Chapter Thirteen
LOLA
I stare at Estelle. “What do you mean, ‘If it was happening to him, too’? You think Nic is going to start killing people he thinks are sinners?”
Estelle shakes her head. “I came to see if his magic was also corrupting him.”
“What would that even look like?” The pit in my stomach gnaws harder.
“Well, with Laurel, the moonshard’s magic seems to feed on her guilt . . . so the worse she feels, the stronger it grows. What does the Liar’s power feed on?”
“Secrets.” I push my glasses up my nose with shaking hands. “And the lies people tell to cover them up.”
“So the more he lies, the stronger his power would grow. Have you seen him recently?”
The barrel of his gun pointed my direction flashes across my memory yet again. I close my eyes, tipping my head against the inside of the wardrobe. “He tried to shoot me last night. Laurel was there.”
“Laurel?” Estelle’s brows rise. “How did you know it was her?”
“I saw her in one of Nic’s secrets once.” A thought occurs, and my eyes fly open. “Wait. Do you think it’s possible he’s under Laurel’s control? That she was using her magic to make him shoot me?”
“It’s possible.” Estelle frowns. “The people under her control behave like puppets. Their movements are all jerky, and often their expressions won’t match the situation. Did you notice any of that with him last night?”
I purse my lips, thinking back to the moment the gun went off.
He was a ways down the street, but I recognized him instantly, his scar glowing like a beacon across his stony face.
He looked as though he were righting himself after having lost his balance, but his movements were steady, his arm holding the gun purposeful in its angle.
There hadn’t been terror in his eyes—only a grim-faced resolution hinting at a return of all those walls I thought I’d broken through during the tournament.
Maybe I never did. Maybe he never had a fortress guarding his heart. Maybe that was his magic, slowly choking the humanity out of him.
Maybe Nic’s gone, and the only thing left is the Liar.
“No,” I whisper, meeting Estelle’s eyes, throat closing over. “It seemed like he was fully in control.”
Estelle purses her lips and presses a hand to my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lola.”
Tears bite at my vision, but I blink them back.
I will not cry for him, not when he was clear from the beginning that he was a villain, that he was a liar, that he did not have my best interests at heart.
This is not the same as it was with Enzo, who lied but seemed to care for me.
I don’t know where Nic stands. I don’t even know who he is.
Or who he was, if his magic has truly taken over.
What are he and Laurel up to? Is he helping her hunt down sinners? Is that why he tried to shoot me?
And if the magic has taken them over, how long before Enzo succumbs, too?
What will it do to me—to my heart beating in his chest—if it does?
“We have to stop it,” I say. “We have to get that blasted magic out of them.”
Estelle sighs, mopping both hands over her face. “I know. That’s why I’m looking for them. I just haven’t been able to come up with a way to do it yet.”
I shove out of the wardrobe and start pacing, adrenaline zinging through every limb as my thoughts whir. “Enzo’s been trying to create his own moonshard to break his curse. What if we do that? Use a moonshard to cast new magic that could nullify the power that’s already there?”
Estelle sits on the lip of the wardrobe, propping her chin on her hand.
The lines around her eyes deepen with fatigue, and the daylight streaming through the window highlights the redness in the whites of her eyes.
“I don’t know, Lola. Fighting cursed magic with more magic?
Seems like a recipe for destabilizing it further. ”
“Right.” I resume my pacing, tearing my hands through my curls.
Then I halt as my brain lands on another idea.
“Wait. A moonshard is made by channeling starlight into a shard of raw voratium, right? And Nic, Enzo, and Laurel are starblessed, which, according to everything I’ve read, means they’re essentially stars.
What if . . . what if we used lumenoring equipment to channel magic from the three of them into a new shard? One that’s stable enough to hold it?”
She considers. “That . . . sounds like a possibility. Can you show me what you mean?”
“Come on.” I drag her down to my briefcase in the gambling hall, where I fish out the pages from Nell’s journal.
“These are from the lab notes of the priestess who made their moonshard,” I explain, shuffling through the diagrams and graphs to a drawing of the diffusers and lumenoscopes arranged to channel starlight into voratium, precise angles marked with mathematical equations. “This is what Enzo is trying to do.”
Estelle peers at the page. “This all looks very specific.”
“I figure,” I say, “since stars are far away, the angles have to be very precise. But if we’re talking about having Nic, Laurel, and Enzo in the same area as the equipment, they’ll have a wider scope.
As long as we keep them in the general vicinity—maybe the area of a city block—the equipment should still be able to draw in their power. ”
“That sounds doable.”
I sink into Nic’s desk chair. “Except . . . Here.” I point at the scribbles under the illustration of the astral spectral diffuser. “It says it has to be in place drawing the starlight in for a period of twenty hours.”
“How on earth are we going to get them into one place for twenty hours without them hurting each other . . . or blowing up all of Aethera?”
“Maybe we don’t need them to be together for twenty hours straight . . . maybe we could do it in chunks. A few hours at a time.”
“Still.” Estelle studies the notes, chewing on her lip. “Laurel certainly wouldn’t cooperate even for a few hours if she discovered we’re trying to pull out her magic. And if Nic has followed suit, he’d be hard to keep our hands on, too.”
I shuffle through the papers, ears ringing as I dart from one idea to the next. But nothing seems right, and despite the adrenaline making me jumpy, my thoughts are sluggish from a night of not sleeping well.
My eyes fall on the gambling tables.
“What if we did a game?” I say softly.
“What?”
I turn. “A game.” The pieces slot themselves together in my head, and the words spill out of me faster and faster as things slot into place.
“Nic kept us all here at the Liar’s Den for the whole week of the tournament.
We were so preoccupied with completing the challenges, we weren’t even tempted to leave the building. ”
“Maybe . . .”
“We could do it in rounds. Keep them inside one spot—wherever we have the equipment set up—for the duration of each. Maybe three nights in a row? With eight hours per round, that would give us twenty-four hours—more than enough time for the voratium to soak up their magic.”
Estelle stares at me, gears turning in her eyes, and then a slow smile curves her lips. “That actually might work. We’d just have to come up with a prize that would incentivize all three of them to enter.”
“If Nocturne runs the game, then Enzo will be there,” I say, thinking of the desperation I’d felt in him last night when he’d attacked me.
“Nocturne?” Estelle asks, brow furrowing. “You mean that sea-spawn lady everyone’s been whispering about? Why would she help us?”
I laugh, tugging Nic’s magic through my bracelet to transform my appearance into Nocturne’s for a heartbeat. “Because,” I say in Nocturne’s velvet voice as Estelle’s eyes widen, “she is me.”
Estelle chortles as I release the illusion and turn back into myself. “Impressive.”
“Thank you.” I take a dramatic bow. “Enzo’s been trying to track down Nocturne for weeks. Maybe the prize for the game could be a magical favor from her. He wants her to—”
The words die in my throat as the plan crumples around me.
“He wants her to what?” Estelle prompts.
I flip through the notes again, chest deflating. “The priestess who wrote these notes used some sort of code, and I have no clue what this part is supposed to mean.”
I hold it out for her to see.
“And lest the fragment divide itself,” I read aloud, “which power at that threshold is wont to do, it is necessary that it be sealed. The great Odelia’s gaze, behind her lunar petiole, is the only cement with the strength to stitch such power closed.
” I pause, mulling over the words again.
“Clearly it’s saying that in order to stabilize the moonshard after it’s full, it needs to be sealed.
‘The great Odelia’s gaze’ probably is referring to sunlight, since Odelia is the sun goddess, but I puzzled through this for hours last night and still haven’t come up with what a ‘lunar petiole’ is supposed to be. ”
“Petiole is a word for leaf.” Estelle chews on her lip. “When I was in the theater troupe, they would sometimes call the masks petioles. It was an old colloquialism from the early days when people would make masks out of nature. Maybe it means the sun is going to take on some kind of disguise?”
“But what . . . ,” I begin, and then it hits me. I shoot to my feet. “The solar eclipse!”
Estelle’s brows raise almost to her hairline, and then she grins. “That has to be it.”
I rush to the stack of star charts and constellation maps behind Nic’s desk, riffling through until I find what I’m looking for. “See, here was the last solar eclipse where totality hit Aethera . . . twenty years ago.”
“That had to have been when Lightsworn did it.”
“And the next one happens just a few days from now. Which means . . . we actually have a chance.”
She rushes at me, grasping my hands between hers. “Can we do this? Can we pull it off ?”
I can scarcely breathe. “We sure the depths are going to try.”