Chapter XXX. Domenic #2
On-screen, sinewy white roots threaded through the detritus, and the girl halted. The camera panned up, following the trunk of a massive alban tree.
The grass parted, and he ran down its path until at last, the forest eased into meadow. Pollen whirled in a soft, dreamy vortex, and at its center, there stood an alban tree.
Rhodes halted beneath it.
Domenic craned his neck back, sunlight kissing his cheeks.
Rhodes reached up. A branch bent toward her, and briar entwined her fingers.
He climbed, and once he emerged at its top, he gazed triumphantly at the surrounding field. The meadow bloomed for him. And for the first time, finally, his magic bloomed with it.
In the present, Domenic squeezed Valmordion. Beside him, Ellery, too, looked haunted.
As the film continued, Domenic was unsure he blinked, even breathed.
Though Rhodes’s story didn’t perfectly match his own, he had the uncomfortable impression it was his life on-screen, his most intimate moments laid bare to an audience who watched, not with understanding, but with morbid fascination.
After what felt like hours but couldn’t have been more than ninety minutes, Alice Rhodes stood on a mountain summit.
Sweat poured down her forehead, mixing with a bloodied cut on her brow.
Icy storm clouds ruptured above her as if she’d cleaved a crater across the sky.
As the winds stilled, the score cut out.
The only sound was the pounding of Rhodes’s heartbeat.
She lowered Valmordion toward her lips.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Domenic braced himself. Ellery hitched her breath. But neither dared to break character. Even in the dark, stares pressed against them from all sides. Stares that looked but didn’t see.
The theater brightened as Rhodes ignited.
The special effects were dramatic and crude.
Flames caught across her skin as easily as tissue paper, yet even as they consumed her, as her profile thinned from round cheeks to the sharp angles of bone, she didn’t so much as whimper.
Flecks of gray peeled off her face and flurried into the air.
The locket dangling from her neck glowed molten.
Too quickly, all that remained of her was a charred, mangled shape, somehow still standing, still dignified, already a monument beneath a glorious, Summer-blue sky.
One hundred and fourteen years later, her successor, every bit as dignified, hurled up a cloaking enchantment and bolted outside.
How welcome the night’s cold was. Domenic darted through Mercester Square and ducked into the half-privacy of the bus stop, gasping as he wrenched the bow tie from his throat.
The image of Rhodes and the alban tree seeped over his own memory, staining what few precious parts of it he hadn’t already lost to its excruciating aftermath: the realization that he’d been gone not hours, but days.
His family’s realization that he’d been gone at all.
And worst, the way they’d looked at him from then on—like he was alien to them, unknowable to them.
Dead to them.
Domenic’s fingerprint had always been among a dozen on Valmordion’s shaft. But it still disturbed him how closely his story mirrored one that ended in tragedy.
Our prophecy is different.
Ten minutes later, after Domenic recovered each broken piece of himself, he caught sight of the transport map. To his shock, magic shimmered across it: a butterfly fluttering across the Gold Line, starlight twinkling atop the Gardens, diamond-bright radiance illuminating the Citadel from within.
Ellery’s and his enchantments were still here, all these weeks later. Even when cast by training wands.
Suddenly, reassurances were not enough. He needed to know the line between significance and coincidence. He needed to know if there even was a future worth waiting for.
Domenic walked his usual route home. No one noticed him through his cloaking enchantment, but several people paused their shivering as he passed, as if crossing a nighttime patch of sun. (He tried spitefully several times to shut this off, but it seemed he couldn’t.)
In the foyer, he set his shoes on the rack, shrugged off his spell like a heavy coat. His heart thumped as he climbed the stairs and approached the door that adjoined Hanna’s bedroom to his own. He rarely ever used it.
He knocked.
“Yeah?”
He pushed it open and treaded inside, wary in more ways than one.
Sure enough, Hanna held Syarthis. Light poured from its tip over the open pages of her science-fiction novel. Its eyes peered at Domenic over the cover.
She smirked. “You look like a waiter.”
He smirked back. “You look like a grandmother.”
“I like nightgowns. I feel like I could bake banana bread. Or, I don’t know, roam the hallways at three a.m. and make weird moaning noises, like a ghost.”
“Shit. This whole time, I assumed that was Iseul.”
They both laughed, but their jokes had the same cautious pattern as they had for weeks. They teased. They deflected. They pretended things were as they’d ever been.
It was better than fighting.
He navigated around the mounds of clothes to the foot of her bed. He sat.
“Why did Alice Rhodes burn, Hanna?”
Hanna’s smile caved in. “What?”
“The only other Chosen One who died was the one who failed. So why was she the unlucky one? What did all the others do right that she didn’t?”
She didn’t answer.
“What did the other Chosen Ones do, after they thwarted their cataclysms?”
She picked at her cuticle.
“Why did Peak haul me aside at the border for some man-to-man talk about sacrifice?”
Nothing.
“Damn it, Hanna. I don’t want to fight with you. And I don’t care if you hate me right now. You have to tell me the truth.”
“I…” Hanna dragged her gaze, not to him, but to Valmordion. Something dark lurked in her stare, something haunted. “I could never hate you, Dom.”
He was crying now. He was always the worst at arguments. “Please. How many of the past Chosen Ones survived? How many?”
Hanna tilted her head back, scowling as she blinked away tears. She crawled toward him, then she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and propped her chin atop his head.
After several seconds passed, Domenic finally spared her the burden of telling him. He answered for them both.
“None of them did.”