The hours linger. His eyes adjust to the pervading darkness, and he fixes his gaze on Lilah’s window, detecting the smallest of movements in the room. He blinks. He focuses one last time with all his attention. Nothing. But he has a plan to get her attention.
She sleeps through until the next night. Figures come and go throughout the day, but Lilah stays in bed. A solid rock of weight forms in his gut. What happened?
Caleb ate, dozed, and made one trip down to the river. The water of the stream is just as cold as it was yesterday afternoon, but the chill of it against his skin wakes him fully. He cups his hands to take a drink. After a time, he fills his canister with the clear water. The sky is a sour gray hue, and Caleb wonders if it will snow tonight. He shivers. If his plan works, he won’t be outside tonight. He ambles through the forest, back to his chosen spot, careful to obscure his footprints.
In two swift moves, he sits back on the bough. Positioning himself for the night, he gets ready by trying a rope around his torso and legs. Digging in his pack, Caleb takes half of his last sandwich to eat. He sighs, but smiles, then chastises himself for feeling giddy at the prospect of speaking to her again. Tonight, he will lure the sleeping young woman to him.
Marcus flips the thick vellum letter, sealed with a strange sigil, over and over in his hands. It is not addressed to anyone, but with a seal such as this one . . . Marcus grinds his teeth. He sits with his back against Lilah’s closed door. He made a promise, he’ll see it through. But he couldn’t have predicted all that has happened. And now that woman . . .
He turns the letter back to the blank front, the texture of the paper uneven beneath his touch. Florence was supposed to meet them here but had yet to arrive or send word. He sighs. Just when you think everything will work out fine . . . He can only imagine what has gone wrong, though he tries not to, since his imagination spits out the most illogical horrors. He drops the letter and rubs his eyes.
Javier comes bounding up the stairs, a nonchalant smile turning to a straight line at the sight of Marcus. Marcus met the man briefly once before and found him so unremarkable that he nearly didn’t remember him upon this second meeting. He can’t fathom why Florence would entrust something so critical as the protection of Lilah to such a man, but—Who am I to judge? Marcus smirks and gives the man a nod. Javier’s eyes fall to the letter. “This was on the porch this morning.” Marcus hands the sealed letter to Javier, watching the man’s reaction like a bird of prey. He refocuses his anima onto Javier’s heart but doesn’t detect a change.
“Ah,” Javier says, taking the letter and turning it over in his hands. “I was expecting this.” Marcus raises his eyebrows and waits. “I have a niece who went to the Ludi—this should confirm her safety.”
Marcus crosses his arms. A niece, huh? He finds no lie, so then why does he feel uneasy? Marcus stands, reveling in the difference of their heights, with Marcus coming out at least a head taller. “Jia said she’d take the first watch.”
“I’ll take the second, then,” Javier says, the line of his jaw twitching.
So, you don’t like Deirdre being here either. How interesting. “That leaves me with the last shift.” He pats Javier’s chest before making his way to the empty room he claimed as his own.
Her arms laced across the sill, Lilah looks out the window into the dark, obscure abyss, her chin on top of her hands. She had slept an entire day away but woke with a vigor she hasn’t felt in days. The cool breeze lifts a few strands of slightly moist hair from her forehead. A shapeless form creates a ricocheting wave in the distant darkness, catching Lilah’s heightened senses. She shifts, adjusting herself for a clearer view. Unable to believe what she sees, she blinks and then rubs her eyes. Moving toward her is a butterfly. Its wings flap and then pause to drift on the wind, heading straight to her windowsill where it lands precariously on Lilah’s right index finger. Its wings are the color of lemons and its legs are tiny black eyelashes stuck to an oblong body. Enchanted, Lilah dresses in a borrowed coat and cloak, climbs through the window, and down the trellis, soundless. She stops for a moment and turns to look at the bleak black house. Not a thing stirs.
With a sliver of the moon, the grassy expanse between the house and woods shivers in shadows. The butterfly flutters in front of Lilah, and she follows like a bee to a blooming flower.
The butterfly leads Lilah through the woods, then down the street of a town. The butterfly’s form disperses in front of a dingy bar. I only know one person who performs that spell. A wooden sign rocks in the wind on the side of the storefront. It reads, “The Tipsy Doe.” Lilah smirks and decides she might as well walk in and see if her suspicions are correct.
She checks each of the faces until she makes it to a booth in the back and her gaze lands on strangely familiar shoulders. When the head tilts just so, catching the dim light on the line of his jaw, Lilah stops.
Turning to look at her, Caleb smiles and waves. “Hey.” He motions for her to sit. “Please, sit.”
Setting her jaw, Lilah narrows her eyes and relents for pure curiosity. How did he find me? How did he summon me here? She slides into the booth and crosses her arms. “What are you doing here?”
Caleb shifts. “That’s a complicated question.”
Lilah sits back against the padded high backing of the booth. She gives Caleb a quick look over. His clothes are disheveled, and he blinks slowly, as if he’s not slept well the past couple of nights. Lilah leans over the table. She lowers her voice and speaks through her teeth, “You better have a very good explanation for summoning me here.” Lilah can feel Caleb’s sharp intake of breath in the vortex of the air around them. She sits back again, arms crossed. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“Well,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling. Caleb leans back so that his face is partially obscured in the dark. “Pathfinders will find anyone for a fee.”
The buzzing in her ears fades to the pounding of her heart. She turns her attention from Caleb’s gaze to her hands, placing them on the table. Her torso warms, and bitter taste rises in the back of her throat. “I guess I should thank you for healing me after . . .” She can’t bring herself to speak about Verna’s death or Alessandra’s hand in it.
“No need.” Caleb shifts again, then inhales. “How do they get away with using tenebrae?” He gestures to the brands on her hands.
“The Order may have decreed the practice illegal, but that doesn’t matter. They do it to teach us the meaning of obedience, and the meaning of punishment, and the meaning of power in those of authority.”
“Well, it doesn’t look very effective, considering.” This time, Caleb grins when she looks up at him.
She frowns and shrugs. After a moment of uncomfortable silence, she says, “Why are you here, Caleb?”
His smile turns soft, and he darts his eyes to the bar. “I’m here to help you.”
“Help me?” she says slowly, then laughs.
His expression pinches with pain. “Alessandra will likely attack you again.”
Her torso ignites.
Chapter Thirteen
Deirdre wakes to a chill running across her exposed feet. She shivers and makes to pull herself up from the bed, but stops when she sees a shadow sitting in a chair behind the closed door of the room.
“Deirdre Blackwell. Feeling well?”
Deirdre props herself half on an elbow and half on her side. “I suppose I should have known you would be here, Javier Cota.”
Deirdre lets herself gently fall back onto the pillow and closes her eyes. His anger radiates from across the room, pushing out the chill. She clasps the emotion, lets it wrap around her like an embrace. When she opens her eyes, Javier stands next to the bed, his eyebrows slung together and his lips curled with disgust. His chest rises and falls, his hands shake. Deirdre stares into his flickering eyes. In them, she sees her own anger and sorrow trapped. The heat shifts and dissipates.
“It seems two birds are better than one, wouldn’t you say?”
She gazes at him with a malevolent grin, then stands. Shifting her weight between her feet, she dances her hands in the shadows, enjoying the energy that pulses through her body. She feels Javier’s eyes on her. Amazing what a little rest can do. “Curious, don’t you think?”
His topaz eyes flicker toward the window. “Don’t get comfortable here. We won’t be here long.”
Deirdre smiles innocently and nods at him. “Of course.”
Alessandra paces the dark corridor, soundless. She tightens her fists and forces herself to exhale slowly. All these years . . . She sees the girl’s face, her expression one of pure—Alessandra stops and clutches her chest as it tightens. It was a look of pure power, confidence. A tinge of something—Pride?—courses through her.
“Rowley,” she whispers, a name she swore she’d never say again. It sends a jolt of some long-lost emotion through her. “She’s stubborn, like me.” If only he could have seen her, maybe this would be different. But fate cut a different thread, severing with it any chances of that forbidden future.
Entering her quarters, Alessandra looks into the mirror, seeing eyes of a woman who she stopped recognizing years ago. I am already— She outlines the face looking back at her with her fingertips. Gone with Marcus Gyfford . . . Once, in the gardens of Waterstone Academy, distracted with a book in his lap, she creeped over and without a word, took his face in her hands and kissed him. She thinks, in that moment, when his hazel eyes stared up at her with disbelief, it was the only time she was ever seen. He had followed her, until—until—
Her head throbs with pain, and she buckles over, covering her face with her hands. She gags and coughs up blood. Time has been gracious with me but now its patience wanes. Her anima rises inside of her. She pulls the sleeve of her dress up to see the black veins. She vomits, then lies on the cool floor and bares her teeth. If she had only been able to convince Florence, then maybe this wouldn’t have happened, but her sister’s will depends on the Six. Alessandra’s credibility lost to her raging. She laughs. Even I didn’t believe it.
When the shadow first came to Alessandra, years ago during the war, and presented her with the missing piece to the riddle, she laughed. “How did you know?” she asked the shadow.
The shadow answered, “We’ve been waiting, but couldn’t interfere.” To think she might have found the answer alone, Alessandra realized, was pure hubris. “The moment of your true work begins now.”
But the shadow came too late, Alessandra already made her greatest sacrifice.
She holds herself and remembers. Soft cries against her skin, tender and pale. Smiles, mild and sweet. A tiny hand inside her own. Even Rowley had changed, grown soft. Those moments gave her hope, but now they leave her with a sour taste—or perhaps the vomit did. Now, she must make amends for it. But the struggle to fight it off becomes impossibly harder with each step toward the reason to struggle at all. She smiles. It’s okay. For you, I will gladly die. So long as I can save you first.
“What?” Lilah says through her teeth.
“Listen.” Caleb shuffles in his seat. “I was sent here by Alessandra—”
But Lilah’s hands grip his throat, cutting off the rest of his words. She can feel his blood pulsing beneath her hands, and the sound only makes her desire for the beating to stop greater.
It is happening again.
She can feel the surge of anima in her gut, and with it goes what little control she had maintained, but this time, she doesn’t go blind. Her consciousness arouses and keeps her keen to every minuscule change. Lilah pulls him off the bench and thrashes his body to the soiled ground, the stench of the bar renewing with vigor in her lungs. Her grasp tightens on his neck, and he chokes a rugged breath. In a flash, he throws her back into the wall; the strength of his kick gives her a moment’s pause.
“Lilah, listen—”
Deaf to his words, she surges forward, feeling her hair darkening from root to tip, her eyes consumed in black. Her body alights. The euphoric feeling of giving in propels her movements, and again, her hands encircle Caleb’s neck. She squeezes until his pulse quickens with fear, but then slows from the pressure of her grip. Caleb’s body begins to soften under her hold and his gaze wanders behind Lilah. She watches as his eyes turn glossy.
Someone’s hand wrenches Lilah backward. Caleb gasps for air, rubbing his neck where Lilah had tried to strangle him. Lilah whips around.
Deirdre stands with a yellow aura surrounding her, illuminating the whole inside of the bar like she’s the sun contained in a bottle. Her long black hair streams languidly behind her shoulders. She rests a hand on Lilah’s shoulder and the longer it stays there, the brighter and stronger the yellow aura encircling her becomes. The tightness evaporates from Lilah’s core, and the rage, which overtook her, disappears. Deirdre releases Lilah, and Lilah gasps. “Look at me, look at me, don’t give in to it. Maintain your breath.” Deirdre’s aura softens and disperses. She moves to Caleb. “Are you okay?”
Caleb nods, though he doesn’t take his eyes off Lilah. In them, she doesn’t find fear, but pity. She looks down at her shaking hands.
“We need to chat,” Deirdre says to Caleb. “Show’s over,” she says, spinning to the patrons of the bar, who had gone silent. To Lilah, she says, “Sit. Don’t even think about trying to leave.”
Lilah contemplates what she almost let happen, and it sends a sharp pain down her side. She winces, pulling her shirt up and exposing the mark sizzling against her skin. Ash stains the fabric of her shirt. Moments before she had been possessed—How else to explain it?—but this time she remembered it all. There was no darkness around it; she had been present. Her anima had soared through her body and took control. It was intoxicating, invigorating, and as it scorched through her it had felt right. This is what it means to be a Hilt. Madness is in my blood.
Tightness in the back of her throat causes her to close her eyes, but the tears come freely down her cheeks anyways. What would Verna think of me now? Lilah’s lips quiver as she tries to stop crying. Stop, stop, just stop. It had felt so right squeezing his neck, watching him struggle, but after, when the rational part of her mind clang back to work, she felt bewildered, unsettled to be in her own skin. That sour puddle forms in her stomach, the same as after almost harming Beau. I don’t want to harm Caleb . . . She bites her cheek.
Her eyes wander around the bar as she calms her breath, and she focuses on the increasing pain in her side. Lilah shifts uncomfortably in her seat. The pain sears her side, and she lets out a tiny whimper, closing her eyes briefly. Folding down toward the table, Lilah attempts to ignore the pain, but it becomes unbearable. She groans and squeezes the flesh.
Caleb stands under the wooden sigh that creaks as it sways. He thanks the woman for stepping in, and she waves a hand and flashes a wide grin. “No problem.”
Caleb taps his heel on the paved sidewalk, the only sound of the night. “What is it you want to talk to me about?” The woman weaves her fingers through her hair and eyes him suspiciously. “What?”
She blinks, then lowers her hands and closes her eyes. “Caleb Addison, right?”
Caleb’s stomach plummets. “Yes? And you are?”
She opens her eyes and extends her hand. “Deirdre Blackwell. We should go back to Lilah.”
Caleb raises his eyebrows. What the . . . “Right.”
“We don’t have long,” Florence huffs. “Rather, I don’t have long.” She coughs, hacking up clotted blood. “They’re going to keep following us. And I can’t lead them to Lilah. I won’t—” She wipes her hands on the grass and inhales. The dark night blankets her in false comfort. “It’s my fault, isn’t it?” Jarred offers her his hand, and she takes it, ravishing its warmth. His silence is more than telling.
Florence finds herself shaking. When did their paths diverge? Florence sees Alessandra’s vivid smile and can’t recall when or why she was so happy. Maybe I imagined it all? Maybe we were never the same.
“We should break our binds,” he says, win
cing. “Then, we can travel to Lilah without risk of bringing anyone close.”
“Ah. Yes,” she says, her teeth chattering. “I touched her blood at the Ludi. I shouldn’t have any difficulty in finding her, then again, Alessandra won’t either.”
“There’s no coming back from this,” Jarred says, his clear green eyes unsure.
“It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” She smiles. “If this isn’t worth fighting for, then we’re lost anyway.”
“I’ll be outside,” Deirdre gives Lilah a poignant smile. “Don’t make me wait too long.”
Lilah watches Caleb slowly exhale. She tries to look in his eyes, but he glances away again. “I . . .” I can’t say it. She closes her eyes for a beat. The precipice entices her with a compelling breeze, whispering, Give in to me, give in to me, Lilah.
“I know you don’t trust me, but I’m telling you the truth when I say you aren’t safe.”
“They’ve done nothing to suggest they aren’t trustworthy,” she says, though she wonders why she’s quick to defend any of them. Even Marcus has hidden things from her. The others she knows even less about. “Why should I take your word for it? Why should I trust you over them?”
His eyebrows furrow. He leans forward and puts a finger to his chest. “I’ve already showed you I’m trustworthy.” At Lilah’s silent glare, he continues, “At the Ludi?”
“What about it?”
“I could have won.”
Her blood pulses, her torso burns. She smiles. “Is that what you believe?”
“But I didn’t. I let us tie.”
Premonition Page 17
