Selene Nightshade's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Selene came back to the basin the next night with the little girl and the round ghost already at her grave, sitting quiet in the wilted flowers. She had bought her nights. Now she had to spend them well. The moon in the water was thinner than before, a bruised silver skin. When she leaned close, the surface trembled. Rings ran across it. Light lifted from the edges and spilled down the stone lip into the grass, where it faded to nothing. Every ripple was moonlight lost. If the basin could not hold still, the draining would fail before dawn. She knelt and cupped her hands above the water without touching it. The trembling did not stop. Something below the graveyard was shaking the ground. She pressed one palm to the dirt and felt the beat of it, slow and heavy, like a sleeping animal breathing under the roots. She followed the tremor away from the basin. It led her past the orchard, past a plum tree heavy with dark fruit, to the far edge of the yard where an old stone wall stood choked in vines. On the other side of the wall the twin towers rose against the dimming sky, two grey spires joined at the middle, every window dark. The tremor came from beneath them. She had heard the old name for the place. She had never gone close. Tonight she pressed her hand to the vine-covered stone and felt the beat run up her arm. A voice answered from inside the wall. Not words. A long, low sound like a bellows in a deep room. Something large was breathing down there, and each breath rocked the ground under the basin. She thought of scales. She thought of a folded wing. She did not need to see it to know what shape made that sound. She could not fight it. She could not wake it further. She could only quiet the surface above it. She went back through the orchard at a run. Near the crooked fence she found the pale carrot patch the hill ghosts had told her of, the roots faint as smoke in the dirt. She pulled six and carried them to the basin. Beside the basin she found the sunken ring of old stones the villagers used for their dead flowers, wilted heads bowed over cracked graves. She broke a handful of the dry stems and laid them across the water in a woven mat. Then she set the ghost carrots around the rim, root-ends pointing in. The ripples slowed. The mat held the surface down. The faint roots drank the small spill at the edges and glowed a little brighter. The moon in the bowl settled and dimmed another clean notch. Above her, the real moon dimmed with it. Selene sat back on her heels. The basin was still. The breathing under the wall had not stopped. She had quieted the water by drawing on the hill's gifts again, and the hill's debt had grown. Somewhere below the twin towers, the thing that shook the ground was waking a little more each night, and she had four nights left.