Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Jacaranda

S arah’s delicate nature would get her killed on Halla, but I didn’t want to say that and scare her. “You see what I was saying, Deacon? She’s too soft for the job ahead of her. She can’t even give the order to execute her betrayer. She doesn’t have what it takes. Too weak.”

“I was strong enough to cut you,” she snapped, hand on her hip.

Deacon laughed. “She has a point, Jac.”

“Is that your name?” she asked.

“He did not introduce himself?” Deacon asked.

I sighed. “I didn’t think I would need to. I hoped you would come back to your senses.”

Deacon turned to her and said, “Your captor is Jacaranda Cozz, my oldest friend and favorite employee.” Then he looked at me. “And if you wouldn’t mind de-mogging?”

I rolled my eyes and hit the button on my belt. I had thought Sarah would be more at ease with another human in the room, so I had changed back into the man who had taken her before Wave delivered her. Once I had transmogrified into my native form, her mouth dropped open as she stared up at me with huge, round eyes.

“I’m not going to hurt you, Sarah.”

She gulped. “Oh. Okay.” She sounded like she wasn’t sure what to believe.

But it didn’t matter what she thought. There was no point to any of this. “Can’t I just take her back to South Carolina? She does not belong here.”

“No,” Deacon said firmly. “Sarah Hollinger will help keep my sibling safe—”

“She can’t even keep herself safe!” I argued.

“—and we will enter into a union to keep her safe on Halla.”

My inner self raged, but I didn’t want to scare her any more than I already had. “Please tell me you’re just trying to get my goat.”

“What’s a goat?” Deacon asked.

Sarah frowned. “Huh?”

“He doesn’t know what a goat is,” I said to her, then told him, “It’s a figure of speech. What I meant to say is, please tell me you’re lying.” Sometimes navigating the intricacies of multiple languages tripped me up, and I lost track of who would understand what.

Deacon was quite serious as he said, “I would never lie about a union, Jac. Who would lie about a union? They are sacred.”

I groaned in frustration. “This is madness, and you know it. She has no idea what this means—”

“It’s like a human marriage,” he explained to her.

Sarah’s eyes went wide with apprehension. “You want to marry me?”

“Yes, but only to protect you from the ghosts.”

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

I ran my fingers through my hair and fell back onto Deacon’s bed near the window. “Tell her. She needs to know everything.”

Deacon said, “The ghosts of Halla can possess living tissue. It’s been many years since it has happened, but our historians tell us of the times they’ve inhabited a human. Being possessed is violent and painful—they can do anything with your body, use it as they see fit, or torment you—it merely depends on the ghost. But they cannot possess someone who is united with another. Union is the only bond they cannot break to enter a person’s body, and thus, it is very sacred to us. I do not enter this bond lightly, Sarah Hollinger, but I do it to protect you.”

She covered her mouth and shook her head. “I can’t marry you.”

“You must. It is the only way to protect you—are you having a side effect from your drugs? I did not think I would have to explain this more than once.”

I almost laughed at his confusion. “Deacon, she’s not asking for you to explain it again. She’s telling you she doesn’t want to do it.”

He frowned. “What she wants does not matter. It will protect her.”

“It matters to me!” she snapped and began to cry.

I saw an opportunity. “This is your savior? The woman who can’t refuse a union without crying? You think she’s strong enough to protect your sibling? She’s hardly strong enough to stand on her own two feet!” I walked over to her and expected her to cringe, but she didn’t. She just watched me and sobbed. “Look at her tiny body and this soft hair. She’s like a cina. Head to toe weakness, that is. I bet she can’t even push me away. Go ahead and try, little cina.” I carefully nudged her shoulder.

“I’m not playing your—”

“Push me!” I barked in her face.

She shoved me with all her might. I stepped back to stop from falling, but landed against Deacon, who laughed.

Suddenly, Sarah slapped my face and screamed, “Leave me alone!” before she realized what she had done. Then she folded her arms against herself, like a shield. Her eyes were glued to me, and her lip quivered, as if I was about to attack her.

Someone has hit her before . I had seen it with orphans and others who had been abused. That palpable fear, the tight posture. I stood straight but hunched my shoulders to appear smaller and softer. I lowered my voice, too.

“Sarah, I’m not going to hurt you for that. I was trying to get a rise out of you. I needed to know you would defend yourself.”

Her nose crinkled and her eyes became slits. “You were testing me?”

“Yes, I can’t let this insanity continue without knowing you can handle yourself.”

“Did I pass your little test?” she spat.

“Better than expected, but not as good as I had hoped.”

“Next time you come at me, Jacaranda Cozz, you better hope I can’t hit you back, because I won’t stop.”

“See?” Deacon sounded proud. “She has strong fighting spirit in her. I almost think it would be enough to protect her without the union.”

Sarah hopefully said, “Then we don’t need to—”

“But we are,” Deacon interrupted.

She huffed and slumped against the wall.

“If she’s so strong, let her stand on her own against the ghosts, Deacon. No union, no guards. Let her prove how strong she is.”

“I will not take such a risk. I require her for my sibling.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. I didn’t want to bring his family into the mix, but I had no other cards to play. “So you want to unite with a human woman, who you don’t even know, to protect your sibling…what would your father say about this?”

“I am doing this because of my father, Jac,” he said, his jaw clenched. “He would want me to protect my sibling.”

“Fine. What would your mother say about this?”

His eyes darkened as he turned on me. “Why are you bringing her into this?”

“She has a right to know, doesn’t she?”

“My mother…” He grumbled, “She lost her right to tell me what to do the day she turned her back on my father.”

“She did not do so without cause,” I pointed out.

He gritted his teeth and admitted, “No. She did not. But all of that aside, it does not matter what she wants in this circumstance. I will do anything to protect my father’s child, as I hope any of his other children would protect me. I recognize that you don’t grasp the concept of classed family, Jac, but this is how it is for us.”

He had to bring that up? “I may not be classed , but I understand what family is, Deacon. You can condescend like that to your crew, but don’t try that shit with me.”

He winced and explained, “I only meant to say that things are different for me than they are for you, when it comes to family. I did not mean to offend you and for that, I am sorry.” It hadn’t been the apology that pained him. It was the fact that he had crossed a line with me that had pained him.

“Forgiven. Always.”

Deacon gave half a smile. “I know this is not the best circumstance for a union, Jac. If I thought there was any other way around it, then I would have taken that path. But since Justice murdered all the other conduits on Orhon, Sarah Hollinger is the nearest one, which makes her the best candidate for the work. I do not like what I must do, but rich or poor, we must do our duty, yes?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then I will unite with this human. We will have the ceremony and all its pomp right here on Allegiant . Once the ceremony is over, we will go to Orhon, where you and your crew will rescue Silence from her prison cell. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?”

I laughed. “I have broken out how many prisoners from the royal cells now? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

Deacon chuckled. “More than enough to make you the expert in such matters. After that, we take them both to Halla, secure them, and that will be that. Nothing else to worry about.”

“Dun dun, dun!” Sarah said with a shake of her head.

We both turned to her, frowning.

She explained in a mix of English and Ladrian, “Sorry. It’s a human way to say someone had jinxed themselves by tempting fate.”

“What is jinxed ?” Deacon asked.

I said, “She thinks you cursed yourself by saying there was nothing else to worry about—it’s a superstition—if you say something like that, then things will go wrong according to human lore.”

“It is a curse to be confident for humans?”

I sighed. “For someone about to unite with one, you certainly have a lot to learn about them.”