Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Beaufort
I don’t know how it’s come to this, how I’m the one who’s drawn the short bitterly straw, but here I am, hovering outside the door of Clare’s boyfriend’s room.
When we arrived back at the academy, the dragon went slinking off toward his cave, the Professor muttered something about needing to speak with Cornelius, and Dray insisted he had to take care of Fly, despite the fact that Fly was being reunited with his own boyfriend, the redhead whose name is Jack or Mac or Slack, something like that.
And so it’s just me outside that door, wondering how the hell I’m going to break it to this boy.
I raise my fist, and as I do, I picture Clare’s small body laid out on the Tudors’ kitchen table, hidden beneath that blanket. I lower my fist, squeeze the bridge of my nose between my finger and thumb.
Shit.
I’ve had to do some hard things in my time. It was me that broke the news to Hells Bells when our siblings passed away. She was little, with very little understanding of what that all meant. She hardly knew our half-siblings.
This is going to be so much worse.
I steady my shoulders and knock on the door. It takes a few minutes for it to open. And then there he is. Damien. He’s much shorter than me, and he has to crane his head back to find my face.
“Beaufort,” he says, clearly surprised.
I open my mouth, ready to say the words I’ve rehearsed in my head many times while I deposited the two firestones safely in my room and walked over to his tower. Now those words seem stuck in my throat, and they won’t come. The color drains from the boy’s face before my very eyes.
“It’s Clare, isn’t it?” he says quietly.
“Yes.” And before he gets any hope that she’s merely wounded or hurt, I hurry on. “I’m very sorry to tell you, Damien, but Clare’s dead.”
He stares at me, unmoving and unresponsive. For a moment, I wonder if I really did speak the words, or if I just said them in my head once again.
Then finally his face seems to crack, like the ice on the pond out there in Slate Quarter.
“Dead,” he repeats.
“There was a demon attack while we were out in Slate Quarter. There were swarms of them. We tried to fight them, to hold them back. Clare was attacked. We tried our best to save her, Damien. Both me and Briony. We tried to heal the wounds. But there was too much damage. They were too deep. She passed.”
“Right,” he says.
I can see how stiff his body is, every muscle tense, as if he’s forcing himself to remain on his feet.
“I know you cared about her, and I’m sorry. Very sorry.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?” I ask, taken aback by his words.
“For trying to help her. Trying to protect her,” he says. “And for coming to tell me the news. I appreciate it, Beaufort.”
I nod. I can’t imagine the pain he must be feeling. Or maybe I can. It’s too horrific, too hideous to even comprehend.
“If there’s anything I can do…” I trail off, because what can I do? There is nothing. Nothing at all.
“Thank you,” he repeats. “But I think I’d like to be alone now.”
“Are you sure? Might not be the best thing to be alone right now,” I say, scratching the back of my neck. Damn, this is awkward. “Contrary to popular belief, I can be tolerably good company on occasion. And, well…”
“I appreciate the offer,” Damien says, clearly about to shut the door in my face, but then he seems to change his mind. He opens it wider instead. “Would you like a hot drink? You’ve come straight from Slate Quarter, haven’t you?”
“If you have something strong to put in it, then yeah,” I tell him.
“I think I have something, somewhere,” he says, disappearing into the room and leaving the door open behind him.
I follow him inside. It’s a simple room, though not as threadbare or decrepit as the one the academy gave to Briony.
It’s also clear from the decor that, just like his girlfriend, this boy’s a bit of a nerd.
There are books lined up on a long shelf running along one wall, and models and different kinds of contraptions lined up on the opposing shelf – ones I think he’s built himself.
He hangs a kettle over the fire in the hearth and finds two cups. “It’s tea. My mom always makes tea whenever anything bad happens.” He sighs and pours dried leaves into the cups.
I peek at the kettle. It’s clearly going to take a fucking age to boil, so I send my shadows that way. He gasps in alarm at first, then relaxes when he sees I mean no harm.
The kettle begins to whistle. He removes it from the hook and pours the hot water over the dried leaves, making them hiss for a moment. Then he scrabbles under the bed, pulling out a bottle with a little amber liquid inside. He pours a measure into one cup, then into the other, and hands it over.
It actually smells pretty good and the aroma is somewhat calming to my mind.
“Can’t believe she’s gone,” Damien says, cradling the mug in his hands, peering off into the distance.
“Maybe it was stupid, but we really thought we’d be together forever.
That we’d both be heading back to Granite Quarter, and that we’d get married, have a house, have kids.
That kind of thing. I was going to ask her, you know, once we graduated.
My mom has this ring that belonged to my grandma.
I was going to ask her if I could have it.
I shouldn’t have waited.” He glances down at the tea, then places the cup back on his desk, untouched, as I sip mine.
“And I should have come with you. I should have been there to help her.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just another needless, pointless death.
“How’s Fly?” I ask Dray when I return to the tower much later.
“Passed out,” he explains. “Seems that boyfriend of his has a whole collection of different types of pills. He gave him a sedative. Knocked him out.”
I nod and sink into one of the kitchen chairs. I kind of wish I could take a sedative too. The last few hours have been some of the toughest of my life. My brain is racing at a million miles per hour.
Dray sinks into the chair opposite mine, leans forward onto the table, and assesses my face.
“You okay, Beau?” he asks, in a rare display of empathy.
“Fine. That was just… it was tough. He was really in love with her.”
Dray peers down at his hands, fiddles with the rings on his fingers. “Makes you think about things, doesn’t it?”
“It does. It makes you wonder if we’re doing the right thing. If we’re risking too much. If we’ve already wasted too much time.”
“I don’t want Briony to end up on a kitchen table under some fucking blanket,” Dray says, his voice deadly. “And I don’t think there’s any universe, Beau, where your mother is alive and so is Little Kitten. It’s either one or the other. And I’m sorry, Beau, but I choose Little Kitten.”
I frown. “You know I do too, Dray. You know where my loyalty and my heart lie.”
“Then how can you be questioning if we’re doing the right fucking thing? Little Kitten just lost her best friend. She already lost her sister. Fucking hell, her mother too. It ends now, Beaufort.”
“How do we end it, Dray? That’s what I don’t see.”
He leans even further forward, resting on his forearms, the table creaking under his weight.
“She’s coming, Beau. The Empress is on her way to the academy.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve had a crow from my brother.” I arch an eyebrow because Dray’s family fucked us over. We can’t exactly trust them. “This was from Dirk and I trust him with my life,” he growls.
“Yeah, but would you trust him with Briony’s?”
He ignores me. “She’s mobilizing more than just the elite guards. She’s raising an army and they are on their way here.”
“An army? What kind of army?”
“She’s pulled troops from the realm’s border and she’s summoned the shadow weavers to fight.”
“Just for us? Just for one fucking girl?”
Dray shrugs.
“She’s not just any girl though, is she?” Fox says, coming to join us in the kitchen. “You saw what she did out there in Slate. How she obliterated every last demon in the sky. She could be the key to destroying the demons once and for all.”
“And that’s just too great a risk for the Empress,” I mutter.
“Exactly. We have to be ready.”
“Then what the fuck are we doing sitting around here?” I snarl. “We need to get organized.”