Chapter 40
Iawoke to the sound of a door creaking open.
It startled me enough that I nearly tumbled out of the bed and onto the floor.
But it was only Casimir, his silhouette drenched in morning light, his dark curls sparkling with dew drops like tiny diamonds.
I was in Casimir’s loft. In Casimir’s bed.
Why was I here? I fought to concentrate, but my brain had all but melted into slush.
How long had I been asleep? It felt like years.
“What time is it?” I croaked.
“Welcome back,” he greeted me with a soft smile. “It’s ten in the morning on Tuesday. You slept through all of Monday.”
Everything that had happened on Sunday night came flooding back to me with a sickening kind of clarity. Neha and August were dead—murdered by the Bloodthorn Order. Their blood, everywhere, pooling on the dais, caked on my hands—
Panicking, I stared down at my hands, expecting to find dried blood—but they were clean. I looked to Casimir and found confirmation of my worst fears in his grim expression. I closed my eyes, clenching my fists tightly.
August was dead.
I was going to be sick.
The next moment, Casimir was at my side, offering meaningless words of comfort. I caught fragments like “Not your fault—” and “Nothing you could have done,” but his words made no mark on me. Guilt had already stitched its way into my heart, permanently and irrevocably embroidered on my soul.
“Stop!” I shouted. “Just, stop. There’s nothing you can say to make this better.” And with that, I crawled back under the covers, seeking out the only oblivion on offer.
Hours later, I wrenched myself from the fog long enough to see Casimir perched on the bed beside me, reading a copy of The Gargoyle.
The headline on the cover read: “Gruesome Undergraduate Deaths Send Ouverham College into Crisis.”
In the article beneath the headline, I caught the phrase, “suspected murder-suicide,” and stopped reading as my stomach roiled. After retching into a bucket Casimir must have set beside the bed, I rolled over to find the Daemon himself regarding me carefully.
“Satanic suicides?” Anger swelled in my chest like a tidal wave. “How could anyone possibly think they’d done that to themselves?” I tossed the paper aside and closed my eyes, but the darkness offered little relief from my waking nightmare.
There was the cold tang of iron on my tongue.
There were Neha’s vacant, unseeing eyes—a wound across her throat so deep it nearly separated her head from her body.
There was the gurgling sound of August choking on his own blood, and Evren’s screams of agony as my dagger wrenched his eye from its socket.
I tasted, saw, and heard every horrible fragment of that night, over and over and—
Casimir was speaking again. “Devereaux arranged the scene of their deaths so that it appeared like an occult ritual gone wrong,” he explained. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine,” I gritted out before he could finish. “Just—still processing.”
Casimir wasn’t fooled by my lies today anymore than he’d been when we’d first met.
Wordlessly, he handed me a glass of water.
“When you’re ready, I have something for you.
” He leaned over the side of the bed to retrieve a small leather journal.
Before he handed it to me, I recognized the familiar soft brown leather.
The inscription on the front cover read:
M.F.
My father’s journal.
“How did you—?”
“I snuck into August’s dormitory early Monday morning, before the police searched it for evidence.” His lips formed a thin line of disapproval. “Ouverham is going to try and cover up the—incident—as quickly as possible.”
“And Gwen?” I urged him.
Casimir rearranged his features into a carefully neutral expression. “We can talk about that later,” he said evasively. “You should take a bath, you look terrible.”
“What happened to Gwen, Casimir?” What wasn’t he telling me? Terror hung about me like a cloak, heavy and suffocating.
His eyes burned with restrained emotion as he explained, “I spoke to Veronika yesterday. Gwen is fine, just a little shaken. Veronika gave her a draught that causes a mental fog, and I…” he hesitated. “I erased her memories of that night.”
“You—what?” I gaped at him in horror.
Casimir’s lips pressed into a thin line. “Arden, humans can’t know about Ethervale. They might compromise our secrecy.”
“So your solution was to erase her memories?” I exclaimed. How dare he? “Without even talking to me first—”
“Look, Farrow.” Oh, we were back to last names, were we?
“After the ritual—Veronika and I were trying to do damage control. You were practically comatose—I didn’t want to wake you.
The school can’t find out what happened in the Grotto.
It would endanger the students. We—we did things that I’m not proud of. ”
“Like dosing my best friend with poison to make her forget what happened?” I gave a hollow, humorless laugh. “You should’ve made me forget, too.”
Casimir looked at me sharply, his eyes blazing. “Do you really mean that?”
I wanted to mean it.
Begrudgingly taking Casimir’s suggestion, I padded over to his washroom and drew a scalding hot bath.
While I waited for the tub to fill, I began to read my father’s journal.
At last, I would know the secrets that had lain buried for so long.
In the wake of August’s death, it was a hollow sort of satisfaction.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat soaking in Casimir’s massive tub, staring at the pearlescent tile wall, too stunned by what I’d just read to notice that my fingers were pruned and the water had long gone tepid.
A knock at the door wrenched me from my troubled musings. Abruptly, I recalled my anger over Gwen, over how Casimir had stolen her memories from that night.
He should never have violated Gwen’s mind. It was true, she’d gone through something truly harrowing. She’d seen her lover slain and bleeding out on the altar. But Casimir… he’d taken the choice from her. We could’ve trusted her with this secret, surely.
In agitation, I toweled off, dressed, and snagged a comb through my knotted hair. I flung open the door, armed for another argument, but stopped dead at the sight of the blood seeping through Casimir’s shirt.
“Why are you still bleeding?” I demanded. “You were wounded days ago, I thought Daemons healed quickly—”
Guilt flashed over his expression, but before he could conceal his injury, I seized the hem of his shirt and tugged, exposing the dark, ragged wound left by Zhara’s star-shaped knife.
I could not suppress my gasp of horror. It looked significantly worse than it did last night, as if the outer edges had stained his skin a dark purple.
Casimir’s mouth grew tight. “It’s nothing. It’s fine,” he said dismissively.
“Why isn’t it healing, then?”
Casimir hesitated. “Veronika believes Zhara’s blade was laced with a Necro Hex.”
I gazed back at him, horrified.
“It’s a blood curse that causes the victim’s flesh to waste away,” he explained.
“How long?” I breathed.
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “It’s slow-acting. Better for drawing out one’s suffering.”
“Is there an antidote?”
“The only cure is Mirran Elixir.”
“And where would one find this elixir?” I inquired. “Ethervale?”
Casimir’s expression hardened. “Arden, it’s not possible,” he evaded.
“It’s fine,” I interrupted. “We’ll simply have to go to Ethervale and get the antidote.”
“No,” he growled. “It’s far too dangerous, I’ve told you. Ethervale is no place for mortals.”
“I already made a vow to act as emissary to the Order,” I argued. “I swore it on my blood.”
He winced. “That doesn’t mean—You don’t have to report to the court immediately—”
“Weren’t you the one telling me how dangerous it is to break a bloodbargain?” I interjected.
Casimir fell silent, his jaw clenching. I could feel his resolve wavering.
“You need that elixir,” I pressed. “I need to fulfill my bloodbargain. And…” I hesitated, wondering how far I could push him. “And you have to return, if only to free Isolde.”
His eyes flared with emotion as they bored into me, but he did not reply at once. We sat in tense silence for a few minutes as Casimir’s fingers traced the raw, mottled flesh on my forearm. My newest rune. The Threxian rune, an Ethervalean symbol for debt, for burden.
Casimir’s were eyes as hard and unyielding as onyx when they met mine. As if to remind me how badly this had gone for us, and how much worse it was about to get.
“I never would’ve imagined you’d end up marked with one of these, too,” he murmured, his expression softening. “But I can’t bring you into Ethervale, especially not when you’ve just relinquished your blood protection against softmagic.”
I grimaced at the reference to my bloodbargain with Evren, but my resolve was unwavering. I steeled myself for how the Darkseer might react to this final revelation. “What about a half-Daemon?” I hedged.
Casimir went rigid, his expression blank. A heavy silence settled between us. When he spoke, his voice sounded strangely distant. “What are you talking about?”
I unsheathed my silver dagger, allowing the sunlight to play off the blade’s pink-blue iridescence.
“You never told me why you found this knife so interesting,” I said, turning it over in my palm. My eyes met his. “It’s because this dagger was forged in Ethervale, wasn’t it?”
Casimir stared at me in pale disbelief as I set down the blade.
“One of the many secrets my father hid from me is that my mother isn’t my mother.”
It explained a lot—the cold, distant way she loved me. Why she always seemed so embarrassed by my ability to taste lies. To her, my gift was a sign of my difference, my non-humanness.
“No,” Casimir said, his lips twitching as though this were some sick joke. “That’s impossible.”
I shoved the journal into his hands. “See for yourself.” When he didn’t immediately open it, I urged him impatiently, “Go on.”
I followed along over his shoulder as he began to read.