Chapter 13
A Series of Anxiety-Inducing Events
RAVEN
I knew I was done for when Ah Ma found out about me saving Tia.
‘Do you even care?’ Ah Ma demanded, rheumy eyes glistening with restrained fury.
I’ve been subject to her ire more times than I can count, but the chill of her anger never fails to unnerve me.
‘We have done everything for you. The Nagas and the Foxes came together to help you, and you threw your chance away. Did it mean nothing for you?’
‘I-I just wanted it to go differently,’ I’d retorted, knowing how weak my argument sounded.
‘Do you want the leadership or not?’ Ah Ma snapped.
‘I do.’ My throat tightens from the threat. ‘It won’t happen again.’
So, okay, yeah. Maybe I had been crying as I left Ah Ma’s house. Then my night took a turn for the worse because:
I smashed my phone screen right before my heist (not really relevant, but definitely deserving of honourable mention for events leading up to the Shittiest Night Ever) and ran into eight yaoguai security guards who had to be descended from some sort of ghastly night-time spirit, because they’d been shadow-quick and twice as evasive.
The shame from the Foxes and the tears in my eyes had stopped me from calling for back-up.
No one appreciated this, least of all my gut, which was later unceremoniously speared with a metal rod as a guard tried to stop me from stealing the moonstones (God, those guards were brutal).
A horrible case of post-injury shock had swung me through the wrong window, and I’d ended up in my enemy’s bed instead of my own.
Some facts don’t quite add up, like how calling it the ‘wrong window’ might be a stretch when I’d been yearning for an assuring voice and gentle hands, when my head had been a haze but my heart led me to the promise of shelter.
Now, after the excitement of last night, Tia drops another revelation on me.
More than friends. Are we? What did Tia even mean? What is more than friends?
Every time I try to reach for meaning, it slips from my fingers.
Desperate for distraction, I dig my pitifully busted phone out of my pocket and dial Maria, but she doesn’t pick up.
‘Seriously?’ I mutter, and instead send a text to update her on last night’s mission.
In the silence of the bedroom, Tia’s words ricochet off the echo chamber of my brain. Something between us.
‘This will go away if you do your job,’ I mutter to myself and tuck my phone under the pillow, though the argument is barely convincing. Would there be a way of making leader without killing Tia?
A fake assassination?
I turn the idea over in my head. Just a few months ago, an effort to cheat the Elder’s test wouldn’t have been worth a bratty lunar descendant.
But now . . . I drift back to a restless sleep.
On my third morning, I wake with Tia’s frowning face hovering over mine.
She lays the back of her hand against my forehead, fingers ice cold. ‘You’re burning up. I think you’re infected. How do you feel?’
I almost jerk away because why is Tia Njauw leaning over me? And then I remember I’m sucking a breath through an enchanted fabric mask, which means I’m still Raven. Which, to be fair, is even weirder.
‘Like shit,’ I rasp. I must have thrown off the blankets halfway through the night, but still everything is too hot, and my tongue sits dumbly in my mouth.
‘Hold on.’ Tia bolts out of the room. When she’s back, she has a pail of water and a towel-wrapped ice pack. ‘Put this on your head for the rest of the day. I need to go, but I’ll drop lunch off for you later.’
I wait until the door is closed before I completely collapse. Keeping up the flirty facade is harder when it feels like someone’s ripped my insides out and the room flames a hundred degrees Celsius. Nausea rocks my stomach, and I close my eyes to abate it.
The fever brings me in and out of a hazy, clouded sea of visions, dragging me into nightmares and dreamscapes whenever I let my guard down.
I don’t know when the world swims back to me, finally free from sleep’s throbbing influence, led by a hand pushing my hair behind my ears and wiping sweat off my forehead.
‘Tia?’ I murmur.
‘Okay, she better not have been doing this for you.’ Maria. Her forearms flex as she wrings a towel in the pail, dipping it into the water before she lays it over my forehead.
‘How long’ve you been’re?’ I slur.
‘About ten minutes. You look like shit, sweetheart. Why didn’t you come back to us?’
The very thought of the Fox clan makes my heart constrict. ‘You should’ve seen Ah Ma’s face when she heard about me saving Tia.’
I wish Maria would counter the statement, but for a long beat Maria offers nothing. When she opens her mouth, she says, ‘I tried to warn you.’
‘Real asshole thing to say right now, Mari.’
‘Look, Harper, I . . .’ She reaches out to squeeze my hand. ‘I told you. The clan’s getting restless. I tell you these things because I still care about you. There’s talk of . . .’ She trails off, uncertainty wavering her tone.
Fear roots itself in the bottom of my lungs, rendering it hard to breathe. ‘Of what?’
Rare concern pinches Maria’s lips as she searches my gaze.
‘If you don’t figure out how to do it soon, they will.
I hope you know that whatever you want to spare Tia from, the Elders won’t even think twice.
You have to understand, have you heard how good the supplements from the new moonstones have been for us?
We only have enough for the families with the weakest kids, and it’s helped them so much.
We can’t lose that. Not for whatever demented attachment you’ve formed with the people who are keeping us from that. ’
Tia doesn’t deserve this, I have to bite back, because the statement feels damning in my throat, a prison sentence for a crime to which I’m not ready to plead guilty.
I know that to secure my place as Fox leader, she must die. The issue is that Tia put a bottle of moonstone supplements by my bed, told me to take as many as I want. She’s noticed that I have a sweet tooth, so there are also iced gems and a cup of water that’s never empty, as long as she’s home.
Tia’s love decorates the room, and I’m here plotting her murder.
But I can buy forgiveness in borrowed time and stalling. ‘I know I messed up, but you know I need to get closer to her to kill her. I’ve already told Ah Ma, and it’s working. Don’t worry.’
Maria looks suspicious for a second, but I lay my hands over hers. ‘Mari. I mean it.’
A slow grin splits across her face and she tosses her hair behind her shoulder, a move I only see when she’s proud or satisfied with something she’s done. ‘That’s the Harper I know.’
I raise a finger to stop Maria. ‘One condition. You tell the clan that for me to make this work, I have to get closer to her.’
Suspicion traces Maria’s narrowed eyes, as dark as her eyeliner, and she frowns, jaw clenched. She’s definitely mad, but is it because she doesn’t buy my story, or because her ex-girlfriend is going to have to get close to another girl? Knowing Maria, I won’t put the latter past her.
With a sniff, though, she concedes. ‘Fine. I’ll let them know, but rest. The quicker you heal, the quicker we plan this and get it over with.’
Thank God. I mask my sigh of relief with a crisp mock salute, ignoring the twinge of pain at the move. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
The best thing Maria leaves behind, aside from bad news, is a box of my special painkillers.
I resist the urge to pop a dozen at once, instead taking two and sitting back as the first reprieve from pain in the last few days washes over me.
My wound has been healing well, already half closed up, but the pain never stops thrumming in the background of my every breath, every move.
I’m still somewhat high when Tia barges into the room at five p.m., eyes wide and hair mussed.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask.
Tia ignores me.
‘Tia?’
All I get for my trouble is a glare thrown hastily over her shoulder as she pulls a crop top, jeans and cream knit cardigan from her closet. ‘I’m late. I can’t deal with your antics right now.’ She dives into the bathroom, slamming the door after her.
Late?
‘For what?’ I yell.
There’s a rustle, clatter and curse. ‘We have a presentation with the directorial board,’ Tia says, voice muffled but urgent through the door. ‘I’ve been so caught up with you here that I’ve completely forgotten and now I’m about to be late, so please leave me alone.’
A presentation. ‘Oh, shit.’ The words slip out before I can catch them, and Tia’s head pops out from behind the door, one elbow stuck like a chicken’s wing through her shirt’s arm hole.
‘What happened?’
‘Nothing,’ I lie. Shit, I’d forgotten too. The moonstones’ volatility had been a revelation that’d shaken Niko, so everyone’s been working round the clock to pool their findings together and work out any other properties of the moonstones.
I did some of the slides last week. I might be able to wing it, even if my guts feel a little like they’re trying to evict themselves from my body.
The second Tia’s gone, I grab a pen and rip a page off a notebook on the desk, scribble a note, and hobble out of Tia’s room for the first time in days.
My room’s exactly as I left it. I strip my mask off and grab the first hoodie I find.
By the time I run into the presentation hall, every step precedes a laboured breath and a spike of hurt. I get there in the middle of someone else’s presentation, fifteen minutes before mine and Tia’s turn. Someone ushers me in to wire a mic, and I pop a couple more painkillers to calm my jitters.
Across the room, lips glittered with gloss and eyes lined with gentle downturned wings, Tia looks up from her laptop and watches me closely.
Our eyes meet.
In a moment, the room falls away – it’s just us, two stars with our gravitational fields snagged, the equal and opposite forces of hatred and something else pulling us into orbit like a duo of exhausted gas balls in a messed-up binary system.
The moment passes. We’re standing in front of each other.