33. Silas
Silas
Sweep toward the door, never away from it. Dust pushed inward settles into grudges, and a house with grudges learns to keep the dirt.
Iwas quickly finding I preferred the quiet ease of Brathen over the dangers of the Underworld and the hustle of Grimora. Fewer people meant fewer variables, and fewer variables meant I could keep my attention where it belonged.
Syneca walked between Dez and me without argument, which I chose not to comment on or she’d insist she walk three blocks ahead instead.
I kept my voice quiet, lifting my collar as I spoke, “We’re going to turn right at the streetlamp, slip into the alley on the next block and then it’s only two more over. Let me go in first, do a sweep and then I’ll signal for the follow.”
Dez nodded, keeping an easy pace as he scanned the streets.
I noticed the tremble in his hands though.
The strain on his shoulders. We’d have to deal with his weakening power sooner rather than later.
Syn hadn’t noticed. She held her hood forward against the wind and kept her chin down, focused and alert. I preferred her like this.
I also preferred her arguing, which was a problem I’d stopped thinking about because thinking about it led nowhere I was allowed to go.
She was a distraction when she was quiet and a different kind of distraction when she wasn’t, and the bond made sure I was aware of her at all times regardless of what I did about it.
The cottage sat silently at the end of the street, thankfully nowhere near that fucking train station thrumming with power.
Syneca had noticed the same time I had, but fortunately, her focus was somewhere else.
Which was warranted, considering we needed to find Lyric before he died, and our only clue was a massacre no one talked about.
There were things I hadn’t spoken aloud though. Lengths I’d go to keep Syneca from dying. Her life was tied to finding Lyric, but if it came down to it, whether I liked it or not, I’d kill Celeste and let the fucking veil fall. That was the only loophole the two had left me in their damn bargain.
With them lingering behind, I moved through the home in a single sweep and found nothing that concerned me. A dead witch wasn’t remarkable in Fuerlis. It was a tragedy and a Tuesday. We weren’t here for her. We were here about the book.
I moved back to the door and signaled once. Dez came through first, Syneca behind him, and I pulled it shut at their backs. She let the cloak fall and the blonde hair Ramiel had given her caught the dim light of the cottage. I fucking hated it. The face that wasn’t hers.
Dez caught me looking. The bastard had the audacity to almost smile before he turned to the desk. I shook my head before positioning myself near the door where I could watch both the room and the street through the gap in the shutters. Syneca went straight for the lopsided bookshelves.
“Oh look at this!” She pulled a slim volume free and held it up. “Forbidden Under The Falls.”
The cover illustration of two naked people left nothing to speculation.
I shot her a wary glance. “We’re looking for information on a massacre. Not a romance.”
She thumbed through the pages. “Its location is Staren Falls.”
“It’s fiction,” I argued, still taking the book when Syn held it out to me so she could go back to her search.
“Maybe she was researching,” she said.
I thumbed through the pages before Dez began to read over my shoulder. “My nipples harden as the Alpha—” I slammed the book shut.
“She was researching alright,” he said, taking the book from my hands and slipping it into his back pocket. “Best to continue the cause.”
I scowled at him. “Don’t.”
“There’s got to be some historical context in there.”
“Dez.”
“Moving on,” he said pleasantly, and returned to the desk.
Syneca had already found the chronicler’s account and opened it flat on the workbench.
I moved to stand at her shoulder while she read, scanning the room periodically while she turned pages.
The bond ran steady between us. She was focused and unhurried, which meant she hadn’t found anything alarming yet.
Then she slowed.
“There’s not much here we didn’t already know. Adults and children. No one claims responsibility. No cause recorded.” She turned another page. “What’s the point of having chroniclers trained to write history after a Burning if they aren’t ever going to get it right anyway?”
Dez had stopped searching the desk. He’d found something in the drawer, and when I looked over he was wearing a pair of glasses so thick they’d distorted his eyes to twice their size.
He turned a slow circle, squinting through them at the room. “This lady was blind as a gargoyle.” Then he stopped. “What the—” He yanked the glasses from his face, letting them fall to the floor, shaking his head like he was clearing it. “What the fuck?”
“What?” Syn asked, but she hadn’t looked up from the margins of the chronicler’s book.
Dez crossed to the wall, stopping at a painting.
It was of a waterfall that glistened gold, pouring into a pool of black so still it looked solid.
The water at the base glowed from beneath the surface, the warm, ancient, and deeply unsettling Staren Falls.
The geography was unmistakable if you knew what you were looking for.
If you’d spent years wandering the skies of this world searching for a red dragon.
As if he were in a trance, Dez reached up and pressed two fingers to the canvas.
Nothing happened.
He exhaled. Then immediately used one finger to lift and peer behind the frame.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, picking the cracked glasses up off the floor.
He didn’t blink as he pointed to the glasses. “Put those on and look at the painting.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Silas. Put them on.”
With a sigh, I slid the glasses on. The painting changed.
The falls were still there, but there was an old sagging cottage now and the water seemed further away.
In front of the cottage sat an old woman in a rocking chair, moving back and forth in a rhythm so slow it barely registered as movement at all.
But I knew I’d seen it. I stepped closer to the painting without meaning to, narrowing my eyes, trying to read the detail.
Her head snapped sideways. She looked directly at me. I stepped back hard enough to hit the workbench behind me.
“Did you see her?” Dez asked immediately.
“Syn, stay back,” I said, because she’d already started moving toward me and I didn’t know what I was dealing with yet.
The woman in the painting hadn’t looked away.
But she’d stopped rocking. She sat perfectly still in her chair with her eyes fixed on mine through whatever gap existed between oil and canvas and whatever realm she was actually occupying, and then she raised one hand and crooked a finger toward herself.
I took a step forward. Then another. Close enough that the painting filled my vision, close enough that the woman’s face resolved into something I could read. Her eyes were pale and entirely too alert for a face that looked like it had been weathering for centuries.
She smiled. Crooked and knowing.
Then she was gone. Just the hills again, and the tree line, and the amber sky, and a rocking chair sitting empty outside a cottage.
“Let me see,” Syneca demanded.
“There’s some kind of spell on the painting. But there are no runes in it. I checked,” Dez said.
I took the glasses off and held them out to Syneca.
I watched her face while she looked at the painting through the cracked spectacles.
Watched the moment she found the cottage, then the woman, then whatever passed between them in the few seconds before she pulled the glasses off and set them carefully on the workbench.
She was quiet for a moment.
“The margins,” she said finally. “The witch’s notes.
She kept writing that the Keeper only answers in the cottage.
” She looked at the painting. “She wasn’t writing about this cottage.
She was writing about that one. Virella had been trying to reach her through the painting for months and couldn’t because she never left this cottage.
The old woman in the painting isn’t a memory or art, she’s there and she’s beckoning us.
” Syneca looked at me. “We have to go to Staren Falls.”
“To visit the creepy lady?” Dez practically shrieked. “Absolutely fucking not.”
“Absolutely fucking not,” Ramiel said, arms crossed like the conversation was already over.
“That’s what I said,” Dez agreed from his chair by the fire, Virella’s romance novel cracked open and angled away from the room in a way that convinced no one.
“Good thing it’s not up to you,” Syn said.
An hour later, Calder and Pip had nestled into the far end of the table with a card game that had stopped making sense several hands ago. Pip had four of her constellation buttons lined up as stakes and Calder had a stack of runes.
“That’s not a legal move,” Calder said mildly.
“It absolutely is,” Pip snipped back.
“Show me where.”
She pointed vaguely at the ceiling. “The rules.”
“Those aren’t the rules.”
“They’re my rules.”
Calder looked at his cards with the patience of a man who had decided winning wasn’t the point.
Ramiel sat at the table with his wine, pretending he wasn’t listening to everything.
Dez had relocated to the chair nearest the fire at some point, the romance novel now fully in hand, making no effort at all to hide what he was reading.
Syneca sat across from me, her red hair pulled up, showing every freckle that dusted her face. She was arguing with Ramiel about something I’d stopped following because she’d laughed at something he said and I’d lost the thread entirely.
It happened that fast. That was the problem with her. One moment I was managing it, and the next she was laughing in a room full of people I trusted and I couldn’t locate a single thought that wasn’t about her face, her fire, her everything.