Chapter 33
Dawn was a cruel creature.
The lights in my room were still doused when I opened my eyes, but I knew what hour it was. That was what came of a lifelong habit. And once my consciousness drifted to the surface, the worries it found there ensured I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep.
Why had Kallen left?
My thoughts weren’t any clearer this morning. Someone had been spying on us, which made my skin crawl, but Kallen’s reaction had gone far beyond that. He’d looked like he was afraid of me.
I sighed and sat up, rubbing my bleary eyes. Then I shuffled to the bathroom to start preparing for the day, because there would be no sorting through that mystery until I was more alert.
I heard Carys moving around in my room while I took a bath, and she was waiting with a cup of herbal tea when I emerged. “This should help wake you up,” the dryad said as she handed it over. Her expression was sympathetic. “Meeting ran late?”
She must have heard me come in last night. I nodded, not trusting myself to invent any lies about that particular “meeting.”
I sipped the tea as she combed and oiled my wet hair. It was bitter, but it did make me feel better. Once the moisture was mostly blotted out of my curls, Carys bound them in a scarf to continue drying, then moved to the wardrobe to select a dress. “What events do you have today?”
“A library party in a few hours.” I made a face. “Not that I know what that means.” Trust Imogen to turn reading into a spectacle. “And then the masquerade tonight.”
She nodded, then selected a short silk dress with a tight bodice and flaring skirt for the first event.
The fabric shimmered between crimson and a red so dark it was nearly black, and the sharp collar went all the way up to my chin.
As she tied the laces at the back, I looked at myself in the mirror, grateful for the coverage—not because I could still see the marks Kallen had sucked into my neck, but because I could still feel them.
My body was alive with the memory of his.
“Have you seen Anya this morning?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Triana checked on her an hour ago. She was sleeping well.”
Relief mixed with fresh guilt. She’d needed the rest, but I’d also forced it on her—though her body wouldn’t have been able to continue much longer without breaking down.
Once Carys finished doing my hair and applying my makeup, I went to Anya’s room. I opened the door a crack, expecting to see her curled up in her nest of blankets.
She wasn’t there.
Worry arrowed through me. I closed my eyes, mentally reaching for the connection with the house. The web quivered as I sent a question into it. Where is Anya?
There was a vibration at the edge of my awareness, somewhere to the left. I started walking, following it to the servants’ staircase, then down. The Underfae already at work looked startled to see me. They bowed as I passed, and again I felt the pinch of no longer fitting into my old life.
The mystical tug guided me to the level below the kitchens, and I emerged from the stairwell into a corridor lined with rough blocks of stone.
Dust carpeted the floor, and the air smelled stale.
Blood House might be coming to life, but the vast majority of it still lay quiet and abandoned.
I stepped over a sluggish stream of blood and noticed a set of footprints in the dust.
Torches sputtered weakly to life to mark my passing, and the snap of flame struggled against the heavy silence.
Arched entranceways opened on either side, and I recognized where I was—the abandoned grain stores.
The grain had long since rotted or been reabsorbed into the house’s magic, and the vaulted rooms stood empty.
The house and the footprints guided me into one of those chambers.
“Anya?” I called out, unease clinging to me like spiderwebs.
My voice bounced back. It felt like I’d shouted in a tomb. I could imagine all the servants who had once flitted back and forth here, milling grain into flour and bringing supplies to the kitchens above.
I continued into a corridor lined with storage closets.
At the end of the hallway was a heavy-looking door with a silver wolf’s head snarling from the lintel.
It was cracked open, and the hinges creaked when I pushed, revealing a grimy stairwell spiraling down. The footprints descended those stairs.
“Anya?” I called again as I followed those phantom tracks. The air was musty with decay, but there was something else in the scent that clung to my nostrils unsettlingly.
The staircase ended at a door. I stepped through and found myself in another vast, vaulted chamber. This one wasn’t empty, though.
It was piled high with bones.
I stared at the white mounds, heart in my throat.
Some of them reached nearly to the ceiling, and though they hadn’t been arranged in an orderly manner, there was a logic to the way the skeletons lay.
Overlapping femurs, arms sprawled akimbo, and everything slumping as time dragged its heavy hand over them.
The bodies had been thrown one atop the other until the piles grew too tall, and then they must have been dropped from above by creatures with wings.
I reached for my Blood power, but the bones didn’t feel like much when my magic brushed them. Just an echo of something long gone.
There weren’t hundreds of skeletons in here. There were thousands. And branching across the floor between them were narrow tributaries of blood, whispering liquidly.
Anya stood before one of the heaps, her silhouette stark against the white.
“Anya,” I said, softer this time.
She flinched and turned to face me. “Kenna? What are you doing here?”
Her voice was hoarse, but at least she sounded lucid. The dim torchlight emphasized the hungry hollows of her face, and the scar on her cheek made me think of a coiling snake.
A shiver passed over me. I wanted to get her out of this place—this tomb —as quickly as possible. “I was trying to find you.”
Anya tipped her head back, looking at the top of the nearest pyramid. “I found this place a few days after we got here,” she said. “I come here sometimes after my nightmares. This is all of them, isn’t it? Everyone Osric killed?”
“It must be,” I said, throat thick. Their blood ran endlessly through the walls, kept liquid and restless thanks to the house’s magic, but their bones had been here all along. “The soldiers must have dragged them down here before sealing the house off.”
“There’s a carving by the door.”
I turned to look. Scratched into the stone were two simple words: I’M SORRY.
My skin prickled. Who had carved that? Some reluctant soldier, regretting their part in the massacre?
When I looked back at Anya, she held a skull in her hands. I hurried forward, wanting to rip it away from her. “Anya, put that down.”
She stared at the skull, chest rising and falling with slow breaths. “This one died from a blow to the head,” she said, sounding calmer than she had in days. She turned to show me the jagged hole. “See?”
Anya belonged in sun-warmed kitchens and fields of flowers, not dusty rooms full of corpses. “We should go back upstairs.”
“There are others who were cut with swords,” she said, ignoring me. “I wonder if they were killed by the soldiers, or if he made them do it to each other. I wonder what he made them see.”
I hadn’t considered that. But she was right—Osric would have made the Blood faeries turn on one another. He’d enjoyed that sort of sadism.
I felt cold and sick. I’d known the carnage had happened on a shocking scale, but seeing them all piled here together, their bones marked with the cuts and fractures of battle, was worse than I could have imagined.
Anya let out a shuddering breath and closed her eyes. “How did he get into the house? I want to know the details.”
“He’s gone, Anya. It won’t happen again.”
“He’s not gone,” she snarled. She shifted the skull to rest in one hand, then touched her own forehead with two fingers. “I need to know how he got in.”
I didn’t understand, but I’d tell her whatever she needed to hear. “The secret back entrances aren’t protected the same way the front entrances are. When Princess Cordelia tried to help everyone escape, he killed them and forced his way inside. But it’s blocked off now. No one can get in.”
Anya swayed slightly, still rubbing her forehead. “Who has his body?”
“Osric’s?” My brows rose. “Illusion House, I imagine.”
“I want it,” she said, voice growing savage. “I want to crack him open to see what’s inside. I want to sleep next to his bones. I want to take them with me everywhere so I always know exactly where he is.”
Chills raced over me. Desperately worried, I closed the last distance between us. I reached out to gently touch her shoulder, then dropped my hand before making contact. “Let’s go upstairs. Want to soak in the hot springs? Or maybe we can listen to music—”
Anya’s eyes flew open. “You got to kill him,” she spat. “I didn’t. I don’t want to soak in a tub or listen to some sweet fucking song while you’re off playing the heroine.”
“That’s not—”
“I don’t want to be this anymore, Kenna.” Her voice cracked, and she tossed the skull back onto the pile before wrapping her arms around her waist, eyes sheened with tears. “I don’t want to be who I was yesterday, and I don’t want him in my head anymore. I don’t want to be like them.”
“Like who?”
She jerked her head towards the piles of the dead. “His victims.”
My chest hurt horribly. I finally understood, though. Anya came here after her nightmares because she felt some kinship with these scarred remains. But unlike them, she was still living, still breathing. She couldn’t kill Osric…but maybe she could take power back some other way.
A revelation came to me, the answer to the question of how to protect her when she refused to accept my concern.
I’d been coddling her—offering warm milk to help her sleep, asking if she was all right when the answer was obvious, shoving presents at her like that would somehow fix this horrible wound.
She’d always been the soft one of the two of us, so I’d thought she needed soft things.
Anya didn’t want to be coddled, though. She wanted to rip something apart.
“Do you want to learn to fight?” I asked her. “We have a whole armory. You can have your own weapons.”
She looked at me, eyes still wet. Her lips trembled…and she nodded.
My answering smile was wobbly. This wasn’t the same Anya I’d known.
None of us were the same, though. Time wore over us like a river, smoothing some areas and sharpening others, twisting us into shapes we’d never imagined.
“All right,” I said. “I have some books about fighting techniques, and I can show you what I’ve been learning.
There are some former soldiers in the house who can probably help, too.
” Though she would have to choose between her hatred of faeries and her desire to get stronger.
Anya’s eyes were drying. Her arms loosened and fell to her sides. “I want that,” she breathed. “I want to know how to hurt them.”
“Only our enemies,” I told her, feeling the prick of anxiety. “Not the people here, not like yesterday.”
“I know.” Regret washed over her face. “Yesterday doesn’t feel real. I woke up today, and I couldn’t understand it.”
“Because you slept.” She probably wouldn’t like this next part, but it was a mandatory condition for her training. “You have to keep sleeping, even if it scares you. You have to stop drinking so much. But if you can do that, you can have whatever weapons you want, and I’ll teach you how to kill.”
Once upon a time, Anya would have been horrified at the idea of hurting anyone. Now she looked like a drowning person who had been thrown a rope. “I can do it,” she said. “I’ll do anything if it means I won’t be that helpless again.”
An electric energy hummed through my veins.
Now that I knew what Anya wanted, I could help her seize it.
Who cared if she looked as excited about murder as she once had about pretty dresses or village festivals?
Whatever got her from this moment to the next was what we needed to do.
Whatever made her feel better, stronger, and more powerful. “You won’t be. I promise.”
Anya’s hazel eyes were so bright I could imagine a fire burning behind them.
The flames of renewed purpose. She had finally found something to look forward to, so she would have it, no matter the cost. And when I raided the brothel, I would hack apart the king’s bed and drag the mattress here for target practice.
Maybe she would still decide to return to Tumbledown in a few days. We hadn’t had that conversation yet. But maybe…maybe she would choose to stay with me instead.
“When do we start?” she asked.
I smiled, throat tight. “One more night of sleep, and then we can begin first thing in the morning.”