Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
She thought she would retch.
No, I won’t.
Yes, I will.
Saliva pooled. She swallowed it away.
No, I won’t!
She held a hand to her mouth, because maybe if she pressed hard enough, she wouldn’t vomit her anger, her despair, over the bed’s dark furnishings. But nothing prevented it from building inside her head like an overzealous tumor.
She’d been numb before. She wasn’t any longer.
Feed.
Grow.
Madness.
“You’re free to be a great necromancer now. Rather than settling for a mediocre one.”
Her whole life was a string of betrayals. Except this time, she had betrayed herself.
Lux had witnessed the consequences of madness.
Riselda’s voice, her laugh—they’d changed from one moment to the next.
The effect had been chilling and jarring and Lux never wished to be in its presence again.
But while lifeblood might have prolonged Riselda’s years beyond any members of her family, it never did bring about a cure.
Like the mayor’s tumors, the disease began to eat again at once.
The likelihood that the consumption of lifeblood hadn’t been in practice with the remainder of the Grimrooks spoke to Lux’s theory: It was not a family secret passed through the generations.
It was knowledge Riselda had discovered all her own.
Knowledge she might have fled with.
Knowledge a burgeoning society might have wished to keep for themselves—
“Will you consider the treatment?”
Corvin’s words burrowed into her like a thorn, and every time she shifted, she felt its sharp bite.
All her life, her brilliance had elicited strong reactions.
Poor or positive, it never mattered. She was rare.
Powerful. She could do a remarkable thing.
And for many years, it remained the only part of herself she was proud of.
Her one source of confidence. It still was.
It is all I have. Who will I be if it’s gone?
… no one.
Her grim thoughts were going to burn her from the inside out. Lux hid her head in the pillows. She’d never felt so broken in all her life.
Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.
The nauseous despair retracted, rootless, as her anger grew in strength. It licked at every part of her until her skin grew damp with it. And when she could take it no more, she bit into her knuckles until they cut—and screamed.
Only when it was done did she cradle her head in her hands. Her breaths were labored and loud in her ears.
“It isn’t fair,” she murmured, hoarse and aching. “None of it is fair.”
How she wished she could have screamed for real rather than the voiceless imitation she’d allowed. But she didn’t want to bring anyone running. Not when there wasn’t a single one of them who could offer her comfort now.
Riselda had broken their rules and taken what they coveted. Why? Was it the madness that drove her to it?
You stole from them. And you were only a child. What did you see that I haven’t? What did you know that I don’t? Why did you run?
To Ghadra, of all places.
“My mind can’t take anymore.” But she knew it wasn’t her mind at all, but her heart this time, causing her pains.
Before, those vulnerable words would never have left her mouth; they would have been swallowed by now.
She’d become uncomfortably skilled at wallowing silently before burying her hurts deep.
Except she’d lost that skill some time ago—purged it, rather—and then willingly left behind the person who had been there for her to practice speaking her feelings aloud.
Lux shoved to her feet.
She walked to the mirror, her steps heavy and slow, and when she neared it, close enough that she could read the words etched into the dark wood, a deep rage began to wrap around her anger, causing it to flicker and rise.
She couldn’t reach the words; her nails scraped along the glass instead. Her teeth bared. She audibly seethed. The sound was the only one she heard.
“Brilliance is meant to be a gift!” Her fingers enclosed the body of a decorative gargoyle. She lifted it with both hands from its shelved perch. “And a gift should—not—lead—to—madness!”
She sneered at the statue—and swung it front-first against the wall.
The crack reverberated throughout the room.
Lux sucked a breath.
She picked through the pieces of the fractured figurine.
She pulled at what gleamed. A silver ribbon, at the end of which hung a silver key.
She frowned down at it before turning it over in her palm.
Then she lifted the remains of the gargoyle once more.
A bent hinge lay exposed on its severed neck.
Now headless, she could see inside. It’d been hollowed out. She dropped it back onto its ruin.
“What do you unlock?” she asked the key and glanced afterward at herself in the mirror.
Something shifted in its reflection.
She stepped closer.
She raised her hand.
“It can’t be.”
But the lock reflected to her seemed as real as the key she held.
Lux raised it until it almost touched the glass. In the reflection, the lock remained instead. It didn’t make sense that it should work, but she pushed the key forward and watched with widening eyes as it slipped through. She turned it, heard it click. And the mirror swung in.
She stared into a pitch-black abyss.
A hidden corridor.
“Saints above, devil below.”
Who needs a boy for a map…
Not her.
Spinning away from it, she hurried to her desk where she gathered an unlit candlestick. Her match struck, and the wick flamed. She gripped its holder and moved toward the secret door.
“Please don’t have any monsters,” Lux begged of the gloom—a heartbeat before she stepped inside.
The passageway smelled worse than the stairwell to the kitchen: like wet seaweed gone to rot. Lux could see nothing but her candle’s glow in her first few steps.
“This seems a worthless place,” she whispered.
Though she also wondered if that was the point.
Someone adept at breaking into places not meant for him had once told her if he ever found something that did not make sense, it meant there was something hidden.
He’d said he hadn’t yet been proven wrong.
A high creak met her ears. Lux swung back. She held out her meager flame. And she watched as the mirrored door swung fully closed all its own.
A ghost of a girl was reflected back at her when it was done; she could make out the candle in her tight grip. The dense dark wouldn’t reveal her face, and Lux was glad of it—she didn’t need to see the sheen of sweat forming on her brow or the terror in her eyes.
But she did need to be sure she could return to her bedchamber this way. She dug quickly for the key and audibly sighed in relief when a lock showed at once. “Least it seems to work from either s-i-de!”
The floor fell away from her feet.
Lux landed hard on her bottom, slipping then plunging into the pitch. She slid down a steep incline and could not stop. The meager flame guttered; she thought it’d gone out, but when her hand flew up to protect it, it flamed back to light.
Onyx walls whipped past. She curved first one way and then the other. She nearly toppled over twice. And then she did—the incline abruptly ending, expelling her onto flattened floor.
“Why?” she cried, groaning from her place on the ground.
Lux rose to her feet with a huff of breath. She still held the candle, its flame miraculously flickering yet, when she turned back the way she’d come. Toward an impossibly steep passageway, and no way to climb it.
“Dead spaces,” she mimicked, furious at Corvin, and accepting none of the blame herself. She spun around. “If this is also a dead end…”
But it wasn’t.
Not yet.
Lux held her candle over the edge of a stone staircase coated in decades of dust. She teetered at the top. And ahead—
I can make it through this.
But suddenly, she didn’t know if that were true. The path down was as dark as the rest, but this one felt as yawning as a void. Her entire body rejected the idea.
She swallowed. “There’s something down there, isn’t there…”
Lux recalled the first time she’d felt Death. She’d been outside Ghadra’s fog-crept walls. Her mother had been beside her, bent double with a sickle to hack at marsh grass, and she’d been explaining the ways of the world to Lux.
“You should never take more than you give. That’s called greed.” Then she’d handed off the bundle of grasses and dug inside her purse. She tossed a handful of seeds into the soggy soil.
When they landed, sinking into the muck at different depths, a pressure had tapped into Lux’s chest the same.
A dead woman was recovered later that day.
Lux relived that memory now as she stared into the void. She didn’t always notice such subtle premonitions, but today, right now, she felt the lurk of Death on this hidden staircase.
Soon. Soon. Soon, beat her heart, and she would have claimed it as true—if she could still trust it. Unfortunately, her systems were now diagnosed as a wreck.
“But even if there is something…that’s the point, isn’t it? To see if there’s anything to hide?”
She’d thought speaking it might embolden her.
Her fear did not care.
She still didn’t know what judgement could be passed on Mothlock and its cloaked society. On the surface, it seemed a good thing what they did—collecting books that might otherwise be lost, binding new copies, and distributing them throughout the country. But there was a current moving underneath.
One of old money, desolate monuments, targeted murder, and vague truths.
Lux could feel it beneath her skin.
Her fingers tightened around the key. She only wanted to find the vault. To put her suspicions to rest. Whatever else went on here didn’t matter to her, so long as they’d nothing to do with Bartleby Tamish’s bad business.
She only wished it would be above ground.
You’re delaying, chastised her head.
I know, she replied, and understood there could be no turning back. If she must have some rare condition, the least she could do was see this one goal through to the end. Lifeblood might be here. It might not. But she would have an answer soon enough.
Lux stepped down—and her nightmare reached up from the dark.