Extasia by Claire Legrand

Author:Claire Legrand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2021-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

32

WE WAKE IN THE ELM grove, scattered under the trees. Above me, beyond the black branches, a dim gray sky. Early morning. When I swallow, my mouth tastes sour and my throat feels raw. A knife in my head strikes fast and sharp.

It tastes as though I have swallowed bloodroot, though I do not remember eating it.

When I touch my lips, they bloom with pain. In Avazel, the hurts from Adam’s fists vanished, but now they are back, though not so terrible as before. My face is swollen. My fingers come away red with blood. Hunger has a mean bruise on her face where Adam struck her.

But the true strangeness comes when I look at Vengeance and Sorrow. When we left the Brinsley barn and fled to Avazel, they were well and whole, but now there are scratches up and down pale Sorrow’s arms and legs, as if a creature with thin sharp claws has torn her flesh. Beneath Vengeance’s red hair, her left eye is black and violet, and she cannot fully open it.

“What has happened here?” whispers Vengeance. She clutches herself and breathes thinly, as if her ribs are bruised, and I wonder if Malice kicked her. Or was it Gall, or Ire?

“Did we sleep?” asks Sorrow, staring at her cut-up limbs. “I do not remember falling asleep.”

“It was the coven,” Hunger says, low. “They hurt us, to help the lie.”

My skin prickles. I think she is right. Malice said we must tell a good story, and now here we are. Did we lie there unaware in Avazel, spelled asleep, while the coven kicked and struck and cut us and then shoved bloodroot into our mouths?

Vengeance stares miserably at nothing. “They would not do that to us. We are their sisters.”

“Perhaps only when it is useful to them,” I mutter, pushing myself to my feet just as a shadow peels away from the elm branches above and drifts down.

My heart seems to stop, jarred silent with fear. It is her—the ghost I know with the mouth full of flies. She braces herself against the ground with those long arms like poles and tilts her head to the side to stare at Hunger, who watches, trembling, in her torn nightgown. Then she reaches for my sister with her long, thin arms—too long, too thin—and opens her mouth wide, and there it is, that bell. A silver smile jammed deep in her throat.

My heart is a hammer and anvil. It clangs and hums against my bones. The gray woman moans a low, sad note like the beginning of a song, but I do not want to hear it, nor see her face, nor have her anywhere near my sister. Looking at her, hearing her, makes it hard to breathe. Sorrow said she has seen echoes of things in the ghosts’ shadows—noses and eyes and bits of color. My mother’s face. And if that is true? What words might she say for all of us to hear?

I jump to my feet, spring at her wildly, wave my arms, punch the air.

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