CHAPTER 61 LYRA
LYRA
Lyra watched as Grayson stared down the intruder Gigi had described as kind of deadly.
“Now would be a good time to tell me who you really are.” Grayson didn’t sharpen the words, and they sounded all the more commanding for it.
“I’m just a girl who was once sent to keep an eye on a wayward Hawthorne boy for a time.
” Nora said the phrase just a girl the way Grayson had said that he was passable at playing the piano, and Lyra couldn’t help thinking that the name Nora didn’t suit her.
At all. It seemed too plain, too common, too soft, and this Nora was none of those things.
“It was just one night.” Grayson was all composure.
Nora looked past Grayson to Lyra. “What he really means is that it was just one kiss.”
Lyra let that roll off her back. Any person who could refer to a kiss with Grayson Hawthorne as just anything clearly hadn’t been kissed the way Lyra had. And fortunately, Lyra Kane was not the jealous type.
“Alice sent you.” Lyra kept her own tone even, daring Nora to tell her she was wrong. “Then and now.”
“Until she sent me to Harvard, I had no idea the Woman in White was Alice Hawthorne.” Nora’s gaze found its way back to Grayson. “Perhaps she wanted me to read between those lines, or perhaps she was angling for a different sort of outcome.”
“And now?” Jameson demanded, surging forward. “Why did Alice send you here? What the hell does she want?”
“What makes you think she sent me at all?” Nora replied.
Lyra half expected Jameson to explode, but he didn’t.
“Go home, dear boy.” Wild, raw intensity poured off Jameson with those whispered words. “A north wind blows. Alice sent me back to Hawthorne House. Zella did the same, and the north wind—I take it that’s you?”
“I am,” Nora replied, “from the north.”
“Why are you here?” Grayson’s voice went low and silky, rendering his question as more of a threat. “Why would Alice send you here? Where is she? Where’s Avery?”
“I don’t know.” Nora stared at Grayson like she was staring down a gun and had a taste for bullets.
“If your grandmother did send me to Hawthorne House, she did not do so directly. They call it the art of the cascade—a nudge here, a nudge there, like trickles of water cascading downward, combining and building speed, again and again, until someday, weeks or months or years down the line, the roar of the falls is powerful enough to drown out everything else. If Alice did arrange for me to be here, she did so without me realizing it, and your guess is as good as mine as to why.”
Nora’s weight shifted subtly, so subtly that Lyra only picked up on it because balance was a specialty of hers.
“Perhaps,” Nora continued calmly, “I was sent here for the purpose of testing the security precautions on Hawthorne House and the surrounding estate. You’re doubtlessly already shoring up those weak links I found, aren’t you… Mr. Oren?”
Oren stepped into the room, his gun trained on their guest.
Nora didn’t so much as glance back at him. “Or perhaps,” she said, pivoting to walk slowly toward the whiteboards, “I was nudged into coming here so that I would see this—or something like it.”
“Stop where you are,” Oren ordered.
Nora did not stop. “Lower the gun, Mr. Oren. We both know I’m far more dangerous than I look, but by my count, there are no fewer than eight trained fighters in this room. Unless I’m mistaken, the cowboy’s armed. The one with claw mark tattoos as well—and, I would wager, the woman in the pearls.”
Zara, Lyra thought. Zara was armed? Nash and Slate were somewhat less surprising, but—
Nora came to a stop in front of the board with Alice’s poem on it. Lyra felt the other girl’s gaze came to rest on the array of dots beneath the poem.
Lyra took an automatic step toward the board, earning herself a warning look from Grayson—and Nash, for that matter, who’d long-since put himself between Libby and the threat.
Lyra heeded their warning and kept her distance from Nora, but that didn’t stop her from speaking. “What is it?” Lyra asked. “What do you see on that board that we don’t?”
Nora didn’t reply, but someone else did.
“Constellations.” Knox Landry issued that word as little more than a grunt. Lyra turned to look at him, and Alisa did her one better and cut across the room to Knox.
“You’ll want to elaborate on that,” Alisa told Knox.
“Will I, Ortega?” After a long, long moment spent staring Alisa down, Knox made his way to the board, picked up a marker, and circled the dots.
Not dots, Lyra realized suddenly. Stars.
Next to it, Knox wrote four letters: L-Y-R-A. “The constellation Lyra,” he said, sounding disgruntled to be saying anything at all.
Lie-ra.
The constellation Lie-ra.
“And…” Knox muttered.
“Do go on,” Gigi told him, gesturing as she did.
Knox snorted and circled two other words on the boards: Monoceros… and Aquila.
Constellations.
“You want to know the real kicker?” Knox stalked over to the timeline, to the bit Gigi had added about the Crucible in 1951. “The brightest star in the constellation Lyra? It’s called Vega.”