Chapter 44
“Hold still, professor,” the nurse murmurs, waving her spindly fingers over Fiona’s bruised cheek. The plum-colored blotch fades to a sickly yellow—a week’s worth of healing in the span of seconds. No wonder Harker only employs pixies in their infirmary.
“I’m fine,” Fiona says, typing quickly on her phone. “Really. Go tend to the injured students.”
“Is Nora okay?” Peter asks, sitting opposite her in the crowded patient room.
Fiona sends another email and sighs, massaging her temples before wincing. The side of her head is peppered with bruises. “Yes. She’s at home, none the wiser.”
The tension lodged in my lungs deflates a little.
“You all need to reach out to your parents. I’m closing Harker early for summer.”
Of course she is. Surely the Elders know someone on campus let in another turned warlock. The school’s wards have always had a loophole for witches and warlocks. And this is the second time it’s been abused after Driscoll…I can only imagine the trouble Fiona is about to be in.
“I just can’t believe it,” Sophia murmurs, hands around her knees on a paper-coated daybed next to Elliot as pixies heal the gash in his leg. The paper crinkles softly as she rocks back and forth. “Reid. Your Reid. Our Reid.”
I say nothing from my perch by the window. The sun hides behind perfect, Renaissance-painting clouds, limning them in gold.
“We should go after him,” Elliot says, always the warrior. “Kick his fucking ass.”
The pixie bandaging his leg frowns.
I’d thought once that my friends and I were like the sky. Clouds and stars and sun. I wonder now if the four of us make up one well-balanced hunter. Elliot, strength. Sophia, bravery. Peter, goodness. And me, the bad, violent seed. Beetle crusher. Kill-happy. Lover of murderous demons.
“You will do no such thing.” Fiona stands, pushing past the pixie still trying to heal her bloodied lip. “I’m going to see the Elders now. I’ll tell them of Reid and what Caspar plans to do with Ada tomorrow night. You four have done enough.”
Sophia stands from Elliot’s bed. “But, Professor Lisette—”
“Please, Sophia.” She shoves her horn-rimmed glasses up her head as she looks at me, pained. “They’re going to ask me if I know where you are.”
“I’ll be long gone by then.”
“You can’t run forever.”
“Either we’ll stop them tomorrow or we won’t,” I say. “Won’t matter much after that.”
Fiona frowns, her already-small features twisting up.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s not your fault.”
I’m already coming to terms with the reality here.
I cannot stay at Harker, and I can no longer stay at Fever Dream.
I am out of options, with no ring in sight.
Either Caspar will succeed in killing Ada on the new moon and deviants will roam the earth, or Reid will find the ring, stop him, and save Ada, only to kill every deviant alive. Tears threaten my eyes.
“I wish I knew what he figured out.”
“Did the Elders even say what it looks like?”
“Silver. With a square ruby at the center. But who knows, Viv. This ring was made five thousand years ago.”
Older than even Deacon. A feat. “Thank you. For everything.”
Fiona gives me one last long, pained look before she hurries from the room.
“Silver with a square red stone,” Elliot muses once she’s gone. “Soph’s got something like that, don’t you, Soph?”
Sophia nods, eyes distant. “Yeah, but it’s from the flea market we used to get drunk at, not Mesopotamia.”
“You’d drink at the flea market?” Peter asks. “Aren’t those first thing in the morning?”
Sophia shrugs. “There wasn’t much to do in our town but surf and drink.”
“And I did the surfing,” Elliot tells us.
Peter studies Soph with something achingly tender and rife with understanding. I imagine he feels like I do—what I’d give to go back in time and have been there for young Sophia.
“Think he’s on his way to find the ring now?” Sophia asks.
“Probably,” Peter says. “But where?”
“Egypt, maybe,” Elliot offers.
Peter looks at me. “You sure she said buried in the tombs?”
I nod at him.
“But the Mer said it lights the attic. Attics are at the top of a building, but something buried, a tomb…that implies down below…” He shakes his head. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
I’m sure everyone’s turned to look at me, even the pixie still working on Elliot, but I’ve already affixed my gaze back on the window. A robin is flitting in a magnolia tree.
“How much can Fiona even tell the Elders without implicating herself?” Sophia asks. “She’s the one who vouched for Reid at the top of the year…”
But I just allow my gaze to burrow into that robin’s nest. I try to smell the fresh spring grass and not the scent of antiseptic and hunter blood. A vicious numbness has soaked beneath my skin. I feel nothing as my friends study me. Feel nothing as I think of Reid’s lies.
My phone buzzes in my pocket for the fourth time, and I fish it out, expecting to see my mom’s name across the screen. Something about dresses, maybe.
Deacon Graveheart
The name releases an agonized thump inside my chest. All four missed calls are from him. I send this one to voicemail and tuck my phone away again.
“Viv?” Peter says, voice low. “What do you want to do?”
“How is she supposed to know?” Sophia asks. “Her mind is going to fail her any minute, her ex is trying to commit mass murder, her soon-to-be stepdad is going to kill her grandma, her sister-in-law’s going to be barbecued by the Elders, Astera’s about to become a hell pit—”
I stand without thinking.
It’s all just too much.
“Viv?” Elliot asks.
There’s little reason to avoid the city anymore.
Finn may still want my blood out of vengeance, but he and his father don’t need me any longer now that they have Ada.
War is coming. Between the High Thane and the Elders.
Lymantrians and deviants…Reid and me if he succeeds in killing everyone I’ve come to—
And I can’t think of any of it. Not right now. “I’m going home for a while.”
“You can’t,” Peter says, standing beside me. “It isn’t safe.”
“I need to be alone.”
“They’ll come for you,” Sophia warns.
My entire body aches. My teeth. “Then I’ll kill them.”
“Who?” Peter asks. “The Elders? Reid? Finn? Caspar?”
“Anyone who tries.”
Our Babylon apartment is cold when I let myself in. My already-meager energy wanes when I spy my father’s lacrosse stick on the wall in my bedroom. I wonder if he would be very disappointed in me. I walk like a corpse to the couch and lie down face-first. Suffocation sounds like a blessing.
Reid’s betrayal hangs heavy in my heart, and hot tears pool between my face and the cheap polyester cushions. I feel stupid. Stupid, and broken. What kind of dysfunctional hunter falls for the heir to the Throne of Bael? A killer of innocents? A Brood demon who wants to eradicate an entire species?
And Deacon—he hasn’t even tried to hide what he is.
Why do I keep developing complicated feelings for evil men?
Is there something sinister inside me? Unfixable?
Even in the private silence of my own home, I’m too afraid to answer.
I want a factory reset. I want to be scrubbed clean and started over.
I’m jolted from my thoughts by a hail of fists on the front door.
I bury my face deeper into the couch. I know those fists. Know that tingle in my spine.
The assailant is undeterred by my silence. “Open up,” a voice thunders, the sound of hooves and antlers, and the pale blue of fresh mountain snow.
Rage bites at me. I want nothing to do with him any more than I do his brother. “Fuck off.”
“I don’t want to break your door after the day you’ve had.” I can hear the thinly veiled restraint in his voice. “But you know I will.”
For Penny, and only for Penny—who does not deserve to come home, if she is ever able to, and find a shattered front door—I climb from the couch and unlock the chain. I don’t stick around long enough to look at him.
Instead, I make a beeline back to the couch, where I fold my legs up under me and stare out my window like a petulant child. I have the instinct to wipe the tears from my face, but I can’t bring myself to lift my fucking hands. More tears brim, and then spill over, silent and pitiful.
Whatever he sees when he lays eyes on me pulls a broken breath from him. “Oh, baby.”
“Don’t baby me,” I snap.
Deacon pulls up the ottoman to sit across from me.
But the look on his face isn’t mocking. It isn’t flirtatious or gloating.
He looks…wrecked. Like a kicked dog. Like the sight of me—however I appear right now, crumpled and depleted and all pink and raw—has done something irreversible to him.
His hands twitch as if to touch me. But neither of us moves.
I must be scowling something fierce because he says, softly, “Come on. You were just starting to look at me like I don’t eat puppies for breakfast.”
“Don’t you?”
His lip curls up in the slightest half smile. “Not anymore.”
We sit in pointed silence for long minutes. Across the street a woman waters planters filled with delicate white blooms. Cars honk, brakes screech.
“He ruined my life.” The words hang in the air like fog. “He lied to me, used me, put Penny in danger. Put this thing into my back…I want to kill him.”
When I look at him, Deacon’s eyes carry nothing but cold, uncompromising rage. “Get in line.”
“No,” I snap. “You do not get to do that.”
Deacon’s eyes bulge, and if I wasn’t so angry, I’d snap a photo of the rare moment I’ve rendered Deacon speechless. “Do what?”
“Act all protective. Like we’re on the same team. You lied to me as much as he did.”
“How?” he asks, nostrils flaring. “How did I lie to you?”
“You never told me you were the heir to the Throne of fucking Bael!”
“I haven’t seen myself as such in centuries.”