Chapter 25

25

GAbrIEL

F ear flooded me, followed quickly by shame. Was I really afraid of my own mother? But seeing her there, still and pale in the night, it was hard not to be frightened. A thousand possibilities flitted through my mind, all equally horrible. Had Evangeline been right? Had my mother been in on it?

"If you're going to talk about breaking in, you should do it out of sight of the drawing room," my mother said, signaling an austere hand for us to follow her and stepping off the path to a small alcove in the hedges. "The girl is right," she said to me. "Gabriel, your father is willing to do almost anything for power."

I forgot to breathe. My ears were ringing, and I felt impossibly fragile. "What are you saying, Mother?" I managed.

"Roland has been involved in this since it began," she said calmly. "I doubt he's in charge since, quite frankly, I don't believe he's intelligent enough to pull it off, but he's been instrumental."

I felt like I was going to throw up. I couldn't even convince myself that I was surprised. I'd known my father didn't care about his subjects the same way I did. I'd known he could be cruel if he thought it would pay off later. I had known who he was, and I had followed him anyway.

Next to me, Evangeline was all business. "Are you part of the operation?" she asked. I could practically see her slipping into the mode she used to question persons of interest.

"No," my mother said. "If I was involved, I wouldn't allow it to be run so sloppily. Roland has no idea I know what he's been up to."

Evangeline nodded briskly. She glanced at me, but whatever she was hoping I would contribute was beyond me.

"He's storing the artifact here?" Evangeline asked. "Seems like a risk, doesn't it? Keeping it in the citadel?"

"The citadel has exceptionally strong wards," my mother said. "Yes, people are constantly coming and going, but very few of them are as attuned to light magic as you seem to be. Besides, my husband possesses a unique blend of caution and arrogance. He believes no one is better equipped to protect it than he is."

"We're going to need to get to it," I said. My voice sounded hollow and dead to my own ears. "The wards will recognize me, but he'll have safeguards in place."

My mother reached out to me, pressing her cool, thin hand against mine. I was shaking, apparently, which I hadn't noticed until then. "Darling," she said. She sounded softer than I was used to, gentle in a way I hadn't heard since she'd tended to me during my transformation. She'd spent days sitting with me as I sweated and vomited out my humanity, delirious with fever and pain. She had mopped my burning brow, singing in languages that had been dead for centuries. When I had been reborn, still laying on my deathbed and barely able to open my eyes, she had propped me up and poured my first few sips of blood into my mouth. Now, standing across from her in the dark garden of the citadel, in a city hundreds of years younger than me, I felt achingly young, desperate for her to magically fix things for me.

"Here's what you're going to do," my mother said steadily, cupping my cheek and tilting my face down so I was looking her in the eye. "You're going to go home and pretend everything is normal. You will return to your regular routine. If your father or any of his associates come to question you, you will tell them nothing of this conversation. Instead, you will tell them that I came to you and told you I'd found a source of power I was going to take for myself, and that I asked you to come with me."

"Mother." I didn't know if I wanted her to continue or to stop. None of the options seemed good. I wanted, more than anything, to not be in this situation at all.

"Listen to me," she demanded. "You'll tell them that you refused, and if they ask, you'll tell them that you have no idea where I went."

Next to us, Evangeline was looking studiously at her own shoes, as if she was trying to give us some semblance of privacy.

My eyes burned.

My mother reached into the sleeve of her robe and pulled out a small wooden box, carved with runes and warding spells. She pressed it into my hands, and I took it, unable to resist, unable to do anything but follow her lead. It was far heavier than I expected. When Evangeline saw it, she sucked in a breath sharply.

"That's—" she started.

"Yes," my mother said. "The box is lead-lined and heavily warded to keep the magic contained. Even if Roland has someone at his side who can track light magic, he won't be able to find the artifact while it's inside this. With any luck, he won't notice that it's gone for several days."

"I hope you won't be offended if we open it to make sure the piece of the array is actually in there," Evangeline said.

My mother waved a hand dismissively. "Not at all. I would do the same thing myself."

With trembling hands, I lifted the lid of the box. Inside, cushioned on a pillow of white silk, was another piece of the artifact we'd been searching for—the artifact my father had been using to turn our people into fodder for his own ambitions.

I thrust the box blindly into Evangeline's hands and stepped forward, pulling my mother into a tight hug. She froze for a moment, then wrapped her arms around me tightly, pulling me down so I could bury my face in her shoulder like a child.

"I'll be leaving soon," she whispered to me. "I can distract him… keep him from blaming you for the fragment's disappearance. I've paid off several of the servants to go on the run as well to hide my trail. I'm giving you an advantage, Gabriel, and I need you to use it."

I wanted to promise her that I was capable of using what she'd given me, and capable of facing down my father without flinching. I'd never been much good at lying to my mother, though. "I don't know if I can do this."

She smoothed a hand over my hair. "Gabriel, my darling pup," she murmured. "Of course you can."

My mother pulled back from the hug just enough to cup my face for a brief moment. "Be brave," she said. "Be strong. Be clever. I know the man I raised, and I know he is capable of this." She pressed a cool kiss to my forehead, and then disappeared into the night.

I was only distantly aware of Evangeline getting the two of us home. With the anchoring presence of my mother gone, everything had gone floaty and distant. I felt numb. I might as well have been watching a slideshow of images: the walkway outside my parents' home, the car, the city at night, my own front door, my study.

When I came back to myself, I was in one of the large, soft chairs in my bedroom, with a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and a steaming mug in my hands. Evangeline was sitting across from me, worrying her thumb across the dip in her pendant and reading aloud from a small paperback. She was still dressed for dinner, although her hair had gotten away from her and fluffed out over the course of the evening.

"‘Of course, many theories about the development of the earliest eating utensils fail to consider those shapes available in the natural world. The simple seashell could have easily been pressed into service as a rudimentary spoon. Indeed, any culture capable of developing or finding a bowl could simply use the same method on a smaller scale to?—'"

"Why are you reading about spoons?" I asked. My voice came out as a hoarse croak, and I winced.

Evangeline looked up, a dozen expressions moving across her face more quickly than I could hope to parse them. "You went pretty unresponsive on me," she said. "I figured giving you something distracting to latch onto might help. This was the first book I picked up."

"Smart." My throat was dry as a bone. I sniffed at the mug I was holding and smelled tea, which, when I took a tentative sip, turned out to be a severely over-steeped lemon ginger. "I'm sorry I handled things so poorly."

"You've had a pretty hectic night," Evangeline said. "Between the stuff with your father and the news of your engagement going public, that's a lot. Must've been some real whiplash."

"Not whiplash," I said. "More of a severe downward slope."

I could feel Evangeline's eyes on me. I kept my gaze on the pale yellow liquid in my mug. "I have spent nearly a thousand years trying to please my father," I said finally. "I have endeavored to come up with strategies that will help his people, and to be the perfect son. I know that my actions reflect back on him, and I have remembered that every step of the way. As his heir, I am an extension of him." My voice was remarkably steady. I mentally congratulated myself on that.

"Being his heir includes certain responsibilities," I continued. "Including marrying someone I don't love to continue his line. I've done… Evangeline, I've done so much for his approval, and he's…" Something in me crumpled. Tears stung my eyes, an infuriatingly human reaction my father would have despised.

"I've spent so long being a tool for him to use, I'm not even good at it," I blurted out. "I was always terrible in the council meetings. I got too involved and, and, emotional. He always told me I had to keep a level head and let him handle things, but I just kept trying to help. I just needed to do something. He was letting our people starve, Evangeline, then punishing them for trying to feed themselves, and now my mother is on the run, and I don't know if I'll ever see her again?—"

Evangeline hugged me tightly, and I melted into it. I was mortified and furious with myself. Furious that I was letting this get to me, and that I'd gone along with it for so long in the first place. My words failed me, giving way to ugly, wracking sobs that shook my entire frame. Centuries of my life. God, had he tried something like this before? How many of our people had he led to their deaths, or worse, while I stood by his side, content to be a figurehead of his regime? And it wouldn't have stopped with me. I would have married Gwendoline, had children with her, and let my father use them the exact same way.

I saw the future I'd resigned myself to. The loveless marriage, the children who would be cared for by a small army of servants and tutors approved by my parents. The stiff, uncomfortable family dinners. Decade after decade of sleepwalking through my duties, writing proposals I knew would be turned down before I so much as touched pen to paper. Spending the entire span of my immortality killing myself slowly, piece by piece, and condemning the children I'd had out of duty to the same fate.

Evangeline held me as I cried until I was empty. Eventually, I managed to push myself upright, blinking gritty eyes.

"I'm sorry for the way I behaved when you tried to tell me what you'd found," I said hoarsely. "I didn't want to believe it. Frankly, I still don't want to believe it, but that doesn't seem to matter."

Evangeline rubbed the pad of her thumb along my cheek. I must have looked like an absolute wreck, but she didn't seem to mind. "Yeah, it was pretty dickish of you, but I get it," she said. "And I, uh… I mean, I didn't exactly de-escalate, you know? I thought that I was, like, the other woman or something, and that would've really sucked because I actually like spending time with you even when we're not banging." The last sentence came out in one long rush, all of the words piling up behind each other like they were trying to get out of her mouth before she could stop them.

I gave her a watery smile. "I enjoy spending time with you, too. You are… stubbornly yourself in a way that I admire. A way I hope I can emulate one day."

"You're getting there," Evangeline told me with a small smile. "It gets easier with practice, I promise."

"I hope so," I muttered darkly, and she chuckled.

"Come on," she said, tugging me to my feet. "You look fucking exhausted. I know you don't need to sleep, but you should probably give it a shot."

"Would you… ah. Would you stay with me?" I asked, not meeting her eyes. I was painfully aware that when she'd asked me to spend the night with her, she had woken to an empty bed.

"I was planning on it," Evangeline said. "But I gotta… you know." She waved a hand at her dress and makeup, and I nodded.

Ten minutes later, Evangeline came back into my room in pajama shorts and a tank top, her face washed clean, and her hair in a braid that I knew would be escaping from its tie within half an hour. Wordlessly, I lifted the blankets for her, and she climbed into the bed next to me, pulling me close.

I went willingly, too exhausted to do anything more than let her rest my head on her chest, then I fell asleep with her hand in my hair, and her heartbeat under my ear.