CHAPTER 17 EZZO
EZZO
I should have never allowed Alara to abduct the boy.
Regardless of Raya’s logic, I knew it was a bad idea; I felt the wrongness of it in my bones.
But then I remembered the room full of shattered typics—all those piles of glass the Meridian condemned to a filthy floor—and I couldn’t not do something.
For the first time since Eve died, I felt the need to watch.
And it felt better than drinking.
It’s always felt better than drinking, if I’m honest; it’s why I used to spend so much time hiding inside my gift.
An obsession, Eve often called it, though not the kind she discouraged unless I allowed myself to get too lost. She understood what the others didn’t: that I don’t watch because I’m scared, but because I’m guilty—that even a decade later, I’m still trying to atone.
When I watch, I’m useful.
When I watch, I can prevent the Council from inflicting more needless hurt—or in this case, the Divine Meridian.
That’s how we stop him from doing it again.
Heartless though it was, Raya did make a good point—and she made it sound convincing.
How she did that, I don’t know—I don’t know why I chose to stick with her at all, what possessed me to cuff myself to a Shade, and go Hue hunting with a Shade, and make small talk with a Shade who looks at me like I’m a piece of meat to be fed to the dogs.
But I did.
Because something about her—and I don’t mean the fact that she’s pretty; it’s not a physical thing, it’s more like a . . . I can’t even explain what—tugged at me in a way that felt important, like she was keeping a secret I desperately needed to learn.
So instead of leaving her to the trackers, I allowed her to drag me into this infernal plot.
I let her talk me into using a child as bait.
And now that child is being tortured in a cellar and I have no earthly clue how we’re going to free him without getting ourselves caught.
Already, his screams have forced me to clamp an arm around Raya’s horror, but it’s the moment she catches sight of the Shade strapped to the Meridian’s table that her fear changes to abject shock, the kind that tells me I’ll no longer be able to keep her panic under control.
Shit.
I phase us into the Gray before she can betray our presence, so that when she breaks free of my grip and spills her curses, they’ll dissipate harmlessly into the void.
“Raya, don’t—” I try to calm her, to stop her doing something reckless that’ll land the both of us in that cage in the corner.
“Get off me, Ezzo, we have to go back!”
My only saving grace is that she’s too incensed to initiate the blink on her own, to remember she has that power.
“Raya—”
“I said get off me, you filthy half breed! That’s my friend in there! I’m going back!”
Ah. The force of her reaction suddenly makes sense. If it was Novi on that table, I’d be fighting me the exact same way.
“Not without a plan, you’re not.” I pin her to the wall with a sobering effort, keeping a firm grip on her shoulders as I demand that she look at me head-on. “If you want to save your friend, we need a plan.”
“My plan is to kill them.” Raya’s eyes are wild, frantic, stray locks of russet framing her stern resolve. “Whether you help me or not.”
“I am trying to help you. But you have to let me—”
“There’s no time, Ezzo. Akari could already be—” Dead. The very thought strips the strength from her voice. And suddenly, Raya’s not breathing anymore, she’s gasping, her nails clawing into my skin as she struggles to keep herself whole.
“Hey—hey, listen to me.” I tilt her face up by the chin and temper my words.
“They’re not going to kill her right away, okay?
They could have done that in the cage if they wanted.
” And you don’t shackle a person so tightly just to turn around and slit their throat.
“You saw the tools they had in there, Raya; it’s all bloodletting equipment, not designed to kill a Shade fast, but to bleed them out slow.
That gives us a few minutes to think this through. ”
Though why I’m helping her do that is an entirely different question.
Saving one Shade was madness enough, wasn’t it?
What am I even doing, conspiring to save two?
I should be using the fact that she’s distracted as a means to put an end to this disastrous detour, to go find the others and forget whatever evil the Divine Meridian is brewing.
Except there’s a child on that table. It’s Eve’s voice chiding me from beyond the grave.
A child I endangered and a girl for whom Raya would revolt.
I remember what that kind of devotion feels like.
How, to defend it, I’d have worked with any monster in the world—Shade, Hue, Council or Church.
I wouldn’t have discriminated across blood color, and I don’t have it in me to inflict the pain I’ve been living with this past year on another soul, no matter how much I’m supposed to hate her.
And I don’t hate her, I realize. I should but I don’t.
Maybe I’ve used up all my hate on Cemmy, or maybe I just find myself more intrigued by Raya than I am annoyed.
A little impressed, even, given how much trouble she’s managed to court, and how, in every instance, her first impulse has been to fight, not run; to scheme, not surrender; to hurl insults like she didn’t care if they would hurt her cause.
It’s not every day that an acolyte breaks with the Council’s edicts in an effort to prove their worth, and no normal Shade would ever work with a Hue no matter what a vision showed them or how dire that future looked.
There’s something else driving her, and despite my better judgement, I want to know what.
Which is why—instead of abandoning her at her lowest—I allow the fledgling plan in my head to form.
“The Meridian is our biggest problem,” I say, conscious of how every part of Raya is still shaking. “Since we don’t know what he is yet, we don’t know what he’s capable of in the Gray, so you’ll have to be the one who phases him out of there. I’ll stay to take care of Alara and free your friend.”
“No, absolutely not.” The thunder in her refusal is pure steel. “I’m not leaving her.”
“Raya, if he can shimmer, I won’t last three seconds against him, and while I’m willing to help you, I’m not willing to die for you—or for her—so it’s this, or nothing.
” I deliberately turn my words cold. She needs to know that a bitter pill is the only kind I’m offering and that her choice is to swallow it or not.
And though that message takes a few seconds to fully register—to cut through the fog of worst-case scenarios her mind has surely decided to concoct—when it finally does, Raya bats me away angrily and pushes off the wall.
“I swear to all three Gods, Ezzo, if you’re lying to me—”
“What would be the point in lying when I could have already gone?” This time, my words are sincere, and Raya believes them because she wants to believe them—because she needs to believe them—and because they ring true.
She may not understand why I’m choosing to help her, but she will accept my help.
When it’s someone you love strapped to a madman’s table, you’ll do whatever it takes.
By the time we phase back into the physical realm, both the Shade and the typic are screaming. Though where her cries speak of fear and helplessness, his are of an entirely different sort.
Pain.
Potent and acute.
By my colors . . . what did they do? While we were sequestered in the Gray, a giant needle was shoved into the Shade’s arm, as well, connecting her to the boy via a curled length of tubing.
I think they’re—oh Gods, they’re draining her blood into him, and it’s causing his skin to sear black and blister, writhing him with indescribable pain.
Of all the sick tortures I’d imagined, this one didn’t even make the list, a cruelty so bizarre it borders on insane.
What in the world are these zealots trying to achieve? Beside me, Raya pales to snow, her whole body tensing with the need to act, now, and to do it recklessly, forget the plan she’d just agreed to follow.
On three, I mouth, keeping a lid on her urgency until we’re in position and ready to go. One . . . two . . . three.
With a purposefully obnoxious war cry, Raya charges at the Meridian and tackles him into the Gray at a run.
Once they meet the shadows, she’ll get in a good hit, if she’s able, and then quickly shimmer away in the hopes that he’ll shimmer after her, that he won’t allow a Shade to abscond with the knowledge of his secret haunt.
Hopefully, Raya is faster than he is, or else she’ll probably end up right back here, lying prone on his table with a needle buried in her arm.
But that’s the risk she agreed to take so that I can get her friend—Akari—to safety.
The moment they’re gone, I spring out from beneath the stairs, speeding straight towards Alara, who spots me a split second too late.
We collide with a grunt and a sharp exhaling of air, my momentum propelling us into the iron cage in the corner, where she won’t be able to phase.
Without that ability, she’s at the mercy of my height and weight, struggling to hold her own in a fight she didn’t see coming.
A fight she cannot win without magical aid.
“Oh no, you don’t.” I remember her taste for pre-spelled charms in time to stop her reaching for one herself, keeping her pinned down while I lay claim to the crystals and render her docile with a flash of Red.
All the while, the screams coming from the table continue to echo around the cellar in panicked waves, the typic’s pain growing in anguish, Akari’s fear rising in pitch.
“Hold on.” I lock the cage behind me before rushing to her side. “I’m going to get you both out of here. Just hold on.”