After Rebirth The Scums All Cry For Forgiveness novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ginseng Soup
Faye is poisoned by her adopted sister while her brother holds her jaw, and wakes on the day he comes to fetch her.
My brother Leland held my head up with one hand and tipped the bowl to my lips with the other.
My adopted sister Delphine stood at the foot of the bed, crying so prettily that nobody would ever have guessed.
I tried to turn my head.
I had no strength left.
Yesterday they had cut my right kidney out of me and called it a gift for our brother Tobias.
My legs had been broken for a year.
My hands could not close around a spoon, let alone a needle.
"Slowly," Leland said. "It's warm. Delphine made it for you."
It tasted sweet.
Then my stomach turned to fire.
I knew that burn.
I was a doctor's granddaughter, and I knew exactly what she had put in the bowl.
I looked at Leland.
He still did not see it.
Blood ran out of my mouth onto the pillow, and the room went white.
When it came back, I was standing in the corner of the ceiling, looking down at myself.
My body lay twisted on the thin mattress, mouth red, eyes open.
Leland dropped the bowl on the table.
He stared at my face for a long time.
Delphine's tears stopped.
Her mouth curled up at one corner.
Then she covered it with her hand and went back to crying.
"Brother, what happened to her?"
"Someone poisoned that soup," Leland said slowly.
"You made it, Delphine."
"Are you accusing me?" Her voice cracked on cue.
"Maybe Sister wanted out. Maybe she did it herself. She knows medicine."
Leland knew that was a lie.
For a year he had ordered the maids to search me for anything sharp or poisonous.
He knew I had nothing.
He knew exactly who had done it.
He wiped her tears with his thumb. "Don't be afraid. Brother believes you."
I hung in the air and screamed at him.
I was his real sister.
He had carried me on his back when I was small, before the family lost me.
Now he took out a handkerchief and cleaned the bowl.
He wiped every place her fingers had been.
"Go and change your clothes," he told her. "Wash your hands. Leave nothing on you."
Delphine hurried out.
I flew at Leland with both hands around his neck.
My fingers went through him like smoke.
I could not even touch him.
Footsteps pounded down the hallway.
A man in a black suit burst through the door, breathing hard.
Rowan Peverell.
The man from the grey house across the road, who sat at his window in a wheelchair and watched our family.
He had left a year ago.
I thought he had died abroad.
He stopped in the doorway.
He looked at Leland's face for a long time before he looked at me.
Then he crossed the room and knelt by the bed.
He lifted my body into his arms and wiped the blood off my lips with a shaking thumb.
"Faye," he said.
Nobody had said my name like that in two years.
"Get out of this house," Leland said stiffly. "She killed herself."
"No," Rowan said.
He did not raise his voice.
"My people have been to this town. They told me what you did to her."
Leland said nothing.
Rowan carried my body out past him.
At the door he stopped without turning around.
"I will take this house apart, Penhallow. Every one of you."
I tried to follow him.
The ceiling pulled at me.
The white came back.
Then someone shouted my name from far away, and the sun was hot on my face.
I was sitting on the front step of my grandfather's clinic.
My legs were whole.
My hands were whole.
There was a roll of silver needles in my sleeve.
A black car had stopped at the curb, and I knew every scratch on its door.
"Faye?"
Delphine ran toward me in a pink dress with her hands pressed together.
Behind her, Leland stepped out of the car and looked at me.
"I'm Delphine," she said, eyes already wet. "Please come home with us."
"I'm so afraid you'll push me out of the family."
I looked at her.
I looked at the soft white hands that had poured my death.
My kidney was still inside me.
"Pack your things," Leland said. "We're late."
Last time, I had cried and clutched her hands and called her sister.
Last time, I had left my grandfather's patients in the waiting room without a word.
Tobias was alive in that house, and he was already getting sicker, and I knew whose hands were doing it.
I would not be going back to beg.
I put the roll of needles back in my sleeve and stood up.
"I'm coming home," I said.
So I got in the car.
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