The baby was crying.

  Edda looked up. Up and up, the staircase stretched before her, steep and narrow and dimly lit. The walls and ceiling closed in the farther her eyes went, like a long tunnel that grew smaller and smaller as it ascended. It felt as though she would be crushed if she chose to climb it, suffocated as she neared the top; so contorted into the space that turning back would be an impossibility.

  The only way left would be forward, then, toward the heavy door at its pinnacle. It drew her eyes to it, like the distant but unavoidable peak of some terrible mountain. Looming above her in painted grey wood. Sinister, with a thick beam slotted across the door, keeping it barred from the outside.

  For years, she had stood at the bottom of this staircase, just as she did now. Frozen in place, looking up toward that terrifying door behind which the baby cried.

  How many steps separated her from that door? She had never been able to count them. Each time, the dark wood would blend together right before her eyes, grain blurring into ledge blurring into grain. One step became three, three became five. Expanding as she focused. Constricting as she turned her attention. No, she had never been able to count them. Eventually, she had stopped trying. There were too many. There were not enough.

  Still the baby cried, its loud, shrill peals echoing throughout the house. Echoing within her head. Was she the only one who heard it? It had always felt that way. At least the woman was not screaming today.

  Strange.

  She looked down at herself with a jerk. A plain brown dress hung off the emaciated remains of her body, worn and dirtied; little more than a rag splattered with foul-smelling oil. Her legs were slick with it, too, and hot with urine. There was cold stone and rough straw beneath her bare feet, themselves black with grime. She spun, suddenly frantic.

  Behind her and on either side were unforgiving grey walls, their every crack and crevice horribly, sickeningly familiar. She had spent days and weeks and months in their company, with little to do but study them and her hunger. They crowded around her now, as though eager to grab a hold of her. As though to keep her here once more, hoping and dreading and hoping and dreading until only dread was left.

  A pit opened up in her stomach, and she felt bile rise rapidly in her throat. She was in her cell in the dungeons beneath Cachtice Castle.

  But in front of her were stairs, leading up and up and up. Without a second thought, she started for them. Bracing her hands on the stairwell like she kept the mouth of some starved beast from closing upon her, she took one step, then two. Her horror at finding herself once more imprisoned drove her forward, clouding her mind to the claustrophobia of the climb before her.

  And then the baby stopped crying.

  She stumbled, nearly falling backward, gripped by a fear so poisonous that it left her stunned. Halfway up now, her head seemed to spin as she fixed her eyes upon the door that awaited her, so close that she could make out the peeling paint and rusting hinges. And that sturdy beam in its brackets, preventing those inside from leaving.

  Her entire body quaked in a silence filled only by the loud hammering of her heart. In a silence where the baby’s cries and the woman’s screams should have been.

  She could go no further. But she could not go back either, and so she stood there trapped between one hell and the next. Paralyzed by the past before her and the future behind her.

  The smell and the sound of the pyre found her before the heat did. The very same acrid scent of burning hair and flesh that had choked her last breaths. And the deafening crackle of the flames, so loud they almost drowned out the triumphant cries of the people, celebrating as she burned. Her lungs seized within her chest. The pyre had taken her once and it would have her again.

  “No,” she whimpered, “No, no, no.” She began to cry as she slowly, painstakingly took another step forward. And then another. She did not dare look behind her, but she knew the flames crept closer from the lick of warmth upon her legs. There was oil on her dress, she remembered; the oil she had been doused with to further ignite the flames that had killed her.

  If she did not climb, she would be consumed.

  And so, she climbed and climbed and climbed, taking each step a little faster than the last as the fire began to nip at her heels like a hungry dog. Sobbing, weeping, resisting as the stairwell squeezed in about her, suffocating her just as much as the black smoke that filled her nostrils. Every drop of moisture in her eyes and mouth had evaporated as the inferno slowly, inevitably encroached upon her.

  Climb or be consumed, was all she could think. And so, she climbed toward the top of the stairs, where the door, behind which she would find only silence, watched and waited.

  At last, she collapsed upon it, heaving without sound and scrambling against the coarse wood with hands that shook with fear. The heat was immense already. If she did not open the door, her skin would soon begin to blister and boil. She found the beam, pushing and pulling at it with mounting desperation. She did not want to die again. Not like this.

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  Somehow, someway, she hoisted the beam from its place. It clattered to the floor beside her, and she kicked at it, feeling the flames flare up and kiss her legs as it tumbled down the stairs behind her. She might have hesitated, had not the promise of searing agony been upon her. She might have paused before the door and wondered if she could handle what was within. But as the first embers of fire clung to her skirts, as though to drag her back to the pyre, she did not.

  Pulling the door open, she flung herself inside.

  And woke, eyes wide and hands pressed firmly over her mouth. Edda’s palms muffled her ragged gasp, lips stuttering against them as she swallowed the shriek that threatened to follow. Her eyes rolled wildly, insensible with fear. She dared not breathe, let alone move in that overwhelming silence. The baby was not crying. The woman was not screaming. But she had opened the door.

  The seconds passed with painful slowness. Motionless, awareness came sluggishly to her fear-addled brain. There were tears streaming down the sides of her face, into her ears and onto the wet pillow below her. Cold sweat had dampened her clothing, and she shivered in rhythm with the shaking of her icy fingertips. And try as she might to remain quiet, her heart drummed loudly, tellingly against her ribs. She would be heard. She would make the first noise, after the baby had finally gone silent.

  Before long, her lungs demanded air. It was perhaps this purely physical need which focused her, allowed her mind to clear and her eyes to see. The ceiling above her was vaulted and ornate, illumined just barely by the cool light of the moon through the window. In the corners of her vision were the posters of the bed she lay in, curtains neatly tied, and a small shift of her head revealed that Across the Carpathians rested, still open, in her blanketed lap. The room was dark, meaning that the candle at her side had burned down to the wick.

  It was her chamber at Cachtice Castle. She must have fallen asleep, despite her best efforts. And yet, even as that knowledge settled, even as her voice readied to call for Marta, some part of her—some unconscious, primitive part of her—insisted that she remain quiet.

  Still trembling, she pushed herself up in bed, moving as soundlessly as she could. The need for air was too great, and at last, she sucked in a breath, her stomach clenching with panic at the muted sound. She held it for a time, as though in wait. As though expecting that something had heard her. But even as nothing stirred, she almost could not bring herself to release it for fear of the noise.

  At last, the pressure mounted too far and she exhaled; softly though unsteadily. She frowned, watching a misty plume of air appear before her. Gooseflesh rose all along her arms. Even last night, with the window open, she had not seen her breath. Why was it so cold? Her head immediately snapped to the side, eyes searching the window to ensure it was shut and secured.

  Indeed, it was. So, why?

  It did not occur to Edda, then, that her eyes followed the same path that the crow’s had the night before. Past the pool of moonlight into the shadows of the room, to the wall across from her where Marta lay, slumbering in her pallet. Her eyes grazed over the sleeping woman, obscured beneath her blankets, to settle in the corner.

  Where something stood; its back to her and its face resting in the crook of the room.

  Before even registering what it was she saw, Edda clamped her hands over her mouth once more, so tight and so hard that she must have loosened her teeth. Like the instinct of an animal hunted, she knew immediately that she should not attract its attention; that if she so much as whimpered, it would turn to her. And once it saw her, there would be no escaping.

  Body vibrating with a quality of fear she had never experienced before, she studied the thing with unblinking eyes—too terrified to look away, lest it hear the rotating of her head. She wanted to disbelieve her sight, to deem it a hallucination or a black dream. Perhaps even to question her own sanity. Maybe then, she could simply wake Marta with a shout, and have the woman assure her that there was nothing there.

  But every fiber of her being insisted otherwise.

  The crow’s haunting words from the night before returned to her—the promise of whispers and of other things in the dark. And so, too, did her own frightening conclusions about what those words meant. Fresh tears began to trickle down her face as she desperately muffled her shallow breaths.

  It must be a blood witch. But even as she considered the possibility, she knew it was not. Although she could only see its back, the thing before her was no child. Even as it stood hunched forward, it was tall enough to scrape its fingers across the lowest part of the ceiling; thin fingers, tipped with dirty nails. Long enough to encompass her neck. Her breath shuddered, try though she did to keep it under control. No, it was no child before her.

  She longed to shut her eyes. To hide beneath the blankets like the scared child she had now become. But her eyelids had forgotten how to close, and she did not have the courage to move her hands from her mouth, lest her screams bubble forth uncontrollably. The more she looked, the more horrible the sight before her became.

  Swathed in stained white cloth, she could see little of the thing’s body. Its hands hung loose at its sides, swaying just enough for her to know that it was awake. And then, there was its head. A hastily suppressed whine rose in Edda’s throat. Patches of fine, stringy locks were upon that white pate; but it was not that which frightened her the most. No. It was the twisted and unnatural way the thing’s head hung forward, limp and useless.

  Its neck was broken.

  Edda could do nothing. Fear had paralyzed her upon the bed, her eyes glued to the monster as she prayed that her low breaths and incessant trembling would not alert the thing to her presence. Her limbs had grown numb as the temperature within the chamber continued to drop, and even the quilts that covered her felt like sheets of ice. Hopelessness began to overtake her, now, as her tears slowed to a stop.

  Was this what the crow had intended for her? To contend with this monster the entire night? She had been wrong to expect anything else from a witch’s messenger, and she realized that now with certainty. It had steered her toward a different death—far earlier than the one she had died before and—she pressed her lips together to stifle a moan of terror as the thing before her shifted just slightly—perhaps far worse.

  Locked in the spiral of her thoughts as well as the stillness of her body, she almost did not notice the movement in the corner of her eye. It might have gone unnoticed, in fact, but for the rustle of cloth. But for the sudden, startling sense that someone was now looking at her.

  And then the whispers started.