Chapter 51 #2
Yes. Coen’s voice hitched. My adoptive father is a Mind Manipulator, so our secret’s safe with him… but I had to erase the encounter from everyone else’s mind.
My neck didn’t so much as twitch in Dyonisia’s sharp-eyed presence, but my heart broke for him. He’d been trying so hard to leave other people’s memories untouched, only to have to erase himself from the very same villagers who had raised him as a boy.
It’s better that way, Coen whispered. I can’t share my Mind Manipulating power with everyone.
I could see the first sparkles of the Esholian Institute now as the carriage skimmed the treetops, aiming for the courtyard.
I couldn’t believe how different this descent was from the one I’d made a year and a half ago.
I was no longer riding the carriage with Quinn and Lander during the daytime, but touching down with the leader of the entire Good Council in the dead of night… and a voice in my head.
What about Dazmine and the others? I asked quickly. Terrin, the twins, Barberro and Nara?
I brought them all back to the ship. Barberro’s lower arm is absolutely mutilated, but he’ll live. And I’ll go fetch Emelle and Lander and bring them back to the Institute as soon as you’re back on your own two feet and Dyonisia is long gone.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rayna. You were right. If Dyonisia hadn’t watched me die, she would have turned Hallow’s Perch upside down in search of me. Your plan—and Emelle and Lander—saved my home village.
At that moment, the carriage jostled as the wheels touched down right before the Testing Center.
I could feel the weight of that one name neither of us had uttered yet.
Coen’s grief sunk into my own stomach like stones—or maybe that was my own, tugging me down into a place that was both sorrowful and… angry.
Out of everyone who deserved such a swift and brutal death, it shouldn’t have been Garvis.
Dyonisia had no idea what I was thinking, though, as I climbed out of the carriage. Her lips merely puckered with distaste, once again, at all the blood and grime that had hardened on the silk of my tattered dress.
“Try lemon juice, child,” she said, finally waving me away. “I’ve found that gets rid of the worst of stains.”
I didn’t move from my frozen position until her carriage had dissolved into the misty night high above my head.
When I had made it back to Bascite Boulevard, a feline shape was waiting for me where the moonbeam touched the shadows in the space between the Mind Manipulator and Wild Whisperer mansions.
Lights pulsed from every house on Bascite Boulevard.
Music poured from open windows. Everyone was celebrating the postponement of the second quarterly test. I was pretty sure I even heard Rodhi’s boisterous laugh echoing from one of the houses—and good for him.
I made a mental note to thank him later for setting his spiders on the Testing Center.
“You’re alive,” Jagaros said.
“Well, hello to you, too.”
I had to admit, part of me felt… disappointed at the sight of all his muscle and power just sitting on its haunches here at the Institute. Maybe if Jagaros had joined in our fight, Garvis would still be…
The dark, fathomless presence in my mind flinched, and I stopped those thoughts right in their tracks.
Jagaros huffed.
“I made an oath a long time ago that I would not interfere in the Good Council’s…
projects. At least not directly. I couldn’t go near Hallow’s Perch at the time of the attacks any more than I could chew off my own head.
And trust me, I wanted to chew off my own head when I heard that you were there and I could not help you. ”
Oaths. I hated oaths. Jagaros had never sounded so bitter, and suddenly, his black stripes looked like the inky bars of a jailcell tattooed right over his fur, just like Coen’s was tattooed on his back.
“You can still help,” I whispered. “There’s a bunch of exiled ones in the bunker of Hallow’s Perch. They’re safe for now, but…”
When Dyonisia caught wind that her exiled ones were alive and useless, she would hunt them down—and punish all of those people in the bunker for keeping them. Just as Kimber had told Quinn so long ago, a hiding place was exactly what they all needed.
Jagaros’s tail stilled. His eyes narrowed into slivers.
“You wish to aid the ones who have harmed you in the past?”
I didn’t hesitate before I nodded.
Despite how much I still disliked Kimber and Jenia, despite how those monsters had murdered villagers and injured Barberro… it was Dyonisia who had instilled the violence in them. Like Kimber had said, she’d fed into their hatred to play them like pawns in a game they didn’t even know they were in.
They deserved a space to heal and figure out who they were without that kind of manipulation. Away from brands and chains.
“That is what I wish.”
“Very well, then. I know of a place on the island where the Good Council cannot tread. Now that the official attack is over, I will go to Hallow’s Perch to fetch the exiled ones and take them there.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Thank you, Jagaros.”
In response, he did something he never had before. Rather than demand I pet him, he came up to me and nuzzled the side of his head against my neck, a deep rumble growing in his throat.
“Stay cautious. Stay curious. Stay clever.”
Just as he was crouching to bound off, I touched his back.
“Wait. I got all my memories back and now I can see them more clearly. You’ve been in search of a map of the world, haven’t you?”
Those slivered pupils studied me, surprise slicing through them.
“I thought such a thing might aid both of us for different reasons, yes. You so that you could see where your lineage is from, and me…”
He didn’t finish that thought, and I didn’t lower my blockade to snatch the answer out of the air. I was too exhausted, too weighed down, for more secrets—or the revelations beneath them.
“There’s one in my bag that Dazmine left in the bunker of Hallow’s Perch” was all I said. “When you get there, you can have it.”
The faerie king of old twisted his maw in a feline version of a smile, canines glinting yellow in the moonlight.
“Thank you.”
With a leap, he was off, that silky, striped coat bunching over the ridges of his back, his tail whipping behind him.
When he was gone, I leaned against the Mind Manipulating mansion, listening to the hum of the vines that crawled up the wall.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the last twenty-four hours out from under my eyelids. Images of monsters and dead bodies cycled in the darkness behind them every time I blinked.
My plan with the pills had failed, but maybe, if I could secure a spot on the Good Council, I could destroy Dyonisia Reeve from the inside-out. I just had to come up with another plan.
For now, though, I needed to recoup.
As I leaned my head against the wall, just breathing in all the muggy scents around me, a soft breeze toyed with the ends of my hair.
I opened my eyes to find an object floating toward me from the sky, dark and circular. The wind eddied around me, jostling the string of black pearls to and fro before sliding it gently over my head.
The wind is my friend, the Cardina jeweler had told me.
And her friend was finally delivering what I’d been waiting for.
No sooner had it rested against my chest than a voice—not in my head, but one carried by the wind—sent electricity shooting through each of my senses.
“What a pretty necklace.”
Coen appeared before me for only a brief slice of time.
Then his hand reached out and tugged me into his swirling darkness, where far-off lights flickered all around us.
There, in that space between stars that I’d come to know and love, we hovered against each other, our bodies fitting together like the God of the Cosmos had carved us side by side during our Making.
Coen grazed my new necklace with his fingertips.
“It’s my tally,” I said in answer to his silent question.
A melancholy smile lifted his lips.
“For?”
“How many times you came back for me.” A pause lumped in the base of my throat. “How many times you chose me over everything else. Besides, they were just too precious to sit in a drawer, you see.”
All of that was only half of it, though.
I’d also asked the Cardina jeweler to make me this necklace so that I could wear my love for the male before me right on my chest, where everybody could see it but only I would know what it meant.
My missing memories hadn’t triggered that realization in me…
it had been developing for a long time. Slowly and painfully, but beautifully, too.
My subconscious had known it all along.
Coen leaned back to thumb my jaw with a tenderness that left my skin aching for more.
“They’re even more precious against your skin, little hurricane. And I will gladly spend every day trying to earn back just as many reasons for you to be proud of wearing it.”
“I already am,” I whispered, “and you already have.”
Without even meaning to, we’d fallen into a gentle sway, my arms looped around his neck and his hands gripping my hips.
Both of us were still covered in layers of all kinds of filth, but I never wanted to miss an opportunity to dance with him again.
Not after I’d seen his dead body on the ground.
Not after what had happened to our friend.
“Garvis?” I finally whispered after a few beats of pulsing silence.
Coen exhaled roughly.
“I laid him to rest on a lonely isle to the north of here. It was peaceful and quiet and shrouded in mist, and just seemed like the place he would have chosen for himself, i-if he could have.”
His voice snagged on those last few words. I leaned my chest against him, pulling him closer and listening to the strong rhythm of his heart.
Alive. Coen Steeler was alive. And even though I’d spent the last six months loathing him and telling myself I wanted him dead, we were even more officially enemies now.
I was set to join the Good Council. He was the Good Council’s greatest threat—an oath-bound monster with a jade-encrusted sword who could breach the dome at any time. The queen of Sorronia’s deadliest weapon. The Fated General and head of the entire faerie fleet.
Yet I’d never felt so safe against the chest of someone so deadly.
“Garvis said we had a spark.” I tried to swallow the tears climbing back up my throat. “Do you… do you still feel that spark, too?”
Coen stopped swaying us to peer down at me.
“I never stopped feeling it, Rayna. Every time you looked at me, even when you wanted my head on a spike, I felt it. Sometimes, it was the only thing that kept me going when everything felt so dark.”
My tears climbed higher, but so did my courage. I braved the words that had been brimming inside me for the last day.
“Then I’d like to choose you. And to keep choosing you… if that’s what you want, too.”
After a moment of surprised silence, during which he traced every contour of my face with his eyes, Coen gave me a smile that ignited in their smoky quartz like an ember among ash.
“You are my devastation, Rayna. My catastrophic event. And you are the one who put me back together into who I am today. I can’t think of anything or anyone I’d like to choose more than you.”
When he lowered his lips to mine once more and I got to taste that promise on his tongue, the world beyond the darkness around us—I could have sworn it shivered.
Because official enemies or no, whether she thought Coen was dead or not, Dyonisia Reeve didn’t know what was coming for her. She and the queen of Sorronia were playing a deadly game with each other, each of them using one of us as a weapon.
But what neither of my aunts realized was that together, Coen Steeler and I were two sides of the same blade—a double-edged sword that could slice back.
And we didn’t have to be their pawns.
We could be players, too.