Chapter 26
“That rock is connected to the Grym Dunaras?” Zeed shook his head, “Wild.”
Suddenly, it felt like we had eyes on us.
“Not here,” I shushed him. Hecate only knew what we were dealing with – and if anyone was marking our passage through the grounds.
Was I being paranoid?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Hustling them through the front door of Liam’s cabin, I watched our backs, and for just a flash of a second, I thought I saw a shadow move up against a house in the distance. I stared into the darkness and took a half step toward what I’d seen. “What the fuck . . .”
“Harlow.” Liam’s voice was low, but I still had to suppress a yelp as he put his hand on my arm and tugged me toward the door. I relaxed as I caught sight of him, letting him pull me inside as I shook off the feeling of being watched.
The main floor was dark, and Liam led me to the stairs, taking us down to the games room in the basement.
“It went okay?” He tightened his hand a little over my wrist, letting his fingers drift to mine. Soft, a fluttering hesitant touch as we stepped off the stairs.
“Well,” Ross drawled, “If you mean by okay, we all nearly died? Yeah sure, went freaking fine.” Of course, on the way to Liam’s, Ellie had taken the worst of our wounds off us. She on the other hand still had a few cuts across her arms and face. She had no way to heal herself.
Calypso squirmed and I pulled her out of my pocket. “They got it, they got my coin!”
Fable unzipped her backpack and lifted the dinner-plate-sized coin out, laying it on the pool table. I opened the locket and set it next to the coin so Calypso could see it clearly.
There was a beat of silence then . . .
“Oh.”
Only that one word slipped out of her. How could one word hold so much emotion? Sadness and relief and something that sounded a great deal like hope.
“Calypso?”
“Try not to die before you bring it to me, Harlow.” Her voice was . . . choked with emotion . . . “I have not had a reason to truly hope until you fell into my prison. Do not take it from me now, at the last hour. Even if I don’t deserve it . . .”
I bent to look into the locket, but Calypso was gone.
My heart gave a little squeeze. “I don’t plan to die . . .”
And yet you keep coming close.
Closing the locket, I slipped it back in my pocket. “Liam, what happened with Thalienne?”
He grinned and leaned on the table. “That was easy, I scheduled a meeting with her to talk about what happened with Bryony. About what the students had done to protect her. She’s very proud and more than happy to speak of the wonder that is her school.
” He gave a soft laugh. “It is her one point of pride, and the only thing that you can always guarantee that she will talk for hours about.”
Liam waved his hands, as if clearing the air, “But this, this is great . . . and what about the Grym Dunaras? Anything with that? And Bellamy’s . . . rock?”
He stared with wide eyes as Gary carefully set the brass-colored stone on the pool table next to the coin.
Flat on one side, with a couple of square edges, it was slightly rectangular, not the square I initially had thought.
Maybe twelve inches by fifteen or sixteen inches.
It didn’t look like anything special, and the color was brassy as Bellamy had said, but there were some deep green veins running through it on one side.
“Okay, so like, we can’t just give this to that guy you made the deal with, okay?
” Gary looked to me, and I nodded for him to go on, even though not giving Bellamy the stone would mean he kept Opie’s bracelet.
“See, there’s been this voice that I can hear sometimes when I’m in the school, and it’s coming from this –”
Liam bent over the rock, his hands checking the sharp edges. “What’s it saying? Maybe it’s a spirit trapped inside? You could have a connection to more than just creatures, Gary, we don’t fully know the extent of your Quirk.”
Gary sighed. “It’s gone quiet now, like maybe it’s sleeping. But I swear I’m not making this up. It was saying something about the Morrigan, and . . . that it knew all about the Grym Dunaras.”
“May I hold it?” Liam asked Gary and he gave a quick nod.
Picking it up, Liam held it to the light, inspecting it at every angle. “Average weight to it, no special metals that I can see. No gold, or grimsilver. No markers of warding or runes.”
My eyebrows shot up. “That’s not real.” Grimsilver was a mythical . . . ah, who the fuck was I kidding? “Okay, so let me rephrase, I thought that grimsilver was a myth but obviously not?”
“Rare, very rare to find here. Much of it was stolen by the dark Dwimmers from Everdark before they were locked away. To say the Senate was pissed about that is like saying that a night without a moon is only a little dim.”
Marina tapped the table. “I’ve not heard of grimsilver. What exactly would we use it for?”
“Grimsilver was used to make weapons that amplify your own natural magic,” Zeed said.
“I read about it in my great grandfather’s journal.
He was around when they closed the Weave between us and Everdark and had some skill with metalwork.
” His face was pale and made me wonder what else was in his grandfather’s journal.
Couldn’t be worse than what was in my own father’s journal, if I could ever get the damn thing open.
Liam kept turning the rock around and around. “I think you might have a possessed item, Gary.”
Fable held out a hand, brows knit in concentration. “Can I see? I could take it with me to the library tomorrow, see if I can find anything about possessed items that look like this.”
Gary scrunched up his face. “I don’t know . . . what do you think?”
I realized he was asking me. “Fable is our girl when it comes to research.”
She flashed me a smile. “That I am.”
“I can help,” Zeed added quietly. “Cover twice the amount of ground together.”
Fable shot him a tight smile. “No, that’s not necessary.”
My eyebrows shot up; what had happened with the two of them? Typically, she’d have been climbing over the rest of us to get a bit of one-on-one time with Zeed. Either their time apart or maybe Zeed’s newfound rather terrifying Quirk had put a wedge between them.
Zeed cleared his throat. “Actually, it makes more sense not to, now that I think on it. If I’m bait . . . we can’t be seen together.”
It was my turn to scrunch my face up. “Speaking of you being bait and secrets and shit . . . there is something that I need to come clean about.”
They all turned to me, the weight of my friends’ belief in me a palpable thing that sat like a yoke on my shoulders.
I swallowed hard and shook my head as if that would make this easier.
I could rip the bandage off, dive into the deep end, or whatever other stupid idiom you wanted to use, and tell them about Nocta.
But now that the moment was here, I found myself chickening out.
I cleared my throat. “Look . . .”
“Is this about Typhon?” Zeed asked.
I blinked at him. Of course, he’d touched my hand after my interaction with Typhon. And, pathetic as I was, I grabbed onto the rope he’d just inadvertently thrown me like a lifeline. “Yeah. So, Typhon knows we are here. He can see through my glamor.”
The intake of breath was across the board. Caterina stood up. “Then we have to go. Right now.”
I held up a hand, stopping her. “He’s not going to turn us in .
. . it was his idea to bring Zeed here not as bait but because Typhon knew that we needed each other.
That House Phoenix has to stay together.
He’s known since he arrived, guys. And I don’t think he’s said anything to Tarquinius. Or Sage Thalienne.”
I clenched my sweating, clammy hands at my sides. “I . . . I trust him on this. If he’d wanted to take us all back to Neverthorn he could have done it the minute he saw me get roughed up by Mallachtan.”
Gary shrugged. “Okay.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Just like that?”
He grinned. “You’ve never led us astray, Harlow. Every step, like every step, you’ve gotten us through this.”
Ellie sighed. “I imagine it has been weighing on you and it’s not like we’ve had a lot of down time to actually talk about anything.”
“Right.” I nodded, my throat tightening. “Thanks, guys.”
Chickenshit.
“By the way, Harlow. I think I may’ve made some progress on the stuff with your curse,” Liam cut in.
Fable’s eyes flitted toward me. “Curse?”
I held up a hand. “No worries on that front. I . . . It turns out that it was Calypso, not the gate. And it has eased up a lot since we got to the coin. As long as we can get it back to Neverthorn in the next couple weeks, I think I’ll be all good.”
“Scaly bitch,” Fable muttered.
And, for once, Calypso had nothing to say in her own defense. I felt an odd burst of defensiveness for the siren, despite what she’d done, even though she’d expressed a similar dislike for Fable. “It’s no big deal,” I said. “We’ve already talked through it, and she regrets what happened.”
Cat let out a sharp breath. “Well, if she’s sorry . . .’”
“Look, let’s just move on. It’s all good.”
A deep rumble filled the room, like a distant freight train, and I almost spun a rune.
Almost.
Ross let out a nervous laugh, grabbing his belly. “So yeah, I’m starving, I couldn’t eat, I was so amped up for the basement journey.”
There was a chorus of ‘me toos’ and Liam led them back upstairs.
Fable stayed behind with me as they all slipped away.
We were halfway across the room when she grabbed my arm, her voice in one of those whisper shouts drunk people do when they think they’re being quiet, but they most assuredly are not.
“When you said you had something to say, I thought for sure you were going to tell them that Nocta is your father!”
Her voice . . . carried.
Right toward the stairs, where Marina stood, hand on the door as she came back to ask us a question that now hung on her open lips.
“What did you just say?”