Chapter Ten
NIC
Laurel’s arm is stiff in mine as we stride out of the subway into golden midmorning light. She’s barely spoken a word since we woke, and it’s all I can do to keep up as she tugs me down the sidewalk, the clack of her heels driving stakes of trepidation into my skull.
After the incident with Lola last night, she puppeted me to an apartment in north Aethera, the place she apparently acquired for us. As soon as she jolted me inside and locked the door, she curled up in one of the two beds, ignoring my questions and pretending to be asleep.
I agonized all night, trying to avoid the glimmer of her eyes watching me from across the room in the dark. What was she thinking? Had I destroyed my hard-won progress with my slipup?
This morning she rose, barely ate half a banana for breakfast, and told me to get dressed. Now here we are, thirty minutes later, surrounded by the East Side’s apartments adorned with iron trellises and flower boxes spilling chrysanthemums.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
She avoids my gaze. “To pay a little visit to someone the gods have told me needs to be exterminated. For the good of Aethera.”
A pit boils low in my stomach.
She pulls me through the gold-trimmed doors of one of the most luxurious apartment buildings I’ve ever seen, and we mount polished wood stairs to the third floor, stopping at the first door. She knocks three short raps.
“Whose apartment is this?” I ask, trying to keep my voice calm.
She turns to face me. Holding cold, heady eye contact, she places her hands on my chest, then drags them into my jacket, checking my pockets, tracing the seams of my shirt and my vest, slipping her fingers along my belt.
It isn’t until she bends to draw her palms along my legs that I realize what she’s doing.
She’s looking for voratium.
“Laurel,” I say.
Finally, satisfied, she straightens. “Fix your hat.”
“Laurel.”
She trains her eyes on the door.
I sigh, straighten my tie, and resituate my fedora as footsteps shuffle inside and a lock pulls.
A butler answers, a short white fellow with a kind—if tight—smile. “May I help you?”
“Yes,” Laurel says smoothly. “Tell Emmeline the Liar is here to visit.”
My stomach jolts. A nurse named Emmeline worked for me at the casino, concocting her special salves and mixing formulas to take the edge off my clients’ hangovers. She wouldn’t hurt a fly. Why the depths would Laurel think she deserves to die?
“I’ll fetch her at once.” He gestures at a settee in the foyer as he ushers us inside and takes our jackets. “Please, do sit down.”
“Surely you’re mistaken,” I hiss to her once he disappears down the hall.
Laurel sits, crossing her feet at the ankles. “Not at all.”
“Emmeline’s the least sinful person in this city.”
“You give people far too much credit, Nic,” she says, her eyes finally lifting to mine. “It’s how I know there’s still good in you.”
“Oh, Liar!” Emmeline comes around the corner in a lovely maroon frock, gray curls piled atop her head.
Bulbous pearls weigh down the soft lobes of her ears, and a string of matching ones rests at her throat.
“How kind of you to pay me a visit! After the casino closed, I feared I wouldn’t see you again. ”
How does Emmeline afford to wear jewelry like that? And live in such a place? And pay for a butler? The Emmeline I knew was barely scraping by due to her sickly granddaughter, Lizette, needing all her funds for medical treatments. It’s part of why I gave her so many bonuses.
“Of course not,” I say nervously, eyes flicking to Laurel.
“Just get on with it,” Laurel says, nodding at Emmeline. “The gods have shown me her guilt. She has to go.”
“Wh-what did you say?” Emmeline asks, smile fading.
Once, Laurel would have found speaking for the gods far too prideful and corrupt. Now she’s claiming to know their minds as though she is one, all because of my Unbreakable Lie.
“Nic,” Laurel prompts, eyes sharpening. She’s testing me. After what happened last night with Lola, she wants to see where we stand. How loyal I truly am to her and her gods.
I cannot afford for her to question me any further, not if I want to keep Lola—and the rest of Aethera, for that matter—safe.
But Emmeline? Acid rises in my throat.
“What was her sin?” I ask, trying to keep the horror out of my expression.
“Poisoning her granddaughter to get people to give her money.”
Emmeline’s smile disappears entirely. “What is this?” Her voice is sharp.
“Really?” I say to her. “Did you do that?”
She harrumphs. “I don’t know what this woman is talking about.”
Laurel grasps my hand with one of my chips of voratium in her palm. The instant the metal slicks ice-cold against my skin, Emmeline’s secret fills my nose. I’ve of course sensed it before, but people always have their secrets, not all of them villainous.
“Is that true?” I ask Emmeline. “Did you poison your grand-daughter so you wouldn’t be lying to me when you said she was sick and needed care?”
“Of course not,” she snaps, blotches of pink blooming on her weathered cheeks as the stench of her lie crawls down my throat.
Well, shit.
“Use this. It’ll be less messy.” Laurel releases my hand, letting her magic seize it instead. My arm raises as though it does not belong to me, and it pinches the voratium between forefinger and thumb in front of my face. Not for Emmeline to see, but for me.
A warning.
If I do not do Laurel’s will of my own accord, then she will force me to. And if it comes to that, it will prove to Laurel I don’t believe in her gods or her mission.
I’ll be back under her control once more.
So, though all of me is screaming not to, I turn to face Emmeline, forcing a smile I know will charm her because that is what I do; I charm people, and then I destroy them.
My eyes catch on a brooch at her collar, a voratium piece I gave to all my staff, empty of soullight in case I needed to be able to protect—or punish—any of them.
That’s the key. A piece of voratium Laurel won’t know I have.
I hold up the voratium she gave me, and with the tiniest sliver of magic, I send a whisper in Emmeline’s ear, barely audible enough for her to hear, so quiet Laurel won’t.
“Emmeline,” it says in my voice. “There’s going to be a flash of light. When it happens, you need to collapse. Pretend to be dead. Once we’ve left, get as far away from Aethera as you can. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Blink twice if you understand.”
Emmeline stares at me, eyes wide. She licks her lips, then blinks once. Twice.
That’s all I need. I pull in more magic and detonate an illusionary explosion.
Emmeline topples.
“Directing light into her corneas like that can induce a small seizure,” I tell Laurel, channeling an illusion to make Emmeline’s limbs stiffen and her eyes roll into her head as she quakes on the floor.
“If enough stimulus is fed to the brain, the neurons short-circuit.” I make a show of looking like I’m doing just that, complete with ear-splitting noises and quick sensations from cold to hot then to cold again, for effect.
Then I complete the charade with an illusion of Emmeline going deathly still, drool oozing from her loose, pink-stained lips.
I approach, pressing my fingers to her fluttering pulse. Angling my body to hide my hands, I unclip the brooch and stash it in my sock.
“She’s dead,” I say.
Laurel holds out her hand, eyes still sharp. When I drop her voratium into her gloved palm, her shaking fingers curl around it instantly, like I’ve given her some sort of explosive.
“Let me check,” she says softly.
I move out of her way, drawing magic through the ice-cold brooch against my ankle to make Emmeline’s veins feel still and pulseless.
Laurel presses her fingers to the woman’s neck, and my own heart skips faster as though to make up for the one I’m trying to hide.
After what feels like an eternity, she rises, smoothing her hands along her skirts. When she turns to face me, a tear drips off her lashes.
“You promise you didn’t mean to miss that shot last night?” she asks, voice barely more than a breath.
“You know liars can’t make promises,” I reply, hating myself and what I’ve turned her into.
“Why did you hide Astra from me?” She steps forward, and I slide my hands around her waist, steadying her.
“My brother was there.” Hopefully she’ll think I was trying to protect him, not Lola. “He was noncorporeal, but there was a chance you might have seen him . . .”
“Ah.” Laurel nods, grimacing. “It can be difficult when family tests us.”
I force a smile.
“But you can’t let your love for him eclipse what’s right,” she says, pressing against me. “I know how hard that can be.”
“You do?”
She presses the voratium chip into my palm once more. Her magic curls my fingers around it and then delves into that icy pit in my heart.
My own power.
She tugs until it burbles forth. Sparks of light flash clumsily around us. Sounds and smells as she searches through the stream, and I try not to let her see the horror in my eyes.
After several agonizing minutes, she figures out how to access her secrets and pulls one into the voratium, filling it until it glows a pale cerulean blue. Then, with sweat beading on her brow, she releases me.
“Watch that,” she says, nodding at the voratium piece still clutched in my hand.
I should resist, but curiosity burns through me hot as hunger.
When I close my eyes, I glimpse Laurel rushing into her childhood home—the one I spent so many hours in as a youth—with moonshard fragments encrusted on her palms. “Father!” she cries, eyes bright with excitement. “The stars! They’ve—”
The tall, spindly man jolts up in surprise, then shoves the papers on his desk out of her sight, but one slips off in his haste and lands on her foot. She picks it up before he can, scanning the figures scribbled on it. I realize the same moment Laurel does exactly what this is.
An accounting of money he’s laundered from local small shop owners.
“What have you done?” Laurel lowers the paper, voice quavering.
He snatches it out of her hands. “None of your concern.”
Threads not unlike the ones I see when I focus on my magic unfurl around Laurel’s father.
Laurel must have opened herself to her own power.
Tiny strings of light weave through his body like a nervous system.
Strings that whisper of the awful deeds that, judging by the horrified look on her face, she did not know he was capable of.
“How . . . ,” she gasps as tears film over her vision. “How could you?”
“You were missing,” he replies, swallowing hard. “We were trying to find . . .”
She shakes her head. Blood rushes to her cheeks as tears roll down them, and something far worse than anger darkens her eyes.
Disgust.
“You set it right,” she snaps. “You give it back!”
“I—I can’t, sweet pea. It’s all gone.”
“Then sell the house!” she screams, fists clenching so hard her knuckles blanch white.
“You know I cannot do that.”
“You’re a coward.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but a knock bangs on the door behind her. He grabs her, shoving her into the closet. “Stay quiet,” he whispers. “Not a sound.”
She glares through the crack between the doors as he answers the knock.
A burly pair of men crowd inside, one of them shoving a pistol to her father’s throat. “You only paid half,” he sneers, and I recognize him instantly.
It’s Tomas Hildebard, one of Magnus St. James’s henchmen, who competed in and lost my tournament and whose corpse was found last week.
“I’ll get the other half to you within the fortnight!” Laurel’s father protests, sweat beading on his brow, cheeks going pale as he retreats, shaking, to the wall.
Hildebard massages the trigger. “You said that a month ago.”
“You never found her, though!” Laurel’s father says. “Your search was fruitless.”
“Our contract was for services rendered,” the second man barks. “We did not guarantee results.”
“I’ll get the money to you, I swear!”
Hildebard tsks. “Too late, my friend.”
“Oh no, you don’t,” Laurel whispers, fists clenching. The two men go rigid as corpses as she seizes control. The jolt makes Hildebard’s finger twitch, and the gun goes off.
“No!” Laurel screams, shoving out of the closet as her father crumples.
She gapes as crimson pools at her feet, eyes wide, skin pale. Then she buckles to her knees, pressing his wound with desperate hands. But it is pointless. The bullet struck his heart.
Hildebard, suddenly released from her magic, bolts for the door. The second man chases after him, but Laurel raises a hand dripping with her father’s blood.
The man halts, stiff as rigor mortis.
Her tears flow freely. Silence fills the room as the man’s eyes bulge. His chest does not rise or fall, nor does his mouth open to gasp for air. His face turns crimson and then blue.
Not only has she stopped his movements, but she’s seized his lungs as well, just like she did to me in the street last night. Only this time, she doesn’t let up.
A moment later, he topples. He does not rise.
The secret fizzles away, and when I open my eyes, Laurel is watching me, tears filming on her lower lashes.
“My father was good.” Her voice cracks. “He never would have done such things if not for the influence of St. James’s men, manipulating him in his vulnerability.
” She pauses, taking a shaking breath. “I wanted to give up after that, but the gods had shown me those men’s sins. Given me power to stop them.”
“Laurel . . . That’s . . . I . . .”
She presses a hand to my chest, directly over my heart. “I didn’t let my father’s death sidetrack me from the path the gods laid out for me. Don’t let Enzo hold you back from yours.”
It takes everything in me not to jerk away from her touch. “Thank you for your patience.”
“It is not I you need to thank,” she says. “Just make sure there are no more slipups.”
I allow my hands to settle on her lower back as though to pull her closer. “Of course.”
She tilts her head to meet my gaze, and the slightest smile curves her lips. Her eyes dart to my mouth.
I know what she wants. This is exactly how she looked at me that night I kissed her for the first time under the bioluminescent stars of my cave.
She wants reassurance. She wants safety. She wants promises.
And I need her to believe my lies.
So I dip my head to brush my lips to hers as dread sinks its fangs into my gut. She melts against me, arms twining around my neck.
Shame licks through me. I’ve lied with my words a thousand times. Wore disguises. Falsified smiles. But a kiss?
This is the sort of deception I always vowed I’d never stoop to.
The sort that would disgust Lola.
Finally, after an eternity, Laurel breaks away, eyes dancing. “We’d better get out of here before that butler comes back.”
She leads me toward the door, chatting animatedly about the next target on her list, but all I hear is the thunder of my own heart—a beast caught in a snare of its own making, a noose of lies cinching tighter and tighter around its throat.