18. Alaric
ALARIC
The mark outside the courthouse door is fresh. I press two fingers to the wood, and the paste of Bloodroot burns. Even through my glove, a low heat means they mixed it strong. Someone did this within the hour.
I straighten and look each way. The lamps along the street's main row buzz and flicker, the bulbs guttering as the wind climbs. A storm coming, the kind that floods the culverts.
I start moving toward the footbridge where I find another sign. They are marking the town like surveyors, and every line they draw runs toward her.
I visit Elspeth's grave as the rain starts to needle me and my memories flicker from Elspeth's help, Hannah's insatiable curves, and Lily's sarcasm. I fear for them, Nathan is getting too impatient.
The first real gust takes a dead limb out of the oak above me. It cracks the cemetery gate's top rail, and I begin to move toward the next spot.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. Lily.
"Lily." I keep walking, then stop. No answer comes. There is only breathing, fast and shallow, and the muffled drag of fabric.
I think she may have dialed me from her pocket, but a man's voice suddenly flows through the speaker. "—make this simple. The journals. Then we're gone."
Then Hannah. "There are none. You've torn this place apart twice. You'd have found them."
"We found the floor under your kitchen." A second voice, drier. "We found what you scraped clean down there. So you'll forgive me if I don't take your word."
Hannah again, "Get out. Now."
"Mom." Lily, close to the phone, scared and sharp at once. "Don't touch her. Don't you dare touch her—"
Something heavy strikes the floor. Hannah's voice climbs and breaks off. I hang up and move at vampire speed, the street blurs and the rain thumps against me. As I reach the house, I scale the wall upward.
I creep downstairs and they're all planted in the back room. It's a ruin of upended chairs and broken lamp-glass, and it fixes in me in a heartbeat.
I see a man in a wet jacket with his hand around Hannah's throat, bending her back over the table; a second by the door with Lily pinned against the newel post, a wrench raised in both her hands; a length of restraint half-looped over Hannah's wrist, silver thread bright against dark leather.
My anger takes over, and the man holding her hears nothing. That is the mercy of what I am. I take him off her and put him through the parlor doorway, and the frame splinters around him, and Hannah falls back gasping with her hand at her neck.
"Hannah—the restraint—"
I tear it from her wrist. It's bloodroot soaked, but I don't feel how much it burns to my bone. The second man lunges for Lily.
I get there first. I always will. I catch his arm and the bone gives under my grip like green wood, and he screams. He scrambles for a weapon and darts toward me, and I bare my teeth. I watch the nerves break just like his arm already has, speed toward him and fling him over my head to the ground.
"Cassian," he chokes. "Cassian, we're done, fall back—"
From the dark of the hall the dry voice answers. "Yes." Calm. Unsurprised. They came tonight to learn one thing, and they have learned it. He scolds me with more bloodroot blown to my face, and scrambles free. When I open my eyes they're gone, Hannah is curled in a corner with Lily.
The storm hammers the windows. The lamp swings on its cord, throwing my shadow long across the wall and theirs small beneath it.
Hannah has dragged Lily into her, one arm flung across the girl's chest, her body wedged between Lily and me. Her eyes go to my mouth. To my hand, my face, where the burns still smoke faintly.
"What—" she tries to find the words. "Erm, what are you?" She already knows the answer.
I get to their level slowly, but I don't edge closer.
"They're hunters," I say, avoiding her question. "They came because of what Elspeth hid. I've been trying to stop them from reaching you and Lily."
"That isn't what I asked." Hannah's arm tightens around Lily. "What the hell are you?"
Lily is shaking against her mother, but her eyes are clear, and they're on me, and there is no horror in them. There is only horror in Hannah's.
"Get out," she says.
"Hannah—"
"You were in my house. You were—" She stops. She will not say it in front of Lily. She doesn't need to. I watch her run back through every hour I gave her and find the lie folded under all of it. "Get out of my house, Alaric."
So I do. I rise, cross to the broken wall where the rain blows in, and look back once at the two of them on the floor of the house I've spent weeks keeping whole.
I saved her tonight. The bloodroot still aches in my palm to prove it. And standing in the ruined doorway with the storm at my back, I understand exactly what it bought me. Not her trust. The end of it.