Chapter 11
When I was seventeen, I joined a cult.
It didn’t last long.
I’d left home a month before, hoping to protect my parents from the Nomad. I figured that if he was hunting me, I’d rather him be hunting me on the other side of the world.
It was the loneliness that drove me into the arms of the cult. Not because I was looking for the community they offered. It was their belief in reincarnation that drew me in.
I’d first had the thought when I was thirteen. The dreams felt so real, after all. More like memories than dreams. Looking back, I recognize that the theory was my mind’s way of clinging to a hope that the Nomad wouldn’t come for me. That I could live out my simple life in peace.
Still. Alone at seventeen and missing my parents desperately, hope had made me an easy target for Stefan. He’d been sitting by the fireplace of a dingy inn I was staying at, surrounded by a circle of travelers. He’d been asking them about their dreams, ascribing them to memories of past lives.
I’d been skeptical, but I’d followed him back to his farm, nonetheless. I missed my parents so much it ached. I don’t think I was ever quite convinced, but I stayed for a few weeks anyway, hoping something Stefan would say would prove his theory.
One night, he got drunk at a tavern and confessed to the whole place that he’d made it all up, and that he had a bunch of idiots tending his farm and keeping food on his table.
Apparently, cult leadership was much preferred to hard labor.
All of this to say, I might have been wrong about Stefan, but I turn out to be right about Phoenix and Venus.
It takes two days, but they show up at the entrance to the Gathers, rowing a rather beat-up boat that looks as if it did not originally belong to them but that no one will be missing.
Venus complains about not being picked up at the shore.
The Nomad assembles us in his office, and after the obligatory “Oh, now you want my help?” speech, actual planning begins.
This mostly consists of Phoenix drawing up a blueprint of Vulcan’s manor for the Nomad, while I wait to the side and Venus explores the room.
While Phoenix is busy sketching, I allow my wings to stretch out.
Not only had the Nomad ordered one of his servants to find me some tunics and trousers, he’d also had her alter them to accommodate my wings.
Slits on the back of my tunic allow my wings to expand behind me.
He’d even provided a binder for when we leave the ship and I need to conceal them, but for now, my muscles welcome the freedom.
As I stretch out, my gaze wanders across the Nomad’s desk, searching for clues as to who this man really is, but his desk is mostly topped with papers. The only other objects on the desk are a small bell for summoning the servants, a lamp, and a sealing stamp.
I glance up at the Nomad, who is focused on peppering Phoenix with clarifying questions about her drawing, then slip the seal off the table. I turn it over in my palm, and my heart skips a beat at the shape of the seal.
It’s an urn. The same shape I’d seen on the sketch of my face that day I’d gone with my father to the butcher. The same shape on the back of Wendy’s neck, the night I’d escaped Neverland with Michael and she’d shown me the mark of her bargain.
I’d been so furious with her then, but only because anger is such an easier emotion to sit in than fear.
Why the Nomad chose this for his seal, I’ve no idea. Perhaps because it symbolizes death, and that’s a good association in his line of work?
Still—I run my fingers over the seal—it’s an odd symbol.
I sense a pair of eyes on me and look up to find the Nomad staring. Quickly, I slip the seal back onto the desk and turn my attention to Venus.
She’s wandering around his office, avoiding sitting, just like I did my first time in here. She runs her hands over the spines of the books on his bookcase, though less in wonder and more in contempt.
“Ugh, Noctorious? Really?” she asks, plucking a scarlet volume with embossed golden roses on the cover, thorns snaking on the vines.
“You’re not fond of poetry?” asks the Nomad, and then, as a person as pretentious as him would, he proceeds to quote, unironically, “To look but not see, to touch but not feel, Is this love, or is this real?”
I snort, and though it’s silent, the Nomad catches it out of the corner of his vision.
“Not you too,” he says, grasping his heart. “Uncultured barbarians, all of you.”
It’s a tad too trite for my tastes, I write.
Venus, unable to see my note from the other side of the room, says, “He could be the best poet in the world and I’d still hate him.”
“Vulcan loved Noctorious,” explains Phoenix.
“Loved?” Venus scoffs. “More like idolized. You know, in Vulcan’s way.”
I get the impression Vulcan was the type to kill his idols out of envy.
“Did he make you read out of this to him when he couldn’t sleep?” Venus says, holding up the book and looking at Phoenix.
“No, it was always Venscre for me,” says Phoenix.
“Makes sense. Venscre wasn’t nearly as obsessed with themes of numbness,” says Venus.
The Nomad and I exchange a confused look.
Under her breath, Phoenix whispers, “Venus suffered an illness as a child that left her without feeling in her left hand. Vulcan liked to find poetry he thought she could relate to.”
Venus makes a noise in her throat, then flips through the book erratically.
“That is a first edition, you know,” says the Nomad.
Venus rolls her eyes, then places the book back on the shelf.
“Well, now that we’ve had that culturally enlightening chat, the two of you are dismissed,” says the Nomad, gesturing to Phoenix and Venus.
I take it that means the Nomad is satisfied with Phoenix’s blueprints. I expect the other two women to argue, but Venus seems indifferent, and Phoenix is probably tired of enduring the Nomad’s critiques for the day, because they both leave eagerly and without question.
Don’t we need them in here if you’re going to explain your plans? I write.
“Why would we need them in here?” he asks. “You’re going in alone.”
What do you mean I’m going in alone? I write furiously onto the parchment.
The Nomad makes a show of dragging the paper toward himself, as if he can’t read it upside down from across the table. “Were you not listening earlier?” he asks.
When I scowl at him, he flashes me a teasing smile—as if he’s enjoying baiting me, and enjoying even more that I know he’s enjoying it.
“I can’t go near the place,” he says. “Remember there’s a bounty on my head here.”
Here? I write. I thought there was a bounty on your head everywhere.
“Yes, well…” He leans back in his chair. “This one is slightly more substantial. Vulcan was rather wealthy, even by noblemen’s standards. I can’t simply walk into Kahlia.”
He put a postmortem bounty on whoever his murderer might be? I write. Sounds like something I should do.
“There’s quite an enormous fund in a bank nearby,” he goes on, “ready for anyone who hands over my head. Besides, this place is a haven for bounty hunters and all other sorts of criminals.” He says criminals as if he’s not one. “I’d be dead the moment I stepped off the ship,” he finishes.
What about Phoenix and Venus? I write. Can’t they go with me?
“Them as well,” he says. “Vulcan’s will stated they were to be killed at the time of his death.
I know what you’re thinking—and yes, regardless of whether or not it was one of them who murdered him.
” When I raise a brow in question, he adds, “Apparently he wanted them for himself only. Even after he was dead.”
Disgust coats the back of my throat. I’m not sure I want to go anywhere near this man’s place of residence, even if he is dead. He seems like the type of person whose tainted soul would leave behind an odor.
Surely there’s someone you can send with me, I write, feeling somewhat panicky now.
“You don’t strike me as the type to need company. Not with that independent spirit of yours,” he says.
Yes, well, what if I need to talk? I write, annoyed—both that he doesn’t recognize this as a problem and that, even steeped in his ignorance, he’s still managing to point it out.
“Exactly,” he says. “I need to know that you can manage yourself before we try to steal from the Sister.”
I thought that was the whole point of seeing if I could escape your ship, I write.
“Technically, you didn’t escape my ship,” he says. “And therein lies the problem. I said you were the key to getting what I need, not that you required no practice. Besides, I thought you’d be more confident than this.”
He has the gall to almost sound disappointed in me.
Confident. It’s not that I’m weak or constantly doubting myself. I simply know when an idea reeks of failure. And I’m not one to put myself in a situation where I’ll likely get caught.
Still, as I stare down the Nomad, I realize I have little choice.