His Cemetery Doll (22 page)

Right before he could slip out of the room, Asya's one-eyed gaze found him. Her mask had returned to normal...though now she wore an expression of deep sadness. Then her focus dropped from him to Shyla.

Con wet his lips.

"Come with us," he whispered to her. "Please. You can be with her."

Asya bowed her head, then slowly shook it no. When she raised her face to him, he saw why.

The cracks on her shoulders—across her chest—had started to deepen. Even as he watched, another shard of porcelain broke free and fell to the ground at her feet.

"No," he said. "No, Asya,
no."

"What's happening, Dad?" Shyla asked, lifting her head. Con let her, releasing her from his grip and approaching Asya.

"You can't, Asya, not now. You're finally free. You can come back with us, back to the graveyard."

The doll shook her head again, and now her movements became shakier, less precise. As she moved, the joint of her neck ground audibly, and part of her mask flaked away.

He grabbed her by the arms.

"Why? Why, after all this?"

She glanced away from his face. Her gaze fell instead to her breast, and he followed it. The porcelain crumbled faster now, as it had for the priest, and Conall caught a glimpse of the empty, hollow darkness underneath.

"Your heart," he said. "Your heart! Is it here somewhere?"

Asya sagged against his grip, and her head fell limp.

"Shyla!" he said. His daughter waited right beside him, staring in awe. "We have to find her heart. He kept it, so he could preserve her. It must be here!"

The girl—bless her—quickly voiced an agreement and turned to start tearing through the shelves and drawers containing Fred's medical tools. Conall, meanwhile, carefully lowered Asya to the floor, gently laying her out.

"Just hold on," he said. "Please. Just give us a few more minutes. We'll find it."

Her blue eye locked on him, and her porcelain lips held the barest hint of a smile. He didn't like the expression: it was an expression of goodbye.

"Don't you dare let go," he hissed at her. Then he stood and started tearing through the cabinets.

"I don't see anything!" Shyla cried, digging through Fred's awful collection. "There are no jars, no cases, nothing."

"Keep looking," Con replied. He threw a glance at Asya: she'd closed her eye, and bobbed her head back and forth in weak, slow rhythm. She made a distracted sound. She was...
humming.

"Stay with us, Asya," he said.

She didn't appear to hear him. He could practically
see
her weakening: head lolling, limbs resting limp on the stone floor. She sighed, too weary a sound, and then even her humming came to a stop.

"Asya!" he yelled as he yanked boxes down from above. "Asya, you
listen
to me!"

Nothing.

"
Asya!"

He abandoned his search and returned to her side. Those fine cracks raced down her arms, up her mask all the way to her hairline. At any second...she'd collapse...

"Dad, here!"

Shyla thrust a small box into his hand. It didn't look like any kind of storage box, like Fred had kept around the surgical room. On the contrary, it wore ornate embellishments, silver scrollwork on gleaming mahogany. A detailed arrangement of dials and cogs decorated the top under a frame of glass: the inner workings of a clock, with delicate gold hands and finely-stamped numbers.

It took Conall a long, terrible moment to recognize what his daughter had found.

"The music box!" he cried out in shock.

"He had it in his...well, there's another room back there." She gestured to the back of the room, where there stood another door Conall had not yet register. "I remembered he went in and out of there first, to find a book. I guessed he might have kept...something like
this...
in there too."

"A book?" Conall asked. "Do you know where the book is, sweetie?"

She nodded, and disappeared again briefly into what had probably been Fred's study, or shrine, or whatever place he would study his bizarre arts.

Conall opened up the music box. The graceful figure of a ballerina rose into place as the lid came up, and without even a turn of a key, she began to pirouette slowly to the strains of the song Asya had but seconds ago been humming.

"Here," he said, placing the music box on her stomach, laying her hands on it. The doll's eye sleepily opened.

"Here, Asya. Listen to me. Is this it? Is this where he hid it?"

She stirred, fingers delicately closing around the box. She brushed two of them over the music box's front compartment. It had a tiny, delicate keyhole in it.

"Shyla!" Con called out. "Is there a key?"

"Here," his daughter said, appearing at his side, breathless. She had a huge book in her hands, one Conall hated the instant he saw it. An old red tome smelling of ash. He flipped it open in violent resolve and furiously skimmed the pages.

There. More than halfway through: handwritten notes and pictograms of Asya as the doll. Detailed diagrams of the procedure which had made her thus. Part science, part ugly, black magic.

And between the pages, like a bookmark, lay the smallest key Con had ever seen.

He snatched it up and tossed the book away. Without hesitation, he slid the little key into the little lock. The music box clicked; the ballerina stopped spinning.

When Con slid the compartment open, a small glass heart, interspersed with veins of silver and deepest, ruby red, rested on crimson velvet within.

Asya smiled again, but she looked terribly weak. Con cautiously, ever so cautiously, lifted the heart from its place. For a second, he found himself dumbfounded. What was he supposed to do next?

Shyla closed her hand around his. She guided it over Asya's chest—to where the biggest cracks had already started to cave in.

"It's only a nightmare, now," she whispered to Asya as she and Con closed their hands over the wound, tucking the heart into place in the hollow porcelain chest.

"It's over," she assured the doll. "It's over."

Asya's ribbons slithered, returning to life. Moving like tiny serpents, sinuous and deliberate, they wove their way back to her body.

Conall and Shyla removed their hands, scooting away from the doll as the lengths of silver silk wrapped around her. They twisted and wound themselves together, crisscrossing her white, ceramic flesh, slowly covering more and more of her. Shyla crept close to Conall, tucking herself under his arm. He sensed her shaking and gave her a squeeze. His eyes, though, remained riveted on his doll.

Soon, the ribbons covered her entire body. Every inch, each delicate finger and toe. Even her blonde hair disappeared under their satin gleam. She never stirred. Finally, the figure before them lay perfectly motionless: a silken mummy.

They waited, their heavy, anxious breathing the one sound in the room. Shyla grew tense beside Conall, clutching him tight, shivering. She didn't have to say anything. Con understood her fear...and her desperate hope.

"It'll be okay, dear heart," he said, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. "Don't worry."

She barely nodded in answer.

"Dad?" she whispered finally. "Is...is she..."

"Your mother," he said softly. "She's your mother, Shyla. She hid you with me...to keep you safe. Everything she did...to keep you safe."

"She can't go now," Shyla choked. "She'll get up, won't she? She has to get up..."

When nothing had changed for long, long moments, and Conall found himself almost ready to give up hope, the ribbons rustled. Not like the lovely, sinuous things they'd been before: now they stirred as something moved beneath them, and one lovely hand came up from the floor to begin pulling them away.

Shyla made a strangled sound and bounded out of Con's arms to help. Her hands found the ribbons around Asya's face and began tugging them away.

Then, the most beautiful sound Conall could imagine. As Shyla helped unwrap the ballerina's cocoon, Asya sucked in a deep, full breath of air.

Soon Con was helping too, and together they unwrapped Asya from the ghostly gray shroud. Underneath, she remained pale as porcelain, but as Con's hands touched her he felt the softness of supple flesh, the warmth of life. As soon as he'd removed the last of the wraps around her head, letting blonde hair tumble free, he beheld her face and her two beautiful, mismatched eyes.

"Asya..." he breathed.

"Conall..." she replied. Her voice came soft, weary, but she sounded whole. At last.

Con kissed her, trembling in a fearful mix of awe and joy.

T
he orange glow of the raging fire flickered in the rear-view mirror in Conall's truck. The church, burning behind them. He'd been relieved to find the black thorns receded when they emerged from the basement rooms below the old convent, yet still, he couldn't bear to leave the harrowed church standing. Not when it had been so defiled.

Shyla and Asya, wrapped in a white sheet from one of the upstairs rooms, waited for him in the front seat of the truck as he'd poured petrol around the buildings and threw down a match. When he returned, both had fallen asleep. No doubt their exhaustion had caught up. His girl curled up in Asya's lap, looking every bit the sleepy child in her mother's arms, younger than her years and clinging to Asya like a baby.

Con merely savored the sight for a long moment. He'd hardly had the chance to do more than check over both of them for injuries. Shyla, besides bruised from Fred's manhandling, had no more than the incision on her cheek, but Asya—now released from the necromancer's grasp—retained all the scars given to her over the course of her "transformation." They'd been impossible to ignore, as he and Shyla released her from the ribbons bit by bit. Raised welts of Fred's abuse. Apparently, those were not going to recede.

No matter.
Con reached out to stroke her pale cheek.
She's alive. As long as she's alive, we are going to be all right.

They would tell Shyla the whole story tomorrow. There would be so much more to explain, after all. The most important thing for now, though, was that her mother would come home, finally.

They were all going home.

***

D
ark had fallen by the time Con caught sight of the familiar gates ahead. He rolled up to the house in stoic silence, and when he killed the engine, he gave another glance at the sleeping mother and daughter beside him. They hadn't stirred, either of them, the whole way back.

He didn't mean to disturb their sleep, as he very gently pried Shyla out of Asya's arms, and carried the girl into the house. He did the same then for his sheet-wrapped ballerina, laying her on the couch in front of the cold hearth before he set about taking Shyla to bed. When he came back down, he studied Asya for a contemplative moment—perhaps reassuring himself she still breathed. Certain she did, he turned toward the fireplace to light a fire.

When he had the blaze going and turned around, Asya sat up, sheet pulled around herself, watching him with her beautiful eyes.

"Welcome back," he said. He scooted closer to her, sitting on the floor before her and gazing up. "Lord, Asya...it's so good to finally see your face."

She brought one hand up to touch her cheek. Then, she touched his. Her lips parted, but no sound came out.

"Shyla's upstairs, in her bed," he told her. He imagined it must have been what she meant to ask. "I, uh...you can stay here. With her, I mean. I want to—"

"Thirteen years," Asya interrupted.

Con stared, waiting for her to go on. When she didn't, he ran a hand through his hair.

"Yes. I imagine...it must be..."

"Unbelievable," she finished for him.

Asya tilted his face up to her, caressing him with her long, delicate fingers. Her arm, extending from underneath the sheet, bore several of the necromancer's marks. Conall cupped her hand in his, laying it palm up, and gently traced his other fingers along the lines left on her skin.

"I gave up hope more than a decade ago," she whispered. "I imagined no one would ever find me, and moreover, they would believe me...a monster. It didn't matter, though...as long as I could believe she would be safe. Safe, in the light of day. Alive. Free from
him
."

"I did try," he said. "To keep her safe. For you."

Asya nodded.

"I believed, once he'd taken me, he would forget her. She'd merely been an obstacle, after all, in his attempts to have me. If I'd had any choice...I didn't
want
to leave my baby in a graveyard. I simply...I made a desperate, painful decision."

She met his eyes. The first glistening tears sparkled in hers, but beyond them, a depth of warmth and gratitude. When she continued, her voice became choked with emotion.

"I see now...I couldn't have trusted her to any better guardian."

Gazing up at her, Conall said nothing. Still holding her hand in one of his, he reached up to caress her with his other, stroking her cheek. He pulled her down into his arms and kissed her.

Her lips...warm, pliant under his own. Soft and the slightest bit damp. After the first kiss he had to have another, deep and full of longing, as his arms wound around her body to pull her closer.

"Conall," she whispered. "I never...I thought I would be lost forever."

"Sh," he soothed. "It's over now. You're safe with us."

When their lips met again, his tongue found hers, trading sweet caresses. He brushed his fingers through her hair, and next dropped his hand down to begin peeling away the sheet.

His first glance at her nakedness broke his heart. Her slender body, rendered in a map of the mad priest's investigation. Scars down the center of her chest...her abdomen...her arms and legs. The one feature Frederick had spared had been her face, but even now, the hints of her cracked mask left little white lines down her cheek.

She saw him looking and glanced away. He drew her back and kissed the site of the scars. He traced the tiny memories with light, gentle kisses, following those with a tender nuzzle.