Autumn leaves crunch under my boots as I wander through the cemetery. If I look back, I’ll see Bolt waiting by the gates, but I keep going, looking for the grave I’ve only ever visited once before.
The wind wrenches at my hair and I rake it back out of my face. I shove my hands into the pockets of my leather jacket and slouch past a tree that stretches skeletal claws towards the sky. Its roots disturb the gravestones around it so it seems something down there has been moving.
Past the tree, I find the grave I’m looking for. Black, dripping letters carved into stone.
CELENE CROSS
BURNS IN HELL
The last time I visited, I was fifteen. I found out it was here from a newspaper article. What else? It made me feel weird, though, so I never came back. Maybe I suspected, even then, that she wasn’t really buried here. Whoever’s in the ground, it’s not her.
‘They could’ve spent a little more on the headstone.’
The woman’s voice is behind me.
A chill prickles the nape of my neck. At first I think I’ve imagined the voice, or that the woman in the grave is speaking to me, but then I screw up the courage to turn.
Her skin’s stone grey and she’s cut her hair. It’s short and wavy. She’s swaddled in a winter coat and a scarf. There’s nobody else in the cemetery but, if there was, I doubt they’d recognise her. There’s no mistaking the steel in her eyes, though, and I realise every muscle in my body has wound tight.
‘Ghosts in a graveyard,’ Celene murmurs, standing there, just standing there, hands by her sides, no weapons visible. ‘Who’d have guessed?’
Not for the first time, I think I’ve lost my mind. It’s finally cracked under the strain of the past week and my brain is spewing phantoms into the autumn air. But she looks solid. Dangerously solid, like she could grab me any second, sink her talons in, unwind my flesh in stringy ribbons.
‘Should’ve known it would take more than a bullet to kill you.’ I exhale at last, my voice shivering nerves.
‘It almost did.’ She’s motionless; a hunter with sights on its prey. ‘If Vinter hadn’t stepped in, I’d be in there.’ She nods at the grave but I don’t follow her gaze. I’m watching for a flickering muscle, any sign she’s about to lurch at me the way she did at Vinter’s before I shot her. It’s been a week since I killed her and she looks stronger than ever.
‘Vinter?’ I ask.
Celene’s lips split into a parched half smile. ‘A good hunter always expects the unexpected. I knew you wouldn’t make it easy. Vinter got me out of there after Mara took you. He acted quickly. Saved my life.’
I’m so thrown, it takes me a moment to understand what she’s saying. She knew I’d betray her. Am I that transparent or is she just that distrustful? Her own daughter shoots her and she’s already got a plan just in case.
‘You realise how fucked up that is,’ I say.
‘Look who’s talking.’
‘But the papers. They said you were dead.’
‘You believe everything you read in the papers?’
Colour floods my cheeks and I scowl. She’s right, though. How much of what I’ve read has turned out to be true? Celene isn’t the savage killer the press wrote about – she’s more dangerous even than that.
‘The press have a price, like everybody,’ Celene says. ‘It wasn’t cheap but luckily neither is Vinter.’
‘You wanted to die.’
‘Mara had to believe it.’
‘You knew I’d shoot you.’
Celene stares at me. She played me, just like she’s played everybody her whole life. Was there a small part of her that hoped I wouldn’t do it? Did she have a plan B in the event that I couldn’t pull the trigger? The look on her face tells me she knew exactly what I was capable of, even if I didn’t.
‘You had to shoot me,’ Celene says finally. ‘I guessed you would get into the party, and I knew you had a good chance of grabbing the spear. It’s what I’d have done. Your anger… Those few days at the camp… You hate me. It had to come out some way.’
She strolls towards the grave and I flinch and take a few steps back.
‘Relax, Rumer,’ she says. ‘What’s done is done. Luckily, you’re a terrible shot. Missed the heart completely.’
‘Mara wasn’t so lucky,’ I mutter.
Her hand’s reaching for me before I know what’s happening, but it doesn’t snap around my throat. It presses into my shoulder and the steel in her eyes flashes.
‘What’s done is done,’ she says again and something in my chest shudders over and over, threatening to spill tears.
My mother’s dead again, but this time she came for me. She knew she’d never escape her past unless everybody thought she was dead. She tried it before, with the Thames job, but then she messed up by taking down every major criminal in London who’d ever crossed her. She had to die again.
I don’t know what this means. Where we go from here. I wouldn’t go back to that camp, even if it hadn’t burnt down.
‘Was it legit?’ I ask, the question occurring to me suddenly. At her blank expression, I add, ‘The camp. What you were doing there. Was it all for show or were you really trying to… you know… save the world.’
The corner of her lip tugs into a shape like a comma and I realise mine does the same thing when I smile. All those pictures on the wall of the Dead Room and not one of them showed her happy.
‘Legit,’ she says.
‘But…’ I stop. I don’t know what I’m trying to say. ‘People… I followed loads of them for Julian. Loads. Nobody ever changed. Not the way you did. You were…’
I don’t need to say it. We both know what she was.
‘Yeah.’ She releases the word as a breath. We stare at each other for a moment that fills and stretches with unspoken things and I think she’s not going to answer. Because she can’t. There is no answer. But then she draws a breath and her gaze settles on me, those eyes so impossible to escape.
‘People change,’ she says. ‘They go back and forth and round corners their whole lives. Sometimes they end up back where they started. Sometimes they discover something new. That’s what…’ She blinks. ‘I found out I was going to have a child. It’s like… I did something. I created something and it was mine and it was on me if it survived. If it lived. All that death, ending lives, and then somehow I had created it. I didn’t know what to do about it.’
Seems to me she still doesn’t.
‘That’s it?’ I’m still cynical. I wonder if I’ll ever understand her. ‘You got pregnant?’
‘It was the start of it.’ Clearly she doesn’t want to discuss her crisis of conscience and, honestly, I don’t think I’d understand anything she said.
‘What are you going to do now?’ Celene asks.
‘I’m getting out of the city for a while. Bolt has family up north. We’re going to visit. He needs a break, too.’
‘That sounds like a good idea.’
My belly flutters. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m dead, remember?’
‘Right.’
We both stare at the grave and then I feel Celene’s eyes on me. It seems like she’s going to say something, but then she doesn’t. The spider in my mind is still. I don’t know if the curse was broken when I shot my mother. I don’t know if I believe in curses any more.
‘Guess I’ll see you around,’ I say.
She’s already gone, but I know it won’t be for long. As wild as I am, she’s wilder. Like the wind. I turn and stare across the cemetery at Bolt. He raises a hand and I know I’m not invisible any more. I’ll never be able to shadow again, but that’s okay.