He leans forward to push my hair back. Runs his fingertip along the curve of my ugly ear, and I stiffen when his fingers reach it. “Why do you hide it?” he asks. “That cute little bump on your ear?”
I nuzzle his chin up with my nose and kiss just where his neck meets the place I love most on his jaw. He flushes and pulls me close to him, tilting his mouth toward mine, when we suddenly hear a dry twig cracking underfoot and jump apart at the sound.
“Aww—” Beas beams at us, drawing Thom’s arm tighter around her waist. His other arm is sheltering a small steel box against his rib cage. “Oh, don’t stop!” Beas cries, clapping. “I’ve been waiting for this for ages.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, smoothing my hair as my face flames. I step forward to take the box from Thom.
“Mmhmm.” Beas grins, picking up a shovel.
Heaviness settles back around us, and the mood dims with the weight of what we’re about to do. The four of us turn our attention to digging a grave. We pick a spot right next to the bench, where we can cover the disturbed earth and eventually hide it under a newly planted garden. We dig deep, deeper than any of the other boxes were hidden, deep enough to make sure that what we bury can never be found. Finally, when my arms and legs are aching and the first glimpse of dawn is warming the horizon, a hint of worry begins to creep in.
I straighten. “Shouldn’t George and Eliza be back by now?”
“Yes,” Thom agrees.
My stomach twists, and I fish out my Star. “Do you think something happened? Should we go after them?”
“Wait.” Beas freezes and points to a distant bend in the road. “There’s someone coming.”
We grab our weapons and fold together into a line, points extended.
“Thanks for the welcoming party,” George’s voice calls out through the darkness, and I almost collapse from relief. “I know Eliza looks frightening, but she’s really all bark and no bi—?Oof,” he says, as she clubs him in the stomach with her elbow. He doubles over, and she strides forward with the final box, one that’s barely larger than her hand.
I take it from her and align it with the others. When George catches up, he immediately sets to work, arranging the bones inside Will’s makeshift coffin with a scientific intensity. We form a protective circle around him, facing outward. When he’s finally finished, he stands and brushes off his hands.
“As far as I can tell, they’re all here,” he says. “I think we’re ready.”
We turn toward the deep pit we’ve formed in the earth, and the air grows still.
“So, uh,” Thom says. He clasps his hands in front of him. “Should we say something?”
“How about ‘Excuse me, Bard,’” Eliza says. “‘We gave you your peace back, now please return ours?’”
Beas steps forward. Puts her hand over her heart and gestures for all of us to do the same. Then she murmurs solemnly, “Mr. Shakespeare: ‘May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’”
They all look to me, and I unclasp the Stone from where it has become so familiar around my neck. I hesitate. It pools in my hand like water.
I don’t think Mother ever knew this Stone was anything more than a pretty trinket. She died without realizing how much damage it had done, how many seeds of resentment it had sown, how much it had protected her all her life.
I wish I could tell Stefen that she tried to send it to him. That she’d wanted to put things right between them and had died before she could. That taking it off when he asked for it might even have been what killed her.
I run my fingers over its smooth glass one more time. This last physical piece of my mother.
Then I return the Helena Stone at last to its rightful owner. I drop it into the coffin and turn away as Will secures the final screws to seal the bones together, never to be separated again.
Will and Thom jump down into the depths of the pit and lower the casket in stages. We help pull them back up out of the grave, and then, with long, shaky breaths, we each take a shovel.
The earliest rays of dawn begin to heat the horizon as my first clump of dirt hits the coffin.
The second shovelful hits.
The third.
And then something knocks into me as strong as a wave.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Birds are adaptable. They fly south and find a way to survive.
Or, they don’t.
I’ve made it as far south as Norwalk.
I stand on the platform and try to ignore the dull ache in my hand. My injury is wrapped in bandages, like that terrible film Phineas and I saw in the cinema a few years ago. The Mummy’s Hand.
Me and the mummies. We just keep rising up out of the grave.
I inhale air still dark with morning and try to stop glancing over my shoulder. Wonder if anyone from the underground will come after me for what I did to Larkin. I suppose it doesn’t even matter now. I rock on my heels. My hand throbs. And then the breeze changes and my nostrils start to sting.
I take in gulping breaths suddenly tinged with salt.
It fills my nose, my hair, my skin. Dizzying with scents. Soil. Sweat. The breeze itself smells like colors now. Braiding and twining together.
Fruit. The cloying sweetness of perfume. Other things I’ve never smelled before, and never will again.
Juliet’s daughter has actually done it.
She unknotted Phineas’s legacy.
I close my eyes.
I picture Matilda. Wonder if it will be enough.
My lungs fill with air that has been set free of the Curse.
Freedom, at last.
I take a step forward.
I imagine sprouting wings.
In the distance, the train horn calls.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
The air.
The air around me is coming unmistakably alive again.
It sings with scents, each as different and as layered as harmonies. After months of blankness, it’s almost overwhelming—?the mix of compost and wet earth and flowers and musk and sweat. Will fills his lungs with it, and he turns to me, his shovel frozen in the air.
“Aila?” I see his mouth move. But I still can’t hear him.
We each instinctively look up to the sky, its blank, cloudless expanse still unbroken by stars.
Then Beas takes a deep breath and opens her mouth to sing, but it comes out in a monotone whisper.
She closes her mouth again, confused. “Why isn’t it working?” she demands.
“Wait.” George picks up his shovel. “Hurry, help me shovel. Scents went first. They must be coming back in the order they were taken.”
We rush to fill in the rest of the pit, frantically dumping shovelfuls of earth. We smooth it over, leveling the surface to conceal what we’ve done.
Then George kneels for a pouch of Variants and dusts them over his head. They fall to coat his eyelashes and the bridges of his cheekbones. He opens his eyes and blinks. “Nothing.” He turns his hand to let the wind catch the Variants and carry them into the air. “The Variants aren’t working anymore.”
“Look!” Beas cries. She points to the sky.
Overhead, it is as though a giant curtain is drawing back. I take a deep breath as the first stars begin to burst through the darkness. I’d almost forgotten how lovely they are.