Chapter 39
Over the next few days, soft spring winds melt every inch of leftover snow dotting campus. Magnolia blossoms sprout from the trees, unfolding like paper fortunes outside Reid’s window. The hills surrounding campus grow freckled with little wildflowers, monarch orange and baby duckling yellow.
Reid is gone most mornings when I wake up.
He’s perfected the art of coming and going from campus without being spotted, and it mostly involves leaving in the middle of the night or at the crack of dawn.
Sometimes he comes back with groceries. Cooks me quiet dinners, over which we talk about nothing of consequence.
Sometimes he comes back with bruises. He never comes back with the Caspian Ring.
I look at the sketch of Odette nightly and try my hardest to feel something so I can dream of her.
All that comes is my own imagination: her and Deacon, scheming and laughing their way through his storied past. Genghis Khan and Jack the Ripper, Odette telling Deacon he’s got one hell of a woman by his side.
Did she ride on the back of his bike? Did he call her sweetheart too?
My hope for a cure or a vision or anything at all begins to dwindle into something withered and prickly and frail. It’s not until I’m going stir-crazy three days after Reid’s return that Sophia, Elliot, and Peter are able to bypass enough Citadel hunters to come and see me.
“This is great,” Peter says, when I hand over his gift from the archives.
Dawnmere only knew the history of the ring, not where it might be now, hundreds and hundreds of years later.
So we clearly needed a new avenue. Peter moves past me to kick off his shoes and lie down on Reid’s couch, cracking open the book.
Elliot scoops me into a bear hug, and I inhale the body spray and slight seawater scent of his skin. “How’s the season going?”
“Marksmen are four and zero.”
“Hell yeah.” I offer him a high five when he puts me down. “Twenty bucks says you guys beat Bat and Blood on Friday too.”
“I’m not about to bet against myself,” he says, slouching into the armchair across from Peter. When I take a seat next to Sophia on the couch, he relents and offers me his hand. “Okay fine. Deal.”
We catch up on the past few days. Reid being home; all the new information he revealed; my scar from Finn’s claws, which I try to make sure Peter doesn’t have to see.
The intensity of my last syrabraxa episode.
Penny staying at Fever Dream. Elliot says he thinks she and Ward have already slept together.
Sophia and I are adamantly against this.
They tell me how Matt and this blond second-year Ingrid are hooking up.
How Landon is still teaching Combat Training II, which is more than awkward for Sophia.
“Let’s just say I’m running a lot of laps,” she tells me, and I can’t help but beam with pride.
It’s nice to feel a semblance of normalcy.
Back on the Harker campus, hanging out in Reid’s cottage, fire roaring, I can almost pretend things aren’t as bad as they’ve ever been.
That I’m not trapped in a jail cell here on campus.
That I’m not missing anyone with a grin as crooked as the scars on his back.
“I have good news, and I have bad news,” Peter says.
“I’m not sure I can physically withstand any more bad news.” Sophia rests her head on my shoulder.
“Good news first, then,” Peter says. “This relic, the Caspian Ring…Reid was right. It can remove the syrabraxa from you completely. All you have to do is put it on, and the spell is drained from your back into the gem in the center of the ring and stored there for safekeeping.”
“Holy shit,” Elliot breathes, leaning forward. “Where do we find this thing?”
Peter frowns. “That’s the bad news. This text is…” His eyes roam the yellowed pages. “Hundreds of years old. There’s nothing about the ring’s location in here.”
“Of course not,” I sigh, tipping my head back to stare at the roof of Reid’s cottage. “Nicco was the Elders’ djinn. They tasked him with hiding the ring centuries ago. It could be anywhere, and only he and the Elders would know it.”
“And the Elders want to kill you,” Sophia sighs.
Elliot stares at the floor. “And Nicco is dead?”
My lips twist. “Probably.”
“But we do have some clues,” Peter says.
“My favorite,” Sophia deadpans. “Scooby-Doo time again.”
Peter gives her his signature snaggletoothed grin.
“The mermaids told you the band lights the attic. Dawnmere told us that the ring belonged to King Caspian of Mesopotamia. He was a warlock. Some lymantrian historians even believe he created the syrabraxa spell. You wanna hear the craziest part?” Peter asks, brows raised.
I forgot in all my panic about the ticking clock on my sanity that this is also Peter’s favorite pastime: a research project.
“Do tell.” I grin at him. I missed my goonie squad way too much.
“If the host wears the ring, the spell is transferred from them into the ring, right? But then anyone else who puts on the ring can wield the syrabraxa and be spared the madness—”
“Oh, wow,” Sophia breathes. “That’s great. Full power, no consequences.”
“No, no,” Peter says. “Instead of madness, the wearer suffers instant death.”
I bite my cheek. “Not much of a trade-off, huh?”
“No,” Peter agrees. “It’s not. But that’s not our problem. It’ll be the Elders’.”
“It will?” Sophia asks.
“You lost me again,” Elliot sighs.
“When we find this ring, and Viv uses it to get the syrabraxa out,” Peter tells him, “we’ll trade the ring, now filled with the dark magic, for Viv’s name being cleared.
” When I grimace at the thought of giving the decaying, possibly deviant Elves such astronomical power, Peter corrects himself.
“Or we can give it to whoever you think can best keep it out of the hands of…” His face hardens. “Finn. And the High Thane.”
Sophia takes his hand and squeezes once.
For some reason I think of Deacon. I’d trust him to do almost anything, especially to keep Caspar and the Elders from wielding the syrabraxa. The thought of how much faith I have in Reid’s brother is so weighty I shove it away.
“So we wouldn’t just be saving Viv,” Sophia muses aloud. “Reid said Viv can never be used to make a syrabraxa again, right?”
Peter nods, eyes a little heavy-lidded as he watches her delicately work her long copper hair in thought. “Her body wouldn’t be able to withstand it. She’d die, which wouldn’t make for a very valuable host.”
I frown at him. “Wonderful.”
“And Viv is probably the last aeon, right?” Sophia continues.
“Except for that old lady at Shiloh,” Peter says. “If Deacon was right that she was turned into a host.”
“She would have had to be an aeon,” I sigh. “And I’ve found no evidence of any aeons going to this school but my dad and me.”
“If so,” Sophia continues, undeterred, “once we get that ring on Viv and hide it for good, nobody can ever make a syrabraxa again. Unless Viv has an aeon kid, I guess.”
I hadn’t even thought about it that way. I’d felt so consumed by hopelessness, but if I can find the ring and get the spell out of me, its unimaginable power can finally be put to rest. No more threat of bedlam let loose across the world. I could sleep easy at night.
“I wonder if the Elders would sacrifice one of their own,” Sophia says, “just to render the ring useless. Better than hiding it, right?”
“They would do just that,” I say. Fiona all but told me so, when we first came back to Harker.
Elliot sits up. “You mean force some sacrificial Citadel hunter to use the spell on something useless just so it’s done and the Brood can never wield it? And then that poor schmuck would die?”
“They wouldn’t be a poor schmuck,” Peter says. “It would be a hero-level sacrifice, giving up your life to stop the High Thane—or anyone else—from ever opening the Chasm. It’s like the Flash running into the antimatter cannon in Crisis on Infinite Earths. Issue number eight.”
Sophia’s frown says she doesn’t get the reference.
“Logan giving up his immortality to stop Dr. Cornelius in The Death of Wolverine?”
“You’re getting colder,” I tell him with love.
“You know what I mean,” he huffs. “Maybe they’d use the power to kill Caspar and his whole Brood.”
The thought is sobering. “Could it do that?”
“It could kill everyone on Earth, ostensibly.”
“No Brood would certainly make our jobs easier,” Sophia muses.
“And more boring,” Elliot weighs in.
When we all cut our eyes to him, he only shrugs. “I like hunting.”
“Then join a fight club.” Sophia gives him a light kick. “I’d be fine hanging up my crossbow.”
“Really?” Sophia seems to love the hunt. Or the adrenaline rush, at least.
She twists her mouth in thought before settling on, “I think I’d need an outlet like any of us, but…yeah. I could be good at other things, I think.”
“You could refurbish old cars,” Peter suggests.
Her eyes shine at the idea. “Exactly.”
“And fuck all the rich old dudes who bring them in,” Elliot jokes. “Double the profits.”
“Now that I’d be great at,” she says, but her voice has lost a little of its wonder, and Peter’s eyes are back on the book in his lap.
Outside the spelled windows, the clear sky is fading to a dusky lavender. The logs in the fireplace are cooling, and my eyes are getting heavy.
“We should head out,” Elliot says. “Field Training is with Professor Crowley now that Landon’s leading the Viv witch hunt at night.”
“Have fun,” I mumble as the three of them stand. I wish I was free to hunt in the city with my friends tonight instead of being cooped up in this cottage. With Reid…
The thought makes my chest tighten—
“I’ll walk you out,” I say to Sophia. Which is weird, and not something we usually do since we aren’t on The Bachelor, but she’s kind enough not to argue.