Lily Whitmore's Arc

Chapter 6 of 17

Lily stood beside the bucket fire and tried to place herself. The clearing was wrong. She remembered a slope of ferns and a fallen log, and there was no log here, no ferns. The trees stood farther back than they should. The ground was flat where she remembered a dip. She had died here. She was certain of the place by the note and the smell. But the shape of it had changed, and without the shape she could not tell where her body had fallen. She walked the edge of the fire in a slow ring. The cat watched from a stone. She looked for anything her feet remembered. Nothing pulled at her. The dirt was only dirt. Ollie stepped out from between two pines. He looked at the fire, then at her. "You can't find it," he said. "The ground's wrong," Lily said. "Someone cleared it. Cut the log. Filled the dip." She pressed both hands to her face. "I stood right here and I don't know where I fell." Ollie crouched by the bucket. He picked up the green cloth and held it out flat. "Marrow tracks," he said. "She reads ground. She'd know what got moved." He looked at the cloth, then past Lily into the trees. "She's close. That's why the cloth's here. Someone wants her called in too." He set the cloth down. "Use the warm flask. Not to walk. To call. Break the stopper and hold it up. She'll see the shine through the trunks." Lily took the small flask from her pocket. The gold bands caught the firelight. She did not know if this was what the girl in white had meant it for. She thought of the one squeeze of cold already spent, and the ghost girl's face fading into the trunk. She pulled the stopper. The green light lifted off her palm in a slow column, brighter than the fire, and climbed above the clearing through the branches of a cherry tree at the edge. The blossoms lit pink from underneath. The flask went cold and empty in her hand. She waited. The cat's ears turned first. Then brush moved at the far side of the clearing, and a collie pushed through, ribs showing, tail low. Marrow came out behind the dog with a knife in one hand and her uncle's satchel across her chest. She looked at the fire, the note, her own cloth on the log. She did not speak. She knelt and put her palm flat on the dirt near Lily's feet. She moved three steps and did so again. On the fourth try she stopped. "Here," Marrow said. "Ground's been turned. Someone dug and packed it back. Not long ago." She looked up at Lily. "Your body's under this."