House of Salt and Sorrows (Sisters of Salt #1)

I trudged up the stairs, exhausted from the long afternoon on Astrea. After lunch, I’d wanted to race home and ask Papa if Edgar had ever approached him about an interest in Eulalie, but Morella had other plans. She whisked us from shop to shop, appraising the wares like a magpie in search of treasure.

I planned to drop off the purchases in my bedroom before searching for Papa, but as I walked down the hall, I spotted steamy air billowing from the bathroom. It smelled of lavender and honeysuckle, such a distinct scent I paused as memories of Elizabeth flooded my mind. She had a special blend of soap made in Astrea just for her. I hadn’t smelled it since the day her body was discovered. One of the Graces must have come across a bottle and decided to try it for themselves.

Sure enough, wet footprints led down the hallway toward their rooms, staining the carpet runner.

With a sigh, I followed them. They led past Honor’s and Mercy’s rooms and came to a stop outside Verity’s. She lay on the floor, sprawled out with her sketchbook and surrounded by colored pastels.

“You’re lucky I caught you and not Papa.”

Verity sat up, dropping a blue pastel. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t towel off properly and left a watery mess in the hall. You know how much he loves that carpet.”

He and Mama had bought it on their honeymoon at a bazaar. Papa said he’d turned his back for a moment and a merchant had pounced, showing off his hand-knotted wares. Mama had wanted to buy a small one for her sitting room, but her Arpegian was so bad that when the rug arrived at Highmoor, it was fifty feet long. She’d loved to describe the look on Papa’s face as the runner rolled out longer and longer.

“I take baths at night. I’ve been in my room all afternoon. See?” Verity raised her hands, dry and smeared with colors.

“Who was it, then? Mercy or Honor? It’s still steaming.”

She shrugged. “They’re in the garden, tying ribbons on the flower bushes.”

I glanced back into the hallway. The footprints were still there, just barely. On closer inspection, they were too big to be Verity’s. “Were the triplets up here?”

“No.”

“Well, someone left wet footprints behind, and they lead straight to your room.”

Verity closed her sketchbook. “Not my room.” She gestured out toward the hallway, at the door directly across from hers.

Elizabeth’s.

“I know you pilfered her soap. The bathroom smelled like honeysuckle.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Then who?”

Again, she looked meaningfully at Elizabeth’s room.

“No one is in there.”

“You don’t know that.”

I sank down onto the floor next to her. “What do you mean? Who would be in Elizabeth’s room?”

Verity studied me for a long moment. I could see her thoughts grinding. Finally, she opened the sketchbook back up and flipped the pages till she found the right picture.

It was a portrait of Elizabeth. I noticed the date scrawled in a shadowed corner. Verity had drawn this recently.

“Are you having nightmares again? Have you been dreaming of Elizabeth?”

Verity often suffered from horrible night terrors. She’d scream so loudly, even Papa would rush up from his study in the East Wing. When pressed, she could never remember what they were about.

“This isn’t a dream,” she whispered.

I brushed aside the chill that had settled over me. “No one is in there. Come and see.”

Verity shook her head, her chestnut curls springing like snakes.

I pushed up off the floor with a frustrated swish of skirts. “I’ll go, then.”

The footprints were almost gone, fading out of the carpet. If I’d come upstairs only a minute later, I never would have seen them. My fingers closed around the door handle—a burnished seahorse poking out from the dark walnut—and there was a rustle behind me. Verity paused on her threshold, eyes wide and pleading.

“Don’t go in.”

Something about the way her tiny hand dug into the jamb sent a streak of cold racing through my chest. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled, rising in defense against an unseen horror. It was ridiculous, but I couldn’t shake the look of fear in Verity’s eyes.

I pushed open the door with resolve but did not step inside.

The air felt thin and dusty. After Elizabeth’s funeral, maids stripped the bedding and covered the furniture with thin, gauzy cloths. They never returned to clean it.

After a cursory sweep of the room, I turned to Verity. “There’s no one in here.”

Her dark green eyes drifted up to the ceiling. “Sometimes she visits Octavia.”

Octavia’s room, another shrouded, untouched shrine, was on the fourth floor between Papa’s suite and Morella’s sitting room.

An involuntary shiver snapped me from the eerie trance Verity wove. “Who does, Verity? I want you to say it and see how absurd it sounds.”

She pressed her eyebrows together, wounded. “Elizabeth.”

“Elizabeth is dead. Octavia is dead. They can’t visit each other, because they’re dead and the dead don’t visit.”

“You’re wrong!” She raced into her room, snatched up the sketchbook, and held it out, unwilling to enter the hallway.

I flipped the pages, searching for whatever proof she thought these drawings would offer.

“What am I meant to be looking at?”

She flipped to a scene in black and gray pastels. In it, Verity cowered into her pillows as a shadowy Eulalie ripped the bedsheets from her. Her head was snapped back unnaturally far. I couldn’t tell whether she was supposed to be laughing manically or the odd angle was the result of her fall from the cliffs.

I drew a sharp breath, horrified. “You drew this?”

She nodded.

I studied my little sister. “When the fishermen brought Eulalie back, did you see her?”

“No.” She flipped the page. A chalk-white Elizabeth floated in a red slash of ink, surprising a robed Verity, ready for her nightly bath.

She turned another page. Octavia curled up in a library chair, seemingly unaware that half her face was smashed in and her arm was too broken to hold a book straight. Verity was there too, peeking around the door, a small, scared silhouette.

Another page flipped.

I took the book from her, staring at Ava. We had only one portrait of her hanging in Highmoor. She’d been little—nine years old with short curls and freckles. This…this looked nothing like that.

“You’re not old enough to remember Ava,” I murmured, unable to look away from the festering buboes or black patches of infected skin at her neck. Most disturbing was her smile. It was soft and full, exactly as it had been before the plague. Verity had been only two when Ava got sick. She couldn’t know what Ava ever looked like.

I turned the page and saw a drawing of all four of them, watching Verity as she slept, hanging from nooses. In disgust, I dropped the book, and sheets of loose paper—dozens of sketches of my sisters—escaped. They exploded across the hall like macabre confetti. In the pictures, they were doing things, ordinary things, things I’d seen them do all my life, but in every drawing they were unmistakably and horribly dead.

“When did you do these?”

Verity shrugged. “Whenever I saw them.”

“Why?” I dared a glance back into the seemingly empty room. “Is Elizabeth here now?”

Verity scanned the room before looking back at me. “Do you see her?”

The hairs on my arms rose. “I’ve never seen any of them.”

She took the book and retreated into her bedroom. “Well…now you’ll know to look.”