by Emery Belle
I reached for the pen, but Lyra beat me to it, swiping it from the ground and tucking it back into her pocket, which it must have fallen from when she’d leaned forward a moment ago. Before the pen disappeared into her robes, I caught one last look at it, noting its unique filigree design.
My pulse spiked.
I’d seen that pen before. In Orion’s hand, just before he died. But a few days later, when I’d returned to that hospital room to gather the centaur’s belongings for his wife and daughter, the pen had been missing. I’d made note of its disappearance at the time because it had seemed expensive, perhaps an heirloom or a keepsake. After he died, no one besides the police and hospital staff were permitted to enter Orion’s hospital room. And that included Lyra.
I stared at Lyra, who was so clearly still grieving her father, then shook my head. My imagination was running away from me. It happened, after you faced down three murderers—not to mention a herd of bloodthirsty manticores out for revenge—and lived to tell the tale.
She stared back at me, then cocked her head. “Is something wrong, Wren?”
I shook my head, then turned behind me to rummage through my bag for my notebook so I could give Lyra an update on what I’d learned up until this point. After our meeting, I planned on stopping by the police station to give my notes to Kellen in the hopes that they would aid the official investigation and eventually bring Orion’s killer to justice.
When I turned back around, notebook in hand, Lyra had a bow and arrow aimed squarely at my heart. The notebook fluttered to the floor, and I gaped at her, open-mouthed, my mind trying to process what my eyes were seeing.
“Get up,” she said, her voice cool and calm, though I could detect an undercurrent of fear. Using her arrow, she jabbed in the direction of the far wall. “Get over there and face me, and keep your hands where I can see them.”
I walked shakily to the wall, not daring to reach for the wand in my pocket—besides, I knew I’d have an arrow through my heart before I had a chance to unwrap all the duct tape binding it. When I reached the wall, I slowly faced Lyra and raised my hands to show her I was defenseless. “Please,” I said, meeting her eyes.
I could see that her arms were trembling, but she kept the arrow pointed at me. “Get on your knees,” she barked.
I obeyed. “Lyra,” I croaked out, “you don’t have to—”
“Shut up.” She began pawing at the ground nervously and pacing back and forth. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was foolproof. Foolproof.”
As she muttered and snorted to herself, she stopped paying attention to the arrow, whose tip had drifted toward the floor. Eyeing the door, my only possible escape route since the centaur was blocking the window, I shuffled toward it on my knees. I’d only made it a couple of inches before she swung back toward me, snarling. “Do that again, and you’re dead.”
I froze.
Using one hand to keep the arrow in place, she felt in her pocket with the other and held the pen in the air between us, its silver tip pointed at me. “How did you know about this?” she asked. “The magic within is so carefully concealed beneath the shell that only the spellcaster can detect it.” She glared at me. “And you are not the spellcaster. I am.”
“I have no idea what spell you’re talking about.” My knees were beginning to ache, but I didn’t dare move. “I saw your father holding the pen before he died, and then when I was cleaning his room a few days later, it had disappeared. How did you get it?”
She shrugged. “I walked into my father’s hospital room and took it. None of the nurses thought to question me, or, gods forbid, prevent the great Orion’s grieving daughter from entering the place where he had taken his final breath. I merely told them I needed to pick up one of his dress loincloths for the funeral.”
I nodded toward the pen. “What’s so special about it, anyway? It looks like an ordinary pen to me.”
Lyra lowered her bow and arrow, propping them up on the desk beside her but still keeping them within easy reach, and moved to block the door as she considered my question. Finally, she said, in a soft voice, “Do you know what it’s like to not live up to your parents’ expectations?”
I remained silent, not wanting to point out that I’d never had the pleasure of knowing what my parents’ expectations for me were, and besides, the question seemed rhetorical. Instead, I shook my head. Lyra twirled the pen slowly between her fingers—she seemed captivated by it.
“All my life,” she said, “my parents groomed me to be the family’s next great seer—there was one in every generation, and it was apparent from a young age that my brother did not have the gift. But I showed glimpses of having the sight every now and then… predicting when my great-uncle would die, finding my mother’s lost pearl earrings, foretelling a foot injury that plagued my father for years. Everyone in the family believed that my father would pass the torch to me.” She snorted. “Imagine how disappointed they were when my talents amounted to nothing more than flashy fortune-telling. My mother could barely even look at me, she was so disgusted. And my father… well, he tried to hide his disappointment, but I knew better.”
She tucked the pen back into her pocket and hoisted up the bow and arrow once more, though this time she aimed the arrow tip at my head. I glanced toward the window, which was a few paces away, and knew I would never get there in time… and besides, how was I supposed to break through the glass?
My wand shuddered in my pocket, and Lyra, noticing the movement, galloped forward and swiped it from me before I could react, then tossed the wand across the room, where it slid beneath her desk and far out of reach. So much for that, I thought, although I supposed it didn’t matter much—any spell I tried casting would probably just result in Lyra’s bow and arrow doubling in size.
I cast my mind around in a frantic attempt to figure a way out of my predicament—suddenly, those manticores didn’t seem like such bad company. And where was a gargoyle savior when you needed one?
“I don’t get it,” I said, intent on distracting her while I tried working out an escape route. “You seem to have the gift now—you had a vision about me the last time I visited you, and you just told me a few minutes ago that you passed your sight test.”
“Yes.” Lyra gave me a mysterious smile. “My powers have been growing for four months now, and they have finally reached their full strength. The gift is mine.” Her smile turned slightly manic, and I pressed my back against the wall, as if that would protect me from the arrow she was holding mere inches from my face.
“Four months?” I repeated. According to Dale, the head nurse on ward twelve, that was the precise amount of time Orion had been in the hospital. But I still wasn’t seeing the connection between that, and the pen, and Lyra’s powers. What was I missing…?
I must have spoken the last sentence aloud without realizing it, for Lyra considered me for a long moment, and then shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter if I tell you, since you won’t be leaving this room.”
Her arm quivered slightly under the weight of the bow and arrow, but she held it steady, aiming for the center of my forehead, which had broken out in a cold sweat as panic fully set in. I still hadn’t been able to figure a way out of this room… because there wasn’t one. I was trapped.
Lyra produced the pen again, shifting the bow and arrow to the side so she could hold it up to the light once more. As soon as the pen touched her skin, I could see it pulsate slightly, and in that moment, her eyes flashed silver, so quick I almost missed it, before melting back to brown.
“Not many people bother to read centaur lore,” she said, examining the pen, “including my father. He was too arrogant, too confident in his own abilities, to think that he might learn something from the wisdom of the ages. And that was his mistake. If he hadn’t been so conceited, he would have known that it is possible, under the right circumstances and with the aid of a powerful spell only a centaur can perform, to drain a seer of his power.”
She wiggled
the pen. “Every time my father touched this—and thanks to the crossword puzzle book I gave him, he used it every day—some of his power would be stripped from him. A minute amount, nothing he would be able to detect. It was stored here.”
She used her fingernail to pry open a hidden compartment near the pen’s tip, filled with silver liquid, and tilted her head back, allowing a single drop of the liquid to fall onto her tongue. Then she closed her mouth and sighed deeply as a shudder of pleasure ran over her body. “Delicious.”
“So… what?” I said, disgust roiling in my stomach when I saw the look of rapture on her face. “You snuck into your father’s hospital room every day and drank his essence?” How positively nauseating.
She winked at me. “You’re a fast learner. Yes, Wren, that’s exactly what I did. I sat by my father’s bedside for hours every day, the perfect picture of a grieving daughter. As soon as he drifted off to sleep—which, thanks to the cullenberry poison I imbued his crossword book with, was quite often—I had myself a nice, cool drink.”
Her face fell slightly. “I would have preferred not to kill him, of course—for all his faults, my father was a decent man—but it was a necessary evil. One doesn’t enter the hospital with a simple case of the weasel pox and end up losing a thousand years of sight. Eventually, he would have noticed.”
“He didn’t need to notice,” I said softly, remembering what the old centaur had told me by the river—Orion had known the day and the hour of his death. “He always knew what you were going to do. He was, after all, the greatest seer the world has ever known.”
Lyra gave me a sharp look. “What are you talking about?”
Ignoring her question, I said instead, “The cullenberry flower. How did you get it? The manticores have been magically chained to the island, and so they’re not able to fly to the Isle of Caoimhe to procure it.” After all the time I’d spent chasing down the answer to how the tiny flower that packed a deadly punch had arrived on Magic Island, this was the question I was most eager to have answered. How did Lyra manage to fly to the remote Irish island?
“My father…” she said slowly, her voice trembling as she began to catch on to what I’d said. “He visited the island many centuries ago and brought the seeds back so we could plant them in our garden. I always thought they were beautiful, and he knew that, so they were his gift to me. I didn’t know until many years later that they carried a deadly poison in their petals. But when we planted them, he told me…” She swallowed hard, her eyes now shining with tears. “He told me that maybe someday I’d find a use for them.”
And she had. Orion had known all along that his own daughter would betray him, and he did nothing to stop it. He wanted her to have his gift of sight, and he knew that this would be the only way for her to get it. He had made the ultimate sacrifice for his daughter, who’d been so blinded by her thirst for power that she hadn’t been able to see the endless depths of his love for her. Now, she would have to spend eternity trying to forget what she had done. I felt sorry for her.
Lyra sank to her knees and moaned, the bow and arrow clattering to the ground beside her as she looked up at me. “I never imagined that my father would have foreseen his own death and done nothing about it. Seers, even ones as powerful as my father, can’t foretell everything that happens, just bits and pieces. But all along, he knew what I would do to him. I can’t, I can’t…” She began sobbing again, dropping her head into her hands as she rocked back and forth.
Torn between comforting her and running for my life, I wavered by the door, keeping my eyes glued to the weapon. After a long time, Lyra glanced up, and when our gazes met, her eyes looked sunken, hollow, lifeless. Zombielike, she picked up the weapon, aimed it, and drew back her arm.
“No!” I cried, lunging forward, but it was too late. Lyra the centaur had driven an arrow straight through her own heart.
Chapter 18
Skin glowing purple, I made my way through ward twelve, bucket of cleaning potion in one hand, mop in the other, and my still-useless wand tucked safely in my pocket. It was the end of my shift, but instead of going home, I had to pay a visit to someone.
“Knock, knock,” I said softly, tapping on Mildred’s open hospital room door. The frail, elderly witch who occupied the room next to Orion’s tore her eyes away from the television set hanging on the wall opposite her bed and glowered at me. I was pleased to see that her skin was looking a lot less bruised, and her cheeks had regained some of their plumpness.
“What do you want?” she croaked, waving a hand at the TV. “Can’t you see I’m watching the soaps?”
She turned back to the screen, where a pale vampire was sinking his teeth into the creamy neck of a woman who seemed positively enraptured by the blood draining from her body. When the vampire was finished drinking, the woman swooned, and he caught her in his arms before transforming into a bat and flying off with her into the sunset. I started to laugh, but quickly stifled it when Mildred shot me another withering look; to be fair, I’d seen far sappier soap opera stories in the human world.
When the closing credits rolled, Mildred let out a dreamy sigh and switched off the television. “Once upon a time, when I was about your age, I knew a vampire just like that. He could drain a vein while making it feel like a caress.” Her tone hardened. “But that was before all the regulations about drinking from living people were put in place. A lot of mumbo-jumbo, if you ask me.” She gave me a sharp look. “I assume you’re here about the centaur.”
I set down my mop and bucket and perched on the edge of her bed. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “You knew what Lyra was doing, and you never told anyone. Doesn’t that eat away at your conscience?”
“What conscience?” She cackled, and then, seeing that I didn’t join in on the joke, fell silent and gave me a long, searching look. “You’ve never had kids, I presume.” Without waiting for a response, she continued, “If you did, you would know that you would do anything—anything—for them. Orion has known for many centuries, before Lyra was even born, that she would betray him. And he let it happen, knowing full well it would end in his death, because he wanted her to have the thing she desired most—his gift.”
“But it ended in her death, too,” I protested. The image of Lyra’s lifeless body lying on the ground, eyes wide open and horrified, was something I would not soon forget. “If Orion was able to see his own death, wouldn’t he have known that Lyra would take her own life, too, in the end?”
“No,” Mildred said. “He believed that Lyra would go on to become another great seer, and that thought gave him peace… and immeasurable strength in the face of what was to come.”
“That means he died in vain,” I said quietly, my voice catching. “His sacrifice, everything he went through… it was all for nothing.”
“Of course it wasn’t!” she said in exasperation. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with the centaurs lately, girl—haven’t you learned anything about them?” I pursed my lips, searching for the right answer. “Come on, you can get there,” Mildred prompted, then added, as an aside, “I guess they don’t make new witches as smart as they used to.”
I frowned at her. “There’s no need to be rude.” Then, as my mind searched through everything I’d learned over the past few weeks, the answer clicked. “The centaurs don’t believe in death,” I said, quickly looking at Mildred to see if I was correct.
She nodded sagely, then turned her head to gaze out the window. “Somewhere out there, in the great beyond, Orion and Lyra have been reunited. They’re together again, which is the only thing that matters. And all has been forgiven.”
We were both quiet for a long time as I dabbed the tears from my eyes. “How do you know all of this?” I asked eventually, breaking the peaceful silence that had settled over the hospital room. “Are you a seer too?”
Mildred shrugged. “Orion told me. It isn’t easy being the only two sane patients on the ward—it gave us a lot of time to talk. And do crossword puzzles.�
� She winked at me. “But I let Orion hold the book.”
On my way home from work, I made one last stop. This time, I entered the casino as myself, though I’d taken the time to change into a dress before leaving the hospital. There was someone I needed to talk to, and I didn’t want the security trolls throwing me out—or whacking me over the head with their clubs—for violating the stringent dress code.
Just like last time, Remy was behind the blackjack table, still expertly shuffling the cards, still looking bored. When she saw me, her full lips parted into a smile. “I was wondering when you’d come back,” she said, then waved me toward the table. “Take a seat.” She began dealing the cards under the pretense that I was playing a round, but she kept her turquoise eyes trained on my face.
“You know who I am?” I asked, studying her intently. She was just as beautiful as I remembered, though this time, I didn’t feel quite so intimidated in her presence. I sensed a certain sadness under her stunning exterior, a reminder that people who seem to have it all rarely ever do.
“Of course I do.” She slapped a few cards on the table. “I always do my homework.”
“Tell me about you and Sebastian,” I said, cutting to the chase. “Why can’t you just leave him alone?”
She considered my question for a few moments, her coral-painted fingernails caressing the edge of the cards. Finally, she said, “After Sebastian abandoned me, I felt the need to remind him that he can’t throw away someone’s heart like it’s a piece of trash on the sidewalk and get away with it. He needs to learn that when he hurts someone, it has consequences.”
“Losing him must have been hard for you,” I acknowledged. “I understand that you two were quite serious, and even discussing marriage?”
“Discussing marriage?” She looked at me in disbelief. “Is that the line he’s feeding you? The man will never change.” Her grip on the cards tightened. “We were discussing marriage all right, Wren. In fact, we discussed it all the way to the alter.”
