Chapter 11 #2
“It arrived during dinner.” Jack flopped onto the bed on the other side of the book he’d brought. “I thought you might like
ample warning before you see Grace again.”
So Mrs. Windsor was too polite to renege on her promise to send an invitation.
Sixteen hours from now, they’d be at Grace’s ball.
“I have another gift.” Digging into his pocket, he held out a silver chain. “If we affix Rose’s relic to this, it’ll lie flat
against you, and you can use it whenever you please.”
Snatching it from him, Emmy did not give him the satisfaction of testing if the coin would fit in the setting. “This doesn’t
change anything.”
“No, but it makes you far less likely to lose my sister’s relic.” Kicking out his long legs, he reclined against her pillows
as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
She pointed to the hole she’d now have to repair. “Out.”
“Gift number three.” He patted the leather book. “Aren’t you curious?”
“Out.”
With a yawn, he nestled deeper into her pillows. “I used to be afraid of the dark.”
“Out.”
“Absolutely terrified. I couldn’t be alone in the nursery without running out, screaming for my nanny. Do you know how I overcame
it?”
He still wore his dinner jacket, though it had to be well after midnight. And despite her handiwork, dark circles had re-formed
underneath his eyes. She’d made him into a beautiful new tapestry, one that was already fraying along the edges.
But he was not her concern.
“My father removed all the light from the nursery and locked me inside. I couldn’t conjure for more than a few seconds, so
I screamed awful things at him.” His smile was a ghost on his lips. “But he was right. I could not be the future commander if I was afraid of the dark. By the third night, I was content to sit in the pitch-black nursery.”
“What a cruel thing to do to a child.” Papa would have never used her fears against her. Still, Emmy could not let Jack prey
on her sympathies. “And in this allegory, I am the meek child afraid of the dark, and you’re the cunning father who thrusts
me into it?”
“My father taught me to think like a future commander. To eliminate guards’ fears and hone their strengths.” His gaze drifted
to hers. “When I sent you to the dress shop, I was thinking like him, and not like a . . . friend.”
“We are not friends.”
“You have a gift for anger, you know that?” He scrubbed at his face. “I cannot think straight when you’re upset with me. It’s
entirely too distracting. I couldn’t even enjoy the first good meal I’ve had in a long time—and it was hanger steak, my favorite!
So will you release me from this torture and forgive me already?”
He was quite literally pouting. With his mussed hair standing in every direction and his eyes wide and desperate, he was the
picture of contrition. An infuriatingly handsome picture.
She pinned him with a glare. “This is a terrible apology.”
“I made you a necklace.” His lips quirked. “That must count for something.”
“You haven’t even said the words!” She pushed away from the bed, putting a good distance between them. “You want forgiveness,
but you don’t even regret what you’ve done.”
He rose, too, stepping toward her.
She stepped back, nearly tripping on the edge of the hearth.
With a knowing smile, he approached once more, leaving her two options: risk his proximity or run away, just like he’d accused
her of doing around men.
She would not give him the satisfaction of being right.
“I’m sorry, Emilia Vallillo,” he murmured with taunting sincerity. “Caleb was right. I’m a selfish cad.”
Curse him for wielding his proximity like a weapon. Already her heart was quickening, her body attuned to the shrinking space
between them. It ought to have been easier to be near him, now that he was Nathaniel, but Nathaniel was attractive by design.
How many times would she have to be hurt, or used, or cast aside, before she’d learn? He’d lied to her. He’d laughed at her in Grimsbane.
She was in far too deep to quit their schemes, but she could never trust Jack Fontaine.
Propriety required one of them to move, but Jack had been right; Winnie Fairchild could not bristle each time a young man
drew near. She needed to be the opposite of the sort of girl who cried behind a dress shop.
She needed to be brave.
Though there was hardly a foot between them, Emmy leaned closer. And it worked. Jack’s pupils widened, his smug expression
melting away. For the first time since Grimsbane, Emmy held the edge.
“For the sake of our plans,” she said quietly, “we can consider this matter closed.”
He turned away, unable to look at her, and Emmy smiled victoriously. Being beautiful was going to be fun.
Retreating across the room, he opened the leather book. “I thought you’d want to see these.”
It was a portfolio of sorts, one with black-and-white drawings protruding from its edges. As he pulled out a picture, Emmy
had no choice but to come closer.
The background was a blur of shadows, but the foreground was a remarkably realistic rendering of Jack’s true face as he knelt in front of Oliver Stratton.
Both boys were wearing formalwear, though as usual, Jack’s top button had come undone and a lock of hair tumbled over his forehead.
His face was either shadowed or bruised, it was hard to tell.
He gazed beyond the drawing, his smile uncharacteristically sad.
As Oliver Stratton slashed his throat with a knife.
“Oliver spent a great deal of time here at Mistfield, where he could avoid his prick of a father. We were friends, I guess
you could say. If our lives had gone according to plan, once our fathers retired, we would have taken their positions and
joined the triumvirate together.”
Emmy could not stop staring at the thick droplets of black ink spilling from Jack’s neck. With a healer for a father, she
was no stranger to knife fights. Usually, people aimed for the heart, though it was protected by its cage of bone. The neck,
however, held several crucial connections—between the head and the heart, the lungs and air, the stomach and nourishment—yet
all that protected it was soft flesh. And if Rose’s prophecy was to be believed, Oliver’s knife would slit Jack’s like butter.
More unnerving, Jack was on his knees, not even fighting back.
“To understand what happened, you need to see this, too.” He set a second drawing in front of Emmy. Like the first, it contained
no color, only thick black strokes that shone in the candlelight. Fire engulfed the beautiful girl at the center, who lay
in a four-poster bed, eyes wide and lifeless. Rose Fontaine, surrounded by black flames.
A pit formed in Emmy’s stomach. “She drew her own death.”
“It was unsettling, to say the least. Rose tried to make light of it, but we changed all the candles in the house to ordinary
flames, just in case.” Jack studied a splinter on the mantel. “A few weeks after she drew this, I stumbled home so drunk,
I fell asleep in my suit. Sometime before dawn, I woke to Mistfield on fire—with my black flames. But I couldn’t move an inch, not even to turn my head.”
She knew that frozen feeling all too well. “So Oliver can suppress movements, too. Like his father.”
“He can, but that night, he had a little help.” The muscle of his jaw ticked. “There was a blanket over me, one that Grace had bridged with his conjury. She was with him, searching Rose’s room for the relic. I don’t know how they knew about it. But they came for it.”
Emmy’s heart slowed, her hand closing around the cool, ancient coin. It had been amplifying her conjury for only a few weeks,
but already, she could not fathom parting with it.
Especially to Grace.
“Thanks to Caleb’s conjury, we know that Grace was the one who found the relic in Rose’s room. Like me, Rose was trapped in
her bed. With her bridging conjury amplified, Grace was able to use my conjury without laying a finger on me. She took my flames from a room away. Within seconds, Rose’s room was on fire.”
Grace, able to steal other people’s gifts and wield them as her own. A lick of something unpleasant, something just south
of envy, struck Emmy. “How did you escape?”
“My own flames can’t burn me, but they burned through everything around me, including the blanket. Once I was free of it,
I ran like hell, following the trail of destruction they’d left. But Fontaine fire burns far hotter and faster than ordinary
flames. Rose never stood a chance.” His voice remained even, but he could not meet Emmy’s gaze. “I found them mounting Oliver’s
horse in the woods, near the cliff overlooking the Hudson. When I pushed him off his mount, Rose’s relic fell from his grasp.
He tackled me and tried to wrestle it back, but I pretended to drop it over the edge, which made him murderous enough to try
and drag me over the edge. When the guards arrived, they had to pull us apart. And when his father interrogated us, neither of us mentioned
Rose’s relic. Caleb confirmed it later: Oliver and Grace never told a soul.”
“Why?” A powerful amplifier seemed like the sort of thing the Society would celebrate.
“Maybe they feared the Society would take it from them, and they didn’t want to share.
Maybe Oliver wanted to impress his father with exponentially stronger power.
Or maybe they wanted to find out how Rose had tapped into the gift of a long-dead charmed person so they could go from grave to grave making all sorts of relics from old witches.
Which, fortunately for us, they can’t do.
” A bit of pride added much-needed light to his gray eyes.
“Because relics must be forged with Fontaine fire, and I’m the only wielder left. ”
So his strange flames had a purpose, other than being downright morbid. “But you were able to hide the relic from them.”
“He had the river searched for months. And in Grimsbane, he had me searched, too, but I had my ways of hiding it.” He grinned
as if daring her to ask.
Better that she didn’t. “And the chancellor arrested you? Surely it was suspicious that Oliver and Grace were here in the middle of the night.”
“Ah, but your dear old friend wove a clever tale for that.” Folding his arms, he leaned against her bed post. “With tears
in her eyes, Grace bemoaned how I’d seduced her cousin Elizabeth Windsor. Oliver was a knight in shining armor, arriving in
the middle of the night to protect Elizabeth’s virtue. And, as you learned at the dress shop, Elizabeth could not deny it.”
He removed a third drawing from the portfolio. Grace was burning alive, eyes wide, and Emmy let out a strangled noise, unable
to look away—
But it was not Grace. They had the same light hair and wide, innocent eyes, but this was a different girl. “This is Elizabeth
Windsor.”
“Grace’s cousin,” Jack confirmed. “And Rose’s friend. I don’t know if Grace sought to ruin Elizabeth’s reputation by putting
her in my bed, or if Elizabeth had tried to stop them, but she was also trapped underneath that charmed blanket. With my movements
suppressed, I couldn’t even look anywhere but straight ahead.” His teeth ground together as he studied his knuckles. “I never
even saw her.”
His guilt was plain, though he was expertly avoiding it.
Emmy stared at the macabre drawings strewn across her bedsheets. Unnerving, to say the least, especially given that all but one of these prophecies had already come true. “So the chancellor arrested you for their deaths, letting his son off the hook.”
“It was their word against mine. Two great houses—three, if you consider Grace a Windsor—but no one in their right mind believed
I’d harm my own sister.”
And yet he’d been arrested. “So what happened?”
He brushed an invisible piece of dust off his sleeve. “Just as the chancellor was leaving, I may or may not have tried to
knock Oliver off the cliff. With my fists.”
“You struck him?” Emmy gaped at him. “While trying to prove your innocence?”
He shrugged. “Oliver has a face that just begs to be punched.”
Of all the senseless reasons to be arrested. Stifling the urge to berate him, Emmy turned back to the nightmarish artwork.
Caleb had a point. Jack was safer in disguise.
Gathering the drawings, he tucked them back inside the portfolio. “Now that you know everything, do you feel more prepared?”
Emmy would face Grace—at Grace’s new home, no less—in a matter of hours. “I suppose.”
“She may have had more time here, but you’re smarter than her.” Jack gave her a hard look. “Study how the Society acts. Learn
the unwritten rules.”
If only she felt a modicum of the confidence he had in her. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because Jimmy’s been boasting about you for years. How high your marks in school were, how hard you worked at anything and
everything.” Stifling a yawn, he set the portfolio on her night table. “Either we both lie awake, listening for Grimsbane’s
guards, or we spend the night reviewing everyone who will be at the Inaugural Splendor. What do you say?”
She ought to have kicked him out, after the way he’d lied to her about the dress shop, but—the ball was mere hours away.
Crossing her room, Emmy healed the hole in her wall and transformed the debris until it was nothing but dust. Returning to
bed, she settled opposite Jack and smoothed her nightgown over her bare legs. “Tell me everything.”