The plaster struck the floor where I had been standing.
Perrin dragged me through the doorway as the ceiling opened above us. Dust filled my mouth. Vale seized Eda by the coat and hauled her after us while Orrel shouted from the corridor. The hurricane lamp toppled, rolled in a bright circle, and went out.
Auden’s shadow spread beneath my boots, wide enough to cover all four of us. Its edges had lost their shape. They trembled over the tiles like smoke caught beneath glass.
“Move,” Vale said.
We ran.
The corridor had become a tunnel of falling plaster and swinging doors. Something struck the wall behind us with enough force to shake the room numbers loose. Orrel fired once toward the dark. The report punched through my skull, followed by a shower of dust from the ceiling.
Eda stumbled. I caught her arm, and the photograph pressed hard against my ribs inside my coat.
“Leave the log,” she gasped.
“I did.”
“You took the wrong thing.”
“The photograph is the only thing that tells us where she went.”
Eda looked back at the collapsing corridor. “The photograph tells you where he went.”
We reached the entrance hall as a crack split the tiles behind us. Vale shoved the front doors open. Snow blew into the building, clean and sharp, and the shadow pulled me across the threshold with a force that nearly dislocated my shoulder.
Outside, I fell to my knees.
The cold should have gone through my trousers. Instead, a weak warmth gathered around my legs. It lasted three seconds. Then the shadow contracted beneath me, thinning until I could see the snow through it.
I put my hand flat against the ground.
“Auden.”
The shape stirred at my wrist and withdrew.
Perrin crouched beside me. His face was grey beneath the dust. “Tamsin, look at me.”
“I’m looking.”
“You’re bleeding.”
A cut ran from my hairline to my cheek. I wiped it and saw red on my glove. Perrin reached for me, then stopped before his fingers touched my face. His hand closed into a fist instead.
Vale turned toward the sanatorium. The upper windows were dark again. A section of roof sagged above the east wing.
“Orrel, seal the gate,” he said. “No one goes back inside until daylight and a structural team.”
Next
Tamsin must reach Harrowmere’s chapel archive before the watcher does, while the shadow in the photograph and the shadow on the road raise the possibility that Maris’s pursuer is older than Auden’s bond.
“So is the person who brought that roof down,” Vale replied.
Eda stared at him. “You think it was a person?”
“I think someone wanted us out.”
“Then you have learned less than Sallow did.”
Vale’s jaw tightened, but he did not answer. He took the photograph from my coat when I offered it and held it beneath Orrel’s lantern.
The picture had survived the plaster. Maris Pell stood in front of Harrowmere with a girl beside her. The girl’s face was turned away, hidden by the angle of her hair. Behind them, a long man-shaped shadow lay across the snow.
It began several feet behind Maris.
Its head pointed toward the sanatorium. Its feet reached toward the road.
“Could the second figure be Livia Pell?” Perrin asked.
“No,” Eda said. “Livia was already dead.”
“You’re certain?”
“I was the night supervisor. I signed the death record.”
Vale tilted the photograph. “The shadow may belong to someone standing outside the frame.”
“That is what Sallow thought at first.” Eda’s eyes remained on the image. “He spent three months trying to find the body that cast it.”
“What did he find?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
The answer sat between us while snow gathered on the photograph’s edges.
I looked at the shadow again. It had arrived before Maris did. The wording on the reverse had been precise. Whoever wrote it had watched the girl approach, had watched the shadow appear first, and had understood that the order mattered.
“What did Maris say?” I asked.
Eda’s fingers tightened around her lamp handle. “She said a man had been waiting in the east ward when she came to see her mother. She said he had no face.”
Perrin glanced at me. “A man with no face?”
“Maris was seventeen,” Eda said. “Her mother was dying. Children use the language they have.”
“You believed her,” I said.
“I watched the shadow cross the corridor before Maris entered it.”
The wind swept grit across the road. Auden’s shadow leaned toward the photograph, then stopped. It did not recognize the image. The lack of recognition hurt more than I expected. Once, a scarf had been enough to bring him toward me. Now a dead girl and the first evidence of his kind meant nothing.
Eda saw my face and lowered her voice. “The bond is not a library, Tamsin. It keeps what it can use. Sometimes that is a person. Sometimes it is only the direction home.”
I folded the photograph and put it back inside my coat.
“Then we find Maris before someone uses her.”
Vale looked toward the city lights. “We need a name, an address, and a reason to believe she is still alive.”
“Her records are in the building.”
“Which is presently trying to bury us.”
Eda lifted her lamp. “There is an archive beneath the chapel. The old patient files were moved there before the wards closed.”
Vale stared at her. “You said the log was in room fourteen.”
“I said Sallow’s log was in room fourteen. The hospital kept copies.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Because you arrived asking about Sallow. You did not ask about Maris.”
Vale’s expression hardened. “We are asking now.”
“Then listen carefully. Maris was transferred after the eleven nights. Her aunt collected her from Harrowmere and took her to a lodging house on Rook Street. The name was written in the transfer book.”
My breath caught.
Rook Street had been the direction Auden remembered after everything else failed. I had spent weeks believing it was only the road to me. The watcher had built a trail toward it. Sallow had written that grief followed the shade before the dead.
“What lodging house?” I asked.
Eda looked at me with an exhaustion deeper than age. “The Bellweather Rooms. Number forty-two.”
Perrin swore softly. “That address is gone.”
“Gone how?” Vale asked.
“Demolished two winters ago. The site is a tram construction yard.”
I touched the house key through my pocket. Its teeth pressed into my palm.
“Then Maris may have left a forwarding address,” I said.
“Or the record may tell us who her aunt was,” Vale replied. “Either way, we need the archive.”
Eda shook her head. “The watcher will know that now.”
The shadow at my feet flattened suddenly, pointing down the hill toward the city.
Auden had chosen a direction.
Perrin saw it and stepped nearer. “You want to go.”
“Yes.”
“Tonight?”
“If we wait for daylight, the archive becomes the first place anyone searching for Maris will look.”
Vale held my gaze. “You are injured, and the shadow is nearly transparent.”
“I know.”
“Going into another abandoned building may spend what little remains of it.”
The words entered me slowly. I looked down at the shape that had taken the plaster for me. Its edges shook beneath the snow. I wanted to kneel over it, shield it with my body, promise I would never ask for another rescue.
But the road to Maris had been placed in front of us. Refusing to walk it would leave the watcher with the only advantage that mattered.
“I won’t ask him to protect me,” I said. “I’ll go where I can see the danger.”
Perrin’s mouth tightened. “That has never stopped danger from finding you.”
“Then stay close enough to pull me out.”
He looked toward Vale. “She has made up her mind.”
“She did that before we reached the gate,” Vale said.
He turned to Orrel and gave him instructions for the site. Then he took off his coat and wrapped it around Eda’s shoulders. “You’re coming with us.”
Eda held the coat closed. “I am going to the chapel archive.”
“You are going to the city station,” Vale said. “You have survived one collapse tonight.”
“I have survived nineteen years of people ignoring what I saw. I will not wait in a warm room while you lose the girl again.”
Vale studied her. At last, he nodded.
We left Harrowmere behind us, its upper windows blind against the snow. The road down the hill shone under the lamps. My shadow moved ahead of me, thinner than a stain, leading us toward the city and the buried records of a girl who had once arrived after her own shadow.
At the first bend, the shape stopped.
A second shadow crossed the road ahead.
It stood beneath a streetlamp where no one stood, tall and narrow, its head turned toward us. Then it slipped across the snow and vanished between the trees.
Vale raised his revolver.
I took the photograph from my coat and held it beneath the lamp.
The man-shaped shadow in the picture pointed toward Harrowmere.