Chapter Five Quell
Five
Quell
My toushana rages in me with each step. I hold Mom’s key chain tight in my fist. There is no explanation for Octos to have this, unless…The thought lodges in my throat, urging each foot faster until I’m running through the forest. He will answer for this.
When I reach the edge of the forest, I can see the safe house on the hillcrest in the distance. With scraps of wood nailed to the windows, it’s a fortress in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farming fields. Knox’s van and Willam’s truck are parked side by side, and Heeler, their mutt, is tethered to a tree, yapping. I creep close to the house. The side door creaks open and I hide, pressing into the whitewashed siding. Octos and Willam make a beeline for the truck. The two of them lug crates of grains and frozen bags of meat inside the house.
“Attaboy.” Knox hangs by the open door and tosses Heeler something before taking a stern glance around. I lean into my hiding place, easing out a slow breath. Heeler sniffs the bone, then barks harder in my direction. Knox grabs the last bag of groceries from the truck.
“Where’s the girl?” she asks Octos as they head inside.
“She was outside in the field, reading,” Octos says, covering for me. My jaw ticks.
Knox glances at the faint glimmer of sun. Once the locks on the house are closed for the night, no one’s allowed in until morning.
Shadows can’t hide when Sola Sfenti’s watching , Knox had told me once before.
Shadows…Draguns , she meant.
Though no one has outright told me, safe houses seem to be for people on the run from the Order. I watch as Octos casually answers more of Knox’s questions, his hand tucked in his pocket. But none of his covering for me does anything to calm the burning anger simmering beneath my skin. I turn Mom’s key chain in my hand. How long has he had this? Toushana tugs in my chest; the cold bleeds into my core, spreading through my limbs, and wraps all over me like an icy blanket. He’s going to tell me why he has this. Or I will make him.
When they disappear inside, I walk to the front door and twist the knob as I was taught. It resists. Locked. Always locked. Then I twist it five more times in snappy succession to signal those inside that I’m not an intruder. I race around the back to the kitchen door. On the way, I make sure to kick up some dirt on my pants’ legs and bottom so it appears I was actually doing what Octos said. Lace curtains flutter before the door swings open.
“Octos said you were reading. Where’s your book?” Knox asks, holding the door open just so, lodged against the wheelchair she always sits in. Her legs, amputated at the knee, are folded underneath her.
“I was reading the clouds…not a book.” I slip Mom’s key chain into my pocket. “Got all dusty, lying out there.” I smile.
“You shouldn’t be out there alone.” She peers past me before widening the door just enough that I can slip inside. Knox runs things here. Nothing happens without her say. Even her trips to get groceries are meticulously planned, never the same market twice in a row. Sometimes she and Willam, her main helper around here, will drive an entire day to find a place to shop. And they always buy so much , enough for that month and plenty extra to store.
Inside, Knox corners me with her wheelchair. The pendant she always wears around her neck gleams. Her kinky white hair is in thick knots down her back. She studies me with glacial blue eyes, stark against her lush, dark skin. Her gaze snags on my heart. Always on my heart.
The first night I showed up, I said exactly what Octos told me to say: that I was a friend of his and had nowhere else to go. I said nothing of my magic. And she didn’t ask. She locked me in a room with a small bed and sat outside the door. For ten days and ten nights. I was fed, given water. No one was unkind. Eventually, Willam came and laid out the rules of the house. Gradually, I was allowed freedom to roam during certain hours. I was assigned chores, and by the one-month mark, when Octos finally showed up, I was as free as the dozen or so others living in the house. This safe house is actually one of the few places in my life I’ve felt safe.
I clear my throat and she moves out of the way. The kitchen swells with bodies helping to unload the groceries. Knox watches me, so I pitch in, but I can’t get Octos’s betrayal out of my head. I put away a sack of potatoes and slam the cabinet door too hard. Everyone in the kitchen freezes, watching me.
“Sorry.” I shove the last bag of dry beans into a trapdoor in the back of the top cabinet and leave. Down the hall are two small sitting rooms, one bedroom, and a bath.
Octos is nowhere in sight.
I climb the stairs, each footstep heavier than the one before it. There are four rooms upstairs and an attic with a slew of beds. I stop on the second landing and poke my head into the first bedroom at the top of the stairs.
“Octos?”
“He’s in there.” Dimara, the only other in the house about my age, exits the upstairs bath. She wrinkles her nose. “That smell, girl.” Mirth plays on her lips. “You’ve got to work on that smell.”
I shift awkwardly as we pass each other. Being out for weeks of training doesn’t really allow for daily showers. She points to the study at the end of the hall, which is more like a very large, doorless closet with a bunch of bookshelves and a chair.
Octos is reading a book by lamplight.
“Quell, I think I found—”
My hand is at his throat, magic rolling through me in an icy wave. Black coils of mist bleed from my fingers, twisting around his neck. I dangle Mom’s key chain in front of him, and his eyes widen.
“I can explain,” he chokes out. “Quell, please…”
How could he possibly explain this in any way other than outright betrayal? At best he’s a liar. I press harder, and he groans. Then, as my magic grazes his chin, something odd happens. His jaw shifts, jutting out. His cheeks sink in, defining his cheekbones. The trickle of black at my fingers rises, blowing across his entire face, and Octos’s beady dark eyes and deep-set brows morph into someone else. My stomach drops. It feels like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, about to be pushed off.
Show me, I tell my magic, fanning my toushana across all of him in one smooth motion. His whole body shortens. His stringy hair darkens to jet black. It rises above his shoulders while long bangs sprout across his forehead. My heart knocks in my chest, but I can’t look away. The brown in his eyes lightens ever so slightly as the rest of his disguise dissolves.
“Who are you?” I stare. Then my gut twists as I recognize that familiar, determined stare. I stumble backward and he frees himself from my grip. “You’re… him .”
The guy from the gas station in New Orleans. His face had changed into the person standing in front of me. The same guy I saw at the Tidwell Ball in a disagreement with those other Draguns.
“You’re—the Dragun who has been hunting me.” Black dents the edges of my vision. I can’t breathe.
“I can explain everything.” His mouth moves, but I don’t hear the words. Cold tangles in my chest, then cinches in a knot. I force out a tight breath. Then another. And another. Remembering I’m not the scared girl on the run from him anymore. My magic unleashes like a whip. My bones ache at the rush of toushana, but I thrust it against him even harder. Magic slams into his body, knocking him backward. He hits the shelves, sending books tumbling everywhere. He drops to the floor, cowering.
“Quell, please.” A fear like I’ve never seen glazes his eyes.
“Who. Are. You?”
“My name—my name is Yagrin. Dragun, twelfth of my blood, House of Perl.” His chin falls.
Everyone I trust betrays me.
“Quell, please, we can’t do this here.” His eyes dart to the stairs just past me. The safe house. Knox. As I do the same, my eyes cut past a mirror; the girl in its reflection is seething, swallowed in a black fog of rage. A girl I don’t recognize. I step back. My throbbing hand blackens, deepening the bruises that were already there. I draw in a long breath, my toushana retreats, and the fog in the tiny office space clears.
Inside, my toushana bites at my bones.
Strike, it says.
I hook my hands together. “Talk. Fast.”
“I did not hurt Rhea, I promise you.”
“Don’t say her name like you knew her.”
His throat bobs. “When I cornered you—early summer, before you ran to your grandmother’s—at that motel, remember?”
“The first time I learned you were a liar. Yes.”
“I took your mother from the motel. She was kept for questioning, that’s protocol. My order from Mother was to bring you in, not her. So I knew she’d be questioned and let go.”
“You took her to Beaulah Perl’s House?”
“I did. Mother calls in favors from time to time, under the Dragunhead’s nose. And this was one of them.”
“Go on.”
“When I found you at the Tavern, you were different than what I expected.”
I raise my chin.
“So I took on my oldest persona to get to know more about the target Mother wanted me to bring in. Octos was a very close friend of mine. My only friend, really, for a long time. We met as kids. He’s dead now.” Yagrin swallows, and I don’t know if I should be disgusted or moved that he plays dress-up as his dead best friend. “Anyway, you were in the Order, an heiress from a high family, but not willing to cheat your way to success. It struck me with an odd sense of hope, and I’m not a person who’s very hopeful. Not much longer after that, you found me again. You saw me—well, Octos—a grimy Order reject, as someone worthy of trust. That’s when I decided I’d stop hunting you for Mother. The Order needs people like you, Quell.”
I shift on my feet.
“I returned to House Perl and visited your mom, who was still there, to tell her I wasn’t going to hunt you anymore. I visited her more than once and we talked a lot. Eventually, she opened up about how you both used to live. How she has no love for the Order either.” His eyes dart away. “I’m ashamed to admit that I worried it might have been a trap. That Mother convinced her to lure me into admitting how much I hated the Order so she can finally have me killed like I know she wants. So I didn’t go back for a long time. When I came to my senses, I went back to see your mother, and I promised to do all I could to protect your life.”
“She was there,” I mutter, more to myself than him. “For how long? Abby said she saw her in Chicago months ago. And my mother wrote me a letter.”
“That was me.” He sighs. “Watch. Please don’t be afraid.” He slides his hand down the bridge of his nose, and Yagrin’s face shifts with my mother’s dark eyes and warm brown skin.
“No!” Words stick in my throat. I steady myself on the furniture beside me as I stare at a lie of my mother’s face. It’s not her. I snatch at his face, my toushana ripping the mask away. “ Never take her face again! Never. ”
He throws up his hands. “I’m sorry. I just wanted you to see. That was me in Chicago wearing her persona. I delivered the letters to you, too.”
I can’t breathe. The world spins. When was the last time anyone saw my mom?
“Your mother gave me a bit of her blood. That’s how Anatomer magic works, for most of us, anyway.”
I clench my fists. “You could have killed her and took it.”
“Your mother agreed to let me impersonate her to help you. She thought the safest place for you was to keep you at Chateau Soleil. Look me in my eyes, Quell. You know I’m not lying.”
“You were wrong,” I say. “About me being safe at my grandmother’s.”
“I didn’t know all Darragh Marionne was doing. Your mother didn’t either.”
“Is my mother still at House Perl?”
“I went back the day before your Cotillion and she was gone. I was given no information. My House, the Draguns, my own family, they all keep me at arm’s length. Quell, I hate to say this, but she’s probably d—”
I shake my head. No. I try to picture Mom broken and battered, the life gone from her body, but the pieces don’t come together. She is a survivor. She’s the one who taught me how to stick to the shadows, how to fool those with their eyes wide open. How to not exist in order to exist. “Did you see her body with your own eyes?”
“No. But Beaulah discards everything that isn’t of use to her.”
“What facts do you know ? ”
“Quell.” He steps toward me. “I looked for her name on the Sphere, where all the members’ names who have bound are. It wasn’t there.”
My mother never bound to magic. Binding requires plunging a honed magical dagger into the heart, meshing blood and magic together forever. It absorbs the whole blade. But my mother gave me her dagger before we separated, which meant she never completed Third Rite.
“I also checked the Book of Names, where inductees’ names go once they’re anointed. Not there either.”
She may have never been anointed. I don’t know that she was ever inducted. I just know that she had a fancy dagger.
“You would say anything to keep me from killing you.”
Yagrin sighs. “You’re wasting your time hoping for any other outcome. Your mother is—”
I hold up a hand, thrashing with shadows.
Yagrin stiffens against the shelf at his back. “Quell, the Order is the enemy. Not me. Look how they’ve ostracized you. Look how they force the people who don’t fit their rules, like Knox and Willam, to live. If we work together and find the Sphere, we could destroy it all. Take their power from them. Then no one has to live this way anymore.”
The last few months suddenly make so much sense. “You’ve been… using me,” I snap, charging at him. He chokes on the darkness bleeding from my hands. The bruising on my fingers stretches across my skin, up my wrists, clawing its way up my arms. Rage burns through me, colder than my magic has ever felt.
“Easy, Quell,” he wheezes, and I can taste the fear on his breath. “Try to calm. Breathe.”
“Shut up. How do you expect me to believe a word you say?”
“I could have killed you in an instant these last months.” His eyes deaden, and I see someone in him that I’ve only seen in the boy I used to love. A killer. “I’ve lied to you, but I’ve never hurt you. The Order ruined my life.” His voice cracks. For a moment Yagrin is far, far away. Sadness sinks his shoulders. “I hate them all.” He looks away. “Except my brother,” he mutters under his breath. “I won’t apologize for any of it. This is what the Order deserves. And if you don’t agree with that, you haven’t seen how monstrous it is yet.” Yagrin slides to the floor, hugging his knees. “If I don’t find it, she died for nothing. Everything I’ve put up with was for nothing. You can track the Sphere better and faster than anyone. Please help me. Help us all.”
He says us, but he means him . If Knox and Willam saw my condition as freedom for themselves, Yagrin never would have lied about why we came in the first place.
“You’re so good at manipulating people, you’ve forgotten how to tell the truth.”
My mother is not dead. She may be held against her will somewhere, or running deep off the grid, but she is alive. I know it in my gut.
Someone clears their throat.
Knox.
Shit.
“Dinner’s ready.” Her glare travels from Yagrin, to me, and back to him.
I walk to the stairs, unsure how much Knox heard. Yagrin follows. At the foot of the stairs, the front door is open. Willam stands there; his gaze moves past me, to Yagrin behind me—and I realize the open door is for him.
“Your business is yours, but we can’t live with someone we don’t trust. Be on your way, sir,” Willam says to Yagrin.
“Come with me, please, Quell,” Yagrin pleads. Willam tosses his bag at him. I expect him to beg them to let him explain himself. But he picks it up quickly, suddenly in a hurry.
“Your choice, girl.” Willam indicates my bag nearby on the floor as well. Knox folds her arms. A crowd of curious eyes watch from the dining area, silent.
I can leave too, if I want. They won’t stop me. Or punish me for lying about why we were here. A clean break.
I grab the door, and Yagrin’s gaze widens in anticipation.