32. Syneca
Syneca
A scar that aches before rain is a witch’s gentle warning to count your blessings before you lose them.
“Ithink you’ve forgotten you’re not in charge of me.”
Silas didn’t look up from the paper Pip had stolen from the neighbor. “I think you’ve forgotten that I am, actually. That’s the one thing I’ve ensured in all of this.”
“The bargain doesn’t cover my bookshop visits.”
“It covers whatever I decide it covers.”
“That’s not how the bargain works and you know it.”
He turned a page. “All I have to do is say please, Syneca. We both know what happens after that.” He finally looked up, and there was nothing cruel in it.
Just exhaustion. “Your face is on every banner out there. We don’t know if there are hunters still here.
What I do know is that walking you into the middle of a city I haven’t cleared is not something I’m willing to do, disguised or not.
” He picked the paper back up. “Give me two days. Try the location spell again or something.”
“Do you not see this giant spell circle on the floor? Did you miss the candles everywhere? The fucking salt because I was desperate? I’ve tried three times. The scales are too old.” My gaze slid to Ramiel. “Tell him he’s being insufferable.”
“I think he already knows,” the demon prince said from the corner, where he’d been standing for twenty minutes because he refused to sit on the dusty sofa.
I began to pace the sitting room, arguing my point for the hundredth time while twisting a handful of dried herbs into a basic luck charm, even though I’d ruined the spell, simply because of my mood.
Plants were so damn fickle. “There might be a bookshop. A library. Something with more on the Staren Falls massacre, aside from four contradicting government reports.”
“There might also be hunters.”
“There might also be hunters in this sitting room if Ramiel decides he’s bored enough.”
Ramiel lifted a hand. “Leave me out of this.”
Silas set the paper down. “We have nothing narrowed down about those scales. Nothing that tells us where to look or what we’re even looking for.
The most useful thing any of us can do right now is let Dez finish writing his books so that when we do have something, we can move on it quickly and cleanly. ”
I paused, glaring. “You realize that makes no sense, right? Like when you’re sitting there letting that ruminate in your brain, even you hear the part where you’re trying to plan an escape route before you have a destination?”
“The last time we didn’t have an escape ready, we ended up trapped in a building that tried to kill us. So forgive me for wanting the door open before we need it.”
“But you know we could be doing two things at one time, right?” I threw the charm into the cauldron hanging above the fire. It was ruined.
“Not when one of those things gets you killed before the other one matters.”
“Dez.” I turned to the desk. “How long.”
He didn’t look up. “Honestly? Could be another week. Could be three days. The magic here doesn’t behave the way it does at home, and I’m not going to rush something we’re all going to depend on.”
“There it is,” Silas said.
“That’s not an argument for staying inside, that’s an argument for finding another option.
” I crossed my arms. “We circle back to plan A. Finding Riot. He was alive during the massacre and he’s a Guardian.
If anyone alive knows anything useful about Lyric, it’s him.
We’ve been sitting here pretending he isn’t the obvious answer. ”
The muscle in Silas’s jaw tightened. “We’ve been over this.”
“You’ve said that. I’d like to actually revisit your bullshit.”
Silas was clearly struggling to keep the growl from his voice. “Riot was in Dyssara when we went through the veil. We cannot go back there. You know that.”
“But maybe he got out,” I argued. “Maybe we need to go to the Sanctuary.”
Dez scoffed. “Two demons and a demon prince walk into a Fury bar… Then they died. Immediately.”
I was already regretting insisting Pip go with Calder to get provisions. She was the only one they never argued with. “Fine. We keep our ears to the ground about Riot while we learn about the massacre.”
Silas’s tone was as hard as his stare. “While we wait for Dez to write his books. I need you to understand, you’re the Phoenix, and half of Fuerlis has your pretty little face memorized.”
I turned to face him fully, and whatever he saw in my expression made him go very still.
“‘I need you to understand'? I’ve understood what I am every single day of my life. I understood it at seven years old laying across a kitchen table while my grandmother carved it out of my back. I understood it every morning I walked through the Veresear and held my breath. I understood it when they put my face on a fucking banner and called my death necessary. Do not sit there and explain my own life to me like it’s something I’ve somehow managed to miss. ”
The room was very quiet.
“I know what I am,” I said. “I’ve always known. The difference between us is that I’ve had to live with it and you’ve only had to watch. I’m not sitting in this fucking house. It’s my life on the line, not yours.”
“Okay.” Dez set his pen down. Not dramatically but clearly done.
“Here’s what’s actually true. We have scales with a filing number and four reports that contradict each other.
We have a massacre no one knows anything about other than it happened and some nymphs and lycan died.
We have a dragon we don’t know how to find and no reliable way to move this group quickly if something goes wrong.
” He folded his hands on the desk. “Let Silas and I leave tonight. There’s a city two hours’ flight west where I can plant a book and find the root power I need to make it work properly.
Three days, maybe four, and we have something we can actually depend on.
By then, we’ll know if the hunters are in the city, and we’ll have an idea of how quickly I can cover the main cities in the world. Then you move.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “I’m not bargaining with you.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to wait.”
“Fine,” I said, simply because I knew giving in to Dez would piss Silas off. “Four days.”
“Four days?” Dez echoed, staring at Silas.
“I’ve never been more annoyed with two people in all my life,” the grumpy fucker answered, lifting his paper back up to block his scowl.
Silas had arranged for the paper to be delivered just outside the gate each morning, which should have been the only indication to the city that anyone was staying in the abandoned home on Pitsea Place.
It wasn’t.
Over the last few days the house had become something else entirely.
Silas and Dez left on a steady rotation, flying to different locations so Dez could rewrite his scrivener books from scratch, building something we could actually rely on.
Pip and Ramiel had taken the empty house as a personal challenge, returning from the market each day with furniture, new linens, and anything else Pip could convince a demon prince to carry.
There were buttons on things that had no business having buttons.
Ramiel had drawn a firm line at the window treatments and Pip had ignored him completely.
Calder insisted on cooking three meals a day, filling the house with smells that felt like home, and the kitchen had become the one room everyone drifted toward eventually whether they meant to or not.
She’d appeased my curiosity about the banners seeming to vanish, diligently counting them each time she went. Almost every day, there’d been less than before, though what it meant, I could only guess at.
Still, it was the most settled I’d felt in a long time, which made it the most dangerous thing about Brathen House by far.
Dangerous because settled meant I’d started listening for the weight of his step in the hall.
Dangerous because I’d caught myself longing for him to enter the same room as me.
Dangerous because a house this warm made it far too easy to forget he held a bargain over me, and far too easy to stop minding that he did.
The cold bit into my bare feet the second I cleared the door, sharp enough to make me move faster than I intended. I snatched the paper from just outside the gate, cast the ward closed behind me, and made it back inside in under ten seconds.
Pip and Ramiel didn’t notice. They were in the middle of the sitting room facing the couch arguing, once again.
“It’s structurally unsound,” Ramiel said.
“It’s charming,” Pip said.
“It’s falling apart.”
“That’s character,” the sprite argued.
I set the paper on the desk and looked at the couch in question. She wasn’t wrong about the character. She was extremely wrong about the structural integrity.
“Where is everything coming from?” I asked. It had been bothering me for days. The linens, the lamps, the inexplicable new chair in the corner that probably cost more than my Chancellery salary for a month. “Ramiel doesn’t have coin from this world.”
Pip’s wings slowed almost imperceptibly. I looked at Calder in the kitchen doorway.
He lifted a shoulder. “We went back to the Underworld once. To get some things to sell. At night.”
“You can’t just sell demon artifacts in a fucking demon-hating world, Calder Grimm. What in the world were you thinking.”
“I sold nothing with magic,” Ramiel promised. “Though I bet I could get a pretty good price on a gargoyle.”
Pip gasped. “We should bring a grimmie.”
“No!” we all said at once.
Calder nudged me with his shoulder. “We had to eat and this is our home now, Syn.”
“Calder—”
“He’s only done it once,” Pip said quickly, flying to position herself somewhere between us. “And now we have food and pretty things and a chair that doesn’t try to collapse when Silas sits in it.”
I looked at Ramiel. He examined his cufflinks with profound innocence.
“Maybe the next time you go shopping, you should get some practical things. Like a change of clothes for everyone.”