Dahlia Noir's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Dahlia climbed. The pine track was steep and needle-thick. Azura walked ahead, silent, her blue dress catching on brush. The cottage was not yet in sight. Dahlia counted her breaths and watched the trees. Something had followed since the stump. She heard it on the third switchback. Not footsteps. A drag. Like cloth pulled over dry ground. She turned and saw nothing but shadow between the trunks. Then the shadow moved without a tree moving with it. The shape she had drawn in the dirt. The rabbit shadow. Tall ears. No face. It came uphill in a straight line, cutting through brush that should have caught it. It did not catch. "Stop," it said. Flat. Small. "Mine. Give it back. Now." Dahlia's hand went to her coat pocket. The scrap of paper with the bunny mark she had copied from the graveyard plot. Ink on paper. A stolen shape twice stolen now, once by the killer, once by her. "You said he took it," she called down. "Not me." "You wear it. Same theft." The shadow kept climbing. It did not hurry. It did not need to. "Drop it. Or I take." Azura had stopped on the track above. Her face was still. "It will reach you before the porch," she said. "It does not tire." "What does it take." "What it is owed." Dahlia looked at the paper in her hand. The mark was her only key to the killer's door. Without it she had a cottage and no proof of what waited inside. With it she had a shadow at her back that would drag her off the hill. A cold moved through the pines that was not wind. A woman stood on the track between Dahlia and the shadow. Gray dress. White hair. Bare feet on the needles. Dahlia had heard the stories at court in half-whispers. The gray lady. The one who pulled things out of places they belonged. "Give it to me," Lady Moon said. She did not look at Dahlia. She looked at the shadow. "I carry stolen things." Dahlia did not move. "Price." "A memory. Small. Your choice." She thought of the king beside the dahlia bed, late for the first time. She would not give that. She thought of a summer afternoon before any of this, a bowl of plums on a windowsill. Nothing anyone would miss but her. "Take the plums," she said. Lady Moon's hand closed on the paper. The taste of the fruit went out of Dahlia's mouth as if it had never been there. The shadow stopped mid-stride. Its ears tipped. It did not speak. It turned and went back down the pines the way it had come, following the woman in gray who now carried its mark. Dahlia stood empty-handed on the track. The cottage waited above her through the trees. She had bought the climb. She had spent her key to do it.