Page 69 of She Haunts Me Still

Arden shushes her, hugging her tighter. The gesture feels like the gentle wave of a white flag. Maybe she and Arden will never be put back together again perfectly, but complete enough.

“What about a new pact?” Arden asks, like she’s thinking the same thing. “ ‘Never leave each other in the dark.’ ”

Mallory sniffs. “I think that sounds perfect.”

“Why don’t we—”

But then Raf cuts in with a question drenched in alarm. “Mal. What thehellis that?”

Mallory lifts her head. “What?”

“On your neck,” he adds, pointing. “Whatisthat?”

She leaps up and races to the mirror—and gasps when she sees it.

Two puncture wounds on the side of her throat. Nestled in the dark cloud of a bruise.

Mallory should feel a jolt of panic, but all she feels is an electric surge of vindication. It starts in her chest and spreads like a live wire until her whole body is pulsing with the pure satisfaction that she wasright.

For a second, the woman in the mirror looks less like her and more like a woman who might have lived a hundred years ago. Not a corpse, not a ghost. Just a woman who is tired of being silenced, of feeling like her body isn’t hers.

A woman, she thinks, who’s about to take her power back.

Act III

Dissection

Was ever book containing such vile matter

So fairly bound? O, that deceit should dwell

In such a gorgeous palace.

—William Shakespeare,Romeo andJuliet

17

Mallory knew rehearsals over the next few days would be difficult, but she didn’t expect them to feel like dying.

Night after night, she senses Ezra’s eyes on her in the cavern below the stage. The bite marks on her neck burn beneath his invisible glare, as if they know he’s nearby. Sweltering and swelling, calling to him.

She’s kept them hidden beneath a velvet choker, an ever-present reminder that, seconds after forging her new pact with Arden, Mallory was forced to lie to her again.I must’ve cut myself in the hedge maze,she scrambled to say when Raf spotted the wounds.I came back through the gardens and kept getting nicked by thorns.

That evening, as they rehearse one of Juliet’s soliloquies, she can’t remember a single word. Ezra feeds phrases to her from the dark—serpent heart, honorable villain—until Hendrix finally calls Saskia to step in. Mallory sits in the hollow wings of the Crypt and tries to remember what it feels like to succeed at something.

Between classes, Mallory and Saskia huddle in the library, poring over donor records and board meeting minutes beneath the dusty glow of a banker’s lamp. On Monday,Mallory’s focus is laser sharp, fixated on the old documents, driven by the desire to findsomething. But by Wednesday, she’s falling apart. She shows up at the library with red-rimmed eyes and unbrushed hair, running on two hours of sleep. She can barely focus on anything until Saskia sucks in a sharp gasp.

“Look at this,” she says, pointing to a clipping fromThe Shoreview Post-Gazette. “It’s a letter to the editor from a pastor, warning people about the exhumations. It’s dated 1880—a decadebeforeLily died.”

“Yeah.” Mallory rubs circles on her temples. “Exhumations were happening throughout New England for a century—”

“Right, but listen to this,” Saskia insists.

Most citizens are acting out of desperation to protect living family members, believing in misguided superstition. They falsely believe that blood in a new corpse’s heart is a sign of evil, when, scientifically, it is not uncommon for blood to temporarily remain in the circulatory system for hours or even days after death. But there are some individuals exploiting this helplessness, with sinister motives. I have repeatedly tried to warn my congregation to no success. And so, I write to implore you: Do not be manipulated into handing over the hearts of your deceased loved ones to these charlatans. You cannot begin to understand the nefarious level of their intentions. There are no bloodthirsty creatures in your relatives’ graves. The men who seek theirorgans are the real monsters—and you should be afraid of them.

She sets the paper down, turning. “This sounds like what Lily’s sister said in your dream.”

Mallory chews her already-chapped lips, remembering Rebecca’s words about the man who wanted to exhume Lily’s grave.Jacob.