Your Blood, My Bones by Kelly Andrew

Author:Kelly Andrew [Andrew, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2024-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

The following morning, there was no sun at all. The sky sat gray and bloated atop the hills, blanketing the whole of Willow Heath in a pea-soup shroud. Inside the house, it was dark as night, the windows boarded in every last room.

Pedyr found Wyatt in the dining room, her arm crooked under her cheek, her breathing soft. She’d worn his sweater, and it hung off her like a dress, the twice-cuffed sleeves swallowing up her hands. In her lap sat James’s old Polaroid camera, lens winking in the lit twinkle of the chandelier. Several developed photos lay scattered across the table like leaves. Nearby, Mama munched on fallen maidenhair, peering over at him with her usual steely astuteness.

Gingerly, he pulled out a chair and sank into it. At the head of the table, Wyatt didn’t stir. For once, she slept soundly—without crying out. The rare sight of her at peace twisted something sharp inside him. For so long, he’d clenched his anger between his teeth like a bit. Chewing on it, until he went lockjawed and raving, driven mad by the aftertaste. Dying in silence. Living in silence. Surviving in silence.

Simple. Simple. Simple.

And then, finally, there was Wyatt. The key to his freedom, with her hazel eyes and her head full of daydreams, her hand sliding into his. There was nothing simple about her. There was nothing easy. And yet, for years, he’d clung to her as tightly as he could. And now, at the end of all things, he didn’t know how to let her go.

The beast was right. He was a coward.

But last night, he’d looked into the face of the deathwatch and saw how it would end. It was the simplest thing of all, to let it come.

Careful not to wake her, he pried up the scattered photographs and flicked through them one by one. The first several snapshots captured the guest room at various angles—the walls charred in black and wallpaper peeling, a pit of ash where the bed had been. The next cluster had been snapped in her bedroom. There was the great, old willow, wedged in the floor like a weeping guillotine. There was her bed, the canopy in tatters. He shuffled through a few more, past the piano swallowed in moss, the cupboard full of shattered plates.

On the last photo, he paused.

It wasn’t the kitchen that caught his eye, windows boarded and chickens roosting. It wasn’t the blackened grout or the rotting bowl of fruit on the island. Instead, it was the figure in the hall, caught in a candid, his black eyes staring up at Wyatt.

Sweat cropped along Pedyr’s skin as unease festered in the pit of his stomach. Because the boy in the photo was a ghost. Where the light fell, he looked every bit like James. Dark hair, dark eyes, the sharp tip of a smile. But in the shadows, he was all corpse. He stood with ribs bared and limbs gone slack, one half of his mouth gorged open in a skeleton’s sneer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.