CHAPTER 55 Wildfire
CHAPTER 55
Wildfire
H ot rage bubbled in my chest.
I should have known the angel walking on the ice wasn’t Bryn. Even now, I was still falling for the Inquitate illusions, and Tye had spun such a beautiful rendition of the Azekiel that I’d missed my one chance to get revenge.
The cold, burning heat of it still tingled in the knuckles that had collided with Levi’s face, because for a moment, there’d been a glimmer of something other. My Mark? It didn’t make sense.
I grunted as Tye muscled me up the second floor of the farmhouse, his sweaty grip hot on my wrist. Water damage stained the peeling chicken wallpaper, like a wet teabag had been squeezed against it. Each step up brought musty, hot air, and the reek of thick mildew.
How had I been reading my sister’s killer’s journal for months and not known? The triplets. Levi. It’d all been right there, in front of my Bryn-crossed eyes. And I’d missed it because I’d been distracted by him, by Sahn, by the lure of Ruhaven. Of what I hoped I could have been.
I pretended to trip before Tye hauled me against him with one arm, my heels smacking into the stairs.
“I told ya you’re too far in the Gate,” he warned, his breath at my ear a mix of beer and sweat. “One little illusion of your Azekiel and ya forget everythin’. Ya know why? ‘Cause you’re a love struck fool, Roe.”
Yes, but not enough, apparently, to choose Bryn.
“You’re lucky I got to ya before Carmen,” Tye added when I remained mute.
He’d known. This whole time, he’d known—about Levi, the Inquitate, Carmen, all of it. How far back did it all go? Were Bryn and James in danger, even now?
I grabbed for the railing before Tye ripped my hand away. “No ya don’t. Up ya go.”
I tried to summon whatever power I’d so briefly had and make him pay for every lie, every misleading trail he’d sent me down, and mostly, for how he’d stood by and let Levi destroy the best thing in my life.
That rage burned so hot and deep, I wondered how that brief, impossible power didn’t burst from me in flames.
“Consider yourself lucky I called the dogs off Stornoway.”
My chest cracked with fear. “You—you—”
“Easy, girl,” Tye cooed, like he wasn’t dragging my body up the last flight. “Ya play things right with me and that don’t gotta change.”
It took everything I had to tamp the fear down, to shove my sick and sweaty nerves into that box I’d kept so tight. To not wonder why the thread between us had gone completely quiet. Because Bryn was everything I hadn’t been, could never be, everything Ruhaven deserved. Like Willow had been.
We crested the top landing with Tye holding my arm against my back, a parody of how he’d threatened me that day in the gate lodge.
“Why?” I asked, swallowing the ice in my throat. “Why did you let them kill her? She didn’t do anything, wouldn’t have done anything to you. She wanted to be a musician, wanted to—”
“Ya think I had any part in hurtin’, Willow?” Tye booted open an iron door and shoved me inside. “What do ya fuckin’ take me for?”
I’d taken him for someone I could trust. Instead, he’d betrayed not only me but James, too, in every way possible.
“But you knew about Willow, and…”
I stared, wide-eyed, at the attic.
A mattress sprawled in stark relief under a barred window, the flower bedspread wilted and torn. Plastic insulation dangled from an unfinished ceiling, and water damage soaked a dirty trail into a bathroom with one toilet, a shower. At the peak of the angled room, I could just stand without ducking.
“Carmen and Levi, they thought Willow was you, just like James did. So they needed to stop ya before you could hurt us. But I ain’t never held with Carmen’s choices on that.”
When Tye prodded me in the back, I dragged my feet over plywood boards. There was a metal card table with a vase, two chairs, and a faded painting of a lake basin hung above a lit fireplace with a single bucket of dried wood. Beside the bed, the window wallowed in a gray haze that led to dead witch’s broom trees.
The closest neighbor, an abandoned tree fort, was coated with a layer of snow. On the opposite bank, the farmhouse Bryn had urged me to escape to was dark. There was no smoke from its chimney, nor hazy light glowing through the windows.
My knees shook, the adrenaline having long since nose-dived, and being knocked unconscious had my body hanging to the unsteady cliff of oblivion.
“Roe.”
I sank onto the bed. Springs squealed, my breath fogged into cold mist.
“Roe.”
I lifted my gaze to Tye’s, and for a moment, he looked as foreign as the room. His face was a study in contrasts, the left side licked with yellow flame, the right as blue as the frozen snow outside. Faint wrinkles fanned out from the corners of his eyes, but his mouth was tight and drawn.
He loosened a button of his collar. “I didn’t want it to be this way,” he said to the crackling logs. “It’s why I did what I could to keep ya from the Fall, from being manipulated by Stornoway into makin’ it.”
Except Bryn had wanted me to stay here. Despite everything, he’d chosen the electrician from L’Ardoise.
And I’d chosen Willow.
“What am I doing here, Tye?”
He closed the door, locked it. “Ya know what the problem is with you Ruhaven?” he said, strolling to the fireplace, hands in his pockets. “Ya only think of yourselves. Me, me, me. And if it’s not about you or Stornoway, it’s Willow.”
If I’d thought of her more, I wouldn’t be in this situation.
Tye grabbed a log from the basket, breaking it into kindling over his knee. Crack. Crack-crack.
And if I’d spent more time researching the Drachaut, looking at those triplets, I’d have answers for her. If, just for once, I could be good at something, at this, I wouldn’t have put James in danger too. Wouldn’t have Tye threatening to send Levi after Bryn.
“Tell me what Levi did to Willow.” My voice was cold, unrecognizable even to me, and I gripped the lamp beside the bed.
Tye’s eyes flashed with impatience. “Darlin’, if I gotta hear that woman’s goddamn name one more time, I ain’t gonna be happy.”
Fuck. Him.
I exploded off the bed.
“ Goddamn it! ” Tye ducked the vase’s whistling dive before it smashed into the wall, the handle rolling on a separate path from the body. “You’re lucky I’m too much of a gentleman to throw that back at ya. Ya deserve it, let me tell ya.”
“Then throw it.” Better to start a fight here, now, and maybe I’d be able to escape in the mayhem.
“Look who finally found her spine,” Tye mocked, lifting a smoke to his lips and crossing his legs. “But there’s a lot ya don’t know, Roe, darlin’. Like how Stornoway and Kazie have been meetin’ in the Gate, their past lives colludin’ over just how to get yours to make the original crossin’ over here. It’s why all three of us ended up gettin’ reborn in the Ledger. Fuckin’ Stornoway, always up to his tricks, ain’t he?”
My head whipped to Tye. Bryn had known why we’d been reborn here? No, not just known, Tye was saying that Bryn— Sahn— had wanted Nereida to be in that Ledger. For what purpose? Why? And why would Bryn keep that from me? Never mind what role Kazie might have played.
We are really going to have a conversation when I’m back, I said down the thread to Bryn, though the words landed in emptiness. If I’m back.
“That’s right, darlin’. They both knew the end of the memories was gettin’ closer, knew that when Kazie passed through, ya only had days. So now, here’s what’s gonna happen,” Tye said with a short nod. “You’re gonna stay in this room ‘til Bryn, you, and me, all hear the call together—like a nice little happy family. When two weeks pass after that and ya miss the Fall, I’ll let ya go.”
My heart sunk. I wouldn’t make it to Ruhaven for Willow, would never make the Fall, would never bring her back.
“I’ll give ya this, Roe, ya really had Stornoway over a barrel,” Tye continued as my thoughts spun and escape plans hatched. “I was nearly whistlin’ at how ya left him in that room. He tries to Romeo himself at the Gate, then he tosses his very, very attractive—sorry, Roe—fiancée away just for your mere existence. And when all he asks is that ya stay here with him, live a good long life just like I’m tryin’ to do, you throw your delusions of Willow in his face. I bet he’d like to strangle her dead memory just as much as I would myself.”
I pressed a hand to my gut. “You’ve been lying to me, saying he was controlling, crazy, that he was—”
Tye waved me off. “Well yeah, Roe, and that ain’t a lie either. He did want ya to make the Fall. How was I gonna know he changed his mind?”
“You told me he was a liar.” But it’s you .
Tye kicked the bucket of wood. “He is a liar. He lied to ya about being your mate, he lied to ya about the bond, he lied to ya about just how far he’d go to get Nereida back. You ain’t never seen him for what he was. Like that day in the woods—it wasn’t him that saved ya, it was me .”
I squeezed the edge of the windowsill. “You’re delusional.”
“I was keeping the Drachaut away from ya for months. But that day, Levi went around my back, he was lookin’ for Bryn to finish what he started back in L’Ardoise. But then he found you and thought he’d take care of ya for me.”
Why? Just because I was a triplet?
Tye paced up and down the small attic, needing to hunch to avoid clipping his head on the beams. He ran his fingers over the insulation behind clear plastic, stabbing through the odd holes. “I used my own Inquitate to get rid of him, and I didn’t much like doing it, Roe. I hate those things.” He curled his lip.
Yet Tye didn’t have any problem with summoning his Inquitate on the ice out there.
“Do ya know how much I had to fight with Carmen and Levi to leave ya alone? They were worried you’d make the Fall. I had to convince ‘em otherwise, so I kept a close eye on ya, just in case. And when I couldn’t, I trusted Stornoway to do so. Then you go and piss him off so much he must have been too far away not to feel the Inquitate right away.”
I had. I’d belittled him, insulted him, humiliated him. Called him names it made me blush to think of.
“And Oslo?” I asked, throat rough. “Was that Levi too?”
Tye’s fingers tightened on an overhead beam. “Carmen. Like I said, they wanted to get rid of any risk to me. So when you went to Norway, she saw an opportunity. Then I find ya kept it from me. I coulda throttled ya. You’re goddamn lucky Stornoway never left your side again.”
What risk was I to Tye? What risk was Bryn? Why did it matter if we made the Fall?
“Fuck, Roe,” he cursed when I asked. “The same thing that happened when ya made the crossin’ here. You’re gonna pull Bryn and me. You’d go on and steal my life—my very fine life—right out from under my nose. I might be on the beach drinkin’ a beer one day and suddenly find myself disappearin’, my soul getting’ torn through worlds to be reborn as someone I don’t know and don’t care to know. You’d do that to me.”
Then this wasn’t about me going back for Willow, it was about Tye going back. That’s why they’d killed the triplets. To prevent any of us from pulling them through, ending their lives here. And Willow had been killed for the threat they thought she represented, that she’d return to Naruka one day and make the Fall, dragging Tye with her.
The overhead bulb quivered in a circle. “It’s a damn stupid idea anyway,” Tye added. “Throwing your life away here. You’re killin’ yourself and just not callin’ it what it is.”
If that’s how he felt, then why had he brought me to Naruka to begin with? He could have left me in L’Ardoise, or easier, had the Inquitate kill me like Willow.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Tye warned under his breath. “I never killed no one. And I ain’t gonna apologize for wantin’ to stay in a world you despise so much.”
My breath wheezed through my nostrils as if all the oxygen up here had been sucked into the fireplace. “I had to make that choice,” I said through my teeth. “For Willow . I don’t want to leave Bryn—”
Tye slammed his hand on the card table. “I told ya, I don’t want to hear her name no more. Your twin’s life ain’t worth more than my own. And if ya think Stornoway’s gonna come save ya here, you’re wrong. If he really wants ya and not Nereida, he’ll let me take care of his dirty work by keepin’ ya here. If he doesn’t, if he wants Nereida back, then he’ll show up, ‘cause he’ll never go back without her.” Tye hefted the door. “This ain’t such a bad deal, Roe. And one day? You’re gonna thank me. ‘Cause I knew what you didn’t—Ruhaven? She ain’t no fuckin’ dream.”
He slammed the door.