Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
“These boots pinch like the damn devil itself.”
Lux swung around to scowl at Shaw in the dark.
“Shh,” she hissed between her teeth. Because she’d already told him—about what Kent had said regarding guardian’s leech—and he’d acted properly horrified.
Now, it seemed he was more horrified with his expensive new boots. She eyed the brambles with unease.
The collector had said they could sense a person’s heart, but that didn’t mean they should draw even more attention by tromping down the path, complaining. Lux eyed the first statue and then the looming manor itself. Besides, who knows what else is listening?
She stalked farther down the path. Shaw caught up to her in several strides and bent to her ear. “You’ve mastered the silent steps, I see.”
Lux bit down on her tongue to keep from retorting. Why he thinks he is the only one good at sneaking about…
Her will was not strong enough, in the end. “I always have. You should take lessons from me. Considering it was you who nearly exposed us with your moaning and groaning in your climb over the wall that time.”
“My climb…at the mayor’s mansion? I did not moan.”
She snorted but otherwise didn’t reply. They passed the statue of the distraught Granville Grimrook.
The garden appeared infinitely more uninviting in the late night.
It hadn’t been inviting to start, but still, Lux was taken aback by the oppressive gloom.
She adjusted the hem of her top, black to match the sky.
She’d brought it along—that lace blouse she’d worn more often than not in Ghadra—though she hadn’t pulled it on once throughout her journey.
It felt familiar to wear it now, but in a strange way.
The rest of the ensemble, though, she was quite content with.
Her skirt fell to her knees, blessedly short.
They passed by the melancholy Rosamund Grimrook. Then those she hadn’t memorized yet, but had dubbed the Miserly Lord and the Concerned Groom. More were too far buried in the overgrowth to discern, and she and Shaw came soon enough to the door.
Lux stepped up to it. The lamppost at this exit was unlit, and she could hardly see a thing. Still, she pulled the key from her corset. She glanced to Shaw, watched him nod, and said, “Why didn’t you change your shirt before coming to find me?”
A cloud shifted to offer the barest glimmer of cool light. It lit upon his features and the dried stain both. “It’s your blood,” he replied with a tone of appreciation.
Lux wrinkled her nose. “How morbid.”
He only grinned. “Put the key in the lock, Lux.”
She crouched and prodded around for it. The lock was there, she discovered, only camouflaged. The key was a perfect fit. And Lux, grinning with triumph, turned it.
But a click didn’t come. Scowling, she yanked it out and returned it. This time, she used more effort. Then she used both hands.
“Let me try,” said Shaw, coming forward.
Lux was loath to release it—it had been her idea after all: to use the key she’d discovered in her fit of temper that had thus unlocked her mirror. But she did release it. Shaw’s hand enclosed over the key in her absence.
He didn’t use force, but a gentle pressure, and all the while, he bent his ear to the thing like it would speak to him and tell him what they’d done wrong. But Lux knew what they did wrong. It was the wrong key. Of course it was. Otherwise, it would have been too easy for the pair of them.
The universe never has luck to spare. She huffed an irritated sigh when he released it. “Can you pick it?”
He rose and tucked the key securely into her corset, his fingers dipping beneath the garment for hardly a second. It was, unfortunately, all that was needed to unravel her. Lux pressed her eyes closed when he turned away. His tools were already in hand, and she needed to restrain herself.
But he hadn’t even kissed her yet.
Maybe…he didn’t want to?
“It’s an odd lock,” was all he replied.
“Not as odd as the mayor’s lifeblood cabinet, surely?”
“I can hardly see, but I don’t feel any markings for directions. I think it’s a regular lock, but also…not.”
Lux’s eyebrows met in her confusion, but she didn’t ask anything else about it.
He’d more experience than she in this. Instead, she listened to his tools scrape away.
To the whisper of the sea breeze through the brambles and the waves crashing against the cliffs.
She listened for anyone coming down the garden path. She listened to—a crow?
The creature cawed and startled Shaw enough that he dropped one of the tools. It startled Lux hardly at all. She stared up at it perched atop the stone arch, and she said in a heated whisper, “So you come back to gloat? Or did you come to peck at me some more?”
Shaw straightened from retrieving his lock pick. He glanced at the bird before returning his attention to her. “Enemy of yours?”
“Yes,” she said at the same moment the bird repeated its call.
“It seems one-sided.”
“Does it?” Lux glared up at the animal. “Well, maybe it is. After all, I didn’t bite its hand or peck its leg.”
“It attacked you? It isn’t—”
“No,” Lux hurried to reply. “It isn’t revived or even sick, I don’t think. It’s only mean.”
Shaw stepped nearer to the door, his attention riveted on the bird and its lack of movement. It only watched them both. Calculating, she thought. But when it didn’t launch an attack, he bent again to the lock.
Lux managed a short, shocked cry and nothing more when the crow flew down upon them both.
She could feel wind. Wings. She crouched and covered her head, swatting at the air with her free arm.
But she met nothing, and after several heartbeats, the bird had taken to the air again.
This time, it landed farther along the fence line.
She scowled fiercely at the animal and then looked at Shaw.
Found him staring down at his one remaining lockpick.
The crow had stolen the other. It held it in its claws and cawed again—almost exasperated. And Lux could only shake her head.
“He won’t fit,” she said to the bird.
“Pardon me?” Shaw questioned.
“It’s helping us. Or thinks it is. There’s a bend to the bars in there, but it isn’t much. I was even worried I—wait.”
Shaw stepped off the path.
He did so carefully, with his back pressed to the fencing and his front prepared for any movement of brambles. But when the shifting didn’t reveal any teeth, and the bird continued its pacing, he moved quicker. Soon enough, Lux lost sight of him beyond the curve of iron.
“Fine,” she huffed at the crow, and followed Shaw inside.
Lux tucked her hands beneath her arms while she watched.
Shaw gripped the bar a second time, and for the second time, he pulled hard against it. His entire body strained—she was close enough to see the pulsing tension in his neck—as he bent the bar further.
He stood to place his hands on his hips, breathing heavily. “That should be wide enough.”
“For me, for sure. I don’t know about you.” She glanced him up and down.
“You’d be surprised at what I can get into.”
Lux curled her lip at his tone but said nothing. She left him chuckling, and with the brambles’ teeth swaying behind her, she crouched at the hidden opening. Then—very carefully—she squeezed through.
The fabric caught even with her slow maneuvers. She heard a short burst of ripping at her skirt and grimaced, but she’d made it. She straightened at the opposite side.
The cliffs were sheered near her feet, and the sea sent a brutal burst of wind against her bared skin. Lux shivered, goosebumps erupting over her body, but she didn’t dare dwell on it.
There sat Grimrook House.
It was a quarter of the manor’s size, pale stone, with a slated roof.
The escaped moon highlighted one tower and two chimneys.
She leaned as far as she dared, until she could see the house sat upon an outcropping, and that outcropping was large enough to contain a small garden with several trees and even a bench.
She straightened.
She shook her head.
Her entire body hummed with anticipation, leaving no room for nerves or fear. She didn’t understand it, but there it was, rooted in her chest: that feeling of being on the right path. The feel of—
A grunted oath announced Shaw’s arrival. She turned in time to watch his knee connect harshly with an iron bar. He hissed an expletive, and then he was through.
He staggered to his feet. “These trousers cost more than a month’s rent in Ghadra.” He limped toward her, the fabric torn wide over his thigh.
“Are you hurt?”
“Only if you want to tend to me.”
She scowled up at him then pointed. “There it is. Riselda’s childhood home. They’d said we can’t get to it; that part of the path is crumbled away. But it seems every other thing they’ve told me has been a lie. That probably is too.”
Now that Shaw stood beside her, she saw he bled; he did not appear to notice.
Lux waited for the familiar sick feel in her gut, the tightening in her chest, but…
it didn’t arrive. Her eyes skipped from her own dried blood on his shirt to his trickling wound, and before she realized what she was doing, she’d pressed the torn portion of her skirt to his skin.
He stiffened in surprise against her, and she looked up. His pupils had dilated in the night until no warmth remained, but she could find it still in the line of his brow and the shape of his mouth. His lips parted. “Have you moved past your aversion to blood?”
Her fingers grew damp with it. “Only yours.”
She blushed at his expression. Shaw’s hand came around her back, fisting in the folds of her skirt. Her skin heated like a kettle beneath his grip. He cradled her face, his thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone.
Suddenly, he pressed his lips to hers, light and swift, and pulled back the moment he was through. She stumbled forward.
“No, I shouldn’t focus on that right now. You’ve been manipulated by this deranged society, and we need to find out why.”
She absorbed nothing after his first sentence.
What did it say about her that she would happily focus on it? Rather than the fact she’d tossed someone to a horrific death and had been tasked with reviving another. Rather than the possible deterioration inside her.
Rather than their discovery of the buyers of lifeblood—her most fervent goal.
He shouldn’t have kissed her at all. She’d rather not get a taste if she’d be denied the rest.
“It’s rather impressive, isn’t it?” He stared from the cliff’s edge at the sea. “I don’t think I’ve done it justice.”
“Yes. And you have.” Lux sucked a salt-filled breath. “Have you—” She stopped, watching an immense wave crash against a jagged beast of a rock. Her brow furrowed.
“Have I…”
“It sounds far-fetched.”
She glanced to find his eyebrow raised and an expression she took to mean, “Really? After all we’ve been through?”
She relented. “Have you ever felt like you’ve finally found it? The right path, or even the right choice? I don’t know why, but ever since I saw the sea… When I glimpsed this house…”
Shaw’s features turned thoughtful. It took him time to answer, but eventually he said, “That night in the prison. I knew we wouldn’t make it. Letting you go was the only choice. I’ve never felt surer of anything than wanting you to live.” He looked down at her. “Something like that?
Lux’s breath abandoned her in a rush. She stared up at him.
They’d never talked about it—what he’d said that night—but she still replayed the moment every time she closed her eyes for sleep. He’d confessed in that wretched hour. Finally admitted he’d come to like her as she’d come to irrevocably care for him. And then he’d hinted at more than even that.
Her chest felt heavy in a different sort of way. Heavy with words she needed to say.
“Something like that,” she murmured.
His gaze roved over her face. “Let’s see if this path has really fallen away or not.”
Narrow, weather worn stone seemed to sheer sharply from the ridge. Ahead, Lux could see a bridge connecting their broken road to Grimrook House’s garden. Her jaw clenched.
Shaw’s sudden throw saw a rock landing perfectly suspended in air. “Looks like an illusion.”
Lux sucked at her teeth. “It looks like the bridge outside Ghadra.”