How does Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil end?
Alice destroys both of the vampires who shaped her fate. In Sabine's penthouse she drives a shard of shale through Sabine's heart in the shower, then waits for the returned heartbeat Lottie promised, and it never comes. Realizing that Lottie lied about the maker-bond and meant to kill her just as she once killed Penny, Alice lets Lottie drink blood poisoned with grave dirt and stakes her with a silver-handled hairbrush. She walks out into the Boston night still undead and alone, and chooses to keep going.
How does Alice kill Sabine in Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil?
Sabine comes prepared, wearing chainmail beneath her dress to guard her heart, the one place a feral rose can be destroyed. Alice first tips the grave dirt from her pendant into a poured glass of blood, but Sabine refuses it because she feeds only from the source. Alice then slips away to the shower, snaps a shard of shale off the wall, and waits; when Sabine steps into the steam and sheds the chainmail, Alice spins in her embrace and puts the shard through her heart. Sabine crumbles to ash smiling, almost pleased the girl had the nerve.
Why does Alice kill Lottie?
Lottie told Alice that killing Sabine while the maker-bond was fresh would break it and bring Alice back to life; that lie powers the whole plan. When Sabine is ash and no heartbeat returns, Alice understands the bond was never going to break and that Lottie knew all along. For two hundred years Lottie has drawn women close and then buried them to keep Sabine away from her own door, and she ended Penny exactly this way in New York in 1994. Knowing she was meant to be next, Alice poisons Lottie's wineglass with grave dirt and drives the silver hairbrush through her heart.
Was Lottie going to kill Alice?
Yes. Lottie had spent two centuries bringing women into her orbit and burying them to shield herself from Sabine, and she ran the same play on Alice that she once ran on Penny, whom she killed in a New York apartment with a silver hairbrush. Sabine tells Alice as much in the penthouse, describing every dead girl of the past two centuries as a love letter to a fledgling who would not come home. When Lottie steps off the elevator with two wineglasses and soft reassurances, Alice strikes first.
Does Alice become human again at the end?
No. Her heartbeat never returns after Sabine's death, because the maker-bond cannot actually be broken; the promise of restored life was Lottie's invention. Alice finishes the book undead and hungry, the last of the three women standing. Her closing choice is simply to keep going.
What happens to Alice in the final scene?
Alice leaves the penthouse and walks into the Boston night, the emptied pendant warm at her chest, her mother and Catty both gone. She replays Catty's last voicemail, and her call from her father in Scotland interrupts it; Alice tells him, untruthfully, that all is well, and stays on the line listening to his breathing across the ocean. When the call is over she keeps walking, pacing her steps to the rhythm her breath would keep if she still had one, and decides to go on.