Chapter Twelve
ENZO
As the cab trundles closer to my childhood home, hills dotted in trees going orange and gold roll past the window, pulling at something buried deep inside me. I haven’t returned in five years, and in spite of how much Aethera has grown in that time, Warthington seems not to have changed a bit.
The same stone cottages wear the same gray shutters and carry the same flower boxes overflowing with the same blooms. The same roads go bumpier as the smooth city streets give way to the gravel paths of my memories.
The little white church sits on a hill, its spire the tallest point in the town, its brass bell glinting, and I can almost see Nic climbing the steps with me to ring it before services.
Can almost hear the songs we used to come up with, as crude and crass as twelve-year-old boys were wont to create, to accompany that shrieky toll.
The leaning cottage next door to the parish slumps into view.
“Could you stop here, please?” I ask, and the driver pulls over in front of the peeling picket fence.
Usually, I might just vanish, leaving the cabby to drive back to Aethera without pay.
But something about being here in front of the home where my father taught me to fear the gods makes me drop a handful of plats into the front seat.
“Thank you,” I say distantly as I exit the vehicle.
It rumbles away, and I approach the front gate. A little girl in a frilly blue dress and a boy with holes in his trousers toss a ball back and forth in the yard, seemingly unaware of me.
In their laughter, I hear that of my brother and me. In the call of their mother inside, I hear that of our own before she died.
Shuddering, I drag myself away. This place does not belong to me anymore, and I am not sorry for leaving it. I set off up the hill, feet crunching in the gravel.
Movement in my peripheral vision catches my eye, and I glance over my shoulder.
There stands the shop I once stole a diamond scale from—Gerard’s Gems and Jewelry.
An older, wider, grayer Mr. Gerard darts a furtive look at me.
Our eyes meet, and he flinches as though burned, disappearing inside his shop and slamming the door shut behind him.
The curtains in the window yank down an instant later.
Perhaps I should have worn a disguise or at least gone noncorporeal. Anyone could report back to St. James, let him know I’m poking around places I haven’t in years. He could catch on to what I’m doing.
But so what if he does? It’s not like anything here could be traced back to my Tentacles.
And, unlike my brother, I do not fear St. James.
There is no prison that could hold me, no locked door I could not pass through.
As long as those I care about never come here, it does not matter who sees me or whom they might tell.
So, holding my head high and nodding at passersby, I duck into the parish.
It’s just as I remember it. Wooden pews face a simple carved pulpit on a riser.
Behind it, stained-glass depictions of several of the Gods Above filter light in hues of scarlet and gold.
Books line the walls— dozens of copies of the Odelion, yes, but also ancient research texts and constellation maps.
Most parishes have a library like this, typically much more expansive than the one here.
A figure shuffles toward me, clad in the exact same robes my father wore. Simple and fastened up the front with small wooden buttons, sleeves pooling wide like tents until they reach his hands, where they knot at the wrist.
When I glimpse his white-spun hair, his pale, weathered face, and his sunken gray eyes, all of the air whooshes out of my lungs.
That’s Seren Plinth, the man who helped my father run this place.
I stumble, catching myself on a pew as memories pull me into their violent current—memories of waking after the moonshard was gone, my body disintegrating into nothing as Nic walked free.
Not alive, for I could not feel, could not touch a soul, could not speak. Not dead, for I could not end it. Trapped a phantom forever-more, a yawning abyss stretching beyond me for eternity.
Hunger gnawed through me, and I clawed at people for the soul-light glowing inside their skin. But they passed through me as though I was nothing but smoke.
Eventually, my wandering ghost’s feet brought me here to Warthington and the little parish that had once been home.
I dragged my fingertips through the hearts of the flames atop the candles at the front of the room, but the fire did not so much as flicker.
I tried to pull books from the shelves, but they did not budge.
And then my eyes caught on the decorative voratium pieces draped along the back window hanging from tiny threads to look like stars. I reached for one, fully expecting my palm to pass right through.
But it didn’t.
The voratium moved wherever I took it, dulled by the shadow of my hand.
“What the devil?” a voice grunted behind me.
I turned and caught sight of Plinth. His silver brows knit as the voratium moved seemingly on its own.
That devouring hunger inside me roared wilder, and I moved on instinct, yanking the voratium until its string snapped and pressing it to the priest’s neck.
His life spilled forth. Filling me. Awakening me. For the first time in weeks, there was sadness, there was joy, there was air on my cheeks and clothing on my body and my heart thrashing in my chest. There was fatigue and there was rage and there was hope.
I cried out, tears filming over my vision as Plinth’s eyes widened, as his body flickered into nothing.
I could still see him, faint as a wisp of air, but the worshippers in the pews cried out in shock as he dissipated into nothing and I rose from that nothing, full and whole and corporeal for the first time in weeks.
Plinth’s frail hand curled around mine, his eyes bulging, his mouth forming words no one could hear. Stop, he seemed to gasp.
But I didn’t stop. I sucked everything in through that voratium, let it fill me with light, with life.
His noncorporeal chest began to heave, air rasping in and out of his phantom lungs in short bursts.
The longer I pulled on his soullight, the more the terror of the past weeks filled me. Terror I should have felt but couldn’t because I had been nothing. Terror that would leave me with nightmares forevermore.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I was killing him. But I was so desperately, ravenously hungry. I could not have stopped even if I had tried.
I did not try.
I drank his soullight into every vein, every tendon, every nerve.
His spectral hands tried to pry me away, but that voratium fused us like a shackle.
I began to laugh through my tears, a sound too high, too loud.
“Lorenzo!” a voice bellowed from the door, breaking through my reverie. I stumbled back, tearing the voratium from the man’s throat. He collapsed, but it made no sound, for he was as much a ghost as I had been.
But, filled with his soullight, I was whole. I blinked, clutching the metal tightly in my hand. It glowed a blinding blue between my fingers.
My father strode up the aisle toward me, priest’s robes flapping. His face was drawn with fatigue, but his eyes were wide with anger, the pale blue irises barely a ring around dilated pupils.
“Get out.” His voice speared me like an icy blade.
“I need your help,” I said, desperate.
“You need,” he snapped, “to be arrested. What have you done with the priest?”
I glanced at Plinth’s invisible form, still crumpled on the floor. Had I killed him? Had I banished him to a fate worse than that—an eternity of wandering the world as nothing more than a whisper?
Unlike how I had been, he still glowed faintly with that soullight only I could see. Which meant that, in time, he likely would return to corporeality.
But me? No. Soullight siphoned away from me in wisps with every exhale. A trickle of fear slipped through me, and even my relief over finally being alive, finally feeling, finally being seen was dwarfed by the terror of being plunged back into that abyss.
I needed to stop it from happening ever again.
“Please.” I grasped Father’s lapel. If anyone could help me, he could.
Even if he believed the stars were gods, that didn’t negate the fact he likely knew more than I did about soullight, about magic, about whatever had happened to me at the temple.
And maybe he had known about the moonshard.
Perhaps he had helped perpetuate the lie that it could not exist so people like me wouldn’t go looking for it. “Help me, Father,” I pleaded.
“You are no son of mine.”
The words hit me harder than any blow he had ever delivered with paddle or hand or belt. I staggered back. The world tunneled, as though I’d been plunged underwater. Sounds distorted. Sensations dulled.
When he grasped me by the arm with not an ounce of tenderness or remorse and dragged me from his parish, I did not feel the pinch of his fingers that left purple bruises I would discover later.
When he threw me into the gravel, the bite of the stones drawing blood from my palms did not sting.
And when he cursed my name from the doorway, calling to the gods to forgive him for bringing such depravity into their precious world, I barely heard his voice.
The echoes of his words bludgeon me as though he’s still alive, as though he’s here now, and I force the memories back, the terror, the hunger, the shame until the parish swims back into focus once more.
“I never thought I’d see you in this church again, Lorenzo Sinclair,” Plinth says.
Wheezing, I raise my head and look into his eyes, which are as full of terror as they were the day I nearly killed him.
“Seren,” I say, uttering the title for zenithic priests in a hushed tone and tipping my head in respect.
He stares at me for a long time, and though he holds his jaw steady, his breath quavers and his glance flits toward the exit. He remembers that morning as vividly as I do.
“Look,” I say with a grimace. “I owe you an apology.”
He considers me for several long, slow, rattling breaths. “What do you want?”
“You’re not going to kick me out of the parish?”
“Not yet.” But he crosses his arms as though in challenge.
“I, uh . . . I’m trying to remember someone—a priestess—who used to come here on occasion.” I keep my distance, running my hand through the curls at the back of my head. “Maybe twice a year.”
The priest frowns. “Was this an older priestess or a young one?”
“Same age as my parents, I think. Blond hair. Told a lot of jokes during her sermons. I remember because Nic and I actually paid attention when she spoke.”
He tsks. “I shall choose not to take offense to that statement.”
“Very wise.”
His brows knit, thick white fuzz pulling together until they nearly obscure his eyes. “If it’s who I’m imagining, she hasn’t been here in years . . . Lolly? Lisette? Lavinia?”
“Hmmm, that doesn’t sound right.”
“Lenora?”
The name breaks something loose. Old memories of when Nic and I would try to call her ma’am and she would correct us. Just Lenora.
“That’s it.” A thrill rolls through me. I’ll discover who Nocturne is yet. “Do you know her surname?”
He ponders for several long moments before he finally sighs. “You know, Mr. Sinclair, this old brain has been crammed with far too many names over the years. When you get to be as old as I am, they all start running together.”
“What?” I joke. “You’re not old. A young spring chicken.”
The old priest’s leathery lips purse, and I let my chuckle fade awkwardly.
“Too soon?” I say. “Yeah, it is.” I nod to myself. “Too soon. Sorry.”
“You could check the Aetheran Temple. Lenora worked there for many years.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.” I extend a hand. He scrutinizes it, then carefully grasps it. Instead of shaking, he pulls me in close. “Even seaspawn have choices.”
The statement punches me in the gut, and the words I should say, the goodbye I should bid him, the thanks I should repeat are all caught like flies in my rib cage. “What?”
“We are not as trapped as we think we are.” He releases me and shuffles away.
I stare after him, mouth working.
I don’t think I’m trapped. I am trapped. This deluded priest doesn’t know the meaning of the word.
Except . . . perhaps out of everyone in the world, he knows exactly the sort of imprisonment I fear.
Shaken, I duck into the sunlight.
A pair of burly arms slam me against the wall next to the door. The cold barrel of a pistol juts into my throat, and a pair of blue eyes exactly like Lola’s glare down at me.
“Where is my daughter, you son of a bitch?” Magnus St. James growls, so close his spittle flecks my nose.
I sigh. “This is getting tiresome, St. Jimbo.” I glance past him down the road to where Mr. Gerard watches from his shop window, a steady satisfaction on his ruddy face.
“Tell me where she is!” St. James barks.
“We know how this goes. You demand things; I don’t give them. You ask me where she is; I refuse to tell you. We dance around until either I disappear and you throw a temper tantrum, or you shoot me and then I disappear, and you throw a temper tantrum. You need a new tactic.”
“Fine.” His nostrils flare. “Tell me where your brother is.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know where he is.”
St. James’s eyes bulge, a vein pulsing in his temple. “Damn you.”
I sense him pulling the trigger an instant before the gun goes off, barely enough time to avoid getting blasted, though the bullet does graze my skin as I vanish. It slams into the stone behind me, sending chunks everywhere.
True to my prediction, Magnus St. James fires off a string of expletives that would make the demon god of curses cry. I pass through him, angling toward Aethera.
And I try not to cast my eyes back to the little cottage on the hill with the two children playing ball outside.