Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
GWENNA
“We’re leaving.”
I almost burst into tears again as I stumble over the threshold to Morgan’s room.
“What?” The straw of Morgan’s bejeweled black tumbler falls out of her mouth. “Oh, goddess. Come in.”
She sweeps me the rest of the way through the door and I will myself, force myself to get a grip, stand up straight and strip the tears from my eyes and take a deep breath through my nose. Door closed, Morgan circles around me, peering into my face. “What do you mean? What happened?”
Another deep breath. I accept her offer to sit, sinking into her plush little couch for what might be the last time, and just thinking that makes my chest ache.
I blink away whatever’s threatening to burst out of me and stare—not at Morgan, her mascara immaculate and her hair waving over her shoulder in a low ponytail, but across the room, into space, at the little plume of scented air curling out of her diffuser.
“We’re leaving,” I say again, and explain it all as best I can: that the Consistory knows Luther’s not dead, that it’s presumably only a matter of time before they come here and, at the very least, insist on their payday from his estate, that we need to stay one step ahead of them in case they—
“—resort to alternative means of persuasion?” Morgan says.
“Fuckers.” She sets her cup on the coffee table.
“This is organized crime with a cross on the front. I knew they were like this. All the weird shit they had those guys do in France, in the name of training? I bet they’d literally break kneecaps.
” Seeing my face, she hits the brakes. “Oh. Gwenna.”
She pulls me in for a hug. I sniff.
“I don’t want to run away,” I mumble into her.
“I bet.” Morgan pulls back. “I don’t want you to run away, either.”
I push back. “I want to fix things,” I say, my voice plaintive and pathetic. “I really wanted to…” I glance around the room, at the windows, the too-early afternoon dark already starting to roll in. I swallow hard. “How’s Elena?”
Morgan’s expression flattens. “It’s…bad,” she says.
“I brought her some salves that took down a lot of the inflammation, but.” She breathes out, and for the first time I notice how tired she looks.
“We’re dealing with something that’s beyond.
It’s not regular contagious, but…Elena’s not the only one. ”
My stomach falls through the floor.
“I shouldn’t be going,” I say. “We shouldn’t be going. I should stay here, and study more, and try to figure out—”
Morgan takes my face in her hands. “Gwenna. Listen to me. Some days you can only save one person, and some days that one person is yourself. Okay? That’s one part of your whole religious deal I can get behind.
You are a person, made in God’s image, or whatever your Bible says, and you also deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ”
“That’s not the Bible,” I murmur. Morgan sighs.
“I know. Just, you get my point, right?”
I nod.
“Okay.” She lets me go and leans back a little. “Besides, if the four of them are determined to keep you safe on some private island somewhere, I’d like to see someone stop them.”
“Hah.” I fidget in my lap. “I don’t think we’re at private island level yet. Just…South America, maybe.”
Morgan frowns, considering. “How’s your Spanish?”
I wince. “Bad.” For all my love of languages, I never did have the good sense to pick up the one spoken by six hundred million people worldwide.
My mother’s voice fills my mind: It’s like you’re determined to make the most impractical choice at every turn, Gwenna.
“Hopefully I can get by with French and a little Italian.”
As I say it, something flickers in Morgan’s eyes. She holds up a finger—wait here—and leaps off to her bedroom. When she comes back, she’s holding a little stack of something in her hands—notecards, I think at first, from her serial killer board. But no: these are cards, but printed ones.
Tarot cards.
“For you.” She settles back next to me and fans them out. “A parting gift. Little…good-luck charm, I suppose.”
I take them, fan them out.
Cavaliere di Spade, Cavaliere di Bastoni, Cavaliere di Coppe, Cavaliere di Denari.
Knight of Swords, Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Knight of Pentacles.
I’ve seen these before. These particular cards.
“Gwenna?”
Morgan raps lightly on the coffee table and I jump back to attention.
“Hm?”
“The question?” she says, like she’s repeating something I clearly missed her saying. “When I did that tarot reading for you, way back in the fall. What was the question you asked?”
Oh. God, I haven’t thought about that in ages.
It was a lifetime ago, before I knew anything about what Morgan was or the four of them were, back when I thought this was all just a normal college and I was going to be a normal medieval literature student falling asleep on dictionaries and arguing about whether Pierre Abelard or Bernard of Clairvaux was worse to women in his writings.
But I remember. That day in the Oracular Curio, in Sarrasford, when Morgan had drawn five cards for me: four knights, and the table. That’s when I’d first seen these cards.
I stare at them once more.
“I asked What am I doing at Camlann House?” I tell her. “Why?”
“Nothing,” Morgan muses. “Just…thinking.” She narrows her eyes at me. “You’re in love with all of them. No playing favorites, picking sides.”
“I…” It’s so forthright I can’t even conjure anything but the honest truth. “No. Yeah. Yes, I am.” I swallow. “Why?”
Morgan purses her lips. “I’m wondering,” she says.
“I’m wondering if maybe that’s not a coincidence.
For whatever you’re supposed to…be, or do, I mean.
That you found the four of them, all four of them.
” She shrugs. “Maybe I’m overthinking it.
But they’re all so different, you know? The four suits of the cards are so different.
Objectively, it doesn’t even make sense as a reading.
It should kind of cancel out, or contradict, or…
pull in too many directions to point to anything clear.
But.” She shrugs again. “Here you are. Here they are.” A faint smile flickers over her face. “For now, anyway.”
I look down at the cards again, running my fingers over their edges, taking in all the intricate details of the engravings of the tiny knights.
I want that to be true.
“And that’s…good,” I say slowly, looking back up at Morgan. “The reading is. You think?”
“It is what you make of it,” she says simply.
“Nothing truly good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Tarot is just a tool to invite inquiry. Ultimately, you’re just interpreting the signs, drawing conclusions, making your own meaning.
” She shrugs. “You know what they say. As above…” She taps my forehead.
“…so below.” She presses her hand to my chest.
“Abracadabra,” I murmur.
“Now she’s getting it!” Morgan beams, but it’s a subdued smile.
After a few more minutes of logistics—keeping in touch, phone numbers and emails and maybe even letters in the mail if it comes to that—the sun is fully gone from the windows and I need to get back.
At the door, Morgan takes me by the shoulders.
“I promise you we’ll see each other again, Gwenna,” she says. “I promise you.”
“Okay,” I say, and hope I believe her.
She pulls me into one final hug, then lets me go and puts her hands to her chest, fingers arched and thumbs pressed: a heart.
After Morgan’s, I take my time crossing campus.
It looks, objectively, terrible. Dark—it’s fully evening now—but bleak, the patchy dead grass and salt-bloomed earth and stone buildings looming, silent as a held breath.
It makes my heart ache.
Caliburn University, my alma mater—my caring mother, such a weird Latin phrase, when you think about it—and here she is wasting away.
I don’t want anyone to be sick or hurting—obviously, not even Elena Shalott—and yet the fact that this place is so visibly dying too carves something right out of the middle of me.
I don’t want to leave.
I walk slowly, slowly, slowly, trying to memorize every detail. Too soon, the golden windows of Camlann House rise before me, and I tramp up the porch steps, wondering how many times I’ve done that, wondering how many more I’ll ever do that.
Inside, it’s warm and animated. A fire crackles in the hearth, and everyone seems to be in motion—carrying things, talking over each other, going up or coming down the stairs.
Kingston sees me first, stops in his tracks and practically runs over to take my coat.
“Gwenna.” The relief at seeing me is plain on his face. “You’re back.”
I nod. “I’m back.”
“And welcome to the Last Supper.” Kai, sweeping a hand at the dining room, which I approach with no small amount of surprise.
It’s an absolute mess of food, emphasis on mess, a hodgepodge of everything I recognize from the deep freezer and pantry, and what seems to be ten, maybe twenty, bottles of wine on the side buffet.
“That’s…a lot of wine,” I remark.
Lanz, who’s in the corner opening yet another bottle, shrugs. “No point in holding onto the good stuff.” The cork gives with a pop, and he sets the bottle down, gesturing. “What would you like?”
“I…” My understanding of wine begins and ends with my ability to pronounce the varietals. And tell red from white, I guess. I just shrug. “Surprise me.”
He does. Red. It’s good, not too heavy but not too sweet, and I guess suits the food well enough, to the extent that anything can pair well with this utterly random assortment of options—olives, cheese sandwiches, whole-grain strawberry cereal bars, quiche lorraine, some sort of paté spread on pita bread.
Callahan carries my plate and his, and I settle in the living room with the rest of them, everything glowing gold from the firelight.
We’re nervous. Almost energized. Even Lanz seems lively again.
But no one seems to be able to talk about plans or problems, like we all know it’s coming and just want this one moment of reprieve.
I certainly do, anyway. Kai ends up telling some story about a fencing match—meet?
tournament?—when they were teenagers, which Kingston immediately follows with a corrective, more accurate version of events, and eventually culminates in the two of them trying to recreate, from memory, the exact choreography of how it went down.
And they’re not trying to be funny—Kingston’s definitely not, anyway—but something about the back and forth, the literal repartee—has me laughing, giggling, even, although probably some of that is the wine that keeps finding its way into my glass.
Then, for some reason—some reason that is probably also the wine—I decide that it’s a good idea to regale everyone with the entire plot of The Michelangelo Matrix, from memory, complete with voices and accents and help from Callahan to play Dr. Patton Montgomery to my Fabienne De La Croix, but the story is so ridiculous and the one-man peanut gallery of Kai, with occasional input from Lanz, is so intent on commentary that I lose the thread constantly and finally just run out of steam.
“And then, you know.” I wave a hand wildly through the air, then push hair from my eyes. “They find the Garden of Eden, they kiss under the Eiffel Tower, blah blah blah, everyone goes home happy.”
Kingston, who’s been at polite attention this whole time, nods sincerely. “Wow.”
I feel my cheeks flush. “Okay, okay. I got carried away.”
Kai, who’s been sprawled on an armchair, head flung back over armrest, suddenly pushes himself upright. “Please, Wednesday.” He fixes me with a stare, grinning lopsidedly. “You’re cute when you’re on a tear like that.”
My face flushes hotter. I glance at Cal, my unwilling scene partner, who just shrugs. “Um. Yeah. Agreed.”
And so the night winds on.
I try, try so hard, to stay awake, to make it as late as I can, like I can somehow prolong tomorrow coming if I just never sleep, but the night winds on and eventually the wine and the food and the warmth of the fire catch up with me.
I’m awake one minute, then I blink and my head’s on Callahan’s shoulder, the room is darker, everyone’s muttering about going to bed.
I yawn and shake my head in protest, cling obstinately to Cal’s arm, but he just picks me up like it’s nothing and carries me to my room.
And it is nice to lie down, properly, and the pillow is soft and the blankets are warm and so is whoever’s dropping in beside me—Kai, that little press of metal against my skin when he kisses my neck.
I both don’t want to fall asleep at all and want to fall asleep like this forever.
The rest of the night is black and solid and deep and then, too soon, there’s light in the windowpanes.
Dawn.