Anger was rising in me now; anger I had condemned myself to the same terrible fate as Mordue and Feathering.
‘Why did you leave the book out in the library when Carvell reopened?’ I asked Feathering, flares of anger bursting across my chest like flash-bangs. ‘Why would you want anyone else to have to go through this?’
Feathering shook her head vehemently. ‘I didn’t. I have no idea who did. I was telling the truth when I said there were no copies in the library. Or at least there shouldn’t have been.’
‘My original copy went missing right before the final North Tower murders,’ Mordue said, pain etched around her eyes like a linocut. ‘I have no idea who has it now – or who planted it in the library for you to find.’
A kind of paranoid dread slicked up my spine.
Who would want to do this to me?
There were plenty of people I had wronged. Harris, Noémie, a thousand others I’d snapped and snarled at since arriving here. But none of them would have had the insight to do this. How would they have known about the disastrous effects of the ritual?
Unless . . .
Lottie.
She was tapped into the supernatural pulse in ways I could never understand. And I had hurt her plenty over the last few months.
What if Sister Maria had channelled through her? What if she had planted the book in that terrifying sleep-like trance that kept leading her to the base of the North Tower?
But . . .why?Why would the dead nun’s spirit want more girls to meet the same fate?
I turned to the dean, my nose itching with the strength of the spices emanating from the sideboard. ‘And Renner is a dead end? He definitely doesn’t have the missing pages?’
‘I’ve visited the lighthouse every week for years. Still no answers.’
Resting my elbows on the long mahogany table, I dropped my head into my hands. The life I so badly wanted for myself was disappearing. I would never be a judge. And yet that was not what concerned me the most – and nor was the idea of suffering the pain of transformation every single day of my life.
What frightened me most was a life without love. Without intimacy or affection. Without my family, without children of my own.
Unless I found the answers, it would only ever be this. This room, these people. For however many months or years or decades it took for me to hurl myself from the North Tower and put an end to the misery.
Yet I still had one more question. One that I’d almost forgotten through all the despair.
I raised my head and looked at them both, noticing with vague surprise that Mordue’s hand was resting comfortingly on Feathering’s.
‘What happened to Poppy Kerr?’
There was a long, heavy silence. And then Mordue spoke.
‘I killed her.’
Horror unfurled like gossamer insect wings in my stomach; slow and strange.
‘What happened?’ I asked, feeling the weight of every syllable.
Mordue let go of Feathering’s pale hand and rubbed her own face until mascara smeared down her cheeks. She didn’t look sad or remorseful, just exhausted to her bones. ‘I . . . I can’t.’ Her voice was tight and small. ‘Kate? Please.’
Feathering climbed shakily to her feet, gripped the back of the chair she’d been sitting on, and stared up at Sister Maria’s portrait. When she spoke, it was weighed down with sadness.
‘As you know, it was the night you performed the ritual for the first time. I was already running late to meet Vanessa and do her ritual – I’d been caught up helping a professor with something – and I could feel my own darkness flaring dangerously. I hurried up to the second mezzanine to use the clubhouse door behind the philosophy bookcase. That’s when I saw you convulsing on the floor, the book splayed out beside you. I dashed over, planning to pull you into the clubhouse with me, but you were stronger than I thought.Angrierthan I ever remember being. And so we fought.’
My fingers went to my face of their own accord, remembering how the dark crimson felt crusted against my skin, how it made my shirt cling to the curves of my chest. ‘That’s where my bleeding nose came from?’
Feathering nodded. ‘I eventually managed to knock you out. Blow to the head from the heaviest book I could find.’
Fear coated my insides like soot in a chimney, cold and black and choking. ‘Then what happened?’