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Chapter Nineteen.
A month has burrowed itself into the throat of the cabin, and there is an entity who fills Taissa's vision in the storm. Sade Thorne. Jackie's death was the all-together severance of any chance of reconciliation. Van faithfully accepted Lottie's prayers to the wilderness, a courteous, submitting knight at her side. She hasn't been a human for a very, very long time. She still cared for Sade.
"Is Sade not coming?" Van wonders out-loud, taking her usual beside Taissa.
"Not today, no," Lottie shakes her head, "she needs to rest." The Matthew girl's eyes possess a curt finality to abandon the subject of Sade's nonattendance as they join hands.
"No surprise there." Van cranes her neck into the secluded view, watching as Sade tossed freshly chopped wood into the dying fire, trudging back into the cabin. Tai nudges her to stop. She's absent from Lottie's meditation for the fourth time in a week, they notice. Sade has sacrificed her own mind for them, in a way.
They all remember the séance. How Lottie practically murdered her. Her love for Lottie endures long, treacherous roads. She thinks about Van. Happy wife, happy life. Signs and wonders. Acceptance of the monster. Sade breathes, walks, and is possessed by orthodox angels, but death has been assisting her at all times. Death continuously tears at Van's sun-lit hair. Maybe it's time to get familiar with It and take after Sade.
𓂀
There is an archangel who loiters outside of Sade's heart uninvited. Laura Lee. Lottie does not mention the blonde anymore. Her name is a locked drawer now, dust gathering in the grooves. But silence is not the same as forgetting.
Sade busies herself with the cabin, turns the act of cleaning into something close to protection. Natalie speaks to her only in the language of migrations and animal welfare now—where the bunnies have burrowed, how the geese carve their sharp V's through the sky, never looking back. Travis treats her like an airborne plague, skirting around her presence with a quiet, surgical precision. She doesn't blame him for wanting to be alone.
Sade suggests digging near the denser trees in the earth; chorus frogs are abundant, hibernating in deep burrows of mud and decay, their frozen bodies waiting for spring's thaw. The Scatoricco girl refuses with a curl of her lip. Her face is a shuttered house, vacant and unwilling.
A sinkhole or avalanche could happen and scare off any game, she warns. A place where the ground swallows whole. Strife between them has worsened.
When Sade leaves to hunt, she comes back with at least a couple of small birds—gray jays, their wings limp in her hands, as if surrendering to the cold long before the bullet found them. (They don't hear the pleas of the bird's beak, cries for her to stop. They wouldn't care, anyways.) Frosted berries tumble from her pockets, little winter encrusted spheres of crimson and onyx, gleaming like scattered beads from a broken rosary. Mari weaves them into something edible, happy to finally get rid of Jackie's belt.
