Chapter 51
CHAPTER
Warmth gushed over my hand.
The sound of his body hitting the cobblestone was like a crack to my senses, jerking me out of a trance and straight into a nightmare.
I’ll find the right version of myself when Steeler is dead, I’d told Willa at the beginning of the year
Now, I was staring at the dead, blank-eyed form of him at my feet, and I’d never felt less like myself: hollow and cold. Oh, so very cold.
Never again. I never wanted to see this image again.
I ripped my eyes back to Dyonisia, who had momentarily gaped in surprise, as if she hadn’t thought I’d actually do it.
When she saw that Coen’s body didn’t so much as twitch on the ground, though, she smiled again—this time almost genuinely.
Her mist dissolved around us.
And as soon as my two powers flooded back into me, I used the opportunity to pounce.
Eat the corpse, I commanded the crows.
They obeyed instantly. Eagerly. Hungrily.
“Food!”
“Food!”
“Food!”
The Wild Whispering coachman couldn’t hold them back. With a great flurry of sleek black wings, the crows pulled the carriage toward Coen’s body and began to peck at every inch of his exposed flesh.
“No!” Dyonisia shrieked, flapping her hands at them. “Stop it!” She turned to the Wild Whispering coachman. “Tell them to stop! I want that body!”
He tried to order the crows back, but they didn’t pay him any mind. In the commotion, I bit down on my lip until I tasted blood, clamping down on the smile slowly rising within me.
Because that wasn’t Coen’s true body, but a Shifted replica of it… and now Dyonisia would never know. She’d never know that even as the crows ate away at that replica, the morphed flesh was already withering back into its original form: rubble and grit and ash.
I chanced a half glance at the two shadows loitering in that alleyway behind the carriage—Emelle and Lander.
Emelle and Lander had come to save me. To save us.
I had whispered my plan into Felicity’s mind right before we’d dropped her off at the Institute. Until ten minutes ago, Coen hadn’t had any idea that I’d asked her to relay my whole story, along with my plan, to Emelle, who could relay it to Lander.
For I’d known that Dyonisia wouldn’t trust me completely until she saw me pierce Coen’s heart. And Lander was the only Shape Shifter I trusted to help me fake his death without turning me in.
I don’t know which of their powers they’d used to get here in time—there was a variety of Wild Whispering or Shape Shifting ways to travel across the island—but I did know that Lander had used his power to make a clone of the male he’d seen me with as best as he could.
That clone had been warping slightly around the edges, and those eyes had been Lander’s warm brown color rather than the smoky quartz of Coen’s real gaze, but other than that…
Well, Dyonisia had been fooled, at least.
Even the blood that had coated my hand had felt real.
Blood that had turned back into ash and dirt on my hands.
Thank you, I shot into that alleyway. Thank you so much. I didn’t want to tangle you up in all of this, but…
Although I sensed Lander was panting and sweating with the effort it had taken him to Shift something so small into something so significant, neither of their minds so much as flinched with shock at the sound of my voice in their heads.
I’d asked Felicity to tell my best friend everything, which meant both Emelle and Lander now knew about more than just Coen. They knew I was half-faerie. That Dyonisia was my aunt by blood. That I had a second brand hidden beneath my matted and tangled hair.
And their minds were filled with nothing but love and pride as Emelle thought back, We knew you were hiding something this whole time, Rayna. When that monkey of yours found me, it was honestly a relief for us to be able to understand. To be there for you.
Lander’s mind was straining with exertion, and I could practically see the sweat streaming down his forehead as he maintained the bones of his creation. But he still managed to think, Thank you for letting us in, Rayna. It means a lot to Melle… and to me.
My throat stung. I couldn’t do it in real life, but I threw them both a mental image of me wrapping my arms around their necks and squeezing tight, picking up on more subtle pieces of knowledge when I did so.
Felicity was safe in my room with Willa.
Rodhi had set his spiders on the Testing Center during the beginning of the second quarterly test—ensuring that nobody had noticed when Lander and Emelle had slipped away.
I’d forgotten about the second quarterly test. Forgotten how dangerous it would have been for them—for all of us—if we hadn’t showed up.
Mrs. Smetlar, especially, would have relished reporting us to the same female who was currently shrieking at the crows as they continued to tear apart the replica of Coen.
As if Emelle could sense my guilt seeping into her mind, she added warmly, I noticed, you know.
Noticed what?
That you filled my birdfeeder for me when I couldn’t. You might not have been able to give much of yourself to anyone this year, but you gave me that. She paused. I knew it was all you could manage. And it was enough.
My eyes were watering by the time the crows finally picked their way to the ground, leaving nothing behind besides a Shifted skeleton.
Dyonisia sniffed at what she believed to be Coen’s bones.
“Who knows where they’re going to shit out all of that bascite I could have studied. Good God, I hate birds.”
Now I was extra glad I’d had the birds demolish the evidence of how I’d tricked her.
When Dyonisia had sensed a Mind Manipulator in addition to a Wild Whisperer in her web, she hadn’t realized she’d just been sensing me: Coen’s power that ran in my blood.
My ruse would have been over if she’d realized that the replica had no bascite at all.
As it was, she merely sighed at me.
“Come, child. Let me take you back to the Esholian Institute—maybe you will stay there like you’re supposed to now that you know what I can do to misbehavers.”
As if to prove just what she could do, she snapped her fingers.
Her antipower lunged back down, devouring Lexington’s remains.
Which promptly disintegrated into nothing more than dust.
“There.” Dyonisia brushed her hands against her dress.
“Now I have two extra spaces on my Good Council to fill—Ms. Leake’s and Mr. Lexington’s.
I’ll see to it that Mr. Gleekle contacts you about the initiation process at the beginning of next year.
I daresay you’d be a good addition… if you can handle a little more power, that is. ”
She clambered into the carriage and held out her hand.
I didn’t dare glance back at the alleyway now that her focus was trained on me. Coen could Walk Emelle and Lander back to the Institute when the coast was clear.
No, I didn’t look back.
And as a dark, fathomless presence returned to the periphery of my mind, hovering and guarding from his space between stars, I stepped forward and took my aunt’s hand.
The carriage ride back was much too silent and much too loud at the same time.
Dyonisia, the Wild Whispering coachman, and I kept our mouths shut as the crows hefted us up and over Hallow’s Perch—what looked like a pile of smoking ruins from above—and across the gentle rise and fall of the jungle canopy.
I hadn’t realized until now that the sky above all that mist and smoke had melted back into dusk.
The carriage ripped through the wind. I felt Dyonisia’s eyes as she studied me unabashedly, her lips pursing in distaste at the filth coating my skin and the jagged rips in the dress she had given me.
She still doesn’t trust you, came his voice in my head.
I’d felt his presence follow me, but I still had to bite back the surge of relief that threatened to well in my eyes at the actual sound of his voice as he rode his own wave of darkness alongside the carriage, trailing us in his in-between space while Dyonisia was none the wiser.
I know, I replied, hardly daring to blink. Indeed, my aunt seemed to be shimmering with an aura of mist, antipower coating her like a second skin—a film of protection from any kind of magic I could possibly throw her way. But at least now she thinks she can control me.
Maybe she can. Coen’s voice was a whisper. Maybe she controls all of us. When she had you in that dome of her antipower… I couldn’t get to your mind. I couldn’t hear you.
So he hadn’t heard me say that I loved him. And now he sounded so heartbroken, so angry at himself, that my fingers curled in my lap with the effort it took to hide how much I wanted to gather his face into my hands and smooth out every harsh line I knew rode his skin.
Well, you can hear me now. And I can hear you.
He still didn’t sound convinced.
I should have known you were in trouble with Lexington. I should have been there as soon as he dragged you away. I should have—
Stop that. You were literally fighting monsters. There’s no way you could have known anything while your mind was so preoccupied.
Well, there was a way… but it was a rarity, an impossibility, and I tucked that small kernel of wishful thinking into the shrine of my mind.
I waited until the carriage tipped forward as the coachman instructed the crows to descend to ask, the exiled ones?
I’d asked Coen to whisk them all away before Dyonisia could catch sight of them in their original forms, but…
I got them to the bunker in time, he sighed. The village healers are tending to them.
So Kimber, Jenia, and the others hadn’t run away, after all.
Dyonisia had no way of knowing that her own citizens had taken in the monsters she’d set on them, but that wouldn’t last forever.
Eventually, one of those villagers would talk, and the news that Hallow’s Perch was harboring exiled ones would make its way to the Good Council. To her.
Did you see your family? I asked.