Chapter 50
It’s not like a movie reveal. No glittering riches that light my awed face in a golden glow. It’s a box of junk. Scraps of metal, loose pebbles, vessels of old green liquid. Some rusted diadems and a scrawled note on crumbling paper that looks like a list of ingredients.
“Is it in there?” Ward asks, back in his human form.
A pang of defeat wails through me like the mournful note of a violin. I’m about to tell him no, that we’re fucked, that it’s all over, when Peter says, “Do you need a light?”
I look up at the ornate sconces that illuminate the chamber. “No, I…”
My mind stalls out midsentence. Each silver sconce in the ancient room is decorated with three square red rubies. I stand on shaking knees and come to Peter’s side. He’s already following my eyeline.
I clear my throat. “You don’t think…”
His heart is beating through his rumpled suit. “I do.”
The band lights the attic.
That’s where we are. In Harker’s oldest attic.
And the band—the ring—lights the room.
Peter and I move for the sconces. The rest of the group catches on, following our lead, gouging the stones out of each one, me with my blades and Sophia with her arrowheads and Deacon with his claws. I’m on my seventh one when I dislodge something circular.
“Well, well,” Deacon breathes over my shoulder. “Would you look at that.”
I yank it out and study the thing under the dancing light from above. There is no debate. Thick, carved silver, filthy but intact ruby center. My heart slams—
The Caspian Ring.
When I look up at Deacon, he’s watching me with a punishing intensity. His nose is still bleeding.
For a moment, I remember what this means. The removal of my syrabraxa. No more being hunted—by Finn or Caspar or the Elders. No more mania, crippling bloodlust, threat of insanity…But also no more visions. No more Odette.
Deacon takes a step nearer, and my heart begins to rattle.
It’s not that I think he’ll hurt me. I do, genuinely, trust him now. For better or for worse. But I wouldn’t be a creature of self-preservation if the thought didn’t at least pop into my head. Unlucky for me, Deacon can scent the way my emotions turn on a dime.
His brows lower. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m sorry,” I mutter. I clutch one dagger in my free hand just in case. Just in case it’s more important to him to find his mother than see me freed. I wouldn’t blame him. Maybe I’d do the same for my dad. But if that’s how he feels…I can’t let him take the Caspian Ring from me.
“What are you waiting for?” Ward asks, sauntering over. “Put it on.”
Deacon’s head cocks to the side in confusion before he realizes.
I see it bare across his face. The moment he understands my fear.
And the way it crushes him. He narrows his icy, violent eyes at my grasped blade and then at me.
“Vivienne.” His voice holds only hollow disappointment. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Guilt sluices through me. “No, Deacon. I—”
“Quickly,” Sophia says, adjusting her dress. “We need to get out of here.”
“I should wait,” I say, thrusting the ring into her hands. Guilt is eating at me. “Let’s find Elliot and Baz and put it on Ada first. Make sure it can free us both.”
“She’s been unwell for decades,” Peter says quietly. “You deserve a chance to live. It’s what she would want. It’s what her son would want.”
“If only one of our lives can be saved—”
“Put it on now, Vivienne,” Deacon commands, steely cold. I’ve hurt him and I know it. “Your selflessness is tiresome.”
But where is Ada? What would my father want me to do?
What if I’m rendered mortal by this? After all, that’s what the removal of the syrabraxa was always said to do.
The thought is sobering. Shocking. To find I have no more desire to be free of my hunter gene.
To find it might not be freedom after all.
I’m so caught up in what-ifs that I don’t even see Deacon snatch the ring from Sophia. Don’t have time to stop him as he grabs my hand and slides the Caspian Ring onto my ring finger.
Everything goes white.
A glowing white so blinding, even my closed eyes can’t shield me. An electric current of pulsing, fluttering power courses from my finger, up my forearm, around my elbow, past my shoulder, until it shoots down into my back. Along my scar. The blaze rips out of my lungs and floods the room.
The pain is nothing like when the syrabraxa was cast into me. It’s not the agony of something unnatural, something violating. This is like removing a tick embedded in your skin. Yanking out a thorn from below your fingernail. Piercing, agonizing, but…release.
My knees fall to the earth of the catacombs.
The white is gone. I’m panting, hands braced in the dirt.
I blink. I blink again.
Nobody says anything.
My hands are shaking as I take off the ring and marvel at it. The ruby inside is now glowing, swirling like there’s a jellyfish floating within. The tomb’s walls and the ogre’s body are cast in its watery crimson reflection.
Sophia falls to her knees beside me and pulls me into a hug. Peter actually claps. When I peer up over Sophia’s hair, Ward is grinning and Deacon’s looking at me like he’s witnessed a miracle. I can see both of his tattoos clearly in the dim light. Hunter vision still intact.
“I’m free,” I breathe, staring at the ring. Our way out of all of this. Power to destroy and create. “I’m free.”
“Yes, you are.” The sorrowful smile on Deacon’s face is soft. Excruciatingly so.
It eats at me. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. For fearing him, after everything. For Odette.
But he says nothing.
And I am still in shock, held in Sophia’s arms. No longer a poison frog, warning painted down her back. Shakily, I hand the ring to Sophia, who drops it into her bag.
She smiles at me. “Let’s go get this onto Ada.”
My blood stops as footsteps sound in the tunnel to my left. Not the way we came.
My skin sizzles—
“I never doubted you.” Reid slips out of a cobwebbed arch, flanked by Orin. Relief and regret war across his face. “Give it here, Viv.”
“You followed us?” But I know as soon as I say the words. His plan all along. To let me lead him to the ring. “I’m not giving you shit.”
Orin snarls, raising his hands in my direction. The scents of sage and hemlock rise.
Deacon steps in front of me. Sophia nocks an arrow. I brace myself for what I know I might have to do. But time is of the essence. It can’t be too far from midnight now. And I have one last plea left in me.
“Work with us to save Ada. If you take the ring now and decimate all the deviants, you’ll die and Ada will never get the syrabraxa out. She’s suffered for years, driven mad by the same spell you allowed them to put in me.”
Reid’s face shifts into something grim in the curling light. “She could put the ring on after I’m gone.”
“Who knows if it will work once it’s been used? If you help us free her, Caspar will have no way to open the Chasm. And that will give you time to track down the censer. You can have your ring, fully powered, with a way to spare your own life when you use it.”
Sophia’s eyes cut to mine. Ward stiffens, though he doesn’t shift.
“All I could want—to help you, your family, live to see the world righted…” Reid sighs. “I just wish I believed you.”
If I ever thought myself a good liar, this is the final test. The culmination of years of deceiving everyone I loved.
“You were right, yesterday in the archives. I’m a hunter.
Killing deviants is what I do. All I care about now is saving my family.
Getting the syrabraxa out of Ada. Stopping Caspar. Then the ring is yours.”
Reid looks from Ward to Deacon, wary. “You’d die for my cause, brother?”
Deacon answers coolly. “I’ve been alive long enough.”
He’s an even better liar than I am.
For a moment, nobody breathes. I can see Reid’s wheels turning. Does he buy it?
“I think you’d let every deviant die to keep your family safe and the Chasm closed,” Reid says to me in the end. But then his eyes find Deacon. “Every deviant, except for one.”
I don’t even get a chance to suck in a shamed, shocked breath.
“Isn’t it a little crowded down here?” a hauntingly cool voice asks.
It’s the voice of my nightmares. The voice of frost so cold it burns your skin. Of the grim reaper in a spotless black tux. Ice shards crawl across the walls of the crypt. My heart is already climbing out of my throat when I whip my head toward the High Thane, but…
All the fight goes out of me.
Caspar isn’t alone. He has my mother.