Belladonna

I MEANT FOR IT TO BE MARJORIE.” THERE WAS NO HESITATION IN HIS words, no guilt or denial. “Did you think no one would ever realize the truth? The entire town already whispers about Father likely having bastard children roaming about. How long did you think it’d take before someone figured out that I was born to the governess?”

“Marjorie only ever wanted what was best for you,” Lillian spoke through Signa’s lips, hoping that her son might say something to redeem himself. That she’d still find love somewhere deep within him. But Signa saw only a callous young man who believed that she and Sylas would burn that night. It was the reason he spoke so freely.

As many times as Signa had been spurned, the realization still cut like a knife. She’d trusted him. Danced with him. Relied on him. And for what?

“If Marjorie wanted what was best, she never would have told me the truth.” There was no extinguishing Percy’s anger. No soothing the rage that burned in his voice. “She didn’t want what was best—she wanted a relationship. If I allowed that, then how long until she wanted others to know of us? How long until word got out that I was a bastard, and my prospects ruined? Don’t you see? I had to protect myself and this family from shame.”

Lillian wanted nothing more than to forgive her son, and Signa had to gather every drop of energy she had to push against Lillian and remind her of the truth. Though the spirit resisted at first, Signa could feel her understanding in the way her body wilted, shoulders caving in as Lillian asked, “Then why was I the one who ended up dead?”

“You tell me!” Percy seethed. “I put belladonna into a pot of tea that was meant for Marjorie. But you drank it, didn’t you? I didn’t realize it until you grew sick, and by then it was too late. You were dying, so slowly that you had the manor descending into chaos. So I gave you more berries, always in the tea, to help you pass on so that everyone might end their suffering. But it was never enough. I was getting them to you too slowly, and your body was developing a tolerance too quickly.”

Signa noticed then that Percy was shivering from the chill of communing with the dead. She wished it were enough to freeze him. It was a bitter thought, though in that moment she hated Percy so deeply that she’d have taken Death’s scythe and cleaved him in two herself. He had no remorse. No sympathy. He spoke like he had that day at the apothecary—with the cold calculation of someone who cared only for how others perceived him. How fast a person could fall into that trap and let themselves be ensnared.

“And what of Blythe?” Signa was surprised when her own words were spoken aloud. Lillian’s grasp on her was weakening. She registered the smoke growing closer around them and Sylas’s shadow on the hard ground beside her. God, she never should have gotten him into this mess.

Percy turned his face to the flames. “I had to do something to bring Father back to his senses. He wanted to ruin this family. I needed to bring him closer to me—I thought that we might become closer through our suffering. Yet ever since you arrived”—he glared venom at Signa—“he’s only gotten closer to her.”

“So you made yourself sick as well,” Signa added. “Not just to get rid of the antidote but because you thought you could—what? Scare him into keeping Grey’s? Have him offer it to you out of sympathy?” The puzzle pieces were finally locking together.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” Percy spoke too easily. Too confidently for the situation, slipping back into the role he so often played in high society. “My father took away everything I’ve spent my entire life working toward, all because he was too deep in his mourning to make sense of anything. I did what I had to do. He left me no choice.”

“You had every choice.” It was Lillian who spoke again, a tremor of exhaustion in her voice. “Your father didn’t take the business away because he hates you. He did it because he loves you, Percy. Because he regrets spending his life working and never seeing his family. He didn’t want the same for you, don’t you see?”

A shadow crossed Percy’s face, and for a moment Signa wondered if the words hit their mark. If there was any light left in his soul. But the darkness crept over Percy’s eyes again as he shook the idea free, refusing it.

There was no time for discussion. No time to argue. There was fire at his heels. “None of it matters anymore.” He locked eyes with Lillian. With Signa. “This fire will consume your body, and I’ll be free from you at last. And this time, Signa, you won’t have the chance to save anyone.”

The flames caught the glow of steel in Percy’s palm—a pocketknife. Small, sharp, and ready for blood. He aimed for Signa’s throat, but his swing went wide as Sylas shoved her to the side, hard enough for her to lose her breath, and he buried the knife in her shoulder.

Signa felt each of Lillian’s emotions, even sharper than the thrust from the knife—the sorrow, the pain, and most potent, the realization that there was no coming back for Percy. She lifted her head to steal one last look at her son, to forever remember him as the baby placed in her arms twenty years before, and then Lillian turned to Sylas. “He is yours to do with as you will. I cannot protect him anymore” was all she said, each word cracked and broken, and she dropped her hold on Signa’s body.

Signa fell upon all fours, clutching her chest and gasping from her returned breath as Percy brought the knife down again. Before it could strike, Sylas stepped in front of her and caught the blade in his palm. Percy gasped, eyes wild as he tried to lower his hand. He pushed down upon it without success, attempting to get the knife to budge. To cut. To do anything. “What is this?” His lip trembled, skin ashen. “What are you doing?” Percy looked to Signa for an explanation, trembling like a leaf caught in a storm.

Sylas didn’t waver as he held the blade. Signa waited for the blood to come. For him to wince from the pain. But there was not so much as a scratch upon his glove.

It was as though all the air had been pressed from her lungs when she heard him whisper, “This wasn’t how I intended to do this. I’m sorry, Little Bird.”

His shoulders were blurring, bleeding into the night. Signa understood the sorrow in his voice as shadows built around his feet and engulfed him until he was no longer Sylas but the reaper of the night. The bringer of death. One by one the stars winked out, until the night turned black and the only light came from the seething flames that glistened upon the snow and bowed at his feet. He pulled the night into him, claiming the moon for his scythe, and pointed its tip at Percy’s throat.

Death stood before her, and Signa could not breathe.

Sylas had been the one to bring her to Thorn Grove. To help her, step by step. He’d led her to Grey’s, to the garden, the library. It was him she’d ridden with in the moonlight. Him who made her question her feelings for Death.

Death and Sylas were one and the same.

She couldn’t ask why. Not yet anyway, for Gundry stood at his heels. The hound was no longer of this world. Just as the shadows had wound around Sylas, they spun around Gundry as well, lengthening his maw and sharpening his incisors. He tripled in size until he stood at Death’s shoulder with paws larger than Signa’s head, eyes as crimson as blood as shadows dripped from his panting mouth. Hungry, Signa realized. He was hungry.

“This is where you make your choice.” Death spoke to her with words like nectar. Like honeyed wine she could drown in. “This is where you decide what world you are made for. There are but two options: let him run and hope that he will be a changed man, for if you send him to trial, he will surely be hanged. Or…”

“Or?”

Death touched her shoulder, where the knife wound had already stitched itself back together. He pulled her up to her feet so her back pressed against his chest, and so she faced Percy and the flames that charred Lillian’s grave. “Or you claim his life as your own and give his remaining time to Blythe. You are not cursed—you are a reaper. You are the night incarnate, the ferrier of souls. You are the bridge between the living and the dead—a caged bird that’s ready to fly. So spread your wings, Signa Farrow, because you are limitless. Spread your wings, and oh, how we’ll fly.”

How right it sounded. How simple, like something deep and pulsing within her knew that was the answer. That it was right.

You are no soft thing to be coddled. The words Death had once told her played in her mind, over and over again. You are bolder than the sun, Signa Farrow, and it’s time that you burn.

He was right. She no longer feared what brewed within her, and she was done making apologies for who she was. Signa would not just burn; she would ignite. She would blaze hotter than a star at Death’s side and would finally claim all that she was. All that was hers.

She leaned against him and let that thrum of power course through her. It was ice in her veins and fire in her heart. Gone were her worries, her fears, for as she let the power consume her, she understood those fears meant nothing. She no longer claimed them. She was to be the ruler of the night. The bringer of death. A reaper. And she would start her reign now.

“Are you certain?” Death’s voice was a caress amid the chaos.

Signa had never been more certain of anything in her life. She had cared for Percy; had begun to love him. But she understood now why Death had done all that he did. Understood why he’d given people an early end, all because he’d been selfish. All because he’d wanted to protect her.

For Blythe, she would do the same. For Elijah, for Thorn Grove, she would be selfish. Percy had made his choice, and now it was time to make hers.

If Percy would not feel remorse for his sins, Signa would ensure that he came to regret them.

When Signa faced her cousin, it was with the night itself in her eyes and hair silver as starlight. She didn’t need to speak. She simply thought of her desire to raise the dead garden beneath him like a cage, and the world bent to her will. Dead bramble tore through the snow and flames, roots ensnaring Percy, whose nails ripped at them in desperation, trying to tear himself free. “Release me!” He gaped at her through the barbed trap of thorns and vines. They snaked around his wrists, securing him to the ground. “What in God’s name are you?”

For once, she had an answer. “I am free.” And then she turned to Gundry and let the hellhound have his feast.