Chapter Six Lysander
Cyrus is waiting for Lysander when he arrives back at his room.
He’s sprawled across the armchair by the window, a smear of blood darkening his chin. Remnants of his most recent feed. Lysander doesn’t see him there until the door swings shut. Immediately, he tugs it back open.
“Get out.”
Cyrus doesn’t move. Not a muscle.
“You let the watchdog live,” he says.
“He made me a compelling offer.”
“That’s not the reason. If you killed him, she wouldn’t forgive you.”
His room is sparsely decorated. A bed. A trunk.
A table. It lacks character, the way hotel rooms do.
It was never meant to be anything more than temporary lodging for out-of-town tourists—a scenic stopover for travelers hoping to catch a ride on the old cog railway.
There’s a view outside the window, but he doesn’t see it.
The glass has been blacked out. Sunlight gathers on the other side of the paint.
A tantalizing bit of brilliance in a room dark as pitch.
“When I want your opinion,” says Lysander, “I’ll ask.”
Cyrus’s laugh is dry. “That’s the benefit of having me as your right hand. You don’t have to ask. I anticipate your needs, and I take care of them. It’s why you keep me around.”
Lysander follows his lieutenant’s gaze toward the rounded tea table before the hearth. It’s bare, save a single absinthe glass, a shallow pool of blood slowly coagulating within.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” asks Cyrus. “You think I haven’t seen how little you’re taking from her each time?”
“I take enough.”
“You’re rationing blood like a peasant, when you should be feasting like a king. Do you think Keeling lives like this? I’ll answer that for you—he doesn’t. He has his pick of veins, and you’re here surviving on the same old scraps.”
Lysander props a shoulder against the high wooden post of his bed. He feels unduly exhausted, like he’s gone twelve rounds in a boxing ring.
“This is starting to feel like a lecture.”
“It is a lecture. You want to send a strong message to Keeling? You want to let him know you’re not his whipping boy? Start by getting rid of the watchdog. Make it public. Bloody. Show everyone what happens to trespassers when they—”
“He’s staying,” says Lysander. “The soldier.”
Cyrus blinks a slow, owlish blink. “Here? At Mercy Ridge?”
“For now.”
“Great.” Cyrus unfolds himself slowly from the chair, squaring off against Lysander across the cluttered dark. “Okay, no, that’s fine, it’s just—are you insane ?”
“Careful,” warns Lysander.
“He’s wood watch. His job—his sole job, by the way—is to exterminate anything that comes out of the woods. And who lives in the woods? I do. I live in the woods.”
“He’s the sunshine sniper,” adds Lysander.
Cyrus drops back against the bedpost, bewildered. “That’s not a point in his favor. You do see that, right? Have you given any thought at all to what kind of message this sends to the rest of the crew? To Keeling ?”
Lysander doesn’t waste his time answering Cyrus’s questions. “Put Boyce on the watchdog,” he says instead. “I want Thorley monitored at all times. He doesn’t even take a piss alone.”
“Boyce is a baby.”
“Boyce is a Mercy Boy. He’ll do what he’s told. And so will you.”
He can feel Cyrus biting back his criticism. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Send Sully to the eastern outpost. Have Nkosi put eyes on the Parker house. Anyone goes in or out, I want to hear about it right away.”
Cyrus sucks air through his teeth. “I assume that means Shea’s staying, too.”
“She is. She’s up in the presidential wing. I put Choi outside her room. They were in the same year at Hornbeam, so they have history. I don’t want her going anywhere without an escort.”
Lit by a single bar of light from the hall, Cyrus looks as skeptical as Lysander has ever seen him.
“So that’s it, then? You’re so wrapped around her finger that you’ll give her whatever she asks for?
Free food and accommodation here at Mercy Ridge.
A private suite for her boyfriend. I bet she didn’t even need to open a vein. ”
There’s a tic in Lysander’s left eye. He stifles the urge to rub at it. “It’s temporary. They’re only staying until the revel.”
“The revel you’re not attending.”
“Did I say that? I’ve changed my mind.”
“You mean she changed your mind.”
A loaded silence follows. “Actually, Asher Thorley did,” quips Lysander, because now he wants to get under Cyrus’s skin. To irritate him, the way he’s been irritated all evening.
He thinks of finding Cyrus dying in a shallow roadside ditch. He’d been bleeding out in a patch of dead nettle, his voice a scrape against the wind: Help. Please help me.
They’d hobbled together to the spring at the Gravewood’s center—drank from its waters, cold and transmutative.
While dawn approached, they huddled on the frozen bank and let the Rot take hold—let the forest knit Cyrus back together.
It was the beginning of a brotherhood. A blood bond, forged in deep winter.
Lysander learned early on in life that every beginning has an end.
He has no problem cutting the cord if it comes down to it.
“Since you don’t seem to need me for anything,” says Cyrus, “I guess I’ll see myself out.”
“I wish you would.”
With a muttered “asshole , ” Cyrus stalks toward the door. He doesn’t make it far. Lysander cuffs him hard by the shoulder, stopping him dead in his tracks.
“There’s bruising on her throat.”
“Are you surprised? She’s always struck me as the kind of girl who goes looking for trouble. Guess she found some.”
“Guess she did.” Lysander smiles his most chilling smile—a menacing sneer he learned from his father. “Mark her like that again, and I’ll kill you.”
He lets go, and Cyrus staggers forward. His stare is closed-off, but Lysander can smell the fear on him. He knows he’s replaceable.
“You kill me, and you’ll be giving Keeling exactly what he wants.”
“ Anticipate my needs , then. Don’t put me in a position where I’m forced to choose.”
Cyrus tugs the rumpled leather of his jacket flat. “If you’re not careful, your little obsession with Shea Parker is going to destroy everything you’ve built. And that’s not an opinion, Lysander, that’s a fact.”
He slams the door shut behind him when he goes. Lysander stares at the place where he’d been, blinking away swimmers.
His eyes catch on the glass of absinthe.
A single starburst of light illuminates the blood within, making it glitter like a ruby.
He ought to bolt it down. Swallow it, quick, before it clots.
Cyrus is right—he’s starving. It isn’t enough, to survive on sporadic swallows of blood.
To take what little Shea offers, when she sees fit to offer it.
To be careful with her, while he desiccates a little more each passing day.
He ought to drink it, but he doesn’t. He is, as always, a creature of impulsivity.
At the mercy of his most intrusive thoughts.
Crossing the room in three swift steps, he picks up the glass and hefts it hard at the wall over the fireplace.
It shatters, sending blood running along the wallpaper in thin rivers of red.
It doesn’t make him feel better, although he hadn’t expected it to. With a sigh, he sinks onto the trunk at the foot of his bed. He feels like a petulant child. He feels several eons old. The paradox of it threatens to tear him asunder.
When the door opens again, the light finds him there, his head in his hands.
“The door was shut for a reason,” he says to the floor.
He’s met with silence. Slowly, he lifts his head and peers out through the messy curtain of his hair.
Viola stands in the open door, frail as ever.
Mercy Ridge’s resident matron is wraithlike as a ghost. Lysander’s own personal nightmare.
She wears her raven-black hair pulled back in a chignon, exposing the angry lattice of scars disfiguring her moon-pale face.
One eye is strangely off-color, its pupil blown. The other is webbed in white glaucoma.
He should be used to the sight of her by now.
“I didn’t send for you.”
Her smile is patient. Placating. As if he’s still a child. “There’s a girl in my wing.”
“It’s impermanent,” he assures her, rising to his feet. Everything in him feels ground to dust. The smell of blood clings to the wall. Even his teeth ache. “She’ll be gone within the week. Leave her alone.”
“She’s pretty.”
“She isn’t.” The lie sticks in his throat. “How would you know, anyway?”
“I peeked out my door when she went past. She’s human.”
Like me comes the unspoken afterthought.
“She is.”
“Do you like her?”
The question is as unexpected as it is ridiculous. He fixes Viola in a look.
“You’re angry.” Her smile quivers. “Don’t be angry.”
“Don’t ask ridiculous questions, and I won’t be.”
“It’s just that I want you to find someone.
Someone you care about. I don’t like thinking of you alone.
” She wrings her hands together like she’s washing them clean.
She’d scrub them raw, if she could. She has before.
He used to tape oven mitts to her wrists, back when they first came north. He thinks maybe he should start again.
Her knuckles are knotted, cheeks concave.
He tries not to notice the subtle little ways she’s changed.
The way it feels like time is taking her from him in pieces.
As though one day, he’ll wake and find her transformed into a laurel tree, like some sort of Hellenistic nymph.
Destroying herself to escape the long arm of Zeus.
“I’m not alone,” he tells her, forcing a smile. “I have you.”
“You never come to see me.”
The pang of guilt in his chest is impossible to ignore. He does his best. “That’s because every time I do, you beat me at chess.”
“You are a very sore loser,” she says fondly.
“I am.”
“Just like your father.”