Chapter 18 The Heart of the Gorgon #3
I wave off the compliment if that’s even what it was.
“It just worked out this way,” I say passively.
I still haven’t decided how much I’m going to tell her.
On the drive over, I considered all my options—tell her nothing happened, tell her something happened but not all of it, or tell her everything.
None of them ended well. The alternative—to not let her know I saw Brennan at all, however preferable—is impossible.
She set me to this task like a well-trained dog, and she’ll corner me sooner or later for an outcome.
I’ve always been a terrible if practiced liar.
Her hand grips mine. “Our Brennan?” she asks as if we are Victorian maids and he our wayward brother with gambling debts. Something wistful is suspended between her eyes, the fragile bud of hope. I can’t tell if it’s performative or unconscious.
I pull my hand out from under hers. “It’s not that bad,” I start.
And the sly creature I know slips back across her face like a Venetian mask. “Some ringing endorsement, kitten.”
My shoulders stiffen. I’ve not told her anything yet, and somehow I’ve already told her everything. “Look, he’s harmless. Just a little … confused. It was an accident,” I try again.
“Apparently not, if you’re here.”
I groan, every word I utter making it worse. “He wants the same things you do. He wants to be safe, to feel powerful. He wants the group. This little slip … It wasn’t intentional. His judgment is impaired right now. He’s paranoid but not dangerous.”
“How ‘little’ are we talking?” she asks, the vulnerability of before tucked back into its cage.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there for all of it.”
She cocks a perfectly coiffed eyebrow at me, and I fold. Without meaning to, I have brought Aaron into the discussion even if I haven’t named him. Just like Brennan warned me not to.
“Who was?”
I fist my hands in my lap. “We were in a bar. There was an incident involving bubbles, nothing traceable, and…”
Her brow arches even more dramatically. “And?”
“He went home with a friend. They hit it off. Something happened between them during … you know.”
“Do I?” Her eyes rove over my face, reading the details I’m giving away without trying. I send a silent prayer asking Brennan to forgive me. “Can you be more specific?”
“It was in private. Like, very private,” I flounder.
She sucks air through her teeth, annoyed, sounding snakelike. “About the magic, Jude, not the sex. I’ve got that part.”
“Oh, right.” I scramble for an answer that will satisfy her without implicating Brennan. “It’s within the scope of his usual power; he assured me of that much.”
“You spoke with him about it?” She gets up, paces a moment, turns toward me. “And the friend? What did he say?”
I swallow. “He called it sex magic. He’s clueless. You don’t need to worry about him.”
Her eyes narrow almost imperceptibly, but she doesn’t press it. “Pretend I’m a child,” she says. “Spell it out for me, kitten.”
The truth is, Brennan was wrong. I was never going to be able to keep this from her, and he of all people should have known that. “Levitation.”
Her composure slips, jerking to regain balance the way someone does on an icy step. But I’ve seen it in those unguarded milliseconds, the fury. It’s the most undone I’ve ever seen her.
Brennan is going to hate me.
“They levitated during—”
“Sex. Yes,” I cut in, trying to recover, to make it sound more mundane than it is. “Aaron was quite taken with the whole affair,” I prattle, catching myself too late.
Arla purses her lips and walks to the windows, gazing out. Her long hair sheets down her back, softer than usual. “So, he’s growing.” She says it under her breath.
“Sorry?”
“Levitation,” she says. “It’s not something he was capable of before. I wonder what else he’s capable of that he’s not sharing,” she says quietly, an edge to her tone.
I hate being caught in the middle. There’s always blowback.
“Can you imagine?” she asks quietly. “Others knowing what we can do?”
I swallow even though my throat has gone dry. “Aaron would never talk, especially if I tell him not to.”
She turns to me. “Even one is too many.”
She’s right, but Aaron isn’t a threat. I can convince him to keep quiet, maybe even that it was something else—a dream, a drug, a hallucination brought on by the best sex he’s ever had. I press my lips together until they flatten. Arla looks out the window.
“What will you do?” I ask though I’m not sure I want to know. The conversation will be excruciatingly awkward. “What will you say to him?”
She sighs, then rubs her brow with a hand and lets it drop to her side. “Let me worry about that.”
I try to imagine what she’s thinking, but her mind is a fortress.
Guilt steals over me in a dark cloud. I came here to fix the situation, to give Arla just enough to get her off my case and to give Brennan some measure of reassurance.
But instead, I’ve done the opposite, spilled Brennan’s secrets across the rug and driven a deeper wedge between them.
I never should have agreed to this in the first place.
“I don’t like being put in this position.
I don’t want to do something like this for you again, Arla.
It’s not my place. You should have confronted Brennan directly. ”
She scoffs. “As if he would have told me the truth.”
I can’t argue with her logic, but still, there’s something slippery to her thinking. I stand and start to drag my purse strap over my shoulder. I should leave, go back to the office. I’m long past a normal lunch hour now. “So we’re clear. I’m done spying.”
She watches me, a shiftiness behind her gaze, as if I can see her thoughts.
I’m about to ask for her help with the ATM footage Jessica has requested when her hand darts out, palm up, waiting for me to take it. “Come. I have a reward for you.”
It feels dirty, like blood money. For so many reasons, I shouldn’t. I tell myself it’s a gift I don’t want.
Sensing my hesitation, she purrs, “I promise it will have been worth it. Thank you for displacing your own principles for me, Jude. I had to know.”
It doesn’t land as a compliment. It hits like a slap, open-handed and loose. Displacing your principles … Is that what I did? “About Brennan?”
“About you. About where your loyalties lie and how much I can trust you. And now I do. Now I know you’re ready.” She extends her hand further, urging me to accept.
My mouth parts, a word cut off in the back of my throat, escaping in a wheeze. I didn’t do this to prove myself to her. This was never supposed to be about me. This was about Brennan, about the safety of the group. Why is everything a test with Arla?
But she doesn’t wait for me to find my tongue. She breezes past me and simply grabs my hand, pulling me the way a tugboat drags a barge through the harbor. “I know you want to see inside. You’ve been so patient.”
My ears prickle. “Inside?”
We are already whizzing into the elevator as Arla jabs at buttons. “My room. In the basement.”
She has me and she knows it. My rational mind is screaming at me to run, to get out before I’m dug in deeper, to forget all this and go on living a safe, obscure life.
But then there is the other side of me, the bit I’ve tried to bury under monotony and routine, utility and drudgery.
The hunger. The need. The burn. And she, I am beginning to realize, is so much stronger.
She’s taking over. Like my mother. Like my grandmother. She will consume me.
I can’t refuse.
The elevator ding vibrates through my bones and the doors glide open, the smells of the club pouring in like heat, thick and heavy.
We cut across it, through the door in the wall and down the storage room until the entrance to the basement greets us.
Arla unlocks it swiftly, all grease and speed now, eager to get me into her deepest, darkest confidence.
We practically slide down the stairs and then we are there, standing in the shadows of the basement, the brick and mortar looming before us, a column of secrets.
A soft light pulses between them, emanating from the mortar itself or maybe from the fine, hairlike cracks webbing the facade.
But it’s enough that Arla doesn’t reach for the lights and switch them on.
It’s enough that I see what I thought I’d seen before—the writing, a tight and slanting script, sparking along the mortar, sealing one brick to another.
Arla whispers in my ear, “You see them, don’t you? The words.”
I’m afraid to answer. Even from here I can see it’s not any language I know.
“Only those who face the dark can see them. He wrought them into the mortar between every brick before he laid it.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see.” Arla squeezes my hand in hers. “Are you ready, Judeth?”
“Yes.” My voice is breathy, a sweet nothing.
“Once I show you this, you can never go back. Do you understand? Everything will change. The whole world will reorder itself. You will be more than the rest of them—the sightless masses who shamble about, thinking they’re in control when they’re nothing. Do you know why?”
I hear Anneli in her voice— Chaos, Miss Cole … It’s everywhere. A force larger and far more powerful than us … I shake my head, unable to utter a word, rapt from the sight of the glowing bricks, the delicately traced characters between them.
“Because they don’t have this,” she says. She tugs on my hand until I pull my eyes away and meet hers. “Because they haven’t seen. But you will.”
“What is it?” I manage to ask, the poster reeling through my mind in flashes—a fin, a horn, a set of sharp teeth.
She steps forward, and I am a fish in her net, caught in the wake of her orbit, swimming to my fate. At the door she stops. “Tell me you’re ready. I meant what I said: There’s no going back.”
“I—I think I am,” I stammer, furious with myself for letting doubt slice the edge off my words.
I’ve wanted to get inside this room since the moment I laid eyes on it, but Anneli’s story is draining my courage.
To gaze upon the immortal is a transgression in every language.
To see beyond your horizon. To reach for what you were never made or meant to hold.
I tell myself they are not the same, we are not the same, her on the glacier before the mountain, me in the basement before this door.
But I can’t shake the sense of an overlap in our timelines.
“That’s not good enough, Jude. You have to know.” Arla’s eyes probe mine.
“How?” It is a squeak. Pitiful.
She exhales. “Because … you would give up everything for it.”
I nod. I can’t go back now. My life is a series of events laid over one another on the screen of my memory—standing on the steps of Solidago for the first time, hearing the voice and the bees, finding the candle in my grandmother’s room, the mantel weeping in the night, Dara’s stricken face, my grandfather’s bulging hands, my mother’s cold eyes.
The house like a torch in the darkness. The earth slamming into me.
Then waking up, starting over, dragging through each day.
The attorney. Roger. The miscarriage. Everything a toneless, tedious, endless spectrum of gray.
And then … this. Levi. Arla. The Fathom. The magic. The burn.
I know now what I want. What I’ve always wanted and denied myself, just past the horizon Anneli mentioned and the fire my mother warned me of. And it was never death. It was simply this—transcendence.
An extraordinary life.
It waits behind this door.
And I would give up everything to claim it.
“I—I would,” I tell Arla. “I will.”
“Good,” she says, crouching down. “Because that is what it will cost.”
With one hand on the lock, she produces a key from thin air and sinks it in with a click. A moment later, the lock swings wide and the latch is in her hand, turning. The bolt slides back, a mighty clang resounding through the cavernous room, and the little door at last cracks open.