My Husband Dies Every Midnight

The Name She Buried

It was not a raucous eruption, exactly. More of a deflation.

The word itself hung in the room, Holloway, and weighed on every heart present. The thing wearing Elena's face smiled like it had been waiting for this moment for two decades.

" Elenka," she said. "No."

"It's true," Maris whispered. "I would have told you."

"You had twenty-six years old."

"I know," she said, blinking rapidly, but not looking away from the creature. "I wanted to tell you."

Nathan moved to comfort her, but Elena lifted a hand anyway, stopping him. She wasn't in the mood to be comforted, not right now. Her head felt disjointed, like the edges of her thoughts couldn't quite reach each other.

"Holloway," she said again, testing it on her tongue. "It's not possible."

"It is, unfortunately," Thomas said, releasing a heavy sigh. "As the name implies... irregularities."

The creature tilted its head, delighted with the tension blooming between them. It let out a wet, gurgling chuckle, and the room followed suit, save for Elena, who flinched with every sound.

"She remembers , it seems," the creature said, and the sound of its voice was not unwelcomed, exactly, but it was unpleasant. Harder. It was a voice that had been stretched and hollowed and twisted into something crueler, and part of it remained familiar to Elena, which made the sound of it all the more hateful. "Elenka, my dear, you truly are the most difficult of the lot."

Maris took a step forward, trembling. "Elena, listen to me. I didn't hide your name from you, I-"

"Why would you?" Elena demanded, her voice cracking on the last word. "Why would you keep me from knowing who I am?"

"Because your father told me to."

The words hung heavily in the space between them.

Even the creature in the doorway was silent.

Elena turned slowly to gaze at Thomas. "What?"

"He's telling the truth," Thomas said, his jaw set in a grim line. "She's not lying."

Nathan shot him a look. "You knew?"

"I knew the name had power," Thomas admitted. "I suspected that the first breach had given them an in, but once the second opened, the whispers began. Names passed between the people below in order to find loose seams in the magic. Anything to get at what we'd hidden, but a name, a true name, could be used to draw it out, to call it to the surface."

Elena stared at him. "So you had her change my name."

"I asked her to, I begged her," Thomas said. "I had no idea what else to do."

Maris gave a bitter laugh. "You begged me to change her name after the fire, after they took her, after you dug through the stone and found me and left me with a child and a door I could not stop hearing from."

Elena listened, but something about this conversation was not snapping together in her brain, not clicking into place as it should. Not yet.

"No," she said softly to Maris. "You let me grow up thinking that I had no father."

"I let you grow up thinking that you were safe," Maris replied. "Don't you see how many people were watching us? Do you know how many times I found their signs on our windows? I found chalk markings, coins left in odd places, names carved where no one could have reached. They were searching for the Holloways. For the line."

"This is insane," Lila muttered.

No one disagreed.

Elena was staring at the charm on her wrist, the little clock face glowing brighter and brighter, the hands spinning wildly until they became nothing but a blur of silver. She felt something inside her stir at the sensation, something ancient and prickly and angry. She felt exposed, as though her veins had been laid bare for inspection.

Nathan was watching her closely. "Elena."

She finally met his eyes. There was something there that made her breath hitch, something between sorrow and guilt, but she didn't know which was which. Perhaps it was both.

"I should have told you," he said quietly. "About the site, about the charm, about the voices."

She almost said it didn't matter, that they were past this, past all of this, that there was nothing more to be gained by peeling back the layers of this carefully constructed lie, that they had crossed too many bridges to be turning back now. He said nothing about his parents or his sister, nothing at all of the lies that had been told to keep his family out of this war. Perhaps it was time to tell him the truth, but the creature in the doorway chose that moment to lurch forward.

It came closer, its skin splitting with wet little cracks, its face peeling back to reveal something blacker, something beneath the surface of her own skin, but her eyes remained the same, wide and searching and cruel.

The candle flames guttered in their holders.

The creature inhaled deeply, and smiled broadly.

"Holloway," it purred. "At long last."

"Ah," Thomas muttered. "It knows."

Maris grabbed Elena's arm. "You have to remember what it was tied to!"

"I'm trying!" Elena snapped, but she could feel the words leaving her, twisting through her, burning her up from the inside out.

"If you're fighting it, it's a different kind of memory entirely," Maris said, and for once her tone was not cruel, only desperate. "You're not forgetting because you're lost, you're fighting because of what you know."

Elena tried to shake off Maris's grip, but the older woman only held on tighter. "My family , your family, was chosen by the thing below to bear its chains. The name was part of that bargain, and it is part of the debt."

Nathan frowned. "They built the gate, didn't they?"

Thomas nodded. "Not intentionally, of course. But when the founders of the chapel realized what they'd done, that it was the only thing keeping it caged, they'd made vows to protect it, to ensure its safety. But they couldn't do it on their own, and so they turned to the families that had survived its influence. The Holloways were among them."

Elena gulped at the name, her skin prickling. "Keepers of what?"

"The gate," Maris replied. "And the debt."

A sound like a wet knock came from the floor boards, and then another, and another. Something downstairs was answering their conversation, responding to the mere fact of the name being spoken.

The creature in the doorway let out a delighted laugh. It gestured at Elena, eyes wide. "She's the last one."

"No," Nathan said immediately, stepping between them. "She is not."

"Oh, but she is," the creature said. "The final Holloway. And she will speak at the end."

More knocks reverberated through the chamber, and now the floor beneath Elena's feet trembled as well. Thin lines of cracks spiderwebbed out from the weak spot in the floorboards, and Lila let out a startled curse as she took a step back.

"This is impossible," Ingrid muttered.

"It isn't," Thomas said darkly. "Because of the pages you stole," he said, eyeing Ingrid with something like suspicion. "The seal is fraying."

Ingrid, too, looked at the weak spot in the floorboards. "It is reacting to the name," she said, finally. "It always has, it only grew weaker as the years passed, but now the lines are thin and the cracks are multiplying. That is why you heard it."

Elena turned slowly to face Ingrid. "You knew this as well?"

Ingrid looked ashamed. "I knew the name had power, but not that the line had survived in you."

"In me?" Elena echoed the words, blinking at Ingrid.

"It was changed after the fire, in an effort to protect you, but it was the only way to keep you safe," Maris said, her voice shaking. "The records had to be falsified, and the priest who baptized you had to be persuaded to alter the parish records. I barely survived those nights, and Nathan's family barely knew what had happened."

Elena turned slowly to look at Nathan. Everything she'd ever known about her life, her family, had been built on a lie, but somehow that did not upset her as much as it should have. Perhaps it was because she could see the same lie in his eyes, the same pain, the same understanding that everything between them had been built on nothing at all, and maybe that was better.

"It doesn't change anything," she said softly.

"It does change everything," Nathan said simply.

The creature in the doorway writhed, and now it was mostly in the room, if not fully, and its skin was peeling back to reveal something beneath it, something that had been buried under Elena's own for twenty years.

It was joined by something else, something large and waiting, in the corridor beyond, and the chamber shook violently, rattling the chains attached to Thomas's wrists.

The voice coming from below was clearer, too, and this time Elena recognized it immediately.

"Elena."

She turned to face the opening in the floorboards.

The seam widened, revealing more of the dark tunnels beyond, and a pale hand extended from it, slowly, carefully, as if testing the weight of the stone above it. It took a few moments before another one followed, and Maris made a choked sound, and Thomas took a step back, and Nathan's hand found Elena's again.

The creature in the doorway smiled as the first fingers appeared from the darkness, and the man who had been buried for twenty years finally spoke her real name.

"Elena Holloway." Then, the floor gave way.