“Get down on your knees.”
“Yes, My Lady,” Carrick said, sinking down in front of her.
CHAPTER
4
Over the next two days while Lily’s skin went from a checkerboard of red patches to smooth, she kept her promise to herself. She didn’t reach out to Lillian, even though she thought about it every time she was alone—which, thankfully, wasn’t very often. Every time Rowan and Juliet left the house to shop for food or new clothes for Rowan, her mom seemed to appear, anxiously hovering nearby.
“It was a good thing that Rowan killed Gideon,” Samantha said out of the blue. Lily had just taken her morning shower and was trying to untangle her wet hair. Hearing Gideon’s name made her hands stiffen. Her mom took the comb, her hands unsteady, and went to work on a knot at the back of Lily’s head.
“Did you see what he did to me in the oubliette?” Lily asked, her voice low. She sat down at the vanity table and looked at her mother in the mirror.
“Yes. He and Carrick tortured you,” Samantha answered. She didn’t meet Lily’s eyes in the mirror, but instead focused on gently working one of Lily’s knots free. “At least, I think it was the version of you that I raised. It’s hard sometimes, you know. Hard to tell which of the millions of you is the one that this me raised.”
“I can’t say I know exactly what you mean—not in the way you do—but I do understand.”
Tears welled up in her mother’s eyes. She smiled through them bravely. “I’ve been called crazy for years, but do you know what crazy is? Crazy is being able to see what your daughter is going through, and not being able to do anything about it.”
“Mom, you saved me. And Rowan. You were the only one who was clearheaded enough to guide us home. To do that, you’d have to be the least crazy person I’ve ever met.”
Her mom nodded, but didn’t look up. She kept untangling Lily’s hair, smoothing each spiral curl between her fingers before moving patiently onto the next. Her mother had magic fingers when it came to Lily’s riot of curls, which were now barely shoulder-length. A lot of her hair had burned away in the fire, but her hair grew unnaturally fast. No one fixed her troublesome mane like her mom did, and the familiar touch soothed them both.
“Gideon deserved to die,” Samantha said serenely. “Maybe Carrick does, too.” Her brow pinched. “The other Lillian claimed him, you know. The Lillian who stole you has claimed Carrick as her head mechanic. She’s training him.”
“Do you know why she chose Carrick?” Lily asked, her back stiffening.
“I’m sorry but I don’t. I can see into the worlds of my children, but I can only see directly around them as it happens. Like watching a million movies at once,” Samantha said, and smiled. Her smile fell and her tone went cold. “I don’t share mindspeak.”
“Can’t or won’t?” Lily asked gently.
“Won’t. Unless it’s to save your life, like when I guided you back home.” Samantha finally met Lily’s eyes in the mirror. “I would never burden any of you with what’s in here,” she said, touching her temple. “It’s too much.”
“Thank you,” Lily said quietly, knowing she would never be as strong as her mother.
“I love you, too, dear,” Samantha said, probably answering another version of Lily who had said “I love you” instead of “thank you” in a different universe. Samantha kissed Lily on the head and wandered out of the room.
Lily sat for a while, wondering if she should tell Rowan about Carrick. Bitterness swelled inside her. Lillian had nearly convinced her that she had Rowan’s best interests at heart. But what possible reason could Lillian have for claiming Rowan’s half brother, if not to hurt Rowan? It seemed like every time Lily started to understand Lillian, she learned some new unforgivable thing about her and hated her all over again.
Carrick was Rowan’s only remaining blood relative, and in families where magic was strong, close blood relatives could mindspeak without using willstones or without becoming stone kin by touching each other’s stones. Lily still hadn’t deciphered all the different ways in which touching willstones was viewed in Rowan’s world because it meant different things depending on how much magic each person was capable of, but Lily did know that the lesser the magic, the more superficial the bond. In the nightclub, Lily had seen how some people in Rowan’s world touched each other’s stones for a weekend thrill. For them, becoming stone kin wasn’t very serious. The sensations exchanged and the bond that was created were temporary.
That was something Lily couldn’t imagine. Touching willstones was a different matter for her, as it was for all mechanics, crucibles, and witches. As a witch, when Lily touched someone’s willstone, she claimed that person for life. The only way to break out of that commitment would be for that person to smash his or her stone—something as painful as cutting off a limb.
Allowing oneself to be claimed by a witch or to become stone kin with a mechanic, where the bond was lifelong as well, was never something that people in Rowan’s world took lightly, but it seemed Carrick knew little of what witches and mechanics were capable of. Carrick had spent his life Outland. He hadn’t been around people with magic the way Rowan had. The way Lily figured it, Carrick must have had no idea that those with strong magic, like Rowan, could mindspeak with blood relatives without becoming stone kin. That ability was extremely rare, and not something that Carrick had ever encountered before.
Good thing for Lily, too. When Gideon kidnapped her, Rowan had found Lily by exploiting his blood bond with Carrick, and even though the two had never become stone kin, Rowan could see through his half-brother’s eyes. He had spied on Carrick and found the oubliette without Carrick ever knowing that Rowan had piggybacked inside his mind. Could Carrick now do the same to Rowan? Lily stood very still, trying to think.
The doorbell rang, shaking Lily out of her worried thoughts. She heard her mother answer the door and an authoritative woman’s voice drifting up the stairs. Right away, Lily didn’t like the way this woman was talking to her mother. There was something pushy and condescending about her tone. Lily went downstairs, already in a fighting frame of mind. Samantha was standing in the doorway, blocking the entrance with her body.
“Ma? What’s going on?” Lily called out as she came swiftly to her mother’s side.
Samantha moved a bit to the side and revealed a tall, solid woman. Her brown hair was dyed a shade too dark and Lily could make out gray roots growing in at her temples. The woman narrowed her eyes at Lily, and the look on her face was almost triumphant. Like she’d just won something.
“She’s not that sick, I see,” the woman said mockingly to Samantha as she tried to push her way inside.
“Who are you?” Lily asked, striding forward. “Mom, it’s okay. I got this.” Lily put her hand on her mother’s tense arm and stood next to her. Together they blocked the door, not allowing the woman to come inside.
“I’m Special Agent Simms, Lily, and I’ve been looking for you,” the woman answered. Her eyes skipped over Lily’s face, the hash marks of Rowan’s skin graft more apparent now that Lily was standing in the light coming through the doorway. It was obvious now that Lily was sick, and that some kind of treatment had been done to her skin. The agent’s eyes pinched around the corners as she weighed a new strategy in her head.
“I’ve been recovering,” Lily said briskly.
“Yes. From radical subcutaneous exposure therapy,” Simms said dubiously.
“Yeah,” Lily said, pointing to the red marks on her face and arms. “It’s been sort of hard on me, which is why I haven’t been in touch with anyone. They say I’m supposed to limit my contact with foreign substances until I’m one hundred percent.” Lily pursed her lips, passively implying that Simms was a foreign substance.
“I completely understand,” Simms said, suddenly smiling. “You look like you’ve been through hell.”
Something flickered in Simms’s eyes—a combination of pity and genuine concern. She could tell that something bad
had happened to Lily, and more than curiosity drove her. Lily realized that Simms was a good person, even if she did rub Lily the wrong way.
“I’m feeling much better, actually,” Lily said honestly. “No more seizures.”
“That’s wonderful.” Simms’s fake smile flashed back on again and Lily’s dislike for her rekindled. “I’m so glad to hear that you’ve made such a miraculous recovery, especially considering how worried we all were about you.”
“Thank you for your concern,” Lily said cautiously. She didn’t know where Simms was going with this and she didn’t trust her.
“So you’ll be going back to school soon? I’m sure you’re eager to graduate with your class,” Simms said smoothly. Lily hadn’t thought about going back to school, and the very notion seemed ludicrous to her. Simms watched Lily’s calm expression falter and smiled a gotcha smile. “That’s why you got the treatment at such an odd time of year, right? You couldn’t wait for summer break because it was your lifelong dream to walk with your class on graduation day. Or so I’ve been told.”
“Right,” Lily answered confidently, trying to recover from her misstep.
“Right,” Simms parroted. “Just like you didn’t tell your friends you were going away for treatment because you wanted to surprise them.”
Lily kept her mouth shut. She knew Simms didn’t buy a word of any of this, but it didn’t matter. There had been no crime. All Lily had to do was stop talking and Simms wouldn’t have anything to go on, but as the staring contest stretched out Lily started to understand what she was dealing with. Simms wasn’t going to give up until she got an explanation she could live with—and maybe even a culprit to arrest.
“Well. I’ll let you get back to healing from your ordeal,” Simms finally said. She turned to leave, and then swung back around as if something had just occurred to her. “Oh, Lily? What was the name of that miraculous clinic you went to? I can’t seem to get a straight answer about that from anyone. I thought you’d be able to help me, considering you were there for three months.”
Lily’s mouth parted and her mind went blank. Samantha spoke up to fill the void a second too late.
“I told you it was a holistic healing center on a Native American reservation, which is why it didn’t show up as a hospital on your search. The name is hard to pronounce. It’s Native, you know,” she said, her hands fluttering to her frizzy hair like startled birds. “I’ll send the details to your e-mail address when I can.”
“When you can,” Simms repeated almost mockingly. She’d seen enough. “I’ll be waiting. And I’ll tell the superintendent of your school how excited you are to be coming back, Lily.” She looked Lily up and down. “You’re so happy you’re practically speechless, aren’t you?”
Simms left them, but Lily didn’t shut the door or turn away until her car had disappeared around the corner.
“Come inside, Lillian,” Samantha urged.
“Has that horrid woman been harassing you this whole time, Ma?” Lily asked angrily, following her inside. Her mother was shaking and her eyes skipped around like she couldn’t settle her gaze on anything solid.
“She’s been very persistent,” Samantha said, trying to smile comfortingly, but only managing a wan grimace.
Juliet and Rowan came rushing in the side door, just back from their trip to the market.
“Was that the FBI agent I saw at the end of the block?” Juliet asked. She plunked down a bag of groceries, her eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Lily replied. “Don’t worry. She can’t do anything to us.”
“Except keep harassing everyone, like she’s been doing. Which is bad enough,” Rowan said, tipping his chin at Samantha.
Your mom can’t handle this kind of scrutiny, Lily. She’ll crack.
What should we do, Rowan? I can’t make Simms go away.
“You need to get back to your normal life as soon as possible,” Rowan said aloud. “Blend in. Don’t give the agent any more reason to be suspicious.”
Samantha had started wandering toward the garage door. She was twisting her hands together so tightly the skin on her knuckles was thin and white.
“It’ll be okay, Mom,” Juliet said, chasing after her and catching ahold of her elbow.
“I think I’d like to make a pot,” Samantha said, her eyes wild.
Juliet and Lily shared a pained look. “Ma, you’re out of clay. Why don’t you let Juliet take you upstairs so you can lie down?” Lily said.
“I’ll make you some tea, Samantha,” Rowan said, already reaching for the kettle.
“Oh, that’d be lovely,” Samantha said with a relieved look. “I love your teas.”
“I’ll bring it up to you as soon as it’s ready,” Rowan replied cheerfully.
Juliet brought Samantha to her room, leaving Lily and Rowan to speak in tense undertones.
“We need to come up with a name for that clinic,” Lily said. “Simms wants to know exactly where I’ve been for three months.”
“Juliet and I are working on a phony Web site. It’s nearly done. Look, let me worry about that,” Rowan replied. “You focus on settling back into your life.”
Lily laughed mirthlessly. “Like that’s ever going to be possible.”
“It better be,” Rowan said sharply. “Or what was the purpose of coming back here at all?”
“I didn’t come back to fulfill a purpose. I came back because—”
“Because you were dying, and if you were to go back to my world it wouldn’t take long before something else would be threatening your life,” he said, cutting her off. “We’re here so you can live a long and normal life. There’s nothing for you to do, except move on and be happy. That’s it. You need to put my world behind you and rejoin this one like a regular person or your family is going to suffer for it.”
Lily was taken aback by his vehemence. She didn’t know what to say, only that she felt hollow and cut off from him. The adventure was over, and Lily had to accept that.
“You should sit. The skin on your feet isn’t completely healed yet,” he said, softening his tone.
Her feet were hurting her. Lily took a seat at the table and gingerly lifted a foot to look at the bottom. Blood had seeped through her sock. The sight of blood reminded Lily of Carrick.
“Could you tell if Carrick was inside your mind, spying on us?” Lily blurted out, changing the subject.
“Of course I could,” he said, coming to her. He saw the blood on her sock and pursed his lips, back in angry mode again. “You can’t be running around yet, Lily. You have no calluses on your feet anymore.”
“Just before Simms showed up, Mom told me that Lillian claimed Carrick. Lillian made him her head mechanic,” Lily replied through her teeth. Now that she was sitting down her feet had started throbbing.
“Here, let me do it,” Rowan said.
He left the room and came back with a leather pack very similar to the one he’d carried when they were hiding in the Woven Woods. Lily assumed that he’d made himself a new one. Inside were the silver knives he’d worn into battle the last night they were in his world and all kinds of small jars and vials of potions.
“Lean back,” he said. He pulled Lily’s feet into his lap and began applying one of his tingly skin creams. His face was dark with anger, but his tone was gentle. “I’ve been trained to recognize it if someone tries to sneak into my mind. The only time I’m vulnerable is when I’m asleep, but I never sleep without casting a ward of protection around myself, which would wake me as sure as a hand shaking me if someone tried to steal into my thoughts. Didn’t I teach you that?”
“Yes,” Lily admitted.
He had taught her how to manipulate the finely knit fields of energy that make up what seems to be empty space. Field magic—wards and glamours—had several different uses. Wards operated like a bubble of security around a small area, and glamours distorted light and air to slightly alter the way things appeared, sometimes making things disappear entirely in dim light. Both were
low-energy magic and not very hard to do; Lily just hadn’t remembered to cast a ward around herself when she was half dead. And since then, maybe she hadn’t wanted to remember to do it. A ward would have kept Lillian from contacting her, and whether she liked it or not, Lily needed to understand what had made Lillian the way she was and why she had made the choices she did, or Lily knew she’d be damned to repeat them. It was more than just curiosity or a perverse desire to view Lillian’s memories. Lillian was Lily, and if Lily ever wanted to understand herself she had to understand Lillian.
“Lily?” Rowan was staring at her, worried.
“Sorry. I freaked out,” she said, lying automatically. “I started thinking about Carrick and I freaked out.”
Will you show me what he did to you in the oubliette?
Lily recoiled at the thought. To show him would be to go through it again. “I can’t.” Her voice sounded robotic and strangely disconnected, even to her.
You don’t have to hide anything from me.
“I can’t,” Lily repeated, her face blank.
“Okay,” he said, looking down.
Rowan stood and left the room, his face sad. As soon as he was gone, Lily felt empty. She wanted to call him back, but she knew if she did she’d have to open that dark box in the corner of her mind and show him what had happened in the oubliette. She couldn’t share that with him. It would change the way he felt about her. There was only one person Lily was certain wouldn’t judge her. Lily momentarily dropped her guard, just to see if Lillian was there.
When I came back from the cinder world I shut Rowan out because I couldn’t tell him what I’d done, or what had been done to me. You and I are the only ones who can really understand each other. Come back, Lily. You need me as much as I need you.
No, I don’t. Go away, Lillian. I hate you.
As I hate myself—but look inside, Lily. You hate yourself, too.
* * *
“Keep stirring,” Rowan said.
“But my arm’s tired,” Lily whined. She propped up her stirring arm with her other hand and sighed dramatically. “And the fireplace is so hot.”
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