Chapter 23 #2
Arla spits a laugh. “I’m not a prison warden, Jude. Everyone’s free to come and go. You do it all the time.” Her eye finds mine, a warning implicit in them.
“Did he say where he was going?” Without word on where Brennan is, I don’t know how I’ll find Aaron.
She sighs. “Oh, can’t we talk about something more pleasant, for pity’s sake? Fuck Brennan and his whiny demands, his never-ending questions and paranoia. The boy was never quite right, if you ask me. We don’t need him anyway. He’s expendable.”
Expendable. The word hangs heavy in the air between us. I swallow and avoid glancing at the ring. Aaron, where the fuck are you? What have I gotten you into? “We don’t need Brennan?”
“Not anymore,” she says, smiling, sucking on a secret like it’s hard candy.
“I’m celebrating, by the way.” She tips her head and the dragon rings zings from the ottoman to her open hand.
She slides it over her ring finger as a sultry voice begins to play from hidden speakers.
It takes a second for me to recognize the melody and lyrics of Nat King Cole’s “Fascination.”
She pours a second glass of wine and glides toward me, holding it out. “Drink with me.”
I take the glass, sniffing it as she waltzes around the living room, the fine hairs at the nape of my neck twitching.
Like Cadence, I can taste something foul and slippery in the air.
It unleashes a stampede in my stomach, a swishing, stomping garble of nausea and emotions.
Carefully, I walk to the table and set the wineglass down. “What are you celebrating?”
She moves lithely across the floor as if dancing with an invisible partner. “It’s a new day, kitten. I’ve been given a gift—one that can never be taken away.”
I narrow my eyes. Arla’s words are always fraught with meaning she expects you not to recognize until it’s too late. “What gift?”
If Brennan’s no longer here, then she can’t be siphoning his telekinetic power. So, either she’s lying, or something else is going on.
“Mm?” Her eyes roll back in her head. She’s limber, bordering on sloppy. I think she’s drunk. She must have already gone through another bottle of wine before starting on this one, maybe more.
“What gift, Arla?” The speakers make a ghastly noise as I bring her music to a screeching halt, killing the power to the stereo.
She turns and faces me, agitation written all over her face. “The final ingredient, kitten.”
My mouth falls open. “You translated Rudzitin’s rite.” I don’t have to ask. I know by the superior glint in her eye, the looseness of her movements.
“All that I need of it, anyway,” she says.
“Which isn’t much, as it turns out. Quite boorish really.
Full of tedious details that only someone without our talents would think were necessary—all Zabriel this and Cursiel that.
Ugh, so many names. And the geometry! Really, whoever needed so many hexagrams to do anything?
” She shakes her head. “Bindings, as it turns out, are deceptively simple. They all follow the same recipe, more or less. Even one of this magnitude. Rudzitin just missed a critical ingredient in his pigment. Re-create it the right way, and I can simply trace over what’s already written. ”
“Bindings?” I could have guessed as much—had, really.
The Fathom is bound to her well, her room, her condition.
But hearing the word brings the candle I pulled from my grandmother’s fireplace flickering to mind—i-n-d.
As in bind. I was a fool not to see it sooner.
It was never a love spell. It was a binding, the lashing of a heartless man to her side.
Forever. But what was my grandmother doing all those years later?
Was she, like Arla, reenacting her first rite, attempting to make the spell hold, the man stay?
Did she doom us all time and time again when she could have simply let him go?
“What is it?” I ask, my voice giving a little. I clear my throat. “The final ingredient.”
“An eye for an eye, kitten,” she says, laughing. “One answer for another.” She takes a large gulp of wine. “What was he like, your father?”
“Is that your question?” I’m not sure where she’s leading me, but it’s clearly not somewhere I expected.
She frowns. “No. Mine was a ballbuster who thought of nothing but money. Every man in our county feared him. He was petty and vengeful and focused like a laser. Impossible to please as it turns out.”
I gathered enough from Brennan to assume as much, and I don’t want her to realize I know about what happened to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Are you? Don’t answer that. That’s not my question either.” Walking over to a console, she sets her wineglass down. “Here’s my question: Did you do it?”
“Do what?” She can’t mean what I think she means.
“We’re more alike than you might imagine, you and I. We share something the rest of them don’t. Do you know what that is?”
Murder, the voice whispers inside me.
“The stain of powerful men,” she answers herself.
“It’s like a birthmark across your soul.
It changes who you become.” She looks down, her face stricken with emotion I’m not used to seeing on it.
When she meets my eyes again, the steel is back, holding her together. “I won’t ever be that weak again.”
Her insistence on keeping the Fathom is making a jaded kind of sense. I can understand the desire to be invulnerable. But I know it’s folly.
“So,” she says, regrouping, “I’ll ask you again. Did you do it? Did you kill your grandfather, your mother, all those other people?”
“Not on purpose,” I say quietly. I remind myself what Levi said about my grandfather, his responsibility for what happened. I spread it over my guilt like medicine.
She almost looks pleased. “Sure, kitten,” she says. “Sure.”
“Your turn,” I say. “What’s the final ingredient?”
Arla walks to the table, pours herself more wine, and crosses one arm over her midsection. “Blood.”
The dead snake dropping to the vanity, the red smear etched into the candle. This I should have known. “Blood.” Brennan and Aaron come to mind and my heart sickens inside me.
“Don’t go getting any ideas though. You haven’t asked the right question. You haven’t asked what kind of blood. Turns out there are four types of blood when it comes to magic. Binding spells require a specific one. You have to know it to be successful.”
“You mean like O positive or B negative, that type?” What if this could be part of how I free the Fathom? Maybe it calls for the same things as the binding but in reverse, a way of canceling out the energy of what was done before.
Her smile says I’m an idiot and an innocent, that I better be glad I have her to school me in the ways of world. “Ah-ah-ah,” she says. “Eye for an eye. Quid pro quo. You got your answer.”
“So ask me another question,” I insist, but, like Brennan said, she’s keeping this card close to her chest.
“I’m all out of questions at the moment, I’m afraid,” she says, finishing off her wine and setting the empty glass down so hard it cracks the stem.
“You’re drunk,” I tell her, seeing a chance to get her out of the way so I can look for the journal, for any sign of where Aaron or Brennan might be. “We should get you to bed. You need to lie down, sleep this off.”
I make a move toward her bedroom door to open it, but she dashes ahead of me, throwing herself against it, spine rigid, arms braced across the frame. “No.”
Overhead, the lights begin to flicker and the water suddenly comes on in the sink so forcefully it blows the aerator across the kitchen, chipping the marble countertop. The fireplace ignites in blue flames that beat against the glass, threatening to explode.
I raise my hands in surrender. “What are you hiding, Arla? Is it Rudzitin’s journal?”
“The journal?” She scoffs. “You and Brennan. What is your obsession with that journal? You want to see it so bad? Fine.” She lifts off the door, marches across the room, and removes a framed Maxfield Parrish print of a woman in a twilight garden from the wall.
Behind it, a safe is tucked. Arla leans toward the lock, and I step lithely to the right, hoping to see what numbers she keys in.
I make out a three, a seven, and a nine simply because of their position on the grid.
But she shifts her weight as she punches in the last one, and I miss it.
The door springs open and I step left again as she pulls out a book wrapped in old linen.
Unwrapping it many times, she holds out a narrow, leather-bound book, smaller than I expected, that tucks into a flap on the front almost like an envelope.
She opens it and flips the pages beneath my nose.
They smell of mold and tannins, the writing so tightly coiled across each page that I fear it might take months if not years to decipher.
Whatever answers it holds, I hope we can reach them fast enough to stop what Arla is planning.
I wouldn’t stand a chance without Levi’s help.
“There. Happy?” she snaps before tossing it with the wrappings back into the safe and slamming the door.
“Will you let me see her before I go?” I ask.
She knows I’m talking about the Fathom and seems amused. “Once wasn’t enough for you?”
“I have questions,” I tell her. It’s not entirely untrue. I want to know why the magic feels so different now, why my flames can be as easily retracted as they are projected. Could I have done that all along? If I hadn’t run, could I have saved my family?
“Don’t we all,” she muses, crossing her arms. “Go home, Jude,” she says, appearing tired again. “I have work to do.”
She couldn’t have slept, looking like that. What kept her up all night, had her drinking first thing in the morning?
“Come back tonight if you want to see her so badly,” she says, tossing me a bone. “I’ll make sure you get your turn.”
Frustrated that I haven’t gotten the journal or come any closer to knowing where Brennan and Aaron are, I’m reluctant to go.
But it’s clear I won’t get any further with her right now, and I at least know where the journal is.
If I come back tonight and bring Levi, one of us can sneak up to retrieve it while the other keeps Arla busy.
I sigh and start for the door but pause and look back at her. “Whatever happened to him—Rudzitin? After he trapped the Fathom?”
I wonder if she knows about the missing people, if he talked about them in his journal, if they had the kind of blood she’s looking for.
I wonder if Rudzitin realized his mistake too late and was trying to shore up his work all along.
I wonder if, in the end, the Fathom got to him or if it was someone else.
Arla’s eyes glint with knowledge, but her expression is a vault. “I really couldn’t say.”