Page 116 of She Haunts Me Still

Instead, Arden raises her chin. “Youwillcome back,” she whispers. “Never leave each other in the dark.”

Mallory’s nod comes without hesitation, and Arden pulls her into a hug. For a second, they’re twelve again. She’s theunwanted, strange girl at school, and Arden is the only one daring to look close enough to see a friend.

Arden steps back and Mallory kneels before Saskia, brushing a hand over her hair, her cheeks. Her skin is sweaty and cold, her eyes bloodshot.

“Mal?” she whimpers. “What’s happening to me?”

“It’s going to be okay,” Mallory whispers. “I’m going to fix it.”

“How?” Saskia licks her lips, dry and flaky. “Did you reach Penelope?”

An ache cracks in Mallory’s chest at the hopeful way Saskia is staring. An ache that only widens at the lie she’s about to tell.

“Yes,” she says. “She’s going to help us.”

Saskia relaxes against the pillows. “Okay.” She smiles, eyes flickering over Mallory’s costume. “Go get ’em, Nancy Drew.”

But there’s something flat in the way she says it. Something about the way her smile doesn’t meet her eyes.

As though Saskia knows that when Mallory leaves this room, she might not come back.

For a moment, Mallory can envision everything that could have been. Saskia on a rain-slicked New York street. Saskia in the silver chill of winter beneath blankets in an apartment with sweeping bay windows. Saskia standing next to her on a freshly painted stage, letting the ghost light welcome them home. Each image, a taunt. A reckoning of all the seasons that will never belong to them.

Mallory bends her head to Saskia’s. She presses a kiss to her forehead and tries to ignore how cold Saskia’s skin feels beneath her lips.

“Mine,” she says in a whisper only for her.

Saskia curls clammy fingers around Mallory’s. “Yours.”

As Mallory walks out the door, leaving Saskia in a room once laced with so much possibility, she realizes Ezra was wrong about something.

Places can be haunted, too.

When the play ends, Mallory barely hears the applause.

After spending the remainder of act 5 lying in a pretend, poison-induced sleep, she slips into the hall and flies down the back stairwell. The one that leads to the narrow stage-door entrance, where no one will notice her disappear, even in her Juliet nightgown.

In another universe, she would be in the lobby, collecting flowers, cheeks aglow with praise. She’d feel like this was the beginning of something. A career. A talent. Alife.

But in this universe, Mallory has none of those things ahead of her. She’s never had any of those things at all. Her whole existence has been catapulting toward this moment: a room full of candles and a creature awaiting the taste of her blood.

She was never going to be a successful actress. Or anyone special. She was always the end of a legacy.

The seventh gift. The final perfect heart.

But if she can stop Saskia from dying, she’ll leave something of value behind in this world. When Mallory takes her final breaths in a space meant for prayer and hope, she won’t be offering herself to a demon, won’t bleed in the name of an ancient bargain.

It will only be for herself. For Saskia.

For something that feels like magic, even as it ends.

The idea becomes a mantra, something to hold on to as the chapel comes into view. A glowing triangle in the dark.

Mallory shoves open the arched doors, stepping inside the darkened entryway. She pauses, fingering the silver knife in her pocket that she’d swiped from the prop vault, thinking of that library book again, the list of other items that can weaken a demon. Crosses. Holy wood and water. She suspects none of those would work—not on a beast that lingers confidently in a church, smugly waiting for its prey. Mallory tightens her hand on the knife’s handle. Prayer has never helped her before; it won’t help her now.

The altar candles glow ahead, casting long shadows across the pews. And as her eyes adjust to the wide-open space, she realizes she’s not alone.

Dozens of robed figures sit in the first two rows. Her breath catches as she recognizes the velvet cloaks from the sacristy and their face coverings: masks with elongated, curved beaks, just like the figures in her dream. All slowly turning, in tandem, to stare at her.