Chapter Fifty-One
FIFTY-ONE
FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS WE have been hunted. Both witches and Black women alike. For hundreds of years we have made sacrifice after sacrifice. Sacrifices of dignity, of strength, of love. Of blood—to a ravening river.
Too many years ago to count, the Mother saved our people with a sacrifice.
One hundred years ago, the new Twelve did the same.
Tomorrow I will make a sacrifice of my own.
A sacrifice that will have to justify every sacrifice that has come before me.
If I am the Cardinal, if I am to bring power back to the Lee Valley Witches, if I am to restore the celestial balance—whatever that means—then Malachi must die.
Because there is no world in which his hunter instincts don’t track me to the ends of the earth.
And besides, I know now that I’ve run out of time.
If I don’t reach my catalyst by night’s end, one hundred years after twelve witches took their own lives for this exact moment, then everything they’ve done, every pain I’ve felt and caused over the last few months, will have been for nothing.
And though I have no proof, something tells me that watching the light fade from those evergreen eyes will be the thing that finally pushes me over the edge.
It will be the thing that tips the scales of my magic.
It will free our power from the bargain the new Twelve made and bring forth the rest of the Daughter’s vision.
The four Cardinals and the Great War.
But I’m not stupid. The hunters have planned to lure me into a trap during the Centennial Night of Remembrance. Malachi and Alastair and whoever else they’re working with.
These are my enemies. Not Gigi. Not the universe. Not myself.
Malachi is the reason I can’t grieve. The longer I sit with it, the more I realize that he represents everything wrong with the world. He has been created in the image of the men bred to prey on the Zodiac Witches.
So, like every single one of the cloaks who will fall after him, he must die.
I’m sitting at the small table tucked into the kitchen nook, staring at the screen of my phone.
I haven’t received a single call or message since I left my friends standing in my dorm room.
I guess I was successful in protecting them from all this. In pushing them away. It looks like the fight in my room was all it took to sever every connection I made on that godforsaken campus.
But that’s okay.
It’s for the best.
I’m sending a text to my mom, some lie about not feeling well, when two sets of messages come in back to back.
Sparks crawl up my spine as my eyes skim over the words.
DM from k!ller_kai:
Heard you finally left
Good
Now run as far as you can and never come back
Pine Grove won’t be far enough
How long has he known about this? About me? Did he know every summer as we lay beneath the shade of the sycamore, as we tramped through the stream, as we swiped handfuls of sticky sweets from the buckets in Bailey’s Candy Emporium?
Did he know during our fight last year, his lip split from his father’s fist?
It occurs to me that perhaps everything he’s said to me since I stepped foot back in Earnest has been true. I’m not safe here. I awoke a shadowed beast in him, turned him into a monster. He hates me.
And yet at every turn, he’s begged me to leave.
What’s worse than the boy you once loved being destined to kill you?
When he can’t make up his mind whether he wants to.
Whatever.
None of it matters.
Not anymore.
Dead men can’t lie to you. They can’t pity you. They can’t lure you to your demise.
They can’t balance your fate on their fingertips, they can’t succumb to their basest instincts, they can’t kiss you goodbye.
The second set of messages makes my eyebrows crinkle in the middle. A piece of the puzzle I still haven’t quite placed.
Lucas Matsoukas:
Where are you?
Daisy said you left.
What’s going on?
Are you okay?
Do you need anything?
I bite the inside of my lip.
Through it all there has been one constant. One person who didn’t repeatedly question me, who didn’t judge me, who didn’t call me crazy, who didn’t gaslight me. There has been one person who, at the end of the day, earned what miniscule, microscopic amount of trust I had left.
But that trust is shattered.
Am I really supposed to believe that whatever scheme Malachi and Alastair have cooked up, Lucas isn’t a part of it, too? After everything, I have nothing to do but face it.
I pick up my phone and hit the Video Call button.
My entire plan is dependent on the fact that Lucas is a drop of blood in the snow, just like me. He understands me in ways no one else ever will. What it’s like to always have one foot in Earnest and one somewhere else. To be desperate to fit, but never quite cutting your edges right to get there.
When he answers on the third ring, my stomach sinks. His face lights up the screen, concern rounding out his eyes.
“Harp? Where are you? What’s going on?” He jumps to his feet, his green comforter bunched up on the bed behind him. “Tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you. Whatever it is, I can help.”
I refuse to look at my image in the bottom corner. I know how I must appear. Puffy, bloodshot eyes and a swollen face. Cracked lips and matted, rain-soaked hair. A crazed, murderous glint in my eyes.
“Harper?” His voice is soft, and I hate it.
“How long have you known?” I ask, straight to the point.
“I—I—”
“How long, Lucas?”
He crumples, the phone dropping down to his waist before he heaves a breath and comes back into frame.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, voice wobbly. “I’m so sorry.”
My mouth goes dry
“You’re sorry for what, Lucas?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not like them. I promise I’m not like them.”
But I already knew that.
“How long have you known?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Since just after the accident,” he mumbles, and I finally understand.
“That’s what changed,” I murmur to myself more than anything. “That’s what broke us.”
“After the accident and the funerals… after we said bye to Lex,” his voice wavers, “my dad sat us down and explained who my uncle and aunt really were, what kinds of things they were a part of. But I could tell from the way Kai was reacting that this wasn’t the first time he was hearing it like I was.
And I didn’t know how to process that. So we got into a fight.
And at first I thought it was going to resolve just like our fights always do, but this one was different.
“Something about Kai was different. It was like the grief ate up every good thing about him, and now he was just miserable to be around. But even then I couldn’t get over the fact that he knew before me, and he kept it from me.
There was this whole supernatural world out there, and he’d been living in it without me.
“So, like, on one hand, I felt totally abandoned because I don’t have Guardian blood, and I’ll never truly understand how he feels. And I don’t agree with what they do. I don’t want any of this… but that’s—he’s my brother. They’re my family. The only family I’ve ever known.
“Maybe that makes me a coward, and maybe you’ll hate me now just like you hate him, but I’m not confused anymore.
“Since you came back, everything is so much clearer. I love you, just as I always have. Maybe even more so. I know you’re not ready to let go of the past, but I am, and the only future I want to exist in is with you.”
I’m shaking. Unable to differentiate between justice and revenge. But it’s clear to me that whatever remains between us isn’t love of any kind.
Besides, even if what he’s saying is true, how could I ever forgive him for keeping this from me? Part of me wants to end the call. Cut him out of my life just like they did to me. But beneath that, I know that if I want my plan to work, I’ll need his help.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you,” he says, and my chest squeezes painfully.
“No, it’s okay. I’m glad you’re telling me this. I’ve spent all semester wondering what changed between you. Wondering what I was missing.”
“They have him brainwashed, you know. I try to remind myself of that. He wouldn’t choose this if he could help it.
And I could—or maybe I could understand, on some level…
why he would want power of his own, after everything.
His dad never treated him with respect, never saw him as an equal.
He was never going to live a life where he could stand on his own or have his own inherent value, not with Uncle Jo constantly tearing him down.
And you know his mom wasn’t any help either.
“Once they were gone, and Lexie was gone, and he was broken… I mean, maybe it makes sense that he could fall so easily into it all.”
“Sure,” I sigh, and I want to believe it, I really do, but there’s a piece of the puzzle still missing. “You said your dad told y’all about the hunters.”
“The Guardians,” he nods.
“So does that mean he’s a part of this as well?”
It seems obvious, but I want to know what Lucas has to say.
It’s not what I expect.
“Are you kidding?” he scoffs. “He was warning us. He was disgusted by what Uncle Jo was doing. This legacy he was born into. My dad has spent so much of his career trying to make amends for all the pain the society has caused, but Kai has fallen too far into their bullshit.”
Lucas has had all this time to tell me what was going on. And he didn’t.
But aren’t I also guilty of so, so much?
“Why didn’t you warn me?” I ask quietly.
His voice breaks when he speaks. “I just—I didn’t know what to do. How to toe the line between warning you and scaring you away for good. I didn’t want to lose you. Not to the Guardians, and not because you left and never came back…”
I’d thought that maybe there was a future where Lucas and I could build something separate from summers, from Malachi and Earnest and the past that haunts us.
I thought that even if it might never spark like stars against my cheeks, that it could still be good in its own way.
Still more than enough to build a life on.
But now after everything, there is nothing left of me beyond the determination to save my people, to avenge my ancestors, and to reclaim what is rightfully ours.
To that end, what Lucas did or didn’t know and for how long doesn’t matter. Not if he’s loyal to me and not them. Not if he’ll do what I say.
And if there’s one thing Lucas has always wanted, it’s to be truly needed and valued. To feel as though he is irreplaceable.
When I tilt my face down, my eyes landing on the table in contemplation, he catches a glimpse of the dried blood trailing down my cheek, half washed away by the rain.
He winces. “Look at me,” he says, lifting his sleeves and showing his arms. “You know that I’m not like them. I’m not like him. I don’t have the mark. I’m adopted, Harper, you know that. I don’t share blood with him, and I don’t share morals with him either.”
I shake my head, closing my eyes to conjure more than the low-simmering rage inside my chest.
“I know that,” I say.
“So what are you gonna do? ’Cause running won’t fix this,” he says, bitterness tainting his words. “When has running ever solved anything? These people are animals, Harper. They’re monsters. For all we know, you’d run, and they’d enjoy the chase.”
“You’re right.” I sneer at the mere thought of them hunting me. “I’m not running.”
“Okay,” he says solemnly as his eyes fall to something in the distance, and silence stretches uncomfortably between us.
I hesitate before I speak. Before I drag him even further into all this.
“Lucas,” I whisper, the air around me taking on an electric weight.
“Yeah?” He frowns.
“I think I have a plan. But… I’m going to need your help.”
“Anything,” he murmurs. “Always.”
The single word is filled with passion, and for the first time, something truly dangerous blooms across his face. My cheeks heat at the openness of his gaze. The way his eyes prowl over me. Dissect me. Like he can see all the darkest parts of me. And he likes them.
Finally, I think. Something kindred.
By the time Lucas and I hang up, the numbness in my core has spread to my whole body.
An emptiness that sings of a deficit of humanity.
My mind lingers on the likeness I saw in him. The hunger. The need that’s filling him up so much, it’s boiling over.
The strange, twisted shame of having been wrong about everything.
How had it taken me so long to see that he and I are the same?
Now my fingers hover over my phone.
My entire plan is dependent on the fact that I know there’s a part of Malachi that still cares. It doesn’t matter that he’s a hunter and I’m a witch, that we both have suffered at the hands of our ancestors, of the twist of fate that’s led us here.
I tap out the message with deliberate strokes.
meet me at hanging rock tomorrow before the ceremony. one more goodbye, then im gone for good
He doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t need to; the message is marked as Read just the same.
He’ll be there. Even if he can’t admit it.
I know I’m right, because although I may have been wrong about a lot of things, I can’t be wrong about this.
Not if I want to survive.