She slowly looked up at Ursino, expecting to see the dagger coming down on the heart.
Instead, terror filled Ursino’s face, and his eyes met her own. Caitlyn realized he could suddenly see her.
She pushed off the altar and slowly stood, and as she did so she saw that she was clothed in cherry-rose satin. Her hands were long-fingered and white; they were Bianca’s hands. Of their own volition they lifted and grasped Ursino on either side of his face.
“You dare to touch my heart?” a voice not Caitlyn’s own said from her throat.
Ursino screamed.
Bianca’s hands pressed inward on Ursino’s head, and after a moment of that magnetic-opposite resistance Caitlyn felt them break through, vanishing into Ursino’s skull. His scream of terror turned to one of agony as blood began to well from his eyes.
A cry of pain from behind her made Caitlyn spin around, her hands tearing out of Ursino’s head, leaving him to collapse on the ground.
Raphael and Giovanni were on their knees, Raphael with an arm around Giovanni as if holding him in an embrace, but his other hand pressed against the base of Giovanni’s jaw, turned now unnaturally far to the left. As Caitlyn watched, Giovanni crumpled to the ground, his head flopping on a broken neck. Horror mixed with a primal joy: Raphael had won.
Raphael turned toward her on his knees, but the effort was too much and he braced himself on the ground with an outstretched arm. It was then that Caitlyn saw the dagger embedded in his chest and the blood saturating his doublet. Her breath froze in her chest.
Raphael looked up at her, his face ashen and bewildered. “Mother?”
Caitlyn stepped away from the heart on the altar, and the rose satin gown vanished, leaving her in her dirty nightgown. She dropped down beside Raphael, her whole body shaking with the sudden terror of losing him. “It’s me, Caitlyn. Don’t try to move.”
He dropped onto his hip. Around the dagger, blood bubbled with escaping air. Raphael coughed, and a trickle of red spilled out the side of his mouth. He raised one hand to the dagger, trying to grab the handle.
“No!” Caitlyn cried, even though she knew it was too late for either of them to do anything to change what was happening. She knew his lung was collapsing. “I’ll go get help.”
His eyes met hers, and in them she read his knowledge of his fate. He started to collapse backward. She caught his shoulders and eased him to the ground, and then brushed the blood from his lips with her fingertips. “Don’t go, please,” she whispered, begging. Tears roughened her voice. She felt her heart breaking into a thousand pieces. “You can’t go. Please don’t go.”
“I come,” he said hoarsely, the sound barely audible on his weak breath, “to you.”
She took his hand in hers and felt it already turning cold. “Even death will not keep us apart,” she said through her tears, and prayed that she spoke the truth.
A whisper of a smile touched his lips, and then the last of the tension left his body. Caitlyn’s breath caught on a sob.
He was dead.
CHAPTER
Twenty-nine
Before the first tear could spill down Caitlyn’s cheek, a faint, glowing form began to rise out of Raphael’s entire body, and with it rose Caitlyn’s heart. He was coming to her!
A long-fingered white hand suddenly pressed over Raphael’s chest, pinning the rising glow atop the body. Caitlyn cried out, then looked up into Bianca’s pale face, her coronet of red-blond hair in perfect order, her carved features betraying no hint of grief or sympathy. “What are you doing?” Caitlyn cried.
The glow began to thrash under Bianca’s hold, struggling to come free.
“Let him go!” Caitlyn screamed, and grabbed for Bianca’s arm.
A thunderclap of sound went through Caitlyn, and the world went black.
Caitlyn fell through darkness, her soul sinking powerless into a vast abyss. There was no sound, no sight, nothing but the endless sinking and her silent screams as the pain of loss ripped through her. She felt the essence of her being disintegrate; without Raphael, she was nothing. She had no anchor, no being.
“Raphael!” she cried, and tried to picture his face. It would draw her to him; it would help her find him. “Raphael!”
Points of light began to flash all around her, like distant stars. She focused on the nearest one and flew toward it, the point of light expanding as she approached, growing wider. It went from a few inches to a foot, to a yard, then all at once it stretched beyond the edges of her vision and she was standing in the grass of the prehistoric Périgord Noir, watching a herd of aurochs amble by with their enormous horns shaped like lyres.
“No!” Caitlyn protested aloud, her voice small in the quiet landscape. This was not where she wanted to be! She shut her eyes tight and pictured Raphael’s face. “Raphael! Find Raphael!”
She felt herself falling, and when she opened her eyes she was once again in the void, the darkness around her pricked with light. She recognized the abyss now: it was the space between her waking and her dreams. It was a nonplace, between one existence and another. She had been here just after taking the Ambien.
In one of the lights she would find Raphael. A flicker of hope gave her energy, and she dove at a light.
A bloody sword sliced through the space where she stood. It was twilight, and she stood in the midst of a battle being fought by armored men. The stench of blood, guts, and feces filled her head. She locked eyes with a warrior, and his eyes widened as he seemed to perceive her, but then the tip of a pike burst through his chest. Caitlyn screamed and covered her face.
“Raphael!” she cried, and this time pictured Château de la Fortune as she fell through the abyss and toward another light.
She felt solid ground beneath her feet and opened her eyes. She was in a dark corridor. “Raphael?” she called softly, and started down the hallway. Silk skirts swished around her legs, and when she looked down she saw that the skirts were the black of mourning, their color a mirror of the ache in her soul. “Raphael? Where are you?” she called.
Shh, shh, shh …
her skirts went.
She descended stairs and started down another corridor. A figure stood halfway down it. “Raphael?” she called, hurrying her steps.
Shh, shh, shh …
She came close to the figure, but realized a black veil of mourning covered her head, blurring her vision. She grasped the veil’s hem and started to lift it.
The figure before her turned into a smear of gray, a shrieking Screecher with dark pits for eyes and mouth. The sound pierced Caitlyn’s skull and she fell back in terror, once more into the abyss.
“Raphael, where are you?” she cried into the darkness, loss and frustration consuming her. “You are dead; I am dead! We were supposed to be together forever! Raphael! Raphael!”
The next light she dove into dropped her into the art studio, where the last hints of sunlight filtered through the skylights. Antoine Fournier slouched on a stool, staring at a blank canvas in the dimness.
“You!”
Caitlyn cried, and pointed at him.
Fournier looked up at her voice, and then fell off his stool, his eyes wide.
Caitlyn looked at his blank canvas and laughed hysterically. “
I
know what you have to paint! You’ll paint Fortuna and her wheel, and hang it at the end of the Grand Salon. You’ll paint that, or nothing, Antoine Fournier!”
She threw herself back into the abyss and tried again to find Raphael, calling his name as she dived into each light and found herself over and over in the corridors and rooms of Château de la Fortune. Each figure she approached, thinking it was Raphael, turned instead into a Screecher, screaming and clawing and running mad.
Panic began to consume her. She could not find him. She had lost him; Bianca had stolen him from her, forever.
Her spirit began to weaken, a growing grief killing her hope. She made one last attempt to find Raphael, diving with the last of her will toward a light. She opened her eyes and found herself standing in a vast space, black except for a wide rectangle of light ahead of her. “Raphael? Raphael?” she called weakly. She walked toward the light, the susurrus of her skirts her only answer.
Shh, shh, shh.
The rectangle turned into a window of sorts, and someone with dark hair and pale skin was standing on the other side, staring in at her. Caitlyn approached cautiously, the face of the person coming clearer with every step.
She knew that face. Even through the black veil that blurred her vision, she knew. She had seen it every day of her life.
Caitlyn stopped a foot from the window and stared into her own pale face, staring back at her with a look of horror, her sea-green eyes wide with shock.
Of course, I’m frightening myself with this dark veil
, Caitlyn thought. She grasped its hem and started to raise it.
On the other side of the window, she saw her other self’s eyes roll up into her head, and then the other self collapsed. Caitlyn rushed to the edge of the window, reaching through in a too-late attempt to catch her. There was a sick
thunk
of skull against a hard object, and then the
whump
of a body hitting the floor. Caitlyn leaned through the window and looked down at a row of sinks, and at her other self in her nightgown, blood pooling around her on the bathroom floor.
It took a moment for what it meant to sink in, and then she shook her head violently in denial. “No!
No, no, no!
” she cried.
She remembered the Screechers she’d encountered in the corridors: Screechers who, in the split second before they’d turned to gray smears of shrieking terror, had looked human.
One had been Mathilde.
“No! It can’t be!” She screamed, “Raphael! I need you! Raphael … !”
But there was no one to answer, and there never would be. She would haunt these halls forever, seeking him.
For
she
was the Woman in Black.
CHAPTER
Thirty
Caitlyn woke to the gray light of dawn coming in the windows of her dorm room. For a moment she hung in a space between sleep and waking, not knowing who or what she was. A deep part of her clung to the moment of confusion and warned her that she did not want to remember the answers to those questions.
She heard the soft sound of a turning page, and turned her head. Amalia dozed in her bed, while Naomi sat at the foot, her back against the paneled wall, reading a book.
I’m back,
Caitlyn thought.
But where is “back”?
She stared at Naomi, and tried to decide: Was this nothing but the dream of a wandering spirit with nowhere else to go?
As if she felt her gaze, Naomi looked up from her book. Her face brightened. “You’re awake!” She shook Amalia’s foot.
Amalia jerked awake and popped up onto her elbows, her face still bleared with sleep. “I’m awake, I’m awake! What happened?”
“Did you find Raphael?” Naomi asked. “Did you warn him?”
The images of the fight in the cavern flooded in upon Caitlyn. She saw the knife in Raphael’s chest, the blood upon his lips. “It wasn’t Beneto,” she said, her voice cracking. “It was Ursino and Giovanni. They … they …” She tried to say it, but the words wouldn’t come.
The pain that been held at bay for a few sweet moments came rushing back and pressed upon her chest like a thousand pounds, crushing her. Her face twisted with grief, and a sob tore from deep in her gut.
She rolled away from her friends to face the wall, curled into a ball, and wept.
She sleepwalked through her English class and French conversation lab, barely aware of the people around her. Grief consumed all lesser emotions, and wrung from her all ability to think or care about anything else. She sat stunned and silent through her classes.
It was only when she got to her art class that something stirred to life within her.
“Self-portraits today!” Monsieur Girard declared, handing out mirrors. “Every great artist has used him- or herself as a model.”
Caitlyn set up her easel and mirror next to Naomi. “You okay?” Naomi asked, looking worried.
Caitlyn shrugged one shoulder, the corners of her mouth turning down. Words were beyond her.
Caitlyn picked up her charcoal and looked in the mirror. She saw a pale, haunted face with shadows beneath reddened eyes, and black hair that hung lank against her cheeks. She turned to her paper and began to cover its surface in black charcoal. Her arm moved with steady deliberation, and slowly turned the pristine white to a void of darkness. When her charcoal was down to a stub she set it aside and picked up her kneaded eraser. Bit by bit she lifted out pinpricks of light in the darkness, and then in the center of it all she created a pale face behind a veil, the eyes empty hollows, the mouth a slash of grief. She worked without care for accuracy or her own physical likeness. She cared only for the reflection of her soul, not her face.