17. Everly #3
It loosens something in me, watching them.
Or maybe it just makes room. Because Helena's warning from last night is still sitting in the kitchen with us, the thing none of us have said in daylight yet—there's a chimera in this building, it eats what the animals collect—and Ren's voice from an hour ago is layered over it, something's being made to swallow it, and the two of them fit together into a shape I've been refusing to look at for weeks.
"I've seen it," I say. Slowly. "Maybe. Wheeler's study, on the third floor.
There's a cage in the corner with a cloth over it.
" The kitchen goes still again; I feel them all turn toward me.
"Something breathes under the cloth. I stood in front of it once and I had thirty seconds before he came back and I—" The honest word is hard to say and I say it anyway, because I don't let myself off easier than I'd let anyone else. "I wasn't brave enough to lift it."
Across the table, Ren—
No. Ren's gone. I forgot for a second. But it lands anyway, the understanding of what he meant.
There's something I need to look at first. He already knew.
His blood sense reached the third floor of this house weeks ago and recoiled and he didn't tell me, the way I didn't tell him about the building, the way all of us keep handing each other only the pieces we think the other can carry.
He didn't say he'd go. But I felt him decide to, in the press of his mouth on my knuckles, and I let him, the way I let him leave, because that's what it means to love people who are also weapons.
***-
The argument over the journals gets loud and then circular: Felix saying the odds on stopping Catalina before the harvest are not what anyone wants to hear, Callum saying the end of the year is what we have so the odds are irrelevant, Atlas not saying much at all, just turning pages, his knuckles white where they grip the edge of the table.
Somewhere in it, under the table, a hand finds my thigh.
Not Ren's—Ren's gone. Atlas's. Warm and broad and absolutely still, not asking for anything, not climbing, just resting there over the denim like he needs one point of contact in a room full of bad news.
I know the difference between a hand that wants and a hand that's holding on. This is the second kind.
I cover it with mine.
And across the table Felix's smile does something I catch only because I've learned to watch for it, and beside me Atlas goes a little stiller, his gaze dropping to where my hand covers his, reading it. He doesn't say anything. He looks back down at the journal. His jaw works once.
It isn't anger. I know his anger; I've stood in the rain with it. And it isn't peace either, because there is no peace in this house, not with a leash on every hand and a thing in a cage cleaning the plate and a stair somewhere under the campus with my name on the bottom of it.
It's just what all of them pay, all the time, whether I ask them to or not—feeling, through the bond, every time one of the others gets near me and they can't follow.
Atlas felt Ren reach me this morning. Of course he did.
He's been feeling it all night, the warm bright pull of it across campus, the mark burning low on his hand the whole time, and there was nothing he could do but lie awake and know.
I press his hand against my leg. I don't have an apology that would mean anything. I'm not sorry I want all of them. I'm just sorry it has to hurt like this.
Helena watches us—watches all of it, the hand and the eyes we keep off each other and the whole snarled web of who-felt-whom—with the patience of someone who once loved a person enough to spend a century floating over the place they died.
"Whatever you're going to do about Catalina," she says, "do it before the harvest. That part isn't optional."
That's all. She closes the journal over the unfinished sentence and pulls it back toward herself, out of my reach, and looks at me with those eyes that won't shut.
She means it as a warning. I take it as one.
But I've spent enough weeks reading the things people don't say to hear the other thing underneath it, the thing she isn't saying, that's louder than the thing she is.
Something that sounds almost like: I have watched this building take two grimoires already.
I have not decided yet what I'll let it take next.
I close my hand around nothing, because she didn't give me the journal, and I find I mind that more than I expected to. The cut from the map's edge is still there in my palm, half-healed, and I press my nails into it until the small pain steadies me.
The end of the year. A woman who means to keep feeding people to something dying under this school, and four of us who mean to stop her, and a dying thing itself that none of us understand yet well enough to know what stopping her will do to it.
A name I'm carrying that belongs to the man holding my hand under the table.
And somewhere above us, on the third floor, the thing that's been swallowing all our secrets, breathing under a cloth, waiting for someone brave enough.
Still here, though.
I close my eyes for one second. Then I open them, and I go looking for better questions.