Chapter Forty-Seven
LOLA
Nic’s voice hits me like an axe to the skull. I lurch upright, cradling my temples as sights and sounds flood me.
I’m in some kind of medical office, complete with shelves of bandages and ointments, scissors and tweezers, stethoscopes and tonics. Nic and Enzo are standing over me wearing identical worried expressions.
I’ve never noticed how alike they look. Enzo’s got his curls and sharper features, and Nic is broader, but their eyes are the same shape. They grind their teeth in a similar manner. They wring their hands in tandem.
Enzo gently presses me back into the pillows. “Don’t move too quickly,” he says. “We don’t know how that magic affected you. Better to be careful.”
The memory of breaking the Unbreakable Lie filters back all at once, and I sink obediently into my pillows, pressing a hand to my pounding head. “Gods, I feel awful.”
“Where do you hurt?” Nic grasps my hand. “What can we do?”
“Everything hurts.” My tongue is dry, my body aching. “But I think I’ll live.” Then I raise my head to look around. “Where’s Laurel? What happened?”
“She’s over there.” Nic nods at a medical bed nearby, where Laurel lies motionless and covered in blood that looks weirdly lustrous in the light. “She was shot.”
“What I want to know is where the depths Nocturne has gone,” Enzo mutters to Nic. “Isn’t she supposed to be here by now?”
“Nocturne—” I swallow, closing my eyes as the gravity of our situation settles like a weight on my chest. I almost expect the Unbreakable Lie’s buzzing to erupt under my skin, and when it doesn’t, dread turns my stomach sour.
I don’t have to lie to him anymore. Which means I need to tell him the truth.
“Nocturne isn’t real, Enz,” I say.
There’s a pause. “What are you talking about?”
I open my eyes, pushing my smudged glasses up my nose. “It was me.”
He shakes his head, first slowly, then faster as though to scatter the thoughts before they take root. “Wait . . . that whole Enclosure game? The barriers? The big party?”
I nod, reaching out to brush his arm, but he jerks away, combing his hands through his curls as our heart wrenches into my throat. “But I thought it was Lenora . . .”
All my compassion for him evaporates as anger slams through me. “Lenora?” I repeat, teeth gritted. “You mean my mother?”
He wrings his hands. “You found out about that?”
“What the depths is wrong with you, Enzo? Why would you keep that from me?”
He presses his fingers into his eyes. “Because I’m an ass. I’m so sorry, Lola. I shouldn’t have . . .”
“Wait, you met her mother?” Nic interrupts. “When? Where?”
“You met her, too. Years ago,” Enzo mumbles, avoiding both our eyes.
“Remember the priestess who visited Warthington sometimes? Apparently she . . . also made the moonshard. But, in my defense, I didn’t realize Nell Lightsworn and the Lenora priestess lady were the same person until yesterday.
I just knew Nell got pregnant with Lola after she made the shard.
Apparently, she went on to use a traveling priestess job as an opportunity for research, which is when she met us, and—”
“How dare you,” I say, voice lethal, “lie to me about that.”
“She was gone long before I met you!”
“But you knew she existed. Knew who she was.” My voice breaks. “Knew she might be out there, alive!”
Enzo throws up his hands. “What good would it have done you to know?”
“I guess we’ll never find out,” I snarl, “since you never gave me that chance.”
His eyes narrow. “Don’t put this all on me. You lied, too.”
“Come on, Enzo,” Nic says, grasping his arm. “Stop.”
“When were you going to tell me you had magic?” Enzo asks me, anger flaring to match mine.
I bark out a laugh. “Oh, don’t you dare pretend you weren’t keeping that exact secret from me, too.”
“I beg your finest pardon?” His eyebrows rise sardonically.
“You knew I was a conduit,” I spit through my teeth. “Just like Nell. It’s why you sought me out—because you’d learned my heart could act as a conduit to the damn stars for you.”
His jaw tightens.
“And,” I go on, “when I learned you planned my ‘rescue’ on purpose to trap me, you still didn’t tell me. Even when I promised you I’d trust you. Even”—I yank up my sleeve, baring my Tentacles tattoo— “when you marked me as one of your own.”
He crosses his arms, chewing on the inside of his cheek, eyes hot as flint and hard as stone.
“You kept me from my life. You kept me from my father and my mother,” I breathe, an inferno blazing inside me. “How long were you going to keep me from my magic, too?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says.
“Oh, I’m sure you had your reasons. But don’t act like I’m the villain here. It’s always been you.” My words are venom, and he flinches as each one strikes home.
“This magic,” he says quietly, “is not healthy or safe. So excuse me if I wanted to rescue someone I cared about from ever getting as mixed up in it as Nic and I are. You deserved better than that.”
“If that’s true,” Nic interrupts, “then why did you mix her up in it at all? If not for your meddling, she’d still be down in south Celestia, surrounded by orange trees. Oblivious and trapped, sure, but far away from the shard.”
“I already apologized,” Enzo says through gritted teeth. “I’ll spend the rest of my life being sorry for that.”
“Good.” Nic scowls.
“But I’m not sorry for all of it.” Enzo turns to me. “Sure, things may have started out wrong. But then you became my best friend, and once you found out I’d set you up, I figured the last thing you needed was to get dragged deeper into any of this shit.”
Tears sting the corners of my eyes. “The moonshard is part of me, too, Enzo,” I say, the anger in me deflating into something deeper and far more painful. “Whether you want me to be mixed up in it or not.”
“Then why haven’t you left?” he asks, avoiding his brother’s glare. “I may have your heart in my pendant, but you could have deserted me. Taken a train to somewhere far away. But you didn’t. You lied, joined my Tentacles, and pretended to love me. Tell me why.”
“I wasn’t pretending,” I say, voice thick. “I do love you.”
“Even if I lie to you? Even if I destroyed your life?”
“Yes.” I hold his gaze. “I wanted answers, but I wanted you to be the one to give them to me. I wanted to fix this, fix us. Because I may have been simply a heart to keep you alive, but you have always only been one thing to me.”
“What’s that?” he asks.
I press a palm to his cheek. “My closest and dearest friend in the world.” Tears swim across my vision, but I hold my jaw steady, refuse to let them fall. “And I wasn’t about to give that up, even if you deserved it.”
“I wanted to protect you—protect the us that we created—from disaster.” His voice cracks. “I was trying to love you.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and whisper, “You didn’t do this because you love me. You did it because you want me to love you. That’s not the same thing.”
He blinks, pursing his lips as my words roar between us. Our heart wrenches, but I do not take them back.
He glances at Nic, who opens his mouth.
But before he speaks, the door swings wide, and Estelle rushes in, trailed by Jade, Soren, Arden, and Isla.
“Is she all right?” Estelle leans over Laurel’s bed to inspect a bandage on her chest.
“She’ll pull through,” Nic says. “It was already beginning to heal by the time it was all cleaned up.”
“Which means we don’t have much time,” Jade says.
When I glance toward her, she’s not looking at Estelle and Laurel. She’s looking at me. All of the Tentacles are, faces stony.
Guilt burns through me alongside the memory of them finding me with Nic in the theater. With shaking hands, I push myself gingerly to a seated position.
“Careful.” Nic reaches for me, but I face the Tentacles, setting my jaw despite the dizziness.
“I owe you all an apology,” I say.
They listen silently as I tell them everything. Finding out about my magic during the Liar’s Dice Tournament, wanting answers from Enzo, using the Unbreakable Lie, joining the Tentacles hoping I could learn what I was and why Enzo had done what he had.
And then I dive into the whole Nocturne plot and how it led to the meeting with Estelle at the Liar’s Den and the game we came up with to create a new moonshard to save Enzo and Nic from Laurel.
“Wait . . .” Enzo holds up a hand. “A new moonshard?”
“That’s brilliant,” Nic says, staring at me.
“Thank you,” I say, smiling past him at Estelle.
Then I meet Soren’s eyes. “I’m so sorry for lying to you all.
I understand if you can’t trust me or forgive me, but I wanted to say it.
You didn’t deserve my duplicity or the way I drove a wedge between you and Enzo.
” I swallow and repeat once again, “I’m so, so sorry. ”
Soren steps forward, seizing me around the shoulders and pulling me in for a bone-cracking hug.
That’s when the tears break free, pouring down my cheeks and soaking into his shirt.
“I’m sorry, too,” he soothes, squeezing me.
Jade, Isla, and Arden join him in a massive tangle of limbs. In spite of the tears stinging my skin, my heart feels lighter than it has in months.
“What are we going to do?” Estelle asks when we finally break apart. “Laurel’s not going to be unconscious for much longer.”
“We don’t need to keep her here forever,” I say slowly, scrubbing the tears from my cheeks.
“Just until the eclipse in the morning.” I look up at the clock on the wall.
It’s already two hours past midnight, which means we have only about six hours until we can seal the moonshard. Can we hold Laurel that long?
“What if we lock her in the vault?” Enzo asks.
His suggestion ignites a spark of hope inside me. “We’d only have to keep her in there a few more hours,” I say. “Totally doable.”
“The vault won’t stop her,” Nic points out. “It’s a good plan, but she’ll be able to control our bodies as soon as she wakes.”
“What if we knock her out every time she regains consciousness?” Soren suggests.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Estelle snaps.
“Why not?” Enzo puts in. “If she’s like Nic and me, then she’ll heal just fine.”
Estelle’s eyes flash. “You’re not hurting her any more than absolutely necessary.”
“Define ‘absolutely necessary,’” Enzo shoots back.
Estelle jabs a finger in his face. “I will never understand what Lola sees in you.”
I interrupt before they come to blows. “Any ideas how we could cut Laurel off from her power without knocking her out?”
“What if we removed the voratium pieces from her arms?” Jade asks, lifting Laurel’s encrusted hand. “Pulled them out like Nic did with the bullet?”
“Those shards are fused to her skin,” Estelle says slowly. “It would be like pulling off fingernails. She’d be in a lot of pain.”
“Not if we do it before she wakes up.” I shove off the stretcher as excitement pounds through me. “This could actually work.”
Estelle looks uneasy about it, so I rush on.
“I don’t want to hurt her, either, but as long as those shards are in her skin, she has the power to control us.” I grasp Estelle’s hands. “We’re so close. We just need a couple of hours.”
Estelle sniffs, then nods. “All right. But I want to bandage her up afterward. Apply ointment and all that. I don’t want to permanently damage her hands.”
“Hand me that medical kit,” I tell Nic, moving in next to Laurel. “Let’s get to work.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but a shout from outside draws our attention to an exterior window. Frowning at one another, we cross to it, pulling back the curtain.
Two dozen people swarm on the sidewalk near the front entrance of the Liar’s Den. One pounds on the door. “Liar!” he barks. “Let me in!”
“Is that . . . ?” I say, squinting to make out the man’s features.
“Magnus St. James,” Nic growls. “How predictable of him.”
I back away from the window so my father won’t see me and turn to Enzo. “You and the Tentacles bar the doors. We can’t let him interrupt this.”
“Got it.” Enzo and his gang dart as one into the hall as I turn toward Nic and Estelle, nodding at Laurel on the bed.
“All right,” I say. “Which one of us feels up to performing surgery?”