“Am I dreaming?” I asked, more to the world itself than to her. “Is this a nightmare?”
“He said you would say that.”
Under the blankets I pinched myself. No, definitely awake. I groaned.
“I want to leave,” I said, glad that I could move my arms and legs again. “At once. You mustn’t try to stop me.”
“He said you would say that, too.” Poppy grinned, pushing the silky hair away from her face. I had never been superstitious, never spurned a person when birth cursed them with a wine stain on their face. But were those not called the Devil’s mark? How fitting that name seemed now. “Nobody will stop you from trying, but you can’t go. The book says so, and that means it’s final. Done and dusted, as the master says.”
Not if I have anything to say about it.
Poppy ruffled the dog’s ears, and he glanced up at her with his fathomless chocolate eyes before turning them back to me. I had to admit, his warm little head on my arm was soothing. It was then that I noted someone had set my wrist and bound it. The pain was distant now, just an echo. All of it—the fear, the urgency—was distant. But only for now. There was too much to think about, and I would need to be alone for a long while to digest it all.
And Lee. God, I hadn’t even thought of him. Were he and his uncle here because they deserved death? It didn’t seem possible.
The girl was not in a hurry to leave, humming softly to herself while she made figure-eight patterns on the blanket with her pinkie finger. This small, soft, pale child might in fact be a killer. I pulled the blanket more snugly around myself.
“Are you really going to hurt Mrs. Eames?” I asked, a tad sheepish.
Poppy’s bright eyes flashed toward me. “Oh no,” she said with a tittering laugh, “I’m not just going to hurt her, I’m going to kill her.”
“How? How could you do such a thing?”
She shrugged, patting the dog’s head. “The same way I do all the others.”
“And what way is that?” Did I truly want to know? My curiosity had cost me so much already, but the urge to know more yet remained.
“With my voice!” she chirped. She grinned and opened her mouth very wide. There was nothing out of the ordinary about her mouth, just a young girl’s teeth and tongue. “I can scream louder than anyone I know, so loud it really, really hurts when you hear it.”
“Won’t that hurt the rest of us, then?”
“No, not a bit; Mary will protect you,” she said simply. “She’s quite good at protecting people.”
Mary. Just the evening before I had shared a pleasant supper with these people, liking them, thinking them my peers. Even potential friends. My brain now pounded with the confusion of it all—there had been signs, of course, that the house was a touch odd, but this was something else entirely.
And I would be escaping it as soon as possible.
“I would like to sleep more now, Poppy,” I said with a thin smile. In truth, I needed time alone to think and plan. After all, it was just a book, wasn’t it? Whatever grand speeches Mr. Morningside made about it, it was a book, and books could be moved, or lost.
Or burned.
Those living shadows wandering the halls would make it more difficult to steal covertly, but they also made me want to steal all the more. This was a horrible place, and I would feel no guilt taking from it what I wanted—ensuring my freedom. America, so far away, with an ocean between here and there, was just what I needed.
“Right you are!” she crowed, hopping down from the bed and scooping up Bartholomew. “Come along, little pup, Miss Louisa has had a bad night, but we’re all going to help her, aren’t we? We all get on so well together here. Soon she’ll be our best and truest friend.”
Chapter Fourteen
When I emerged from my chambers an hour later, I half expected to be met by one of those foul shadow creatures. Residents, Mr. Morningside had called them. Residents indeed.
The hall outside my door was empty, but that hardly made me feel safer. I felt watched now, marked, a bright red poppy in a field of white daisies. Every choice available to me became equally urgent. If I was going to be stuck here, then the least I could do was warn Lee before he became stuck, too, or worse, killed. The pain in my wrist was all but gone, the sturdy splint around it expertly applied. I wondered at who had fixed me up, and I wondered at the fact that murderers could treat me, a relative stranger, with such tenderness.
It didn’t matter, in the end. Only a fool would linger in Coldthistle House once they’d learned its secrets. And I was no fool. I decided to tackle the problems in order of simplicity: food would be easiest, and so I made my way slowly to the foyer and then the kitchen, watchful for any signs of the Residents.
Nobody bothered me. I heard the muffled chatting from morning tea coming from the downstairs parlor, and I heard Lee’s laughter as he found some anecdote or another uproariously funny. I didn’t necessarily like his uncle, but I struggled to imagine what Lee Brimble might have done to be drawn to the book and this place. He seemed so kind, so well meaning . . . But then again, so had my fellow employees, and perhaps he too possessed some dark secret.
I had a few of my own, of course—truancy, magic tricks, and stealing, for example—but those vices now struck me as tame, even silly.
The stoves were still warm from baking, but the kitchen was otherwise quiet and abandoned. Where had everyone gone? Were they deliberately hiding? I hurried to the pantry and swiped a piece of brown bread and a few slivers of dried apple. When I escaped Pitney, I had done so on an even emptier stomach. Life there had made me no stranger to hunger. Our punishments often involved going for days with only crusts and water.
I bolted down the bread and took more time with the apple slices, pocketing one or two for a later emergency. For now, Lee would have to wait—I had no earthly idea how to tell him about all that I knew. We were only just acquaintances, and there was no reason at all for him to trust me or the outrageous stories I might tell. Instead, I took the back exit out of the kitchen and into the brisk cool of morning. My clothes were just heavy enough to ward off the chill, and if I made an escape in earnest I would need to bring the blankets from my bedding for extra warmth. I had escaped Pitney with help from my sort-of friend Jenny, who caused a distraction while I slipped out a window and into the night. Unless I could convince Lee that my stories were truth and not madness, I would be escaping completely on my own.