Chapter Twenty-Eight
LOLA
I find Estelle on the library roof fiddling with one of the mirrors on the diffuser.
“Everything all right?” I ask, surveying the area.
She looks up, clearly agitated. “It seems to be working as far as I can tell.”
“Good.” I gesture in the direction of the city square. “Thanks for your help earlier. I’m still new enough at illusions that I would have struggled to cast Nocturne on an empty stage. Grounding the visual on top of another person’s form is more what I’ve practiced.”
“I did okay?” She drops onto the chimney and mops a quaking hand over her face.
“Absolutely,” I say, crossing to her and resting a palm on her shoulder. “I’m sorry to have sprung that on you.”
She shakes her head. “No, that was fine.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
She looks up at me. “I saw her.”
I don’t have to ask who she means. Laurel’s heart-shaped face and soft, angelic features are still fresh in my own memories. “I did, too.”
“She looked at me like . . .” She swallows.
“Like she didn’t know you?”
“No . . . Like I was her enemy.” She shudders. “It was awful.”
“We’re going to fix this. It’s going to work.”
“Gods, I hope so.”
A creaking noise wafts up from the side of the building, and Estelle and I freeze, staring at each other. We creep to the edge of the roof and peer over the lip.
A pair of shadows climbs out of a window on the second story, swinging down onto the street.
I frown. The illusion I cast—the dome of shadows that marks the boundary of the enclosure—was infused with sensory glamours modeled after the ones Nic put on the Liar’s Den.
Anyone who tries to cross it will experience such intense repulsion their body will jolt backward on instinct.
While people could theoretically bypass the wall, the human brain is typically so inclined toward self-preservation that it refuses.
So how are these two people—whoever they are—passing through so easily?
I squint, tapping into my magic to scrutinize the faint, shimmering threads of my illusions. They pour from the chunks of voratium I placed at regular intervals in the soil around the library.
Except . . .
“There’s a break in the boundary,” I whisper to Estelle. “Someone must have removed one of the voratium pieces, creating a small opening right where that window is.”
“Who are they?” Estelle whispers.
“I’m not sure . . .” I try to make out the figures in the shadows. One is larger, while the other is a lot slighter. As they reach the corner, they pass under a streetlamp. Its light reflects off a familiar head of long, sleek, ice-blond hair. My stomach drops.
“Ostena,” I gasp.
“Vesnes?” Estelle’s eyebrows shoot to her hairline. “What’s she doing here?”
“Likely nothing good. I’ve got to go. Keep Enzo preoccupied. I’ll be back before the end of the round.”
I’m leaping off the roof before Estelle can respond, sinking into noncorporeality as I sail through the air so I hit the ground as a ghost. Then I take off around the corner after Ostena and her friend.
I follow for several miles until they stop at a nondescript apartment building. Paint peels off the walls, and dead flowers crumple over the sides of brittle flower boxes.
Ostena’s companion—a man with straw-colored hair and freckled, ruddy cheeks—produces an old brass key from his pocket. They unlock the door and slip wordlessly inside. I trail them down to the boiler room, where another figure stands waiting.
I catch sight of his face and give a lungless gasp.
It’s my father.
“What can you tell me?” he asks.
Ostena’s friend holds out a chunk of metal. “The enclosure is powered by voratium embedded around the library at regular intervals. Remove one, and it provides an escape point.”
“Thank you, Forsyth,” my father says with a nod. “And the Devious?”
“The Liar is present with his new lady friend,” Ostena puts in.
“The Thief ?”
“We haven’t seen him or his Tentacles yet,” Ostena replies. “Though there is always the possibility they are either disguised or noncorporeal.”
“And Astra Tremaine?” The way he says my false name raises the hairs on the backs of my arms. With the faintest smug smile, like he’s in on a joke.
“No sign of her, either.”
“Very well.” My father pockets the voratium. “Unless you see her, keep your focus on the Liar. And whatever you do, stay away from Nocturne.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Gather as much information as you can on the other players as well as the game itself. I want to be aware of everything.”
“Of course.” Forsyth nods. “We’ll keep you apprised.”
They continue, setting a plan for the next time they’ll meet up to exchange notes, but there’s a ringing in my ears that has nothing to do with the Unbreakable Lie and everything to do with the panic spreading like poison through me.
Of course I knew my father might not comply with Nocturne’s demands to stay away from the game. He certainly isn’t known for his integrity. But I had hoped I might have scared him enough to keep him at bay.
Obviously, I was wrong.
I wait until Ostena and Forsyth depart. Then, with terror squeezing ice around my lungs, I relinquish Enzo’s magic, replacing it instantly with Nic’s to make Nocturne bloom before my father.
He blinks, taking a step back. “Nocturne?”
“Explain yourself, Magnus,” I say, my voice infused with the smoky undertones he’ll recognize. “We had a deal.”
“Our deal was that I would not come near the game, and I have not,” he says with a shrug, keeping his hands clasped loosely in front of him as though he has not a care in the world.
“Don’t mince words with me,” I retort. “Obviously, when I said I didn’t want you in the game, I also meant your minions should stay away as well.”
“Then perhaps you should have specified.”
“If the Thief sniffs out they’re working for you, he won’t cooperate.”
“He’s not going to find out.” He raises a brow. “Besides, I learned long ago not to pin all my hopes on one course of action.”
“To what are you referring?”
“Ostena came to me yesterday with a very interesting backup plan, just in case yours fails.”
“It’s not going to fail,” I grit out.
He raises his hands, a placating smile on his face. “Of course not. But if it does, I want to make sure I’m utilizing this opportunity to the best of my ability.”
“Ostena won’t be able to capture the Thief any better than your other goons have, game or not.”
“The Thief can go noncorporeal,” my father replies quietly. “But the Liar can’t.”
My stomach sinks. The last thing I need is for my father to spark some kind of battle in the middle of my game. “What good would trapping the Liar do? He doesn’t have Magnolia.”
“Those brothers are far more entangled than they allow the public to believe.”
“They hate each other.”
“Hate is another shade of love, Nocturne. Just channeled differently.” He smiles softly. “If the Liar is in danger, the Thief will come.”
“Even if he does,” I hedge, “how would that get your daughter back?”
His smile is wolfish, teeth glowing yellow in the cheap, buzzing light. “I’ll make him choose.”
My mouth goes dry. “You’re banking an awful lot on the supposed love you think exists between two seaspawn who have spent years trying to undermine one another. Especially considering the Liar cannot die. Why would the Thief care about sparing him?”
“What benefit is my daughter to him, other than as a bargaining chip?” my father asks, cocking an eyebrow.
So he, at least, doesn’t know about my magical abilities . . . Unless he’s pretending not to know in order to keep it secret?
“His brother, on the other hand,” my father goes on, “is powerful. In more ways than just magic. And he is capable of feeling pain.” My father’s eyes glitter. “The Thief is a lot of things, but heartless is not one of them.”
The irony would be enough to make me laugh if I didn’t feel so sick.
“Get your minions out of my game,” I hiss, whipping in shadows from every side, plunging everything but our faces into suffocating darkness. “Or our deal is off.”
His eyes flash, but his expression does not change, immovable and eerie as a rictus grin. “Maybe I don’t care for our deal any longer.”
I flood the room with a chill as cold as death. Lightning crackles in the rumbling shadows, sparking near his face.
“You’d defy a seaspawn?” I ask.
He does not flinch. “Magic does not scare me.”
“It should.” My whisper is full of hissing snakes.
“Threaten me, then, if you’re so fearsome. Hurt me.” His eyes flash. “Kill me.”
His voice is conversational, as though we are doing nothing more than having tea, but I hear in it the challenge. The line drawn. The sword raised.
My attack last time struck a chasm between us. He no longer sees me as an ally. Only as a rival to be challenged.
He’s calling my bluff.
Perhaps I did not do so well at hiding my reaction to his pain last time. Perhaps he noticed the flicker of terror in my eyes when I realized what my magic was doing to him. Perhaps he glimpsed human weakness behind my shadows.
Footsteps echo around me. Shapes moving through my smoke. Approaching with pistols raised.
He’s got guards, and he’s not afraid to use them.
His eyes glitter with a maniacal glee that terrifies me.
Suddenly, a man with whom I’ve always felt safe—even, somehow, as Nocturne over the past few weeks—becomes someone I do not recognize at all.
But it’s not that this man is a false version of my father as I’ve tried to believe.
Not a villainous character he’s playing in order to keep his power or to hide his own weaknesses.
No, the father I knew was the disguise he wore.
This is who he truly is.
“Shoot her,” he says.
I go noncorporeal as the pistols fire, and though I cannot scream without vocal cords, a cry razes through every fiber of my soul all the same as the man I still clung to—a figment of my imagination—dies.