Chapter 40
Chapter forty
The staircase curved, wide and scratched, the hardwood a warm, rich brown. It opened into a large room. One that sat steeped in darkness on one side and lit with firelight on the other.
Riselda perched in a high-backed chair before the hearth.
Several more sat empty nearby. Dead plants claimed the windows, slumped in pots, and crumpled on the sills, while decaying vines draped from the walls.
It smelled just as musty as the floor they’d come from, but now with undertones of earth and soot instead of paper. Lux rubbed at her nose.
“Decided the benefit outweighed the risk, Lucena?” Riselda didn’t turn toward her but remained staring steadfast into the fire. It cast flattering highlights over her cheekbones. All it did for Lux was act as a reminder of the woman’s agelessness.
“Your eyes are a different color entirely than your portrait in the manor.” Lux came around a thickly cushioned armchair and sank onto it. “They used to be the same shade as mine.”
“Yes.” Riselda drank deep from a goblet. “Interested in a similar change?”
Lux curled her lip. “No.” Shaw came to sit on a sofa near hers, but only on its edge, poised for any misstep on Riselda’s part.
Lux’s heart warmed at the sight. Her mouth softened.
“The collectors wondered that I looked like the Grimrook family. They used it as further reason I could be suffering from mind disease.”
Riselda chuckled into her wine.
The sound boiled Lux’s blood. “Well?” she demanded. “Am I a Grimrook or not?”
“How could you be, Lucena? You’ve already told me there is no possible way in which we would be family.”
Lux’s lips parted at Riselda’s words. At the way she’d said them. And how she appeared afterward: accepting, but hurt all the same.
“Did you have siblings?”
“None that lived past infancy.”
“Cousins?”
“Dead for more than a century.”
Lux swallowed. “Did you…carry a child?”
Riselda drew a steady breath before giving into her drink again. “No.”
Lux huffed. “So I am not.”
“I did not carry a child. Someone carried you. For me.”
“…what?”
But Riselda wasn’t finished. “I am excellent at growing things, only not inside my own body. I’d no desire to sacrifice myself to childbearing. I traded for a gallow seed many years ago. I traded for something else that day too.”
Lux hated this. Every word. Her chest tightened in its telltale squeeze when suddenly, her hands were enveloped in larger—warmer—ones. She focused on every point of pressure. Of every rough callous against her skin.
And Riselda said, “When I was ready, I called up what I needed from my body. And between me and an alchemist, we formed something marvelous. I lost my family by the society’s design.
I wanted one still. And when I sensed a womb ripe for growing, I used it.
You were born early, yet somehow still fat and wailing. The loveliest thing I’d ever seen.”
Riselda sighed while Lux tried to rein in her horror. It was worse. Worse than she’d ever thought. She didn’t know it could be possible. But as she stared off into the aged room, abandoned and moldering, she knew if anyone would discover a way it would be the unyielding woman across from her.
Riselda could not be bent or deterred.
She’d wanted a child.
She’d done it.
And now Lux would vomit over her boots.
“Of course, I am not maternal,” continued Riselda, as if the world hadn’t fractured.
“I realized my frailties quick in those first few months. I pushed through, because you were mostly sweet, and I don’t wish to admit defeat in anything.
But your parents… They’d wanted a baby and couldn’t conceive.
It was as good a compromise as I could make. ”
“I’m going to be sick,” whispered Lux. Whimpering, she hung her head over the armrest.
“Lucena—”
“Enough,” snapped Shaw, deep with rage.
Lux missed Riselda’s reaction, and she didn’t care. Shaw’s palm moved slowly and steadily across her back, protective and comforting together. It was intoxicating.
And Lux could not love him more.
Devil’s tits.
She scrunched her eyes closed to focus on breathing away the roiling in her gut. To focus on anything but how deeply she felt.
It was inescapable.
How long had she been in love with him?
Weeks, said her heart. I tried to tell you.
But she’d blocked it out. She’d a dream and a purpose and—even more important—she had a promise to fulfill. She did not have the capacity to also deal with something so altering.
Except now she’d gone and acknowledged it, and it could not be undone.
She, Lux Thorn, was in love with Shaw Roser, and damn it all she’d never felt so vulnerable in all her life. A yawning fear opened in her chest. She felt like she’d suddenly been turned to glass. If anything happened to him because of her…
Her eyes flew open when something met her clenched fist. Lux squinted at the biscuit pressing against her thumb.
“They’re not so old,” said Riselda. “I would whip you up a tonic, but I think you only need something in your stomach.”
Lux hissed and swatted it away. It hit the fraying rug and collapsed into a mess of crumbs.
Another biscuit appeared, nudging her hand. Lux’s stomach protested again, but this time, with food so near, she realized that while what Riselda had confided did sicken her…she’d also hardly eaten dinner.
Her jaw tightened as her hand unclenched. She took the biscuit from Riselda’s outstretched fingers and didn’t bother to thank her.
Nibbling at a corner, her nose wrinkled.
It tasted like herbs and not the usual ones, but by the time she was halfway through, her stomach did settle.
Despite everything. Her glance slid to Shaw, to the endearing furrow in his familiar brow and the concern in his beautiful eyes.
She pulled her own away, flushing in an instant.
Yes, despite everything.
“Lucena Thorn hurts those we love. Vesperine Grimrook will kill them.”
Lux jerked so badly the remainder of her biscuit joined the first on the floor.
“Lux,” said Shaw, gripping her upper arm. Even Riselda set aside her goblet.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “That name. Vesperine. It caught me off guard.” She settled her head against the chair and forced slow breaths.
Meanwhile, the horrifying version of herself swayed in the corner of the room.
She could not see its eyes beneath the locks of limp hair—but its blackened teeth were bared and grinning.
When Lux managed to drag her attention from it, she caught Riselda’s stricken look. One quickly shed from her face and replaced with thoughtful blankness as she said, “You remember that name?”
“I remember my father saying it once.”
“Did he? Stupid man.”
“He was not!” shouted Lux—so abrupt and harsh, Riselda startled.
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare speak an ill word about either of them.
Not when you’ve done what you did. Not when they’re dead.
Do you think I care we share blood, or that I will somehow be loyal to you?
You never wanted a family; you wanted someone beholden to your cause. Well, I will never be.”
Lux had to pack it away. Like she used to. Like she’d always practiced. Because if she didn’t… If she thought of Riselda as her—
No. This cannot happen.
Lux didn’t fold. She crushed. She stamped and pummeled the knowledge of how she’d come to this world deep into the void at the back of her head. It would try to get out—they always did—but that was fine in comparison to the alternative.
She would deal with it when she was ready; she was not ready yet.
Riselda watched her closely, and every few breaths her gaze would shift. To Lux’s grip on Shaw’s forearm. “What does he hope to gain, I wonder,” she murmured.
Shaw stiffened underneath her, and Lux growled, “Who?”
“Corvin,” Riselda answered. “I would not think, at his old age, he would be causing such pains for sport.”
Chills swept up Lux’s spine. And here now was the last information she’d kept from Shaw, wriggling to get free. This was not like what she’d just buried. This was something she’d always planned to divulge. He was going to hate it; he was going to hate her timing even more.
“He offered me a place in their society. To undergo some ritual and be named—” Saints above, she couldn’t say it. “It was either that or a Stripping,” she finished.
Riselda brow furrowed. “A what?”
“A procedure. One their healer suggested. He said it would prevent further decay”—Lux watched Shaw from the corner of her eye—“if I removed my brilliance.”
Shaw, to her shock, did not react, and she couldn’t help her curiosity.
Lux turned fully to view him—and knew immediately she was wrong.
Because though he hadn’t physically moved or scowled or shouted the horror of it, his eyes revealed it all.
Fury poured off him in waves. He stared at her—into her—but he didn’t speak.
Riselda’s voice crept like smoke between them. “Your brilliance is in your soul, Lucena. You cannot remove one without the other.”
Lux braced her hands at once on the armrest, Shaw’s reaction forgotten. “Pardon?”
Shaw fairly vibrated now beside her. She could feel him sure as if his skin was laid against hers. And strangely, that steadied her head when horror and rage began fighting for dominance.
“Saints above, devil below…he said it was an experiment.”
And Artemis had been experimenting, all right—
With Mothlock’s staff.
How many had been done?
Why had it been done?
Because what was the use of a discarded brilliance? Of an extracted soul?
And then her stomach plummeted so intensely she gripped her middle. “Riselda. You said the nightmares only lasted through the night, did you not?”
Riselda sat straighter at her tone. “I did. They would come while you slept, waking you enough to see them, hear them, but could not move…” Riselda’s focus distanced into some memory.
“Then how is it I’ve seen them during the day?”
“The day?”
“While awake. It has been with me—this grotesque apparition—night and day.”
“Darling, are you sure?” Riselda peered at her as though she could root out the chaos in Lux’s mind. “Neither of the Alesso boys could force their brilliances outside the realm of sleep.”
“But if they’d somehow claimed another’s brilliance to ferry it out?”
“That is not—”
“Don’t say it. Every time I have, it’s been proven the opposite.”
All that careened in Lux’s head now were bloodshot eyes, dulled eyes, girls in shackles, and a basin doused in what she’d assumed was wet but had been dried and shimmering.
Silver.
“If these collectors aren’t simply drinking lifeblood but drinking whole souls, then that entire manor needs to collapse.
With every one of them inside.” Shaw bit out the words like they were weapons themselves.
Lux found him retreated to the front of the fireplace, his knife trailing shallow scratches in the mantle while he paced.
She scowled. Because using the word “simply” to describe such an awful act did not sit right with her. The rest, however, was too horrific to allow space in her mind. More so than her parentage, even.
Maybe that was the only solution. To destroy them all for good.
“Did you know about their curse?” she asked Riselda. “To petrify without sleep?”
Riselda shook her head. “I’ve heard nothing of a curse. Though, this Society of Saints did not emerge fully until my leaving—”
“And your thieving,” interrupted Lux.
“Don’t speak to me of thievery, Lucena. Grimrook House. Mothlock. The Risen and The Essence. Those things belonged to the Grimrooks long before the Alessos even existed. Before the minders of Mothlock Manor turned an orphanage into a harvest, murdered our family, and created a cult.”
Our family.
The void yearned to unearth her hidden revelations. Lux gritted her teeth. “The Essence? Is that where the loose pages on lifeblood were from?”
“It was my legacy. This house, those books. It is mine. And they have claimed them falsely for long enough.”
Lux stared at Riselda. At her perfect features and perfect sneer.
She shifted, and Riselda’s eyes immediately snapped to her own, a placating smile forming on her crimson mouth.
Lux knew then—this was not a new web being strung together.
This was an old one. With a very old and very capable spider minding its vibrations.
And Lux had been stuck fast in it since birth.
“You knew about him.”
“Be more specific, my dear.”
“Alixsander’s body. It was always your plan to come back here. To bring me along. Was I meant to revive him for you too?”
Riselda swallowed the last drops from her goblet and said, “It would have been an excellent bargaining token, you must admit. Dear Alix. Sometimes I wonder if I should not have left him to die.”