She glances up and into his eyes under her lashes, then laughs. “I can’t tell whether you’re optimistic or just plain stupid.” She smirks.
“Hm. Guess you’ll have to stick with me to find out.” He smiles back at her.
Chapter Sixteen
Caleb summons the hermit again while Lilah rests against one of the ancient oaks, only hearing murmurs as the two speak. She doesn’t bother asking where he’s taking them, through the bind a flood of relief drifts from him to her. It is a deep-seated nostalgia, and she thinks he’s taking her to a place that might be his home.
Lilah has never truly had a home. When Lilah was a child, Verna moved them around always with some excuse, but now Lilah understands it was to keep her hidden, safe. Eventually, Lilah began to wonder what was so special about having a single place to call home when she had a plethora. As she got older, she’s realized it isn’t the place but the people who fill the rooms that make a house a home. It’s a center, a fixture in time, a person. But that person to Lilah is dead.
She picks up a fallen leaf and rubs it between her fingers, until it breaks. She drops the pieces one by one before they scatter in warm wind. She might as well scatter like the leaf in the wind, then maybe she’d find a place to belong.
Caleb motions for her to come, and the hermit moves them through space. When they arrive, Lilah groans and curses, but she doesn’t stumble. She gnaws the tender skin of her cheek and tastes blood.
“Thank you,” Caleb says, then hands the hermit payment. Caleb bows his head, then watches the hermit disappear once more.
“So, where exactly are we?” Lilah says, glancing around. They enter a part of the forest still bearing a scorch mark from the war. An odd sense of familiarity fills her. Perhaps it is only a mistake of her memory.
“It’s just through the woods,” he says.
“Do you ever think of how our powers came to be?” She turns to face Caleb, his eyes scanning her face, perhaps wondering what type of answer she wants or is hoping to get. He shrugs. “There was a single time in my life when I felt like the power coursing through my veins was something good. Something that I could count on when, well, when I had nothing else to hold onto. A protector of sorts. I don’t feel that way. Not anymore.”
“When did it change?”
Lilah thinks back to her years in academy, to the years of being told that simply because she is a Nox, she’s superior to any who call themselves Lux. She considers her instructors, the academy directors, her castigators. She glances down at her arms, a constant reminder of her disobedience to a system that wanted nothing but blind faith. But faith in what? Lilah frowns. She overturns her hands and balls them into fists. I could only ever believe in myself.
She thinks about the years of switching academies and of her utter loneliness; how Alessandra robbed her of Verna, the only person who truly cared for her; how the only home she’s ever had is within herself, her body, which is now being violated by her own anima, which seems to work of its own will.
At one point, she thinks she might have known the answer to Caleb’s question, but now there are too many voices in her head telling her all the hundreds of reasons, and she doesn’t have the care or focus to figure it out. Her core burns, and she knows it is the signa on her torso reminding her of a purpose more sinister. She feels detached from her anima, as if it has grown a face and stares back at her, smirking. The words of the seer wander in her mind, coming to the front of the rising voices. It speaks again—the vision, the end. She blinks.
“I don’t have an answer.” Perhaps the reason she doesn’t feel the light—the endless possibilities—in her blood is because she laid in a pool of it at the Ludi. Perhaps the last of her good will died when Alessandra killed Verna. Perhaps she never had either to begin with—light or goodness. And this she fears the most to be true.
As they pass a giant stone marker, Caleb says, “Almost there.”
A wave of some hidden emotion skirts from him to her, and Lilah tries to catch his gaze, but he avoids looking at her.
“And where’s ‘there’?” Lilah focuses on his heart to catch a lie, but it beats steadily. The only thing she feels from him through their bind is a stream of anxiety, but Lilah can’t pinpoint the cause for it.
“Home,” he says, solemnly.
Lilah listens to the sounds of the forest. A hooting owl soars above and shadows them below, while tiny brown birds flicker from branch to branch creating melodies of crunching tree branches. Small round eyes shine brightly in the wooded area. The wind wraps around Lilah, and she feels strangled by it, no longer empowered by the freedom it holds. She stands back from Caleb, and he looks at her questioningly, trying to gauge her reaction. “No place is safe so long as Alessandra is alive.”
“No, probably not. But maybe there’s another way. I believe we can find another way.”
She pulls her hands apart and places them at her sides. “There’s no other way. That’s what you just don’t understand. Alessandra is a Nox. If she wants me dead—”
“I still have hope—”
“Hope?” Lilah scoffs. She turns her back toward him and kicks the ground. “This is what must be done.”
Lilah follows him in silence, muttering under her breath how foolish she’s been. Then, she no longer hears Caleb’s footsteps or his heartbeat. Glancing up, Lilah finds herself staring up at a great house shrouded in darkness. She blinks several times, pinching the skin of her wrist in disbelief. It is the one from her childhood dreams. Breathless, she takes several quick steps backward. The house, quite an extravagant fixture considering its wild surroundings, is a two-story white-brick complex with a wraparound porch. Her jaw turns slack; she becomes untethered from reality. “How?”
“We . . . acquired it.”
Lilah laughs, the sound humorless and cutting. “Of course, she gave you this, didn’t she? This had been my home, our home.”
Caleb visibly swallows but remains silent.
She runs around, everything just as she remembers from her dream. She pivots and glares at Caleb. Why would she give them this place? She runs back to Caleb. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” he says cautiously.
“You were hiding something. So, tell me. Tell me everything.”
“I have.”
His calm words don’t settle her boiling blood. Her bones purr. She blinks and knows that the black has changed the color of them, her hair, too. Lilah’s senses flare. She can hear everything—Caleb’s breathing sharply increasing, his heart rate rising—and see the minuscule movements he makes. The fire within her jumps up her throat, propelling Lilah’s body forward before she realizes she’s moving. She knocks him to the ground and produces a dagger from her sleeve, holding it against the beating vein of his neck. Her anima winks its black eye. At the tip of the dagger, a bead of blood drips down and sits in the space of his shoulder and clavicle. A quiet part of her knows she needs to breathe and fight against the part holding the dagger in her hands. “I trusted you!”
He overturns her with one swift movement and locks her to the ground. “Lilah, stop!”
Exhaling through her mouth, the faceless thing hidden in her anima disappears, and calm releases the tension from her limbs. She relishes the release, then wiggles uncomfortably as a pinecone pokes through her pants to the skin of her legs. I hate this. “I’m—”
“Don’t bother apologizing,” he says, a dark expression drawing over his features. “You don’t mean it anyways.” He drops his hold of her and stands, then rubs the back of his neck.
“You think you know me well enough to say that?” Lilah tracks him as he walks in a slow circle around her. She folds forward, putting her elbows on her crossed knees. “I don’t know how to control it.”
He rubs the back of his neck again.
She steals a glance at his bare arms. Not a single rod has been held to them. They lay pristine against his sides. Propping herself up on one arm, she puts her hand against her temple. Even his signa are bright
, the color of life, of blood. Not black like decay, such as the ones Nox have. He gives life with his fingers, breathes it into his hands with every incantation. He is bright, too bright; it paralyzes Lilah to look at him. He is the paradigm of the very thing Lilah has been made to extinguish. She moves her gaze to the house. Her voice is small when she says, “Please, Caleb, leave me now. I don’t want to take you down with me.”
“Sorry, but I’m not giving up on you.” He smiles with teeth, and Lilah wants to cry.
Marcus brings his fists to his forehead and groans. She’s gone—Deirdre, too. The other two have gone out to search the woods, since they’re the most familiar with the area, but something’s wrong. They’ve been gone too long. He shouldn’t have fought for Deirdre to stay. Both Javier and Jia were strongly opposed, but he had given them no choice. He knew she was a threat—yet—yet—
He wanted to ask her one question, a selfish question that surprised him when his mind gave birth to the words. He had thought those feelings dead. But, despite it all, he still loves Alessandra. No matter how irrational, he can’t deny his affection. No matter how justified he would be in hating her, he can’t bring himself to fake emotions.
He would have never thought Deirdre capable of taking Lilah. She must not have been as deprived as she appeared. He curses under his breath. There was no sign of a struggle. What’s Deirdre’s game?
He doesn’t have the chance to consider it for very long before the air shifts, and he jumps up from the sofa, hands still in fists. The boundary spell wavers, then energy pierces through. Marcus closes his eyes and pushes his anima to meet the unwanted visitors. “Oh, fuck.” He laughs. That letter. “So, Javier,” he muses, “who do you really work for?”
Florence closes her mouth tight, biting down hard on her inner cheek. She doesn’t release her jaw until she tastes the iron of blood. Her hands shake against her control, while her mind twirls. She blinks in a rapid succession, trying in vain to wipe clean the slate of her mind. There is no spell in existence that can fix the damage that has been done to the delicate fixtures of her mind.
It hasn’t always been this hard. When she first came out of her White Sleep, everything appeared with such clarity that the very details of the world seemed to pop out as if she were seeing them for the first time. But now . . .
Florence chants to herself, but she can’t recall the right words to truly conjure anything at all. She looks down at her pale arms covered in the small brands that the Nox use for punishment. She had been unruly and on occasion wicked, but somewhere along the way the idea of walking off the marked path lost its appeal.
Suddenly, a flash of a memory crawls into her mind’s eye. She sees a face similar to hers, but a bit more beautiful, a bit more elusive. The name to the face floats around in her thoughts, but she doesn’t connect them. Instead, she lets her focus fall upon her own situation.
“We shouldn’t have—”
“It’s done,” Jarred says, holding his torso, where the binding signa dissolves through the skin and muscle. “We need to—”
“I know. We need to go now. Marcus must be worried.”
When they arrive at the sanctuary, Florence struggles to keep herself from coughing, the thick blood working up her throat. She grabs Jarred, whose worry lines his face. The boundary spell Florence had conjured herself to protect the home is gone, rather, ripped and distorted. They stand on the border of where the spell ought to have been, hiding in the line of trees that break from the forest.
Florence nods, then motions with her hands. She pivots and focuses her anima on the inhabitants of the home, searching for Marcus, for Lilah. She recognizes Marcus’s anima, while three strange anima reverberate roughly against hers. She gasps.
Jarred grasps her shoulder. The Order, Jarred mouths.
She hadn’t thought to check with blood magic because she thought that Marcus would be with Lilah, but—What happened? She pushes her anima again and detects freshly unearthed dirt. Her mouth falls ajar. Aza is dead?
Jarred squeezes her shoulder again, then points to the house where three men haul Marcus from the steps. She makes to stand, but Jarred jerks her back with a frown. If we intervene, he mouths slowly.
Florence bares her teeth. Lilah is the priority, Marcus can take care of himself. She can’t help but feel responsible for it all. He wouldn’t have been involved—no, she corrects herself—Marcus has his own reasons for keeping Lilah safe, too. She closes her mouth, her lips softening into a smile. Does this mean the others are with Lilah?
“The problem is you only know how to fuel your anima with rage, but rage is not a stable source,” Caleb muses.
Lilah smirks. “But it’s powerful.”
“It’s volatile and uncontrollable.” Caleb paces around her in a circle, one hand on his hip and the other at his chin. “You know, I can reverse my healing powers? If I’m not concentrating, I can make a wound worse by tearing away tissue or breaking bone.” Caleb involuntarily trembles. “The only difference is the intention, my will.” Lilah stays silent, picking at loose skin around a fingernail. Caleb clears his throat.
“It’s more than that.” Lilah turns her face up at him with a smirk. “Imagine me telling you that you only have to think with intention, and you can change from a Lux to a Nox.”
Caleb frowns.
Stop frowning at me. I want to make you . . . She sighs and stands, putting a hand on his shoulder. “But—I’ll give it a go. How do I force my anima to be more Lux than Nox?”
Caleb purses his lips and tilts his head up, placing his hands on his hips. “Well . . .”
“You have no idea, do you?” Lilah says, breaking into laughter. “Ah, this is ridiculous.”
“Hey, give me some credit.” Caleb smiles. “In academy, we’re told to think of our most powerful memory and push from there.” His voice grows solemn. “I always use one where my parents and sister are present. One when I must be four or five and we play in the backyard, all of us. My sister chases me, while my dad and mom look on.” A smile plays gently over his lips, and his eyes turn bluer still and the gold speckles shine like tiny stars. A yearning rises up from her core, paralyzing Lilah. “It was a moment in my life when everything glowed with this yellow haze, everything was good, and I knew I was loved.”
Lilah breathes deeply into her center and closes her eyes. Verna’s face comes into view, but Aza’s body mires the image, motionless on the porch of the sanctuary, a hole where her heart should be. Her lower lip quivers. She tries focusing on the different calls of the birds or the scurrying noises of raccoons or deer, the sounds echoing out from the woods. But her throat constricts, burns. Why do I feel like this?
“Your anger hides your pain. If you just let yourself—”
“I’m—” she mumbles, opening her eyes, “I’m afraid.” The admission discharges the last of that unthinkable faceless thing inside her, and as the force flees, there is a moment of such profound peace within her, she chokes.
When she opens her eyes, the look Caleb gives her sprouts an unnamable feeling. It is a look that makes her believe—even if only for a second—that she can be the person Verna had believed she could be. It is a look of utter astonishment, as if he sees her soul. His eyes peruse her features with obvious care, like he wants to capture this moment in his memory to one day pull up in his mind.
Caleb smiles. “It’s okay. You’re not alone.”
She nods, turning her head from him. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What is your body telling you?”
She wraps her arms around herself, pinching the skin between her thumb and index finger. The dam breaks, the water pours down, and Lilah reaches up from beneath, her hand grasping nothing but water. She clears her throat, and the submerged weight on her lungs shifts. What am I doing? How can I let this distract me? Why am I . . . “Why haven’t we gone in? Who lives here?” she asks.
“My sister,” he says unenthusiastically.
“What?” Lilah scrutiniz
es him.
“Alessandra required a task from her, too. After the Ludi, she received a letter.”
Lilah crosses her arms, gazing up at the large house before her. “So, what is it?
Caleb meets her eyes. “The letter was from someone who calls themselves the ‘Watcher of the Aequum.’”
Lilah nods. “How do you know this ‘Aequum’ is linked to Alessandra?”
Caleb shakes his head. “I don’t,” he glances down, “but that makes sense.”
His own sister. “Look. Maybe Alessandra is connected, but we don’t have evidence that proves anything. Why not confront Dalia directly?”
“Not everything’s a confrontation. I’ve already asked her about it.”
“And?” Lilah says, waving a hand at him.
Caleb bows his head and his shoulder slump forward. “She wouldn’t say.”
“Do you think she’s a danger?”
His eyebrows shoot up and then he shrugs. “No, but she might be in danger herself.”
Lilah remembers Dalia’s gray eyes, how dull they’d seemed, how the Lux light absent. “If Alessandra is involved, we should be prepared for her to come here—and soon.”
He nods slowly, considering. “We can talk about it later. Right now, I need to eat and so do you.”
A shooting heat in Lilah’s torso causes her to wince; it travels up her body and into her fingertips. She turns and dry heaves—bent over, hands on knees, the skin of her back stretches painfully.
“Let me examine it,” Caleb says, taut. He steps toward her and motions for her to lift the fabric from her back.
She complies, pulling her shirt up, exposing the black signa that glows like the dying embers of a fire. Ashes lay on the skin. The pattern wraps around her ribcage before it swirls upward, beneath her bra, and downward out of sight. She kneels, her back facing him, and thinks how odd it is that she feels comfortable being so vulnerable in front of him, even when moments ago she chastised herself for talking about petty emotions. An unbidden smile—Is it the bind?
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