Chapter 62
Shocked silence winds through everyone, full of thorns.
The patrolmen’s faces are slack, everyone studded with stupor. Havlon keeps blinking, over and over again, as if he’s expecting to wake from a dream.
But this is my nightmare.
“How is this possible?” Conrad asks, breaking the silence. “The Banes are all dead.”
“The Banes were all male,” Havlon adds, his tone acerbic as he looks at my mother. Then his eyes harden. “Arrest her! Take her now!”
Chaos consumes.
With jagged teeth, it rips into the room, ready to tear my mother to shreds, and I scream.
The patrolmen descend like swarming Flies ready to feast.
“Arrest all three of the women!” Havlon bellows with wild desperation.
One of the patrolmen tries to grab me, but Varrik shoves him away. “Don’t fucking touch her!” he growls, and then he yanks out his pipe and blasts out a note.
His magic snaps through the air, and relief swells through me as the patrolman who was going to grab me jolts to a stop. Then his limbs jerk awkwardly as he’s forcibly lured out through the door.
Havlon sputters at Varrik. “What are you doing?”
I push past the others to get to my mother, kneeling down where she’s fallen. “M?m,” I cry in alarm as she looks up at me, tears staining her cheeks, her antlers poised and glossy. “What happened?”
“Estinya.”
I look over at Varrik as Aunt Lenna drops to her knees next to my mother. She starts to help her up while I turn and stand to face him.
“Come here,” he says, his words wound tight.
But I swallow hard and then shake my head. Keep my body in front of my family like a shield ready to bear the brunt of an onslaught.
His gaze sears into me, tracking between my eyes, going over every inch of my expression.
Then he sucks in a breath. “You knew.”
His tone is flat. Condemning. Crushing.
Somehow, I manage to stay upright beneath the weight.
“Y-you have to trust me now,” I whisper, my tone trembling. “She would never hurt anyone—”
His eyes flare. “She’s a Bane.”
“She’s my mother.”
He stares at me as I shake in fear, but I just need him to listen to me. To trust me now, like I trusted him.
“I didn’t know this would happen. I just wanted her to be healed. Please,” I beg. “Trust me.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, and my chest squeezes just as hard. Everyone seems to wait with palpitating strain and unfathomable shock.
Then Varrik lets out a breath and opens his eyes, meeting mine. “I do trust you,” he says quietly.
Insurmountable relief flows through my veins.
“No, Piper, you must arrest her now. All three of them. I demand it!” Havlon shrieks.
“Shut the fuck up,” Varrik snarls, so viciously that Havlon flinches.
Varrik lifts his pipe and spews another note, making Havlon’s body lurch, forcing him toward the front door. “Piper!” he roars.
“Thank you,” I say on a trembling breath. “I—”
My mother’s body spasms then. So does my aunt’s. They both jerk forward.
Shock freezes my breath for a split second before I realize what’s happening. A cold grip closes around my spine. “Varrik, what are you doing?”
He keeps playing.
“Stop!”
He doesn’t. He doesn’t, and my heart falls into my gut.
This is a mistake. He’s just in shock.
Except he keeps luring my mother and aunt toward the door, right behind Havlon.
My voice scrapes out of my throat. “Varrik . . .”
“Esti!” my mother screams.
My aunt tries to fight against the magic, her face blotchy, her body jerking.
My vision spins with denial and fear and horror.
I need to stop this. I have to stop this.
I lurch forward, and only because he’s not expecting it am I able to tear his pipe out of his hands. The music cuts off as I grip the instrument, my chest heaving. My mother and aunt nearly topple into the wall at the abrupt end of the music, and I hear Havlon bellow from the landing.
Varrik bears down on me, but I hold the instrument with clenched fists.
“Give it to me,” he commands, his tone forbidding.
“No,” I cry. He’s not the Piper without his pipe, just like Theo said. If he can’t play, he can’t do this. “I have your magic,” I say, clutching the instrument so hard my fingers ache. “So just listen to me! I’m begging you!”
His expression changes to something impenetrable, and a cold drip of fear pours down my back. Gone is the Varrik I’ve come to know. He’s turned back to the Piper he was when he first stole me.
The look in his eyes is dark enough that all the hair on the back of my neck stands on end.
I back up a step, but he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t try to grab the instrument. Instead, he purses his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle. His lips are taut as he drags the sound out, and I go utterly rigid.
My eyes snag wide, heart plummeting as I feel his tune spill over me, sinking down into my very bones. His magic grips me, tight and punishing, and realization batters.
He doesn’t need his pipe to use his magic.
Shock plumps my lungs with air I can’t take in.
Jerking forward, my hand comes out against my will, my fingers unfurling as I pass him the pipe, even as I try not to. Then his whistled tune draws out its final note, evaporating into silence as his magic releases me.
I stumble, barely catching myself as I stare.
As if I disgust him, he looks away from me to Havlon’s patrol. “Take them,” he says coldly.
My heart shatters. “No!”
I hear my aunt cry out as the patrolmen grab them, and then she and my mother are being dragged out through the door. The sight of my mother’s terrified, stricken expression is all I get to see before she’s ripped from my view.
“You promised!” I shout through a desperate sob. “You promised I could trust you. That you would take care of her!”
My words splinter and crack, leaving me in pieces on the floor.
Outside, I hear my mother scream.
I turn to run to her, to help her, but like a knife stabbed in my back, he lifts his pipe to play a death knell.
And strikes me down.
The notes are thin and harsh, cutting into me like the edges of paper. They slice into every piece of me that I’ve ever exposed to him. Shreds me into strips.
Voices sound—Conrad, Frid, Woodsman, the other patrol. Havlon. Then more screams below.
I don’t listen to any of it, except for the assault of the music. Don’t see any of it, except for the empty doorway.
I don’t feel a thing, except for the dark pit that’s been shoveled into my heart and dug out, leaving a gaping hole behind.
A hole filled with two things:
Fault.
And betrayal.
At the man who, just ten minutes ago, I would’ve confessed that I was falling in love with. At the man who, just hours ago, was cradling me in his arms and promising to protect me. Promising to help me and my family.
I look up at him with that betrayal as it floods from my eyes.
And betrayal also shines back in his. His gaze marking me a traitor.
“I was going to tell you,” I whisper, hating myself for bringing him here. For letting any of this happen. “I was going to tell you everything.”
How utterly foolish I was.
He watches me cry, his expression banked, gaze turned frigid and pitiless.
I think for a moment that maybe he’ll walk out. That he’ll leave me here in these torn pieces, but I should know better.
It started with a song, and it’s going to end with one too.
His tune drags my feet, turning me around and forcing me to the door.
No matter how hard I fight, no matter the vitriol that screams from my mouth, he doesn’t stop. Doesn’t relent.
My jerky movements take me down the stairs and onto the street that’s now flooded with bystanders and patrolmen, though I can’t see my family.
My mind bends. My heart breaks.
When he comes to a stop beside me, he holds his pipe away from his mouth like a weapon lowered, but he’s already done the damage.
Already landed the killing blow.
He pierced right into my heart that was blooming to life, leaving me to bleed.
“I won’t go with you,” I bite, my voice jagged.
“You will,” he says furiously as he grips my hand in a savage hold. “Because you’re mine.”
The final nail of betrayal is far more painful than the lashings that whipped across my back.
I should’ve known I couldn’t trust him.
Should’ve known I couldn’t fall in love with him.
Because the Pied Piper does now what he did before. He rips me away from my family, rips me away from my choice.
He takes me, bending me to his will, and a voice whispers in my head with a brutal reminder that I should have minded his stars.
Defender.
Thief.
Liar.
And stars, unlike him, never lie.