Chapter 11 #2
The hard lines around his eyes softened. He blinked several times, then turned his back to me and stepped further into the greenhouse. “I can see that you believe me to be rude. My apologies. I am… unaccustomed to introducing myself. My name is Nin.”
I’d heard a lot of surnames from a lot of different countries back in New York City. But I’d never heard this one. “Okay, see? That wasn’t hard, was it? Mr. Nin—”
He chuckled without humor. “I’m no mister. Nin is my personal name. We don’t have surnames like you. I am the only Nin, so there is no need for clarification.”
“You’re telling me that you don’t have a surname? A family name?”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I do have an epithet, Nin the Sorrowful.”
Nin the Sorrowful…? Was this a joke? He wasn’t laughing.
I licked dry lips and asked, “We?”
“Pardon?” He turned around to face me again, one dark brow lifted.
“You said ‘We don’t have surnames like you.’ ”
“Yes.”
“Who are ‘we’?”
“People like me.”
My heart was beating so fast, I worried he could tell, and that doubled my anxiety. I struggled to keep my expression neutral. “The first time I saw you, I told my mother that you were late for your own wedding and your bride would be upset.”
He blinked in surprise, and the barest hint of humor crossed his eyes. “And what did she say?”
“She said that marriage was bondage, and that all brides end up weeping when they realize that they are merely property. And that love isn’t real—not the love that’s sold in fairy tales, anyway.”
“Is that so…?” His eyes flicked back and forth over mine, like he was trying to see inside my head.
I supposed he couldn’t, because he eventually turned around and continued walking through the greenhouse beneath lush tropical branches.
That’s when I noticed the protrusion in his jacket.
Something on his shoulder, the one that he held close to his body.
And when he walked through a patch of sunlight, I saw something else.
Bloodstains. They covered the left side of his jacket, but the black wool hid it.
“You’re hurt, sir,” I called out. “I’m a nurse. I know these things. What happened to your shoulder?”
He stopped walking but didn’t turn around. “The master was bored.”
My heartbeat went wild, and my breath came fast. “Voss hurt you? I’m very confused, sir. He summoned you, but then he got bored and hurt you?”
“He trapped me. There. Satisfied?” he snapped. His chest heaved as he strained to get his emotions in check.
I wanted to point out the fault in his argument: He was walking around freely right now.
But then I remembered all the bizarre writing on the crypt ceiling and the slithering sensation I’d felt standing near it.
Not to mention the book in Voss’s quarters, A Master Magician’s Book of Traps and Bindings.
Maybe there was a rational explanation for all this.
But not everything in this world had one.
“You don’t belong here,” I mumbled as this really, truly dawned on me and my mind began to accept it as truth. “You aren’t a ghost, but you aren’t human, either. You drove Bethany’s poor spirit away, she was so frightened by your words… You don’t belong here.”
After a long, slow exhale, he admitted, “I do, and I don’t. My freedom has been snatched away.”
“Because you’ve been summoned here—lured here? And trapped?” I didn’t even fully understand what I was saying. “Why?”
His mouth opened, but he hesitated, like he’d thought better of what he’d intended to tell me. His eyes were bright with pain and uncertainty, and for a moment, he looked like a little boy who’d lost his parents and couldn’t find his way home.
He looked broken. And lonely.
But the moment passed, and he blinked it away. “The whole, nasty thing will make no sense to you, and I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you got pulled into all this.”
“Me? I’m in a nursing training program in New York City. The master is sick, and—”
“The only human who’s ever been able to see me is suddenly brought to the place where I’ve been trapped? Tell me that’s coincidence, go on.”
My breathing quickened. “You mean… me? I’m the only human who’s ever—” I tried again, squinting harder at his face. “Who are you, Nin? What are you?”
“I’m no one.”
“Bollocks!”
“I don’t share my family’s power. I’m nothing. I’m…” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. What is important is that we are on borrowed time. The master can’t catnap forever, and then I will return to my chains.”
So it was true? Nin left his chains while the master was asleep? I certainly didn’t know how, nor did I know why Voss would need to even chain him in the first place.
Sister Helen always said that when you didn’t know how to diagnose a patient’s bigger problems, you should concentrate on the things you did know.
I knew this boy was in pain. And it was my job to fix what was wrong.
“You’re hurt,” I told him. “Please let me examine your shoulder.”
He rotated his body until the hurt shoulder was out of my sight. “It’s no use. Did you not hear a thing I was just saying? Could you be any more stubborn?”
“Me?” I snorted. “You’re the stubborn one. Just let me examine your arm. What are you afraid of? Little ol’ me?”
“I do not fear you, Molly O’Rinn,” he said most seriously.
A muted laugh escaped my lips. He was broad-chested and well over six feet tall, and I was barely above five. He could crush me like a bug. Of course he didn’t fear me.
“My words amuse you?” he said, tilting his head as if he were trying hard to understand how this could be true.
“No…” I shook my head. “It just makes me wonder. What do you fear?”
He considered the question for several moments. “I fear what will happen to you in the coming weeks, Molly O’Rinn.”
Paranoia tightened my chest.
I wanted to ask him what he meant. What he thought would happen to me, exactly. But he continued walking, forcing me to follow him around an ornamental tree that bore fruit in the greenhouse’s unseasonable warmth.
“Hey!” I called out, catching snatches of Nin’s dark figure through tropical leaves as I hurried to catch up with him, but his legs were much longer than mine.
“Listen to me, Molly O’Rinn,” his voice said somewhere ahead of me.
“The master of the house is asleep right now, and that is the only reason I’m able to leave the crypt.
But I cannot go beyond the aegis. You cannot either.
And feel glad about that, because I fear that others like me will be making their moves to get inside here.
If you see anyone outside the aegis, do not engage with them.
They will try to deceive you at any cost.”
The man in the top hat? The poacher? Was that who he meant?
Others like me.
I pushed that thought away and concentrated on his hurt shoulder. “Please allow me to examine you. I can help.”
“Goodbye, Molly O’Rinn, daughter of Cat O’Rinn,” his deep voice boomed from the greenery.
“WAIT!” I cried, racing to catch him, knocking over a fern.
But as I raced to the very end of the greenhouse, I found myself standing alone.
He was already gone.