The Midnight Lullaby Read online

  Elysium didn't grab at him again, but he squatted down to get at eye level. It wasn't unlike the way he had squatted beside him as a boy, when Benedict would fall down or find himself in a fit of terror—there had been much to be frightened of in this house as a kid. Elysium would always be the calming voice of reason, laying things out for him just as they are but with the added promise that he would be okay. And Benedict had always believed him, even in the thick of their worst fights, he had believed Elysium.

  "How did you get down here? You weren't here before, and there's only one door," he nudged his head in the direction of an old wooden staircase. "Benny, you weren't here, and then you suddenly were."

  Benedict laughed, startling himself with the sound. "You're disturbed because you don't know how I did it? That's what your takeaway is?"

  "Benny—" Elysium tried again, voice ever firm.

  "The house moved me," Benedict interrupted him, staring hard to see the traces of fear swirling deep in those eyes—eyes like his own. "I saw it. I saw what you did. I know why you're going to die here tonight—why we're all going to die."

  Hazel hissed between her teeth. "Fuck that," she snapped. "I am not going to be killed by some nobody ghost."

  Benedict sat back, palms pressed into the dirty floor to prop himself up. He tossed his head to the side to look around his brother at his cousins hovering over the table. Theodore looked appropriately terrified, but Hazel still clung to her anger. It had become her buoy in the cold, dark ocean of coming death. "Nobody?" Benedict repeated. "Your victim, Hazel. Your victim—or maybe Gloria Lyon herself."

  Hazel snorted angrily and flipped through the pages of the notebook. By the furious way she slapped the pages down, one after the other, it seemed it wasn't the first time she had gone through the journal. No spells to undo a murder? No way to take back what they had done?

  "Why?" Benedict asked, throat drying around the question and tear-swollen eyes shifting back to Elysium.

  His brother still crouched beside him, but his gaze focused on nothing, the way it did when he tried to think his way out of a corner. "What?" he asked distantly before blinking back to the present, brow pinching when he stared at Benedict. "Why, what?"

  "Why did you kill her? Why her?"

  Elysium sighed, the way a man does when a piece of his soul leaves his body. "You really see her?"

  "Every day."

  Elysium nodded slowly, shoulders sagging as much as a person with good posture ever could. "Is she here now?"

  "Not in this room." Benedict didn't have to look around to know. He always knew when she was with him. He felt her even when she wasn't, like a line connected them. Was that what they had done? Connected them?

  "I'm so sorry," Elysium whispered. "We only meant to give you the sight—her sight."

  His face burned, the muscles in his jaw jumping when he clamped his teeth together. "You killed her for that? So that I would see ghosts like you?"

  "Like all Lyons, Benedict. All of us see them. Uncle Vernon and Mother said that if you couldn't see them—if you didn't develop any gifts—that you would have to be removed from the family line. It's an old tradition, Benny. I tried to talk them out of it, but they said we were all bound by the laws of the Lyon family."

  "So what?" he snapped, sitting upright. "So, I would have been kicked out? I left anyway!"

  He was halfway to his feet when Elysium said in a quiet voice, "Not kicked out. Removed."

  Benedict froze just as his legs straightened. Elysium rose to his feet. He was taller than Benedict, just a little bit, but forever now that they were far from the age of growing. "They were going to kill me?"

  Elysium nodded slowly. "It was this or lose you."

  All of his air gushed out of him, pushing him a step back. "You're all insane."

  "We thought we'd put her to rest, Benny, I swear," Elysium continued. "We thought the spell would leave you with the sight of spirits… We didn't realize it would leave her bound to you for that sight." He spoke carefully, slowly, as though examining something truly baffling.

  Benedict burst, body thrusting forward. The heels of his palms slammed into his brother's chest, shoving Elysium back three steps. His ass hit the heavy slab of a table where they had killed Emmeline.

  "That's not the point, you shitbag!" Benedict roared. "How can you still not see that what happened, how it went wrong, isn't the point? You murdered a girl!"

  Theodore stared at him, too, now, eyes big as saucers and body still as a statue. "She was nobody," he whispered. "She would have had a tragic life. We were saving her…" he trailed the same sentiment as Lucy but with even less conviction. It was like the way a child held up a blanket, believing it would hold back all the monsters of the night.

  Benedict twisted his face, glaring at his cousin before swinging his attention back to Elysium. "What is that about? Why do they keep saying that?"

  "Because that's what we told them," Elysium said quietly. His tone was strange now, gentle, and missing something that had always been there. "Do you remember how sick you were? Your fever?"

  Benedict's brow was pinched so tight that his head hurt. "Yeah, sure."

  "You were eighteen. They had started poisoning you."

  Hazel slammed the old journal shut and shrieked another curse before storming across the room and up the stairs.

  Theodore remained, breathing in tight gasps.

  "I had to find someone fast," Elysium continued, voice still off—hushed and a little hollow. He had lost his certainty, his firm authority. He was confessing. "Mother would grant you more time if I could find someone for the binding spell—time to see if it worked. So, I found her, and I told them she had no one in her life, a drug addict spiraling toward a fast and tragic end."

  Benedict's throat burned with all the screams he swallowed down. "But the truth?"

  Elysium lifted his gaze from a spot on the floor, tears swimming in his eyes, but he fought to hold them back. "She wasn't well off. She wasn't going anywhere in life."

  "But?"

  "She had a family—parents and siblings and friends. She was happy, I think. I don't know. I only saw her a couple of times."

  "Why her?" he whispered the question that clawed at his heart.

  "She had the same birth date as you. The journal said the trade needed to be as similar as possible. She had the same birth date as you, and she only lived one state over. Uncle Vernon and I grabbed her walking home and drove her here."

  Benedict just stared—gawked, really. He'd said it so matter-of-factly.

  It had happened, and it was done.

  But it wasn't done.

  "Mother gave you another year after the ritual to show ability, and you did! I was saving you, Benny," he said, and the authority was back, the vague, almost-apology over. "And I will save you. I'll find a way to fix this."

  "Fix it?"

  "Her ghost is latched on to you, her soul entwined with yours like the roots of two teeth knotted together. That's why you see her and we don't. She'd gone from the world except for what's wrapped around you. You are her only tether."

  "Where's her body?" Benedict asked absently, remembering that she had wanted to know.

  "Cremated and scattered," Elysium said, brushing aside useless facts. He had already explained that her tether was Benedict, after all.

  Benedict took a step back and then another. He glanced past his brother's chair, to Theodore still standing on the other side of the killing table. He cried, shaking his head slowly in that mad way people did when they just couldn't handle reality. They had all seen it in others—in people with ghosts in their homes or spirits trailing them through life.

  Good, Benedict thought. They should feel what it was like to be on the other side of it—on the out-of-control, terrified end of things.

  "Benedict?" Elysium looked up from his thoughts.

  His heel bumped the stairs. "I hope you die," he hissed before turning his back on them both. He took the stairs two at a time
and pushed the flat door open at the top. He stumbled out into the hallway from a wall panel he had never known was a door.

  He dragged two muggy breaths into his lungs and then pivoted toward the foyer. He walked fast, Elysium still calling after him, starting up the stairs himself.

  "Where were you?" Emmeline's voice rushed in panic, meeting him in the hallway near the front door. "I couldn't find you anywhere."

  She hadn't been down there. Maybe she couldn't? It was for the best. "We're leaving," he said. He would have taken her hand if he could.

  Emmeline walked at his side, craning to look up at him. "How? The cars are wrecked, aren't they?"

  Benedict opened the door, holding it for her. "We'll walk. I don't care if we sleep in the woods, we're leaving. Now."

  She nodded, and he followed her outside onto the porch. The storm had dwindled to a steady drizzle. If it had been a monsoon, he still would have gone. They were going to try to get rid of Emmeline—it was the only way to save themselves now. Maybe if her spirit were gone, Mother's would settle.

  He was down the steps and onto the driveway when something larger than a raindrop hit the ground to his right. He glanced at it before actually stopping. A shoe. One of Emmeline's boots.

  "I'm sorry," Emmeline said, just over the rain. He looked at her, suddenly standing not far from the shoe. It was the sort of sorry a parent says to a child when something inevitable is about to happen—something that they wouldn't stop even if they could—something they might even have decided to do. Like moving, or getting a shot, or having a bone set.

  She wasn't looking at the boot on the ground. Emmeline stared up at the house.

  His stomach sank deep. He already knew. He knew because she knew.

  Still, Benedict twisted back to look up at his childhood home. His sister slid off the ledge of her window. It wouldn't have been far enough to kill her, if she hadn't tipped headfirst toward the ground, arms hugging the other boot.

  He barely had the time to brace himself, to register what was happening, and then he watched, unblinking, as Lucy landed, body crumbling in on itself and bending in all the wrong ways. Her spine snapped; he heard it and he recognized it because it wasn't the first time he had heard that sound this weekend.

  Lucy had been a beautiful person, but she had not made for a beautiful corpse.

  He wrapped his anger around himself like armor and turned his back on her body, walking down the drive until he could slip off it and into the woods. He didn't worry about his red shirt tempting wolves today—he was pretty sure he had been living with them all along.

  Chapter Seventeen

  They hadn't made it far, maybe twenty minutes into the thick of wet trees before he felt a physical tug at his heart.

  Benedict and Emmeline both stopped, hands flying to their chests to press over aching hearts. They exchanged glances. She felt it, too. Something was wrong. Cold fingers ran up his spine, despite the sticky heat of the day.

  "What is that?" Benedict whispered. He could almost hear something. A voice? A cry?

  Emmeline pivoted back in the direction of the house, staring though it was lost behind the tangled growth of trees and thick bushes. They had been cutting a straight line for the road. He knew this estate well enough to find his way. They would figure out what to do once they got to the pavement.

  "I told you we wouldn't survive this place," she whispered.

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're killing us."

  Us. He loved the way it sounded, like they were one person. He supposed, if Elysium was right, they were in some sense one person—their souls knotted up. He realized then what she was saying and turned to follow her gaze through the trees. He remembered that possessed maid the other night. When Lucy had tried to cast out Mother's spirit, it had killed the maid. Would they try to cast Emmeline out? Would he snap like that woman had? One vertebra at a time?

  Emmeline took two steps closer to him, close enough that she could reach out and touch him if she weren't spectral. "Do you want me to stop them?"

  The question stunned him. Could she stop them? Could she simply whisk herself back to the house and… Do what? Agitate his mother's spirit into action? Would she do it herself? Possess someone?

  "Do you hate me?" Benedict asked instead of answering. He could feel the imminent danger of time now—the sense of an ax hanging over his head. If he didn't ask now, he might never have a chance.

  Emmeline considered him carefully, and he studied the wealth of emotions twisting behind her eyes like a bed of snakes. "Sometimes," she said, and he understood. She did hate him. But she also loved him. He felt it, warming his heart and pushing his spine straight and chin up. Her love made him proud. It had been his source of contentment for years now.

  "You know then? That they killed you for me? That it's because of me?" he continued, words almost pushing onto one another in the rush to be spoken. Think if he were to die in the middle? Choked off mid-sentence by his own cracking back.

  "Yes," she answered quickly. "Sometimes the details are foggy, but I always knew it was because of you."

  "When the ghosts would attack me—when we would cleanse houses—was that because of you? Did you want them to kill me?"

  "I didn't tell them to do it, but they could feel the part of me that wants you to pay and wants to be free."

  "And the other part?"

  She smiled suddenly, as though he had told a joke and she couldn't help herself. She stepped closer to him, tears in her eyes. "The other part loves you too much to want you to hurt and knows you don't deserve to pay for what happened. I want to be free, Benedict. But I also want us to be free."

  He thought of the way Elysium had described their souls—teeth with roots knotted together. Pull one, and they would both go. What a bloody, painful analogy. "What do you want to do?" he asked, but he knew the answer, he felt it like it was his own and stared deep into the growing light behind her green eyes. "Okay," he agreed. "Okay."

  His heart hammered in his chest, not from the fear of what they were going to do, but the very real danger of what his family was trying to accomplish back at the house right now. "Go. Save me. And I will save you."

  Her smile warmed. Her arm stretched toward him with fingers out, her body already moving away. He reached out in return, the tips of their fingers close for a second before she moved away, running off into the trees and vanishing before she was far enough for the thick shadows of afternoon to swallow her.

  Benedict started running, too. He couldn't disappear the way she could. He couldn't skip across stretches of land in seconds. He had to run, jumping logs and ducking branches, his boots sinking in the wet soil and making everything harder. He ran back to the house in a broad arch, coming out of the trees much farther from the driveway than where he had gone in. The long grass whipped at his already wet jeans, muscles burning and lungs sucking gulps of sticky air. He didn't go for the front of the house and the big doors. He went around the side, almost clipping his shoulder on the wall when he turned around the back.

  The drizzling rain grew into another shower, wet and heavy in his lungs, leaving him panting even when he stopped at the back door. He waited there, catching his breath and listening to the mayhem of muffled voices inside. The panicked feeling of pending dread had eased back from his heart.

  His family inside the house were shouting—screaming even. The walls trembled, vibrating in a low, ceaseless hum. He toed off his muddy boots, turned the knob slowly, and slipped inside under the umbrella of chaos down the dark hallways.

  "Break it, Theo!" Hazel commanded, yelling over the moaning of the house. Music was playing, almost loud enough to smother them all and seeming to come from every direction.

  "You'll kill him!" Elysium roared.

  They were in the séance parlor.

  Benedict moved from the back door into the kitchen, padding across the hardwood on bare feet. He plucked a paring knife from the stand, small and sharp. He wasn't looking to fright
en or threaten. He might have taken the cleaver or the chef's knife if that were the case.

  He walked down the long hall, closer and closer to the parlor.

  "If her spirit is bound to Ben, it could kill him!" Elysium shouted over the music.

  Benedict pressed his shoulder to the doorframe, turning just enough to see into half the parlor. Elysium was on the far side of the room, his clothing rumpled and leaning his weight onto one leg. The chair behind him had toppled over and the picture frames had been knocked from the wall. Had he been thrown? Perhaps Emmeline had done it. Or Mother.

  Theodore shifted, catching Benedict's eye. His cousin had his back to him, staring at Elysium and hugging himself. He shook his head wildly. "We're going to die if we don't stop her..." he whined.

  "This won't help!" Elysium yelled. That awful howl of music continued to batter eardrums, pouring out of the walls. It was too many songs at the same time, too many instruments and tempos in competition with one another, and Benedict was certain at least one of the songs played backward, making that strange, warped sound. "Her spirit is too strong—like Mothers. It'll just set her spirit free and kill Benedict!" Elysium continued.

  Benedict felt the edges of guilt creep into his heart. Elysium was still championing for his life, still trying to save his baby brother. But wasn't that what had started all of this? Mother and Uncle Vernon were ready to kill the failed Lyon all those years ago. But not Elysium. Not his brother.

  "Do it!" Hazel raged. She was deeper in the room, around the corner and out of Benedict's sightlines. "They're tangled up. Killing Benedict will kill her!"

  She sounded truly mad now. Emmeline was already dead, and the Lyons never used the word "kill" for a spirit. It was laughable to think on it now, that it had been a distasteful word to people who had butchered a person in their basement.

  Theodore trembled but started to lift his arms from where he held them tight to his chest. That was when Benedict saw it, the big white plate he clutched in both hands.

  The poltergeist seemed to have struck out at Hazel and Elysium but left Theodore untouched. Benedict understood, now that he could see the fragile talisman his cousin held—the one that could end his life.