’s nothing I can say to that. “Dane, he needs me to be a good daughter.”

“You are a good daughter! Just as you are, you’re a daughter any man could wish for!”

“No, I’m not,” I whisper. “I try to be, but I never am. Not in the ways that matter. I
have
to try. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, be here.” Swift as a blink, he yanks my hand to his heart, flicks apart the top buttons of my blouse to press his other hand against my breast. “Be here, right here. Where you promised to be.”

I swallow hard, at his words, at his touch, at his eyes on the ring still on its chain around my throat. Hours before Dane saw a ghost—before he swore to be a good son to a sundered soul—I promised my living, breathing father I’d be a good daughter. It’s the same vow, the same cost; only the details differ. “I’m sorry.”

“Ophelia, you promised me.” He lets go of my hand, my palm still pressed against his chest, and traces his fingers down my sternum to the silver band. Goose bumps trail in his wake. “You promised me.”

“I know,” I whisper, “and I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying you’re sorry!” he snarls. His fingers curl around the ring. With his other hand still braced against my chest he yanks at the chain. It pulls me with it, choking me even as pain blooms from the clasp at the back of my neck. He lets go of me but pulls again, and I drop to my knees as the links on either side of the clasp finally give way. The ends dangle from his fist like strands of a whip. “Stop saying you’re sorry.”

Tears grip my chest in an iron band. The ring was such a little weight, but I can’t breathe with it gone. His other hand shakes as he strokes the top of my head, and I lean against his knee, sobbing. Salt stings the tiny cuts on my lips, and I can taste the sour, copper tang of blood.

He moves away so suddenly that I pitch forward against the roots that tangle their way to the edge of the lake. “I need you,” he whispers, the words like shards of glass. He says nothing else, just turns and walks away.

Always walking away.

The tears flood me, quake my body with waves of pain. The sun where my heart should be scalds my bones, my muscles, curls through my skin until I’m just a heap of blistered flesh, unrecognizable within the agony.

A cool hand passes over my hair in a damp streak, lightly lifts my face to trace the path of tears down my ravaged face. Mama sits on the tangle of roots, her feet still in the water, her night-purple hair plastered to her pale skin. “And Dahut and the strange lover in the red armor stole from the sleeping king the key to the city, and opened the gates,” she murmurs. “The tide, swelled by the terrifying storm, rushed in through the gap in the bronze walls and swamped the city. The great bells of the soaring churches sang in the wind and the strength of the water. The ocean roared in triumph as it finally dragged the great city to the base of the bay and drowned its beautiful buildings, its elegant churches, the cathedrals that spoke more to the arrogance of man than the grace of God. Even had he the key in hand, the King himself could not have turned back the flood.”

She gently pushes me to make me stretch out on the roots, cheek pillowed on one arm, and she strokes my hair into a great fan around me until I’m drowning in a spill of night. “You let Dane steal the key from you, Ophelia.”

“I gave it to him,” I whisper.

“That never mattered.”

I gulp in shaky breaths, but the sobs don’t stop. They tear at my lungs, make my muscles burn because my body is too weak to take this agony.

“There are less painful ways to drown than in tears.”

But the tears aren’t water; they’re fire, the flares of a star that orbits the shattered pieces of my heart. You can’t drown in fire.

You can only be consumed by it.

Then Father is kneeling beside me, his face ashy and fatigued, and I wonder if he’s spent all night staring at the papers on his desk. “Ophelia?”

“I told him.”

His hand hovers, awkward and uncertain, over my face, then lightly touches my tear-slick cheek. “I know it hurts,” he says softly. “I’m sorry you have to feel this way, Ophelia, because I know you think you love him. But this is for the best.”

Mama laughs derisively, a cruel sound that Father cannot hear, has never heard since her death. “As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood, disasters in the sun, and the moist star upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.” Her voice is almost a song. “Even in the end of all things, when all omens shriek to what comes, men will be the fools their petty lives have scripted them to be. Pain is only for the best when it ends.”

I close my eyes against her words, against the genuine concern that wars with relief in my father’s face. I can feel her hand against my hair, my skin, my back, even as I hear him urge me to return to the house, to clean up and perhaps go to bed for a few hours. The roots dig into my skin, sure to leave bruises, and my elbow stings as particles cling to the bloody wound.

I deserve this.

This pain, this terror, this despair, this is mine to bear.

I promised Dane I would help him bear his grief.

And I walked away.