Chapter 40
“No, no, no,” my mom tells the trembling sales associate. “I said nothing pink.”
The slight woman smiles through watery eyes. “Ms. Abbot, this is actually nude—”
“Well, then nothing nude,” my mom snaps. “Bring out all the green dresses you have.”
The woman hurries away, clutching the stunning gown in her quivering grasp.
“You’re going to give her an aneurism,” I say, leaning against the mirror in a raspberry-colored tulle monstrosity.
“Might do a girl like that some good,” my mom huffs, waddling in a mermaid-cut dress toward the velvet settee.
“An aneurism?” Nora asks. “How so?”
But my mom ignores her. It’s hour three of gown-a-palooza, and she’s had it with both of us.
It’s rare to see even Nora get on my mom’s nerves, but everyone is high-strung today.
Forget that the gala is in two days, and my mom decided halfway through our routine fitting that the dresses we’ve had picked out for months just aren’t “cohesive enough.” Forget that it took hours to convince Reid I couldn’t miss this and we’d had to utilize the wig again.
Forget that he and Elliot are both covertly standing guard outside the dressing rooms, watching me like some kind of secret service.
The real issue is that even the most deluxe fitting room in this NTC department store is too small for the three of our bad moods, and that’s before the landfill of discarded dresses began to pile up in the corner.
Nora’s sour because Fiona’s been slammed with gala prep and about a hundred other things Fiona can’t tell her about.
(She won’t shut up about eggshell napkins!) My mom can’t find a single color that looks good on all three of us.
(Viv, why does everything make you paler?) And I’ve been playing a sweat-inducing game of keep-away with the scar down my back.
(Backless gowns make me self-conscious, and no, I can get this impossibly placed zipper all on my own, thanks.)
“Why can’t we wear the dresses we wore to the gala last year?” Nora asks, examining her skin under the cruel fluorescent lights.
“Because we need to appear as a unified front. And I cannot see Viv in one more black gown. She might as well be in a uniform.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Oh, and all the progress my mom and I had been making seems to have been lost by my dodging her every effort to talk to me or spend time together while I’ve been hiding from multiple forces of evil.
“I’m back!” the reinvigorated sales associate chirps, wheeling in a clothing rack stuffed with feathers, sequins, and satin in every shade of green. “And these are really going to make a statement, especially the chartreuse—”
“No,” my mother says, arms folded. “No, no. We’ll look like frogs.”
The sales associate hides the crushing defeat behind a plastered, dead-eyed smile. “Sure thing. Good point.”
I cut Nora a bewildered look. She only shrugs her shoulders across the fitting room. What do you want me to do?
“How about blue?” the woman offers my mother. “That’s regal. Royal. Trustworthy!”
“What is this, Mad Libs? Out,” my mom tells the sales associate, and she skitters away.
Nora says, “I look great in blue.”
“Too dour. All of us in blue…like a funeral.”
I could impale myself on that broken hanger in the corner. “That’s black.”
My mom’s cell rings, saving us all another argument. “Hello?”
I’m about to collapse onto the settee when ice sluices through my veins.
Though it’s muted, I know the voice on the line. Cruel, cold. Caspar. I’d almost convinced myself he was hardly in her orbit after she’d continuously rebuffed his romantic advances.
“On our way now to the facility,” Caspar says on the other end of the line. “She’ll be all set soon for you to come and visit.”
“Thank you so much,” my mother says. “You are a saint, truly.”
A bitter laugh bursts from me as she hangs up, and she shoots me a punitive glare.
“Mom, I have to go back to work soon.” I’m already stepping off the rotating platform and rooting through my bag to make sure my daggers are there. Even if the High Thane is none the wiser about who I am, let alone where I am, his voice is enough to urge me back to Harker.
My mom pales. “You can’t leave. We haven’t found your dress!”
“What did Caspar do that was so saintly?” Nora asks. When my mom’s eyes widen, Nora admits, “I saw his name on your phone.”
“It’s personal.”
“Come on,” Nora coos. “Who are we going to tell?”
“If you must know, he’s moving your grandmother to the mental health facility he’s on the board of in the Sewards. Free of charge.”
Nora presses a hand to her heart. “That’s very altruistic.”
“Grandmother?” I ask. “Nana died years ago.”
“Not Nana…” My mom frowns as if she realizes we’re about to have a talk she doesn’t really have time for. “Your father’s mother, Ada.”
“Dad’s mother is alive?” My hands freeze as I’m unzipping my dress at the side. “How did I not know this?”
Nora and my mom exchange a somber look. “She isn’t well, honey. I didn’t even realize she was still alive until—”
“I have a family member I didn’t know about?” I cut my eyes to Nora. “But you did?”
Nora opens her mouth, but my mother steps in. “I have been trying to reach you for months, Viv. Trying to set a lunch or a dinner, so I could tell you.” She smooths the skirt of the dress she’ll never buy. “If you’d have deigned to call me back, you would have known.”
I have no excuse. I can hardly hear my own thoughts.
My mom softens. “Your father kept her from me too. I only found out about Ada last winter. He’d set her up to receive care at Shiloh Asylum, but they had a break-in—some con artists pretending to be pharmaceutical reps. They killed an orderly. Never even found his body.”
I stop breathing.
How could I not have figured this out sooner?
The only other person who could have carried a syrabraxa was an aeon, and my father and I are the last bloodline.
She’d called me kitten—my dad’s nickname for me.
When she’d said I had one of those once too, she’d been looking at my locket.
Her locket. I’m an idiot of the highest degree.
Nora shakes her head in disgust. “The crime in this city is just inconceivable.”
“She and some other patients with similarly severe cases were moved out of state. That’s when they contacted me.
I visited her once…but she’s very, very sick.
Hard to talk to. They think some kind of accident that led to brain trauma.
But like I said, Caspar’s on the board of the best long-term-care facility on the East Coast. I asked him to come see her with me a few days ago.
He saw how ill she was…Offered that day to have her taken care of. ”
Literally.
“Mom, I have to go right now.”
I’m peeling off my birthday-streamer dress and sliding into my dark jeans and oversized button-down before they can spy my back.
“What about the gala?” Panic is rising in her voice.
“Work is calling me, I’m sorry, Mom.” And I mean it too. “I’ll wear whatever you pick. Just no low back, please.”
The look on her face isn’t just irate, it’s worse—wounded.
Whether I think the color coding of our gala dresses matters or not, it’s important to her.
I don’t want to leave her hanging, despite everything.
The irony is, I know what she’s thinking.
I can see it in her eyes. She thinks I’m selfish beyond measure, when the irony is I’m about to go fight like hell to save everyone in this city, including her.
“I’m sorry,” I repeat, because it’s what I’ve been trained to say. But I can hear Deacon’s commentary in my mind, as if he’s beside me. Give them a chance to see all that you do.
And maybe he’s right. The whole concept that I can’t tell my mom about deviants when she’s planning to run for the highest office in this city is starting to get really old.
Who made these rules, the Elders? The same deviants who have been allowing Caspar to do what he pleases with this city?
I’ve seen what they believe in, and I don’t know if it’s rooted in anything but keeping people afraid.
Penny learned everything this year, and all it did was make her brave and self-assured and I think successfully sleeping with a lovely werewolf.
The woman—Ada—I met at Shiloh wasn’t just a figment of my Valium-dosed imagination…
She was my paternal grandmother. And if Deacon was right, she had been on Harker grounds when she’d been imbued with a syrabraxa.
Maybe that’s why my dad was so fearful of the same thing happening to him, and to me.
Why he made sure I told nobody I was an aeon.
Perhaps he’d seen it slowly drive her mad.
Perhaps he’d had to keep her safe from whoever at the Citadel put the spell in her in the first place.
If that’s true…the fate of the world is on the line if I can’t get to Ada before Caspar kills her.
All of this feels as good a reason as any to tell my mom what a monster her saint is. I open my mouth to do so, but then slam it shut.
If I tell my mom and Nora everything, I’m going to lose valuable time answering complicated metaphysical questions.
I’ll run the risk that they try to be heroes and end up dead.
Selfishly, I’d get the chance to show them who I really am—a hunter, something I’ve begun to feel shockingly proud of, maybe for the first time since my dad died—but in the long run, all it will do is terrify them and leave them helpless.
“I’m sorry,” I say a third and final time as I bolt through the dressing room and into the store, pushing Deacon’s words from my mind.
But even as I find Reid and Elliot in the shoe section and drag them out and back toward the Windsor, like Deacon, the suggestion stays lodged firmly in my psyche. Maybe another day…
As we hustle warily across a bustling Main Avenue, I call Sophia.
“Hi, babe.” Sparring sounds in the background. If I know my friends, that groan was Peter being flipped onto the gymnasium floor.
“We have a problem.”
“Shocking. We never have problems.”
“Put Peter on too.”
“He’s getting water. Peter!” Sophia screams. I pull the phone from my ear with a wince as I hustle by a tour group leaving the museum.
“What’s up?” he says into the phone. He sounds husky and winded.
“When is the new moon?”
They’re already beginning to rope off the marble steps of the Windsor for the gala in two days, which means I have to show my badges to two different Astera PD officers to get myself, Reid, and Elliot in the back way through the alley.
“Uh.” I can almost hear the mental calculations in his brain. “Sunday. So, midnight on Saturday night.”
Of course. Of course it’s the night of the gala.
“The woman from Shiloh…she’s real. That was my grandmother.”
Reid cuts his eyes to me. Elliot too. Peter’s quiet on the other end of the line.
“If she really does have a syrabraxa in her, we have to find her before the High Thane does,” Reid says under his breath as we speed walk through the Windsor.
“Too late,” I tell him.
“How do you know?” Elliot asks.
And now the hard part. I steel myself as my boots clack on the just-buffed floor of the Windsor toward the utility closet. “My mom told me…she’s kind of working with him.” I glance sidelong at Reid, who gives me a slight, guarded nod.
“The High Thane is Caspar Harlock.”