44. Syneca
Syneca
Hang no portraits in a hallway. Faces in narrow places watch the comings and goings and begin to favor one direction over the other.
Sometimes I learned my lessons the hard way, but the point was, I learned them. So, when that mother fucker took a step toward me, I didn’t even consider hesitating. “Ignis.”
The entire place erupted into chaos the second Wickett Veyne caught fire. And I didn’t even get to watch him burn because Calder’s giant arm came around my waist. One moment I was in everyone’s frenzy and the next, we were standing in Silas’s quiet manor.
Pip burst into laughter, the tinkling warming the whole room.
She could barely stay airborne, wheezing so hard her wings kept stuttering, one hand pressed to her chest like she was trying to hold herself together.
“She just—” She dissolved again, completely unable to finish the sentence.
“She just set him on—” More wheezing. “His face—”
She held up a hand.
I looked at Dez, narrowing my eyes. “I thought you were all pretending to be drunk.”
Dez straightened his coat with considerable dignity. “We were. She’s a lightweight.”
Before anyone could say another word, the familiar pull of Calder’s magic gathered around us, and the manor dissolved. We landed hard on the sitting room floor of Brathen house.
Ramiel looked up from a newspaper. He looked at Dez’s black eye, Pip’s state, and my expression.
He sighed. “Nice to see you had fun without me.”
We laid it all out over dinner. Morgana.
The Venom Court and the shifter king’s father and everything the Keeper had told us at Staren Falls.
The only thing we didn’t tell Ramiel was about the prophecy with the thirteen Moonborn.
If he knew there was a chance that Evanoch could be freed into this world, he would have pushed to follow that problem.
He thought my life debt with Lucy was the kind of thing we could bend, delay, talk our way around.
He had no idea it had been struck in the Underworld, that it bound me as surely as if I’d bargained with a demon myself.
If he saw what redirecting it did to me, the pain of it, he’d know.
And he’d want answers we couldn’t give him.
Nobody said much after. There wasn’t much to say.
Out of habit, I went to the window to count the wanted banners.
But there were none. I squinted, peering all the way down the street, but not a single one lingered.
Having no answer for it, I kept it to myself.
We ate, and then one by one the others drifted to bed, and that was that.
I found myself in the bath, the water hot enough to sting. I thought about Wickett’s face the second before the fire caught, and I thought about Lucy, who had stood between us once when no one else had, and wished she’d been there to see it. She would have laughed. She deserved to have laughed.
The water had gone still around me, and in the quiet of it I let myself think about what the Keeper had said.
About Evanoch and the Erelith falling. I’d spent my entire life being told I was the thing that would destroy everything, the Phoenix, the harbinger, the reason children were taught to be afraid of fire.
But the threat wasn’t me. It was the demons waiting behind purple flame.
If that barrier fell, there would be nothing left to save.
Not the witches, not the lycan, not the scorched or the sprites or the children in the Crook who’d never done anything to anyone.
They’d all become what Morgana had. Every drop of power and life would be leeched from a world that needed it to survive.
Letting the thirteen Moonborn come together was quite possibly the worst thing that could happen.
And yet here I was, in a bath in Brathen, no closer to stopping it than I’d been the night the Keeper spoke those words. The only person I trusted to think three moves ahead of everyone else in this room had walked out the front door without a word and hadn’t come back.
Even later, dry and lying in my bedroom, staring at the Hunter’s Promise on my palm, I found myself waiting for Silas to come back.
He didn’t. The entire night passed and he never returned.
The next morning, Pip and I sat together, playing cards, though I hadn’t been paying attention to the game she was trying to teach me at all.
I could only think of him and where he’d gone and why he hadn’t come back and how long we should let it go before we started to worry. Worry even more, that was.
The gate swung open and I made it to the door before he reached the steps.
“You can’t just leave by yourself without telling anyone where—” The words died in my throat.
My eyes had found the creature behind him. Large. Dark. Moving with that particular loping gait I’d know anywhere, the horned black shape of him unmistakable.
Timber.
Pip hovered at my shoulder, wings slowing as her eyes found the cinderhowl. She knew what he was. Who he was. That he’d never been warm and fuzzy, so she stayed where she was, eyes tracing the long black horns that matched his beautiful coat.
“He found him,” she whispered. And then, quieter, more to herself than to me, “I knew he would.”
I looked at her. “You knew?”
“He may have mentioned what he was planning.” She met my eyes and lifted her chin. “It was a good surprise. I wasn’t going to ruin it.”
I looked at Timber, who had dropped his enormous head to investigate the ground.
Then I looked at Silas, who had put me on my knees on a wood floor and made a bargain.
Who’d become everything this world needed to fear.
Who was impossible and infuriating and had apparently spent his night tracking down a cinderhowl because I’d stood on a porch in the Bloodwood and stared at the shape pressed into the ash where Timber had once been. He’d noticed that.
He noticed everything and said almost none of it, and I was beginning to understand that was its own kind of language.
“Did you—” My throat closed around the rest of it.
“You needed something that was yours,” Silas said. “Something that chose you. And he always has, even over the hunter.”
Through the bond I felt it before I could stop myself, his discomfort, his vulnerability, even the brace of someone wishing they could hide a feeling.
“Thank you.”
He nodded once. Then, quietly, “I owe you an apology. For what happened in that room.”
“No, you —”
“Let me say it. I had no other way to keep their hands off you and I need you to know that I will spend a considerable amount of time hating myself for the look on your face when I gave that command.” He paused.
“You trusted me and I used it. Even for the right reasons, that’s not something I can just move past. And, most of all, I’m sorry you had to see what came after. You had to see me.”
I looked at him for a long moment. The autumn breeze drifted slowly between us and Silas was standing there carrying guilt like he deserved the full weight of it. Like he was the only monster in this world. Like he’d forgotten that I would do far worse to Fuerlis.
“I stopped blaming you,” I said. “Before we even left that room. I figured it out.”
He shook his head, dark hair falling into his eyes. “I know what it cost you. I felt it happen. The betrayal was like a whip through our bond.”
“Stop punishing yourself for keeping me safe.”
The muscle in his jaw worked. “That’s not—”
“It is.” I held his gaze. “It’s exactly what this is. You’re dwelling and it’s exhausting. I don’t need your apology.”
“You’re remarkably difficult to apologize to,” he said finally.
“You’re remarkably bad at accepting forgiveness.”
The ghost of a smile. There and gone but I ached for it the second it vanished.
“Ramiel made breakfast,” I said, trying desperately to move on.
He drew back, scowling.
Pip flew in, still watching Timber closely but not touching him. “Don’t worry. Calder threw it in the trash. Now, there’s real food.”
“See you inside?” he asked.
“I just got a new pet. I’m never going back inside again.” Then I gasped and without thinking reached out and grabbed his hand. “I own this house.”
He truly smiled this time. “Yes, Ith Noem, you do.”
“Timber, we’re going inside.”
Pip flew close to my ear and whispered, “Tell him he can sleep in my room and I’m really nice and I’ll share my things with him.”
Silas’s smile didn’t fade as he walked inside.
Timber hadn’t moved. He stood at the base of the steps, breath clouding in the cold, watching me with those yellow eyes the way he always had.
Like he was deciding something about me.
But then he always was. No matter the time, he’d always lingered on the side of caution as any wild beast does.
I’d never feared him, but then he’d never feared me either.
I came down the steps and put my hand against the side of his neck, which was about waist-high to me. Timber’s black fur was softer than I remembered, and beneath the cold, was the solid warmth of his body.
“Hey,” I said quietly. Stupid thing to say to an ash beast. He pressed his head into my hand anyway.
When I finally turned toward the door he followed without being asked, his enormous body moving silently up the steps behind me.
I held the door open and he walked through it like he’d always known where he belonged.
“We can’t just show up,” Silas argued.
“Why not?” Ramiel leaned back in his chair with the ease of a man who had never once been turned away from anything. “We’ve done it everywhere else.”
“Everywhere else wasn’t a shifter regime with a king who has every reason to want her dead.
” Silas’s eyes cut to me. “The Venom Court palace is impenetrable without an invitation. We walk up to those gates unannounced and we don’t get a conversation, we get a very permanent solution to the problem of the Phoenix being alive. ”
“You’re assuming he wants her dead,” Ramiel said.