Chapter 34
“What now?” Deacon asks. Soft slants of silver moonlight illuminate his mischievously raised brows. “Strip poker?”
But I’m barely paying attention. Perhaps this is an opportunity as much as it is a hideout. It’s certainly a better use of time than indulging in Deacon’s sense of humor. “Maybe we should research the ring again.”
“Didn’t your goonie squad already comb through the place?”
“Yeah, but I never got to look for myself.”
My eyes roam the cluttered room. The desk, with its leather enchanted search engine.
I think of the messages I got from Peter, Soph, and Elliot while Penny and I were stuck at Fever Dream.
How they searched every single thing related to syrabraxas, rings, djinn, and attics.
Then I remember what Peter told me on the phone last night—my pity party with Sophia and Penny feels like it was months ago.
“You know anything about a Sumerian relic called the Caspian Ring?” I ask Deacon.
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Search for it on there,” I tell him, gesturing to the Compendium. “I’m going to call Fiona.”
To my surprise, Deacon doesn’t argue. He takes a seat, the rickety wooden chair barely coming up to the middle of his behemoth back, and dips his quill in the ink.
I’ve been trying to limit my conversations with Fiona lately.
Anything I tell her could be used against us, given how the Elders expect her to help track me down.
I definitely can’t tell her I’m back at the school, but who knows when we’ll be up here again?
I can’t wait for my friends to ask Dawnmere about the ring tomorrow.
If it’s kept in the archives, I need that information now.
I try Fiona three times before panic begins to set in.
But then I remind myself that it’s the middle of the night, and she’s probably home with Nora and I’m worrying for no reason.
If Finn broke into the Windsor and slaughtered the night guards looking for me, Fiona would have been alerted.
She would have called or texted to make sure I was all right.
“Nada,” Deacon says.
“You’re probably not doing it right,” I snip.
“Scoot.” But there’s no room. His legs don’t even fit under the desk.
I kneel beside him and search everything I can think of.
Caspian Ring. Syrabraxa relic. Sumerian ring.
Spelled jewelry. Zilch that can help us.
Only unrelated articles and papers. No long-lost rings hidden up here.
“Wow, you really showed me.”
“We’ll just have to search the old-fashioned way.”
Deacon scans the folders, cupboards, and boxes stuffed to the gills with antique files. “It would take a lifetime to go through everything in here.”
“Good thing you’re practically immortal.”
The next hour puts my hunter vision to the ultimate test as I try—shrouded in near-total darkness—to comb through the most cluttered room of documents, treasures, and books for a single ring with no hints, clues, or performance-enhancing drugs.
Deacon gives up after thirty minutes and begins reinforcing the doors with furniture on the off chance the hunters decide to search for us up here.
I think the odds are low, given the new security measures Fiona put in place after Driscoll.
She’s the only one who can get in, and the Elders have no reason to ask if she gave me a key.
Still, as a protector and a fighter and a knight and a lord of wild things or whatever other lives Deacon has lived, I think it makes him feel useful to barricade us in here, and I’m grateful for that. I’m not good at sitting around and waiting for the fight to come to me, either.
The only interesting things I find as I search are a book on Sumerian relics, which will be helpful if the ring itself isn’t in here, and a spool of dated film coated in dust, with the words La Douleur Exquise, first cut printed by typewriter and taped to the front.
I dump out a canvas bag filled with artifact gloves and throw both inside. Then I return to my rummaging.
“It’s not in here,” Deacon tells me for the sixth time, hefting a filing cabinet in front of the barrage he’s built.
I halt my hands, sifting through a box of leather-bound hunter’s notebooks from the seventies as anger rises beneath my skin.
But I quell it with a breath, letting the papers go.
It’s not his fault he’s right. Why did I think I’d get lucky?
I haven’t once in the past year. I’ve been doomed, kidding myself that if there was a way out of this spell, I’d have any way of getting my hands on it.
Nicco is probably dead, the mermaids speak in riddles, we’ve scoured the school…
I bet Deacon’s known how screwed I was all along.
The hope bubbling inside me turns caustic.
When I take a dejected seat on the floor, Deacon says, “You should sleep.”
“What are you, my dad?” I bite out. When he opens his mouth, I cut him right off. “Don’t even think about it.”
Deacon frowns. “Your dad was killed by demons. Even I don’t find that sexy.”
I press my lips together and scan the room to avoid his eyeline. On the floor of the closet, Deacon’s made a small pallet. A pillow from the wooden desk chair. A blanket of his leather jacket.
“That’s chivalrous.” I’m aiming for sarcasm, but it comes out a little warmed.
“Don’t get your panties wet. It’s too hot in here for leather.”
The weight of the night descends on me like a rain cloud let loose. Hearing him with Tinker Bell the bloodlust, the vampire, Finn’s claws, the taxi chase, the hunters in the thicket. So much adrenaline and blood lost, and nothing to show for it. And I’m more of a fugitive now than I’ve ever been.
“Okay,” I concede. “Maybe just for a little.”
I meander into the closet somewhat reluctantly before I admit defeat and lie down on the floor.
The angle makes the archives even darker.
I’m surrounded on three sides by a closet of locked documents, and too low to the ground to see the jagged slice of moon peeking through the cathedral window in the main room beyond; my eyelids grow heavy and my bones tired.
I’m colder now that I’m not distracted and wish we could blast the heat in here without alerting anyone to our presence.
A shiver overtakes me, and I pull Deacon’s jacket more snugly over my body.
To take my mind off my chattering teeth, I study Deacon.
He moves efficiently, his back muscles barely contracting as he hefts one armoire filled with books after another. The moonlight limns his curved biceps under his white T-shirt, his elegant nose, his full lips.
“How’d you know demons killed my dad?”
Deacon wipes sweat from his brow as he turns to me. “Caspar’s not shy about his achievements. His warlock killing renowned hunter David Cadell was a feat.”
The thought of Caspar and Driscoll celebrating the most unimaginable moment of my life fills my blood with fire. I sit up, leaning against the back of the closet. I am not tired anymore. “I watched him die.”
Deacon considers this. Takes a seat in that desk chair across from me that doesn’t fit him and rolls it to the closet’s edge. “How?”
“Went with him on a routine hunt. Brood cornered us. He hid me in a shipping container to keep me safe.” Emotion squeezes my throat nearly closed.
“He was my best friend, and I couldn’t do anything to save him.
” I draw my knees up to my chest and wish for the hundredth time I had my locket. “I was ten years old.”
Deacon’s jaw is rigid. “I’m sorry.”
I know he means it. I also know that if Deacon had the chance, he would have killed my dad himself that night just for his hunter soul. Opposing feelings swell inside me—affection and shame.
“There was nothing you could have done,” he says after a while.
It’s not the first time someone’s told me it wasn’t my fault. But they weren’t there. They don’t know how I could have helped. How strong I was, even then.
“I’m serious.” Backlit by a fogged moon, he looks almost angry. “You might have been the same ferocious little hellcat back then, but no ten-year-old aeon could have taken Caspar and his men. You probably gave your dad the greatest gift of his life, knowing his death spared your own.”
Something constricts around my heart, cutting me off from speech. In almost a decade, I’d never seen it that way.
“At least you liked your dad,” he adds with a humorless laugh.
“What do you mean? You and your dad were thick as thieves.”
Deacon nods like he expected me to say this. “Reid told you that.”
“Was it a lie?”
“No.” Deacon studies his hands. “I guess not. Doesn’t mean I liked him.”
“Why not?”
He’s quiet for a while, and I don’t push.
I was raised by a monster, Reid had told me once. He’d also said Deacon was no better.
“My mother wasn’t his wife,” he says, studying the intricate threads of the antique carpet at his bare feet. I hadn’t seen him take off his shoes. “She wasn’t even a demon…She was a harpy.”
The revelation sends me lurching forward so hard I knock the breath from my lungs with my own knees.
Deacon is…a half-born? All this time I’d assumed him demon royalty. Top of the food chain. An anomaly to not be in the Brood. To not be running it, frankly.
But another, even more perplexing thought hits me. A harpy and a demon—
That unholy union should only ever birth another harpy. We learned that on the very first day of class here at Harker. “That’s…not possible.”
“You’re telling me.” Deacon’s laugh is bitter. “My father wasn’t happy. He fucked around with harpies because they couldn’t bear him sons. I was…”
An abomination. But I don’t dare say it.
“Unexpected. My father claimed she seduced him. Harpies aren’t so well respected in deviant circles.
” I remember that too. For their connection to the astral plane.
They gain power from many lymantrian sources like asphodel and lotuses.
“His wife believed the story, and he had my mother exiled. I didn’t see her again for centuries. ”
The thought is almost too much to bear. Young Deacon, surely still with that shock of alabaster hair, ripped from the arms of his mother for being what he was.
The guilt I’d carry with me alone…Suddenly the parade of sweethearts trotting in and out of Fever Dream takes on a heartbreaking hue.
He’s like anyone else, suffering from the abandonment of a parent.
Trying to fill an impossible void. I allow myself to lean back into the closet as the new information settles into the corners of my mind. Dust to be inspected later.
“I was raised by this woman who…” Deacon presses one broad hand into his thigh.
“Who just hated me. And for good reason.” He’s still leaning toward me, as if he wants instinctually to be closer but the chair prohibits it.
“I had no choice but to earn my father’s favor.
I was his only son. For a time, at least.”
“Until Reid. Who…?”
“Reid was not a bastard, no.”
“And yet your father was crueler to him than to you?”
“My father thought he’d been dealt a bad hand. A bastard son who was strong and powerful and a rightful heir who didn’t think it was moral to slay a hellhound. In the end, power won out. It does for most people.”
So Reid had been too sensitive for his father’s vicious ways, and Deacon had been the golden child, just as Reid had once told me. But an unwilling one, laced with guilt, it seemed, for siding with the man who took his mother away from him. “You never forgave him for what he did to your mom.”
“Still haven’t and the fucker’s been dead for two hundred years. I’ve slain and warred with the worst of them, Vivienne. To this day, he’s a kind of evil even I can’t articulate. And he loved me fiercely. I was his prized steed.”
I can’t imagine—being adored, being cherished by someone like that.
Deacon and I have made a strange confessional out of this closet.
Bathed in nothing but the rare glint of silver light from the window in the archive beyond, I feel more untethered around him than I have before.
I fight the inexplicable urge to close the door and drown us in total darkness.
See what admissions come out then. “He give you those scars?”
Deacon’s answer is swift. “No.”
And I don’t know what compels me, in the pitch-black darkness of the archives—nothing but the moon behind its heavy tufts of fog to witness the absurdity of it—to ask him, low and whispered, “Can I see them?”
I never stopped thinking of those marks on his back. Not since that night with the mermaids. The way they’d glowed…something within him brimming over with as much pain as strength.
Deacon’s jaw hardens. I grow so still I swear my heart halts in my chest.
But he only stands from the chair and pulls his shirt over his head.
Then he lowers down to his knees. My breath hitches in my lungs as he crawls toward me like a lethal creature born of night—heady, brutal eyes locked on my own—until he makes his way inside the closet.
He maneuvers his body with such grace, such scarcely concealed power, until he’s sitting with his bare back before me.
At his neck, the silver chain hangs, simple and unassuming. The tattoos on either side of his throat are hard to see in the darkness, yet I know exactly where they are. Right below his ears, the size of half of my fist.
And his back—
Elongated, corded in muscle, an instrument of sheer, unyielding force. And not even a demon. Abomination was apt—he’s like nothing that’s ever existed. Like nothing that ever could again.
The scars stare back at me. Those long, gruesome lateral lines. Like someone took a trowel to his skin and scraped until he wailed. The thought chokes me. “How does this even happen?”
“I was carved open and held apart with silver nails,” he says quietly. “Blood loss won’t kill a demon. The body fights to heal itself but can’t. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes months.”
“Deacon…”
But he’s already maneuvering himself to sit against the inside wall of the closet, perpendicular to me. He stretches out his legs in front of mine. “Save your tears. It’s not the worst torture I endured by a mile. Just the most permanent.”
Understanding rings in me like a death knell.
The learned tolerance to silver.
The nightmares.
The tattoos.
“You…” I all but gasp. “You were in hell.”