The Architect of Song (Haunted Hearts Legacy Book 1) (41 page)

Better to admit it to myself before I brought Hawk back. On the other hand, as well as he read my thoughts, I suspected he already knew.

I tried again to thread the necklace’s hook through the loop, my fingers still fidgety.

What would I do if Chaine were guilty?

Were I to go to the local jurisprudence, the pig Larson would win and sweet old Merril would rot away in bedlam. If I kept Chaine’s secret, he would live the rest of his life as his brother, never paying the consequences of his actions, and Hawk would not receive the vengeance he deserved.

There didn’t seem to be an easy answer.

At last, the clasp caught. Tucking the locket under my bodice, I scolded myself for failing to bring any rope to help me climb into the mine.

“Oh no. No. You are not to climb down, my lovely. That was never the plan.” Hawk towered before me, his back turned so he could regard the decaying scaffold over the shaft. “Once you’ve opened the boards enough, I’ll go down and call up whatever I find.”

He turned to me. Anxiety sucked the light from his eyes. He wanted his brother to be innocent as much as me—for all the same reasons.

“Get a stick to pry them apart,” he said. “It should be easy enough. Most of them are rotted. There are just a few new slats.”

I found a fallen branch about the thickness of my arm and the length of my leg. My ghost waited as I wedged the pointed end beneath two boards nailed together.

“Careful now,” he said. “Stand clear of the platform. It might give beneath you.”

My time in the tunnel with Chaine resurfaced, rasping like claws up and down my spine. I ignored the memory and heaved my weight upon the thick end of the stick. A snapping crack reverberated through my arms, and three of the boards gave way.

I repositioned the branch and pried away two more. My wrists and elbows ached. Panting from exertion, I stood back to admire the hole, kneading my raw hands.

“Beautifully done.” Hawk drifted to the edge. “Now say put, and don’t get too close to the opening. I’ll keep you apprised.” With that, he dropped out of sight.

I tossed my stick aside. “Remember not to put any walls between us.”

“I’m not a simpleton, Juliet,” Hawk called up.

“And avoid water puddles.” We had never ruled out if his contact with the water was what had killed those seven petals that night, or if it was in fact our contact with one another. We couldn’t take any chances, having only eight left, including the one in my locket.

“Anymore instructions, Mum?”

“I’m trying to keep you safe.”

“I’m a ghost, Juliet. It isn’t as if I can die again. Wait, my nose is feeling a bit drippy. Dear me, I fear I’ve caught a chill!”

“Oh, hah.”

His answering chortle lifted my spirit, but only a little. Running my fingers along the smooth metal buttons of my split skirt, I leaned over the hole and watched his smearing glow within the depths.

The mine was deeper than I remembered. I scooted my toes a few extra inches away from the edge. “Look for something shimmery, it might be the watch.”

“Nag-nag. Leave me be. I know what I’m—” His voice broke.

“Hawk … what is it?”

After a torturous span of silence, he answered. “I-I recognize this place. My purgatory.”

His voice dragged as if weighted down. Foreboding snaked through me. If this was where his body was buried … it further implicated Chaine. I couldn’t bear to ask if he could see a skeleton.

I crouched closer with my palms on my knees, straining to hear his breath, his clicking teeth.

“Juliet … look out!”

A shove from behind knocked the air from my lungs. My knees slammed onto the platform, my neck slung backward like a whip. The rotted scaffolding gave beneath me. Splintering boards ripped my shin as I fell through.

I was spinning, spinning in my head. Memories jumbled with reality. A child, falling. Stomach queasy with the descent into oblivion. Terror … helplessness. And darkness.

Deaf to it all, not even my own screams to comfort me.

Broken wood floated everywhere. I grabbed blindly at each piece.

Struggling to catch a breath, I hit the ground—right side first. On impact, a shock wave rippled through my body. My teeth jarred in my head. Blood scrambled through my veins. The taste of dirt and bile coated my throat.

I groaned and torqued my neck to see a silhouette looking down from the dizzying heights, perched on the shattered opening. A shadow crept into view beside it. In a moment of horror, I recognized Aunt Bitti and Naldi, the daylight a nimbus behind them. Whimpering, I searched for my locket and found the necklace gone. It had snapped off during the fall; I wasn’t sure I’d had it latched properly to begin with.

I tried to reach with my right arm in search of the locket, crying out for Hawk. Icy fire raced from my shoulder to my elbow, and I fainted dead away.

A warm, rough tongue licked my chin. The scent of musk and fur itched my nose.

The kitten
. It must have eaten all of the ham and wanted more.

It hurt to open my eyes, so I kept them shut and started to lift my arm to stroke the persistent feline. Shooting needles of fire leapt through my shoulder. Nausea gushed into my head.

Disoriented, I groaned and tried the other arm. This one worked. I reached out and met a handful of wiry hair that shuddered and jerked free. A burst of kittens scrambled all across my body.

My eyelids eased open. Bright light filtered from somewhere above, dotting my surroundings with patches of illumination. The kittens didn’t look right … black with beady red eyes.

Rats!

I screamed and sat up too fast. Every part of my body ached, as if barbed wire wrapped my bones and joints. Warm wetness soaked through the left leg of my split skirt. Gingerly, I lifted the torn fabric with my left hand and saw the bleeding gash in my shin.

I shivered, cold despite the hot throb in my right shoulder. Groaning, I propped myself against a dirt wall. The sea of rats parted and vanished into the darkness, outside the light’s reach.

Memory crashed over me. My fall … the missing locket. Bitti.

Why had she pushed me?

I looked up at the opening, so high overhead I would never make it out on my own. Tears rushed my cheeks, hot and searing. I was alone, and unless someone discovered me, I would be here when night fell. There would be no sun to warm me or keep the rats at bay. No fairytale or gentle, muddied hands to provide comfort. Only utter darkness.

My insides quaked. I knew deafness, but had never been blind as well … not literally.

I clamped my mouth with my good hand. My mind shuttered, blinking in and out of lucidity. I struggled to catch a breath, the air shallow and dank in my lungs. My past came back, images of spiders, roaches, and rats creeping in and out of my hair and clothes. The muscles in my stomach rolled.

I lurched forward and threw up my biscuit from earlier, coughing to catch a swallow of air between heaves. Bending my knees to my chest, I slid down the wall. The friction of my spine loosened dirt to sprinkle around me. I didn’t stop until the ground met my left side. There I curled up, sick and defeated.

I heard it then … not a living voice, but a voice captured within a memory.

“Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was a young man who lived in a hole. He was the prince of mud and grime.”

Chaine had been a child when the monster first tossed him into this pit. Yet he managed to survive. Taking a deep breath, I sat up again, slower this time. I forced myself to stand on trembling legs. My left shin almost gave beneath me, but I took a step to assess my injuries. My right shoulder was useless. I’d lost my hat, but my scarf remained hanging in disarray on my head. With my good hand, I tugged it free and formed a sling. Lightheaded and woozy, I pressed my back against the wall and studied the outskirts of the light for any movement.

“The rats were his chancellors, the spiders his stewards, and the salamanders his jesters of rhyme
.”

If a child could tame such creatures, so could I. Smacking my lips to quell the bitter bile on my tongue, I took another shaky step forward in search of the locket. The edge of my hat appeared, just outside the light in a pile of broken wood. A glint of silver glistened from underneath it.

One wary step, then another four. Wincing, I nudged the debris aside with a broken board I’d picked up along the way for a cane, and toppled my riding cap. I laughed, hysterically happy to see my locket, still closed and intact, coiled beneath it.

I bent—as careful and creaky as an old woman—to retrieve the necklace. There was no possibility of putting it around my neck with just one good hand. Instead, I wrapped the chain around my wrist that rested immobile in the sling, so the necklace wouldn’t be dropped again. Then, with my right fist, I clamped the locket as tight as possible without aggravating my shoulder.

“Juliet … thank God …” Hawk’s breathless murmur stirred before I saw him aglow in front of me. He reached out as if to embrace me, then remembered he couldn’t. His hand dropped to his side. “I’ve never felt so damn useless. The shadow appeared behind you and then I was gone.” His jaw twitched. “A part of me kept waiting for you to join me. In my purgatory.” He punched his thigh. “I’m such a selfish worm, to even consider such a thing.”

The remorse on his face made me long to touch him. “I’ve longed for the same, many times. It is only natural.”

“Natural? There is nothing natural about you wanting to die. Do you hear me?” His tortured gaze swept over my body and paused at my sling before catching on my bloodied skirt. “Oh Lord, you’re hurt.”

“I am fine,” I tried to assure him.

“Do you know who pushed you?”

“You didn’t see?”

He shook his head.

Before I could respond, something in the distance distracted me … over Hawk’s shoulder, on the other side of the debris where his glow reached past the shadows.

“Look.” I limped around busted boards and rusted nails, out of the warm comfort of sunshine into the dark. The collapsed platform had opened up a lower end of the tunnel leading to a steep drop and a wall of wooden slats. Several of the boards had cracked, showcasing a dingy white shape on the other side.

“Sweet heaven. That wasn’t opened earlier.” Hawk followed me.

I picked my way through the rubble on the slope, leaning into my makeshift cane to support my left leg. The closer we came, the faster my heartbeat and the slower my pace. A skeleton took shape through slits of broken wood.

A sob pressed against my windpipe. I wasn’t sure I had the courage to see Hawk’s decaying corpse.

The light around me waned and I hesitated, looking behind to find my ghost had stopped moving. Intense apprehension furrowed his brows.

I squeezed the locket in my cold fist. “You do not have to come. You need not even watch. Turn your back. I require only your light.”

His shoulders stiffened along with his chin. “No. Whatever we find, we face it together.”

In that moment, I understood. Like me, he would never be able to believe in Chaine’s guilt lest he saw it for himself. Thus was the strength of his love for his twin … an unsurpassable, inexplicable faith.

Choking back another bout of tears, I nodded and took the final few steps, putting me face to face with the widest crack. I peered within, inhaling the scent of mildew and rot. Hawk’s glow spread across my shoulder, brightening the morbid scene beyond the wall.

The skeleton, dressed in nothing but a few threadbare rags, caked mud, and cobwebs, lay wedged beneath a heavy pillar which must have fallen upon him during a cave-in. I swallowed a whimper, determined to be strong for Hawk.

My gaze ran the length of the remains, finding the square pocket watch in a macabre pose: the chain twisted around a rib, the hinged lid open, the face cracked, and the hands frozen at half-past midnight. Now I understood why his watch did not disappear with the other things that night I met him. Aside from his ragged boots, it was the sole article that hadn’t decomposed and still remained upon his person.

Upon seeing the skeleton’s right leg, I covered my mouth. The leather boot had rotted enough to split, exposing his foot where bones twisted upon one another, setting the ankle at an awkward slant—an obvious deformity.

I cried behind my hand. Hot moisture streaked from my eyes. I couldn’t look at my ghost. Instead, I waited for him to speak. But I never expected the words he said.

“There’s another one.”

“What?”

“There … in the furthest reaches. I see a second skeleton.”

Sure enough, another frame of bones lay sprawled beneath the debris where the small chamber ended against a dirt wall. I had no time to debate what this meant before Hawk shouted behind me.

“Flood!’

My feet swept up beneath me. A wave of warm water pinned me against the wall, knocking my fist open so the locket dangled from my wrist. The mine’s collapse had busted a reservoir, as if a dam had opened. I struggled with both hands to grasp at slats of wood for balance. I cried out—pitch dark swallowing me in the absence of Hawk’s light. Another gush smashed me against the wall, the water rising up to my waist.