Chapter 35
Chapter thirty-five
Lux shook her head on instinct. No. No, she is not. “She was swallowed by a tree, Shaw. I watched it happen.”
“I know. There were markings—all over the trunk. It looked to be from an axe, and once I could manage the light…they were done from the inside.”
An axe.
The wretched, black-handled axe.
Riselda had taken it with her. She’d cradled it to her chest. But the woman had just administered a killing blow to Bartleby Tamish, and Lux then assumed it was affection that caused Riselda to take it to her living grave.
It shouldn’t be possible. But who knew the true meaning of impossible any longer? Lux certainly didn’t.
Shaw shifted underneath her, his hand settling at the base of her neck as if he would keep her in place.
“I picked up her trail outside the marshes. When I first found her, she looked like she should be dead. But between one town and the next, she was healthy as ever. I followed her nearly all the way here, but in Loxlen I lost her. I think she’s looking for you. ”
Lux’s body shook beneath his hand; her toes began to curl. A rage built within her, burning and burning. Shaw flinched when her nails relinquished her palms to dig instead into his thigh, but he didn’t pull away. Her vision blurred in her fury.
How dare she. How dare she not die.
“If she comes here,” she began, quiet as death. “If she thinks to touch me after all she’s done—she ruined my life!”
Lux shoved from the chair, abandoning Shaw. She was heated enough with the rage within her now. In all honesty, she wondered how she didn’t boil alive.
“Her death was my parents’ justice served. Now what? She is just to…be free? To live for a thousand years, destroying whomever she decides is unworthy to be beside her and using those she finds interesting?”
Unfair. That word beat a tempo she couldn’t outrun.
How was it Riselda could live two centuries having been turned a monster by her own vengeance, but Lux had gone mad before two decades? If anyone had done unforgivable things it was that imposter. She should be the one whose mind deteriorated. She should—
“Devil below.” Lux turned her back on the mirror, where she’d been staring into it, unseeing. “I’d forgotten. She’s mad.”
“Her morals are certainly torched.”
“It’s not only that. They’d told me the Grimrook family, Riselda’s family, all died because of this Mania Malus.
That at its worst you can’t distinguish reality from your dreams. What if Riselda feels she is in a dream?
When really she is acting in reality.” She shuddered, every fine hair standing on end.
Sometimes in her dreams she did the most horrific things.
Sometimes it wasn’t her parents she stabbed, but others.
Then she woke with silent screams.
“What would they know of her family?”
“They lived here. You would have walked by their portraits. This was their estate. Then it morphed into—” Lux waved her hand about the room.
“If she thinks to return here, there will be a reckoning for her, and it might not be me who gets the chance to deliver it. They say she stole from them, and they hate her for it.” She glanced at the overturned pack, crumpled and deflated, and her heart felt like it must have done the same.
She sniffed. “Now they’ve stolen it back. ”
In the background, Shaw murmured, “Mania Malus?”
“I have to find that vault.”
“Lux.”
“And we have to find where they keep their prisoners.”
“Pardon?”
She caught his furrowed brow and parted lips and said, “Not like the mansion. Or…I don’t believe it is. There’s a girl they have chained somewhere. They diagnosed her with the salt-sick and say she can’t be trusted to work in the manor until she is—” Lux met Shaw’s intense stare.
He crossed his arms, the stained fabric straining against his shoulders.
He outright glowered at her. “I’m rather good at discerning patterns, love.
This is one. Tell me you see it? You’re whisked away to some obscure landmark and conveniently diagnosed with a disease to render you scared and disbelieving reality.
Why? Have they offered you a position? A treatment?
Were you to stay on staff as Mothlock’s own necromancer? ”
“Except the girl has no real symptoms. None that she can discern, and I—” A flicker caught her attention. Lux turned fully toward the mirror. Her broken brilliance, manifested into a nightmare, hovered inside it.
“Wishes. Hope. Wishes. Hope. All die in the end. Same as you. Same as him.” It gnashed its teeth. “And they die painfully.”
She couldn’t look away. The apparition’s fathomless eyes captured her own and would not blink. Maybe this is the true Devil, and it lives within me.
“What are you looking at?”
“Myself,” she whispered.
Shaw appeared in the mirror’s reflection, and for a moment, there were three beings shown back to her. She watched his hand drift, catch her fingers, and the manifestation dissolved at once in a haze of false smoke.
“We’ve been apart too long,” she said.
He lifted their hands, and his mouth brushed feather light across her knuckles. “I can’t disagree.”
Her eyes flicked upward to meet his. “So much has happened. Too much. I feel like I’ve so much more to tell you, but the only thing I want to say is that I’ve missed you a huge amount. More than I expected. It almost makes me angry.”
It did make her angry, but she’d grown to bite her tongue a little now and then to ease her penchant for stings.
Shaw took one look at her scowling face in the mirror and laughed.
He hauled her to him until she met his chest with a gasp.
His opposite hand—the one that wasn’t still holding hers—lifted to cup her face.
“Is the lovely ice sculpture thawing for me?” He said it good-naturedly, chuckling, and Lux had hardly begun admiring the creases at the corners of his eyes when they disappeared.
He sobered. “It hurt, watching you go that day. You wouldn’t have seen, but I watched you until the marshes swallowed you up.
I understood eventually why you set out on your own.
I like to think I’m brave, but I realized then you’re braver than me. ”
She shook her head against his hand. “That’s because I haven’t told you yet how many times I thought of running back.”
“But you didn’t so really that makes it even more true.”
“Who am I to argue with your obviously sound logic,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Do you mean to start a quarrel with me? When we’ve only just been reunited, and you know I always win?”
A shout of laughter left her before she could stifle it, and Lux clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and focused on the door.
She pulled her opposite hand from his to shove against his chest. “Look what you’ve made me do.
We can’t draw any attention to this room.
Besides, you’ve not won—ever. And the one time I believe you’re thinking of, you had a knife under my chin, and I hardly think that’s fair or should be counted. ”
“You cannot call resourcefulness unfair. We will have to agree to disagree. Though I do agree with you on not calling attention to ourselves. At least for tonight.”
“And tomorrow?” She could sense the minutes ticking closer to that official time. The clock upon the mantle confirmed it. Her dread was a rising, creeping tide. She held little doubt if she wanted to accomplish what she had set out to do that day from Ghadra, that it would be then or never.
“Cannot be avoided,” he replied. “I fulfilled their order of Time when I arrived, so that part is settled, at least.” At her cry of shocked outrage, he hurriedly added, “It’s fake. It’s paint.”
Lux settled her hand over her throat for only a heartbeat before she reached and gripped his chin. “You might have led with that.” A corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk. A shadow of growth pricked her fingers when it did—and Lux entirely forgot what she was irritated over.
She pulled him toward her, and he came willingly. His head lowered, his hand reaching to cover hers. But his finger landed atop her nail-less one. Though the skin had healed, she couldn’t help but wince over the bare tenderness.
Shaw dropped his hand but snatched hers again right after. He turned it over while she grimaced.
“What are you doing?”
He answered with a question of his own. “What happened to your finger?”
“My nail? It was nothing.”
“I didn’t ask if it was something.”
“I… Well, I traded it.”
Shaw’s eyebrows met. First in confusion and then in something else entirely. “For what?”
Devil’s tits. No, I’m not brave at all.
She already knew this, of course.
“…berries.”
He didn’t appreciate her explanation. She knew he wouldn’t.
It did remind her, however, to clean up the mess she’d made in her search for The Risen.
Meanwhile, Shaw returned to the armchair where she’d discarded his book in her rage.
She didn’t care for it much anymore. Aside from the fact it cost an astonishing amount, its contents were tarnished and worthless as far as she was concerned. What else might they have changed?
Shaw stayed silent. He’d thought it was beyond foolish of her to offer up a piece of herself to someone she’d only just met, but she’d argued it wasn’t blood, and at any rate, it hadn’t even hurt…at first. He’d not argued after that. However, the tick in his jaw had yet to stop.
Whatever he held back, she was fine not hearing it.
She’d yet to tell him perhaps the biggest thread in this woven nightmare of a scene. That there was a man well over a century dead below them, and the society wished for her to reverse that. She’d not yet told him of the host of soulless people masquerading as attendants downstairs either.
She’d been selfish, complaining about her own ailment and the loss of her book before relaying all the ways in which they might be in real, imminent danger here. The Risen shouldn’t matter nearly so much as those.
It shouldn’t…but it did.
She sat upon the bed, the lush coverings pressing against her as she sank into the mattress. Her body begged for rest. But her mind—it couldn’t be quieted. She’d survived on little sleep in those last horrific days in Ghadra, and she was certain she could again.
Also, she had an idea. Something which began as a feeling when she’d stared upon it but had slowly grown over her mind like a mold.
Riselda had been tied intricately into the plot designed to destroy her city.
Though she could not be the architect this time, Lux was surer than ever her false aunt had formed more than one knot in this wicked mess.
She must find them and unravel them.
She must go first to Grimrook House.