Wildwood Imperium (Wildwood Chronicles 3)

“Kiddie talk, there.”

“Okay,” said Martha, thoroughly unconvinced.

They continued on, through the dust-steeped granite flagstones of the mausoleum’s entry chamber. An opening at the end of the room let onto a larger chamber. There, the bandit and the girl found the sarcophagus bearing the body of Alexei.

“Whoa,” said Seamus.

“Gross,” said Martha.

“Nothing gross about it—he’s a machine,” said the bandit, walking up to the body and tapping his finger at the body’s metallic cheek. Someone had cast aside the coffin’s lid, somewhat unceremoniously. It lay in pieces on the floor. Martha appeared at Seamus’s side, marveling at the strange corpse: its riveted joints and spring-loaded articulating fingers. The body had been dressed in a martial uniform, all gold brocading and brass buttons, stiff from years of quiet disuse. Martha moved to take a closer look at the boy’s face. He’d been handsome, she decided, and his eyes were peacefully closed. Seamus reached his arm under the mechanical boy’s midsection and lifted; the body gave a moaning creak, a rusty hinge long in need of a good oiling.

“Not too heavy, actually,” said the bandit.

“The teeth!” exclaimed Martha.

Seamus looked up to the head of the coffin; Martha had pried the boy’s mouth open and discovered an empty cavity.

“Gone?” asked the bandit.

“Gone,” breathed Martha, craning her head around to get a better look into the automaton’s mouth.

“Well, that’s not helpful.”

“What did they say? We need the teeth?”

“Doesn’t work without the teeth.”

Martha chewed on her lower lip. “Like, doesn’t work doesn’t work?”

“That’s what they said.”

“What do we do?”

“I guess we have to find out what happened to the teeth,” said the bandit, his voice falling a little in despair. Finding the cemetery amid the ivy scourge was one thing: finding a dead boy’s full set of teeth in a landscape rendered totally unrecognizable was quite another.

Just then, a distinctly young and feminine sob rang out. Seamus mistook the sound as having come from Martha, so intrusive was the darkness that surrounded them.

“Hey, it’s all right,” he said consolingly. “We’ll figure it out. No need to cry.”

“That wasn’t me.” She held the candle flame up to her face, which the dim light showed to be pale with terror.

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Then who did it?” Seamus’s voice trembled with fear as he spoke.

“It’s all my fault!” sounded a disembodied voice, steeped in sobs. It came from the far corner of the tomb, and Martha and Seamus each gave out an eardrum-shattering scream, their bodies reflexively leaping into one another in a terrified embrace. They hadn’t been there l

ong when Seamus pulled himself from Martha’s arms and ran, screaming, out of the chamber and back down the entry hall to the front door. Martha, frozen in her steps, whipped the candle around to face the specter.

“Who’s there?” she called. “Spirit, name yourself!” She’d learned that line from ghost stories she’d been told by the older kids in the Unthank Home. It was always what the ghost hunters and the exorcists said when they bravely faced down some undead soul.

“I’m not a spirit,” said the girl’s voice. “I’m just a girl.”

Martha walked tentatively forward, and the glow of the candlelight fell on a figure crouched against the far wall. She was a young girl, a little older than Martha, and she had long brown hair and sun-kissed skin. A garland of dead flowers was nested on her head, and her cheeks were streaked with dusty tears.

“Who are you?” asked Martha.