Chapter Fifteen
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
THE ROOM WAS exactly as opulent as Lyssa had imagined it would be, when she and Eddie were children loitering outside the hotel’s gilded doors.
There was an enormous feather bed with plenty of warm blankets, and a balcony that looked out over the teeming mass of Warham, gas lamps and electric lights dotting the night like fallen stars.
The bathroom featured an elegant claw-footed tub and an array of scented salts that loosened Lyssa’s muscles almost as well as Ragnhild’s hot springs did, when sprinkled into the steaming water.
She gulped down red wine that probably cost more than everything she had ever owned put together, and ate imported chocolates that she found in a silver box on the bedside table.
But despite being surrounded by luxury, she couldn’t relax. Being in this place felt pointless without her brother to share it with. She wished Brandy were here, rolling around on the thick rugs and leaving his dog-smell on the sheets. At least then she would’ve had someone to talk to.
She turned out the electric lights and flopped down on the bed, wrapping herself in the plush blankets.
It was late, and she had to go to the Iron Lane in the morning.
She really should try to sleep. But although her body was languid from the bath, her mind was racing.
The equinox was so close, and they still had four items to gather, a sword to forge.
Alderic still had to unearth his map from that disaster of a parlor—a parlor that might have Hound-wardens waiting inside of it, when they got back—and lead her to the Beast’s lair.
There was still so much that could go wrong.
Lyssa pushed the writhing tangle of anxieties away as best she could, and tried to think of some personal concerns to use for the sword, instead. If her mind wouldn’t let her sleep, at least she could put it to work.
The only thing she could come up with, after an hour of racking her brain, was that photograph her father had been carrying the day he’d bumped into her at the memorial park.
It was from before Lyssa’s mother got sick—before everything went to shit.
A time full of happy memories. But there was no way she was going to seek her father out and ask him for it, so she would have to come up with something else.
The problem was, she didn’t have anything else.
Lyssa hadn’t been there when they buried Eddie, hadn’t had the chance to claim anything from his body before they sealed his coffin and lowered it into the ground.
She had nothing left of him, none of the talismans the other street kids kept to remind them of their beloved dead—an old dolly, a lock of hair, a button.
A button.
The memory was a kick to the chest, stealing the breath from her lungs and leaving her gasping in the dark.
She had all but forgotten about it, shoved it down with everything else that hurt too much to remember.
That time her brother had wasted a penny on a button the same shade of brown as their mother’s eyes and sewn it into the lining of his pocket so that no one could steal it from him.
Lyssa had asked him what the point was, of buying something he couldn’t even look at, and he’d replied that he didn’t need to see it to feel that it was there.
Like Mam, he’d said. Like love.
A sob welled up inside of her, threatening to escape, so she curled on her side and clamped her lips closed, letting hot tears flow silently down her face instead.
Because if she let a single howl breach the dam around her heart, Alderic might hear, and the last thing she wanted was for him to come barging into her room demanding to know why the Butcher, of all people, was crying by herself in the dark.
Except that a small, traitorous part of her wanted that more than anything. Wanted to confide in someone so that she could stop shoving her feelings down where no one else could see them, where they festered inside her like an infected wound unable to heal.
But she had tried that before, and look what it had gotten her: a sworn enemy bent on saving the very creature she wished to destroy.
And even if Alderic was nothing like Honoria, even if he understood what Lyssa was going through in a way the Hound-warden never had, sharing that part of herself with him wouldn’t matter.
Not really. He couldn’t do anything about it, couldn’t take the pain away.
Which meant there was no point in telling him, no point in risking that level of trust with someone again, even if he had shared his own pain with her.
Her grief was hers and hers alone, and she would have to bear it alone until the moment she plunged her sword into the Beast’s glyph.
The sword. Focus on the sword.
Personal concerns. Photographs and buttons and love.
Love on its own wouldn’t unmake the Beast. She needed something tangible. Something she could burn or melt and incorporate into the forging of the sword.
But what could she use, when she had nothing left?
Nadia’s mocking voice came back to her. You could make each other bracelets out of your own hair. Would a token of undying friendship help unravel the glyph, Rags?
Lyssa sucked in a sharp breath, frustration burning away as an idea began to take shape in her mind. Nadia had been joking, just trying to get a rise out of Lyssa, but what if she was onto something?
What if a personal concern didn’t have to come from only the victims that were killed by the Beast?
Weren’t Lyssa and Alderic victims, in their own right?
Their lives destroyed by the monster just as irrevocably?
Lyssa had always felt like the old version of her had died alongside Eddie that night.
Would a symbolic death hold the same weight as a literal one, for their purposes?
Maybe she could use an item of her own, instead of something of her brother’s. A token of undying friendship, like Nadia had teased. A symbol of love, of happiness.
What was something she loved, other than Eddie?
Brandy. He was her only friend these days, and the last remaining link to her past, to both her mother and her brother. He had lost Eddie, too, same as she had, which made him yet another victim of the Beast.
She could use his collar, maybe—he wouldn’t need it anymore, anyway, after she fought the Beast. Whether she lived or died, Brandy would stay in the Witch’s Wood for the rest of his unnaturally long life, chewing on his beef bones and splashing in the stream without pain.
The thought of it made her happy, and hadn’t Rags said that happiness was crucial to the unmaking of the glyph?
Maybe it wasn’t as good as something of Eddie’s would have been, but it was the only thing Lyssa had to work with, and it would have to do.
She got up, padded over to where her pack still sat on one of the armchairs, and fished out her list of items, her stub of a pencil. Beside personal concerns she wrote Lyssa: Brandy’s collar.
With that settled, the rushing torrent of her thoughts eased a little. Alderic still had to come up with a personal concern and collect it, but at least they were one step closer than they had been before.
Lyssa crawled back into bed, flipping over her pillow because the tearstains soaking the silk were already getting cold.
Sleep was still elusive, though—the room was too big, too quiet, too empty, and it put her on edge.
She missed her bedroll in Alderic’s ridiculous daisy-patterned tent, where she had at least been able to fall asleep to the crackling of the fire, the sound of Alderic murmuring to Brandy on the other side of the canvas wall.
She hadn’t been able to hear what he was saying, but it had lulled her into slumber all the same.
Lyssa woke far later than she had intended to, afternoon sunlight already slashing through the gap in the curtains. She still felt exhausted, her mind muzzy with half-remembered nightmares.
As she pulled on her clothes, she glanced at the connecting door separating her room from Alderic’s.
Was he still asleep? Or awake and already drinking himself into oblivion?
She hadn’t heard a peep from him since he had shut the door in her face the night before, and the realization sparked a coal of concern to light inside her that she couldn’t easily extinguish again.
She warred with herself for a moment, torn between her resolution to sever whatever bond had begun to form between them and a genuine concern for his well-being.
But if he was the key to her success, as Ragnhild’s bones had suggested, it meant that she should probably check on him—for Beast-killing reasons.
She rapped her knuckles against the connecting door. “You awake, Al?”
There was no answer.
She pressed her ear to the door. No sounds inside, no hasty pulling on of pants, or shuffling out of bed, or hangover groan. She knocked again, sharper this time. “Alderic.”
Still no response.
That little coal of concern burned brighter. Lyssa undid the latch, turned the knob—he hadn’t bothered to lock it on his side—and flung the door open.
Alderic was draped across one of the room’s armchairs like a forgotten coat, his legs hooked over one plush arm and his neck braced against the other, his head leaned back and his long pale hair pooled on the rug like an iced-over waterfall.
The white column of his throat was exposed, smooth as marble except for the jagged scar twisting around the middle like a pink pearl necklace.
He was staring at the ceiling beam with a blank expression.
“Go away,” he said, without moving.
“What are you doing?” she asked, concern flaring into anger, because being angry meant not having to confront the fear that had gripped her a moment ago—fear that had absolutely nothing to do with the sword or the Beast. “Why didn’t you answer when I knocked?”