Chapter 38
Reid’s cottage is cold and the air hangs still and heavy.
We can’t open the windows to breathe a bit of spring into the place, as Reid told me on the ride back to Harker, because Driscoll’s spell is a simple illusion on the outside of the cottage—nobody can hear us or see inside.
One open window, though, and anyone could peer right in.
So I turn on the heat and the cottage is pumped with musty air.
I light a candle, only to realize it’s scented with cloves and blow it out.
The place could really use some TLC. Or maybe just a vase of roses and a good scrub.
Reid stuffs his hands into his Harker sweats and leans against the counter to look at me. It’s like he never left.
I try to organize my thoughts—I have so much I want to ask.
But the litany of questions feels more like an interrogation.
What did I see you searching for in your dreams?
What did you want my friends to find at Simon and Son’s?
What did Finn do to you? Why didn’t you tell me the High Thane was your uncle?
How did Deacon kill your fiancée? That last one really belongs in a footnote, but I find it keeps sneaking toward the top.
“What do you want to know?” he asks, as if reading my mind.
“Everything.”
“You want to sit?” He says it like I’m a feral dog. Here, puppy. I don’t bite.
I take a bracing breath and sit down at the small, rickety table. He sits across from me. “Viv—”
“I put my life at risk over and over looking for you.”
“I never asked you to do that.” His face has grown dark. I can’t tell if it’s regret. “I sent you the camera to help you find a way free of the syrabraxa, not to find me. You knew I was alive.”
“And what? You expected me to forget about you after that? Did you want me to move on?”
“No, of course not.” He presses his hands together. “I didn’t think you’d be foolish enough to leave the school.”
“Then you don’t know me very well.”
He ignores the jab. “I certainly didn’t want you to die searching for me.”
“Because you were fine.”
“Fine?” Reid shakes his head as if I’ve proven some conspiracy theory. “He’s filled your head with all kinds of poison about me, hasn’t he?”
“Who? Deacon?”
“Don’t sound so incredulous. I warned you. I told you my brother was a lying, murdering fuck. It’s bad enough I had to see him holding you.” He says the words like they’re cutting him in half. “Now you’re buying into his whole—”
“I am not buying into anything. I went to the Manor. I was there the night you escaped scot-free.”
Anger ignites in his eyes. “Finn pulled out my fingernails. My teeth. My eyeballs, Viv. For days. Does that sound scot-free to you?”
My blood stops cold.
He has the decency to not even say what he was being tortured for.
He isn’t lording it over my head that he suffered for me.
For my family. For Harker, and all the students here.
I may not know everything Reid was doing these past few months, but I know in my heart that he doesn’t want me to feel guilty.
He’d protect me the same way a hundred times over.
Reid pinches the bridge of his nose. Inhales long and deep. “I escaped, yes. I got the camera and left it for you. Risked my life to help you find a ring that might help—”
Hope shoots through me. “A ring? You know about the ring? Is it the Caspian Ring?”
“Yes.” Reid’s eyes light, overgrown chestnut curls falling into his face. “Did the djinn have it?”
His words clang through me, a steel bat against my lungs, my heart, my stomach.
I sink to the back of my chair. “The djinn…No. He couldn’t tell us anything.
My friends have been looking for the ring—even Deacon and I last night in the archives—but we don’t have a single lead.
Is that what you were looking for? In the city? The Caspian Ring?” For me?
His eyes are nearly wet with desperation.
“Yes. I love you, Viv. Everything I’ve done since the moment I saw you, fighting on that subway car, I’ve done for you.
You have to know that. And you’re right,” he sighs.
“It wasn’t fair to be here at Harker and keep you in the dark.
I was able to catch glimpses of you…” His blue eyes shine with some memory.
“Walking in the snow. Peering through my window. Laughing with your friends. You seemed like you were doing well. I didn’t realize… ”
A whole new perspective sinks into me like a stone in water.
Reid, who told me he was falling in love with me the night we’d slept together at the Windsor, and me, who hadn’t said it back.
Reid, who had been so honest about how he saw himself.
Damaged goods. A deviant. Scum of the earth.
Had he wondered if I was better off without him?
“And then when the Citadel hunters swarmed the campus weeks ago…I heard them talking about four hunters being killed in the thicket. About you being on the run. So I knew you weren’t in their clutches yet.
I was going to track you down myself, but Sophia and Peter and Elliot were continuing their lives around campus.
Always texting, making phone calls. I knew you were safe somewhere.
I thought here at Harker. Killed me not to know where, though.
” A dark shadow crosses his features. Perhaps it kills him more now to know I was living with his brother.
“Nothing happened between us.”
He nods slowly. “But something did. Maybe not something physical…”
I take in a shuddering breath. “He’s my friend.”
A humorless laugh. “That may be worse.”
“When I told him you were hurt…at the docks. He didn’t even have to think about it. He rushed there to save you.”
“He lives for the fight. That’s all.”
“You’re wrong.”
Reid shakes his head. Clearly, this isn’t the argument he’s interested in having. “How did you know I’d been in the city?”
“The syrabraxa. I see people—what they’re doing, where they are—in my dreams. If I have a strong enough emotion surrounding them before I fall asleep. And…”
“And…?”
“It’s caused bouts of intense bloodlust. When I’m rageful. Basically my aeon abilities are in overdrive. More bloodlust, more sensing deviants. Mood swings are probably up too.”
“Makes sense,” he muses, even as concern contorts his face.
“How did you—”
“What did—” he asks at the same time.
I press my lips together. “You first.”
He sighs. “This isn’t really how I imagined seeing you for the first time after all those months.”
I stare at my fingers, twined together on his table. “Me, either.”
“What did Deacon mean when he said your deal?”
I’m not going to tell Reid about Odette.
As much as I know that if we aren’t fully honest with each other we have no chance at getting back to normal—and as much as I want to know if Reid has information on who this woman was—I just can’t bring myself to share Deacon’s secret with Reid, of all people.
Deacon would never forgive me. And he’d be right not to.
“I swore that in return for his help, I wouldn’t hurt any of the deviants who work in his club. ”
Reid nods, satisfied. “Your turn.”
“How did you know about the Caspian Ring?”
“As soon as I saw that spell in your back, that day at the docks…” His voice grows choked.
“I swore I’d find a way to get it out of you.
Once I was free from Finn I reached out to some old ex-Brood contacts.
They’d been trying to help Caspar brew the syrabraxa for decades.
They told me of a ring that could remove the spell from the wearer. The Caspian Ring.”
Caspar. He’d called him by his real name. “You never told me the High Thane was your uncle.”
Reid nods. “I didn’t.”
He expected this one. Knew Deacon would have leapt at the chance to tell me of such a huge betrayal on Reid’s part. The irony…I’d found out by accident at that luncheon. Maybe Deacon never would have said a thing.
“Why not?”
“Thought you’d go after him and get yourself killed. I know he’s funding your mom’s campaign. I’d never have been able to stop you.”
“You ever tell Lisette? The Elders?”
“I told Edgar.”
I laugh—a nasty, bitter sound. “I’m sure he got right on that. Did you take souls while you were escaping Finn?”
“I had to. To protect myself in hiding, to get my strength up. I only drained criminals, though. Thugs—”
“No—” I shake my head. “Before. The way you fought at the docks…” The power I’d seen him display going against his cousin.
He takes in another pained breath through his nostrils. “I hadn’t in years before that day. But I had to get you out of there.”
I chew my lip, heart in my throat. It’s like Deacon said. Morality is not an on-off switch. No good guys, no bad. I just didn’t realize Reid had been playing by the same gray rules.
“You don’t have to respect my choices,” Reid says quietly, “or trust me, or want to be with me…” He stares down at his hands on the table.
“All I’m asking is that you stay here where I can keep you safe while we find that ring.
Once that spell is out of you, you can’t be infused with a syrabraxa again.
Finn will have no use for you, the Elders no reason to kill you to protect anyone…
You can return to your life here at Harker, and in Babylon with Penny, and you never have to talk to me again. ”
His face carries such pain, such gut-deep grief, I can’t help but feel the fight slink out of me. “I don’t want that. I just might need some time.”
“I’m a demon,” he says weakly. “I have all the time in the world.”
In the early evening, Fiona finally calls me back.
With as little detail as possible, I tell her I am safe and Reid is safe and we are solely focused on getting this spell out of me before I succumb to the syrabraxa’s madness.
She doesn’t ask about the car chase. If she saw it, or if anyone broke into the Windsor looking for Harker, I am none the wiser.
“Do you know anything about a Sumerian relic called the Caspian Ring?” I ask her, pacing around Reid’s bedroom.