Chapter Thirty-Eight

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Sometimes, you can see love coming. And when it takes a different path, you should be thankful.

—Fragment from the work of Marya Addou, Malfouran poet

The walk back to their apartments was silent. Gabe stayed behind her, a one-eyed shadow dogging her steps and making sure she went where she was supposed to. She no longer wore chains, but it was the first time Lore had truly felt like a prisoner in the Citadel.

Their room was locked. Lore had the key half fitted in the door before Gabe stepped up beside her. “It won’t work.” His voice was low. “Anton had the lock changed.”

She looked at him and said nothing. There was nothing to say.

Gabe swallowed. He unlocked the door with a key he produced from his pocket, then stepped aside to let her in first.

The apartments felt strange now—foreign and ill fitting, where before they’d been as close to comfortable as she could find here. Especially knowing Anton had changed the lock sometime after she left last night. Myriad hells, he’d probably had someone waiting in the halls, watching for her to leave so they could immediately set to work.

Because Gabe told him. Gabe told him everything.

Her wrists felt raw. The iron had made them itch. Lore rubbed and rubbed at them, trying to force the feeling out of her skin, trying to make it stop—

Gentle pressure, Gabe’s fingers interposed where hers had been. “Lore, you’re going to hurt yourself—”

It’d been the truth when she told Gabe and Bastian that she was no good at brawling, but instinct made do. Lore snatched her wrist from Gabe’s hand and struck out with the heel of her opposite palm, smacking him in the shoulder, pushing him off balance and away.

“Don’t touch me,” she snarled. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

He stared at her, one blue eye wide. His jaw clenched beneath the reddish stubble on his chin. “I was trying to keep you safe.”

“By going to the very person we knew was lying?”

“He’s on our side! You heard everything I just did, you know that Anton is working against August!”

“But you didn’t.” Her fingers went back to her wrist again, itching, itching. “You had no idea what Anton was involved in, and it’s pure stupid luck you didn’t get all three of us murdered!”

“It was either that or watch you go to a far more likely murder in the damn catacombs!” Gabe ran his hands over his close-shorn hair, turned away. “I wanted him to stop you from going down there at all. Both of you. That seemed like a much more pressing matter than playing politics—”

“It’s more than playing politics! If we’d been right, if Anton and August were still on the same side, Bastian might’ve—”

“Forgive me,” Gabe cut in, nearly a snarl. “I forgot that one must always be thinking of Bastian first.”

“Save it,” Lore hissed. “We both know what happened here. You got overwhelmed with the thought that maybe, just once, you were wrong about something. You got scared.”

Gabe’s hands twitched back and forth to almost-fists. Instinct had ahold of him, too, and it told him to defend the man who’d stepped in when his father bled out. “Whatever side Anton was on,” he said, “I knew that would be the right one.”

She laughed, high and harsh. “Gods, Gabe, you’re like a kicked dog going back to the damn boot. Anton took you in because he hallucinated that a vanished god told him to. He doesn’t love you. He never has. He’s not your father, no matter what the Church wants you to call him.”

The Presque Mort took a step toward her, and she was reminded, against her will, of that night in her room, his mouth on her neck, his roaming hands. She wondered if he’d kiss her like that again now. It seemed to be what they defaulted to, the only way they could communicate when everything else piled up in jagged mountains, unable to be climbed.

“I wanted to keep you safe.” It rumbled from him, low and dark, but he stopped paces away and held himself there, not allowing his body one inch closer to hers. “And if that meant Bastian got hurt, so be it.”

Lore bared her teeth. “I am gods-damned tired of being the rope in your and Bastian’s tug-of-war.”

“Especially since you’ve already chosen the winner of the match, right?” He laughed just like she had: no joy in it, none at all. “You did the moment you told him where you came from.”

There it was.

“You didn’t know that until an hour ago,” Lore said. “Don’t act like it’s an excuse.”

“How long?” Gabe growled. “How long has he known? I asked you, that first day. I asked you how you came to channel Mortem, and you lied to me. Did you ever lie to him, or was he worthy of the truth from the beginning?”

He stood straight and unbowed as ever, but there was a crookedness to the line of his shoulders. Gabe worked so hard not to show hurt on his face; it came out in other places.

“I told him the night he took us to the boxing ring,” Lore answered. “The first time.”

His eye fluttered closed, then open. “That long, huh?”

She said nothing.

Gabe nodded, his lips twisted in a bitter smile. “You two have been laughing at me for a while, then.”

“It wasn’t like that, Gabe. The only reason I told him was because he threatened—”

“Maybe you weren’t laughing, but he certainly was. And maybe he did threaten you, Lore, but we both know you would’ve told him eventually. You trusted him enough to follow him into the damn catacombs.” He shook his head with a sharp laugh. “One more way he’s beaten me. One more way he’s better.”

“Bleeding God, not everything is about you and your guilt!” Lore shook her head. “You want to know why I didn’t tell you where I came from? Because I knew how you’d react. I knew you’d think I was some kind of monster.”

“You don’t know me at all,” Gabe said, and it was true. Him and her and Bastian were somehow bound, yes, but it didn’t truly make them known, not in all their intricacies. Their odd connections emphasized that point, rather than obscuring it.

“No. I don’t,” Lore said wearily. “And maybe it’s best if I keep it that way.”

As if she had a choice in the matter. As if she didn’t feel the walls of something closing in, trapping the three of them in its center.

There was no flicker of emotion on Gabe’s face—no hurt, no anger. He’d scrubbed it all out, left blankness in its wake.

“Get some rest.” Flat, cold. “I’ll be outside.” He skirted around her, opened the door.

Lore turned to follow him with her eyes. “And when can I leave?”

“Eclipse ball is two nights from now, at eight,” Gabe answered. “So about ten minutes before that.”

The door closed. The lock clicked.

She didn’t mean to fall asleep.

It almost seemed out of her control. One moment, she was sitting in the tiny study, curled up on the one chair, and the next she was by the vast blue ocean, white sand crumbling beneath her feet, the tide gently rolling in to slide against her bare ankles.

“Huh,” Lore said, and then realized it was the first time she’d been able to speak in one of these dreams. That felt important.

The figure beside her seemed to think so, too. Lore didn’t turn her head to look at them, but she felt them stiffen, as if they’d grown more corporeal. “Your time grows near.” Smooth, textureless, a voice that didn’t seem to go with a throat. “And I don’t know how the process will change, so we might as well get as much out of this as we can.”

The voice seemed to be convincing itself.

A tug at her heart, as if it was being pulled through her ribs. The stream of black smoke, spilling from her and across the sky.

It was an effort to turn her head. But Lore did.

The figure turned, too. And it was Cedric. Cedric’s perfect, unblemished face above the ruin of his body, his bloodstained teeth spreading in a wide smile.

But the figure shifted. The child from the vaults, mouth hanging open. Another blur, and it was her mother’s face staring back at her.

Her hair was long and straight and pale, her eyes the same bright hazel as Lore’s. With a gentle smile Lore had never actually seen her wear, she leaned forward, pressing a hand to her daughter’s cheek.

“She just never stops trying,” she murmured as her thumb brushed Lore’s skin, though the voice wasn’t right. It was unnaturally smooth, the same voice from before, everything human stripped out of it. “She doesn’t understand that He cannot allow Them to return.” The facsimile of her mother sighed, smoothed her hair. “It’s not your fault. At least we can use what She gives, this time. It will all be over soon.”

The tugging feeling in Lore’s chest became unbearable, as if her body was trying to turn itself inside out. She screamed as smoke plumed gracefully across the sky.

“Shit.”

Lore sat up, pushing tangled, sweaty hair from her eyes. Her neck felt like it was on fire—she’d fallen asleep with it angled on the chair arm. Cursing again, she rubbed at the ache and stumbled into the main sitting room, squinting at the clock.

After a day of isolation, the darkness outside the window told her it was the very early morning of her birthday.

Tonight was the eclipse.

Food was on the table behind the couch. Easy things, apples and bread and cheese, things that could be set out and forgotten.

She read it like it was a code. No one would be opening that door, not until they were ready to escort her to the eclipse ball.

Escort her to her Consecration, and whatever ritual August had planned around it to make her magic his own. A ritual she had to trust Anton to stop, or she and Bastian would both be dead.

It was almost funny, how easily she accepted that Bastian was magic. That he was born to channel life the same way she was born to channel death, that she was his dark reflection. Down there in the catacombs, with the unquiet dead making their slow way to the door and threads of Mortem tangled in her fingers, she’d felt it when Bastian pulled the clinging threads away. Life, rushing, her veins flooded with too much blood, her lungs full of too much air. In that moment, he’d commanded both life and death, he’d held them both in his hands.

She’d been his lightning rod, the darkness that made the light shine brighter after his Consecration. And now, hers approached. She’d felt her power growing stronger as she spent more time with Bastian, as time marched her down to twenty-four years. A moment that, for others, meant holy celebration.

For her, it meant possible murder.

That figured. Lore grabbed a piece of cheese and flopped back on the couch.

A tear rolled down her temple and wet her hair. She didn’t realize she’d shed one until it dripped into her ear, warm and wet and distinctly unpleasant.

“Fuck you, Gabe,” she murmured into the air, hoping he was still outside the door, hoping he heard. Half of her wanted to try to open it, see if he was on the other side. See what he would do if she tried to walk out. Would he tie her up? Knock her out? Kiss her?

All of those options seemed possible.

Thinking of Gabe made her mind turn to Bastian yet again. Where he was, whether Anton was being cruel. She didn’t think so—the strange conversation they’d had while chained made it seem like Anton had been keeping Bastian safe for longer than they realized; she couldn’t shake the memory of his near-reverent voice. Still, leaving him at the mercy of his uncle made her nervous.

None of them were safe here. None of them could leave.

Her mind drifted, but she didn’t let herself sleep again. The light through the window brightened to morning, deepened to midday, began the slow, golden melt of a midsummer afternoon.

She ate a little more, mostly to settle her sloshing stomach. She opened a bottle of wine from the sideboard below the window, and briefly thought of the first night she and Gabe had pilfered through it before giving a violent shake of her aching head, like the memory was a fly she could slap.

Lore drank half the bottle and swam pleasantly in the warm buzz of it as another hour ticked past and the window dimmed. It still hadn’t rained, and the dryness of the air gave the sunlight a brittle quality, like just-polished glass.

When the clock noted half an hour to eight, the door opened. Gabe. He looked at her wild hair and her flushed face and didn’t comment on either of them. He held a garment bag in his hands and thrust it at her.

“Get dressed.” He sounded like he hadn’t spoken in days, like the last words he’d said were to her and in anger. “We’ll leave in twenty minutes.”

“Such a man of his word.”

His jaw twitched. Gabe laid down the bag and backed out the door, clicking the lock behind him again.

Carefully, still feeling some aftereffects from the wine, Lore made her way over and picked up the bag, pulling out a gown. It wasn’t heavy—panels of sheer dark lace made up the skirt, with a simple black bodice that dipped low in the front and back and left her arms bare. No appliques, no embroidery. Just black lace and black silk.

“Showtime,” Lore muttered.