31. Syneca
Syneca
Eat nothing offered to you in a dream you can’t wake from. Hunger is how they teach you to stay.
The next time I saw Wickett Veyne, I wanted him smothered in flames and screaming my name as death slowly stole his final breath.
I wondered if I went to the window, searching through the hunters circling the building, if I’d see him.
If he’d lock his eyes on me and realize my fire was stronger than his fucking blade.
But there was no time for vengeance. Not with Pip so weak, the demons hiding their nature and Calder no doubt the second most wanted person in this room.
“We need to leave,” I said. “Now.”
Dez was already pulling the satchel open, digging through the books inside. He found the one marked with the strange compass rose and pulled it free. “Looks like we’re all making a stop in the creepy forest first.”
“The Bloodwood,” Pip said quietly, her correction almost automatic as she stared out at the hunters. She’d barely risen from the counter.
The demon dropped the book on the floor and it landed with a heavy thud. His hands moved over the cover, whispering a spell I didn’t recognize. The pages began to turn on their own, flipping faster and faster until they stopped near the middle.
“I don’t trust this magic,” Dez warned, looking at each of us as we gathered around. “I’ve never used a Fuerlis Scrivener’s book and our magic isn’t the same. I can tell by the weight of the pages. So be careful and hold onto each other. Don’t let go.”
Calder took my hand. Silas took the other. Ramiel grabbed Calder’s shoulder. Pip sank into the oversized pocket on Calder’s long coat.
“Ready?” Dez asked.
“Go!” Pip said.
And we jumped.
There was a moment where nothing existed.
Not darkness. Not light, but the absence of everything, a void with no floor and no ceiling and no sound.
I had time to register Calder’s hand in mine, Silas at my back, the muffled sound of Pip somewhere inside Calder’s pocket.
Then Dez kicked something below us and a dull thud echoed strangely in the nothing.
The distinct sound of a page turned somewhere, and the world came rushing in all at once.
We didn’t fall through the ceiling the way we had with Mrs. Deliana’s book. We shot out of the floor, out of the receiving book lying open on the cottage boards, and I hit the ground hard enough that my teeth clacked together.
Rolling to my feet, I immediately looked at Calder. He was already checking his pocket, one large hand curved around it protectively.
“Pip?” I whispered.
A pause, then a muffled and indignant: “I bit my tongue.”
“Good enough,” Calder said, and something in his shoulders dropped an inch.
Silas was already standing. I felt the bond before I saw him and oriented myself with it before I’d consciously registered doing it.
He stood between us and the door, one hand braced against the low frame, scanning the Bloodwood.
I took in the absolute stillness of him when he was listening, like the whole world could wait.
A grumpy demon who still managed to be the most beautiful thing in any room he walked into.
Calder helped Dez up, the scrape of his boots snapping my attention away from Silas.
“Excellent landing,” Dez said. “Very controlled.”
From the floor came a sound of profound, aristocratic suffering. Ramiel looked at him the way a man looked at something he was deciding whether or not to throw. “You landed on me.”
“The softest spot in the room. I have good instincts.”
Ramiel stood and looked slowly around the cottage, holding his coat away from his body with two fingers. His eyes fell over the low ceiling, the crowded shelves, the herbs hanging from the rafters, even the kettle abandoned on the stove.
“There is something on my coat,” he said. “Is everything in this room always this close to everything else, or have we arrived during some kind of emergency?”
“It’s a small cottage,” I said. “Feel free to go back to your palace or whatever you have in the Underworld. I’m sure there’s loads of space for frolicking. Or whatever demon princes do to pass the time.”
“Definitely frolicking,” Dez said, swiping the page from the book on the floor as he studied the writing.
“Mmm.” Ramiel touched the hem of a dried herb bundle hanging near his shoulder. “It’s actually quite charming.”
There was something deeply satisfying about a demon prince finding something to like in the Bloodwood cottage. Eda Mire would have been insufferably pleased.
“Syn,” Calder said.
“One minute.” I was already moving toward the door, sliding past Silas to escape the small space and the memories held within.
Because Gran hadn’t died on that floor. She’d bled and bled and then she’d lived and bled some more and when I closed my eyes, I could only see Wickett Veyne’s hands on her.
I could only see the terror in her eyes when he’d walked into that fucking room.
Even then, with no words, she’d tried to warn me.
I used to think I was so clever, hiding right in front of the Magistrate, entering the Chancellery every day in spite of him, but I wasn’t at all.
I was just a fucking fool, buying time before the inevitable.
The porch was cold, the Bloodwood pressing close the way it always had.
Gnarled trees and black bark, ash soft underfoot, and somewhere deeper in, the deposits of Erelith burning its eternal purple flame against the dark.
I stood at the top of the steps and looked at the ground where Timber had settled when we’d left for Dyssara.
The ash was disturbed there. Pressed down in the shape of something large that had lain and risen and walked away. His tracks led north into the trees, and then the ash smoothed out and there was nothing.
He was gone.
I stood with that for a moment. The cinderhowl that Wickett had broken, waiting on a porch while his master ruined everything. He’d waited. And then he hadn’t anymore.
Pip appeared at my shoulder. “Maybe he’s free now.”
I wasn’t sure that was true. Timber had been captured for one purpose and bound to one person, and Wickett had walked away from him the same way he’d walked away from everything else. But I didn’t say that.
“Yeah. Maybe.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.
One more breath of cold Bloodwood air. Then I turned around and went back inside.
Ramiel had located the single chair in the cottage that looked structurally sound and was perching on its edge with the expression of someone making the best of a terrible situation.
Dez had a jar held up to the weak light, tilting it back and forth with open curiosity.
Calder watched the window. Silas had moved to the center of the room, looking at me like he’d felt the moment on the porch through the bond and was deciding whether to say anything.
“We can’t stay,” I said. “But we’re out of the city and we have what we came for. So now we figure out Brathen.”
Calder walked to the map we’d left on the desk, studying it before the rest of us gathered around. “We go north, following the shoreline. It’s not far and the Ash beasts stay inland mostly.”
Dez scratched absently near one of his horns. “What’s an Ash beast?”
Calder smoothed his hand over the map. “They say when magic was born to Fuerlis, the first Burning twisted everything it touched. Every creature, every docile animal, every living thing that survived came out the other side as something darker. Deadlier. The Ash beasts were the animals.”
“They say that,” I said. “They also say the demons are the worst thing that ever crawled out of the dark, and that the fourth demon prince makes the other three look like children.” I glanced at Ramiel. “Hard to know what the chroniclers actually got right.”
“Well, he was a little fucker,” Ramiel agreed, “But now he’s gone and I hear his replacement is infinitely better.”
“He is,” Pip agreed with a giant yawn.
“The Ash beasts are dangerous,” Calder warned, flashing a pointed look at me. “Don’t forget we were attacked by two. We lost Lucy in that cave because of what came out of it.”
Her name settled over the room.
I hadn’t let myself think about her properly since Dyssara. There hadn’t been time, and time had a way of making that convenient. Lucy, who’d wanted a friendship the way I was chasing the one I thought I wanted. Who undoubtedly deserved it more than Vitoria.
I felt Ramiel’s gaze on me before I saw it.
Right. The cover story.
“Which is why we’re going to Brathen,” I said, pulling myself back. “To find the red dragon. To follow the only lead we have because that’s what I swore I’d do.” I looked at Ramiel and kept my voice even. “That’s our target.”
He held my gaze for a moment, then dipped his chin. “And if we happen to learn what Evanoch is up to as well, then it was a journey worth taking.”
Saving Lyric kept Celeste and I both alive. Chasing Evanoch was currently the least of my concerns. Still, I managed a nod.
“Then let’s not waste the hour.” Silas studied the route without touching the map. “Syneca, Pip and I go tonight. Just the three of us. Calder, you wait for morning and take the other two on foot.”
Outside, only moments later, I could just make out the shape of Silas shifting in the clearing before the cottage. I’d never get used to seeing my familiar bloom from the body of a man.
Pip flew at eye level, spinning to face Calder. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“That’s extremely limiting, Pip Squeak,” Calder said.
She kissed him on the nose. He pretended not to be affected. He absolutely was. Then she flew to my side and I turned toward Silas.
He was waiting. Patient and enormous and watching me with those blue eyes that caught the Erelith glow through the trees and held it. I put my foot in the place where his wing met his shoulder and pulled myself up, settling between his shoulder blades the way I had once before.
“Too bad I don’t have my helmet,” Pip said nervously as she settled into the satchel I’d thrown over my shoulder for her.