Page 63 of What Happens at Nightfall

“You didn’t know there’d be—this.” Jess looked at the fragments of urn, feeling sick to her stomach. That night at the tomb had been terrifying; hearing Cornelia Vanderwilt in her head had been disconcerting; but she had never, until now, felt in personal danger. She’d been a bystander, a bit player, someone who had wandered in by accident.

Why was someone lobbing urns at her? This wasn’t her fight. This wasn’t meant to be her fight.

Even if there’d been a woman who looked like her next to Cornelia Vanderwilt all those years ago.

The world tilted sickeningly around her. Black dots gyrated in front of her eyes like disco-dancing dust motes. Jess blinked hard, trying not to panic. Air in through her nose, air out through her mouth . . .

Adam was staring at the roof. “How in the hell did that get on the roof? We don’t have urns on the roof.”

“Urns would be totally wrong for a house of this style,” agreed Kimmy.

“Maybe I threw it at myself,” Jess said acidly. “Maybe I snuck in and positioned it and then positioned myself and staged this all to win your trust, since apparently that’s the sort of thing I do.”

Adam looked at her, twin furrows between his brows. “I don’t see how you could have engineered that.”

“Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence.” The scratches on her hands stung. There was something sticky on them, making the pain worse. Jess absently lifted her hand to her mouth.

Adam grabbed her wrist. “Don’t do that. It’s yew.”

Jess gave him an exasperated look. “I know it’s me.”

He hunkered down next to her, holding her wrist. “I mean yew. The plant. The sap is toxic. Don’t lick that.”

Jess yanked her hand away. “Why would you plant it there, then?”

“I don’t usually fling people into it!” Adam took a deep breath. He was close enough that Jess could feel his chest rise and fall under his T-shirt. “Yew bushes are traditionally planted in graveyards. They’re associated with Hecate, the witch goddess. There’s a legend that they purify the dead and free their secrets. Also they make a good border.”

Witches. The secrets of the dead. It was a warm day for early October, the midday sun baking the flagstones, but Jess found herself shivering, with a cold that came from within. A graveyard-at-midnight sort of cold.

A ghost—or possibly a demon, or possibly a ghost and a demon working together—had just thrown an urn at her.

Jess half scootched, half crawled to the place where the urn had fallen. She didn’t quite trust her legs to carry her.

It wasn’t an urn. Or at least not an Edward Gorey/Masterpiece Mystery! sort of urn. Instead of a broken handle, a broken wing lay on the ground. Some of the pieces were mere shards, but one sturdier chunk, the size of Jess’s head—she didn’t want to think about what would have happened if that had landed on her head—had survived. In the center of the fragment was a face, surrounded with folds of cloth like a wimple.

“You’re shivering.” A shadow fell over her, blurring the carving. “Shall we go inside? Would you like some coffee?”

Jess clutched the bit of marble hard, feeling the edges bite into her palm. “You’re not afraid to let me into your house?”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said. “I’m sorry I thought what I thought of you.”

Some apologies were worse than no apology at all. “I’m not sure I want to know what you thought of me.”

Adam grimaced, confirming all of Jess’s worst suspicions. “It was like I had a fire in my brain. No, not a fire. Bees. Buzzing. But not all the time. Only when I thought of you.”

“Great. So now I’m the bee in your bonnet?”

Adam scrubbed a hand through his hair, making it stand up at strange angles. “I didn’t know you and then you were here. And you didn’t seem to exist . . . When I typed in your name—what I thought was your name . . .”

Ignoring his outstretched hand, Jess rose unsteadily to her feet. “You could have asked me instead of trying to google me.” She knew she was being unfair. She had googled him too. She’d found a bunch of scholarly papers, a series of videos of him speaking enthusiastically about rewilding, and his New York Times wedding announcement. “What did you think I was trying to do? Play mind games with you for the fun of it?”

“I didn’t know. I still don’t know.” Adam shoved his hands in his pockets. “Look, even if you don’t want to drink my coffee, at least come in and wash the sap off your hands.”

She’d forgotten about that. Jess could feel the faint stickiness on her fingers, now adhering in green streaks to the outraged marble face on the fragment. She lifted her free hand, examining it as though it belonged to someone else. “Do I have to worry about the poison seeping through the scratches?”

Adam smiled ruefully at her. “It’s not a mysterious toxin on a poisoned dart in a Sherlock Holmes story. Just don’t lick it.”

“That’s what she said,” murmured Kimmy, bending down to pick something up off the ground.