Chapter 23 #2
My insides constrict, a pit of snakes.
I turn a dark look up at her, fringed with teary lashes. “Are you arriving at a point soon, or just twisting the knife?”
“I don’t know about you, but I am sure tired of it,” Serena says and, drawing back from the cabinet, she moves for me, a jar of white creamy liquid in her hand.
“Tired of what?”
She offers the jar to me. “For your face.”
For a beat, I look at it, then a reluctant sigh slumps me. I set the phial down on the floorboards, then take the jar.
Serena kicks back from me and stalks for the rows of cabinets and cupboards on the other side of the room.
Her voice follows her, “I’m sick of them—of the men, my father, your father, Oliver, Dray, the lot of them.”
I start sliding the lotion over my cheek.
“I’m sick of their rules, their commands, how they are only charming when it suits them, but ugly when we dare speak a word they don’t like. I’m sick of the control, the restriction, the future…”
My fingertips still on my cheek, the wet milky substance dripping down my jaw.
As if now speaking to herself, she goes on, “I am nauseas in my sickness of stolen futures.”
I watch her hair sway like a rope from a cinched ponytail.
She leans over a rotted table, rummages through things I can’t see but can hear.
A lot of paper, cardboard, glasses clinking, and finally she tugs out a bag.
A plain white canvas type of bag, the kind the poorer students carry around the academy.
I dip my fingers into the jar again, almost robotically, and rub more onto my face.
It’s a soothing sensation, but I don’t get to relish it, not before Serena is marching back to the medical cabinet.
“That’s just the way it is,” she says to herself, lips curling around her ivory teeth. “Don’t question it. Ignore all potential and talent we might have and live to serve the men who claim to love us.”
Her mouth purses and—she blows a raspberry.
My brows hike.
A gesture like that, crude and juvenile, from someone like Serena… it’s startling.
But her words are what should startle me.
Instead, they feel sort of distant. A rant that lashes around me but doesn’t quite touch me.
Because maybe I know, deep in that worming gut of misery and fear, that if I was accepted from the beginning, as a deadblood or with magic, then I wouldn’t be unhappy with the way things are.
I wouldn’t feel trapped.
Serena has that existence that I always wanted.
So how can she feel suffocated?
She gets to breathe.
She does not know what suffocation is.
The metal cabinet clangs, loud enough to strike my bones, and I cringe against it.
She muffles a curse under her breath, then tips some things into the canvas bag—but I can’t see what through the door.
I screw the lid back onto the jar. “What are you doing?”
Serena glances at me—then double takes. “Done with that?”
In three brisk steps, she’s on me, snatching the jar from my loose grip, and shoving it into the bag.
“I’m leaving,” she says, then kicks aside the cupboard door, revealing all the bandages and phials and syringes inside. “I’m taking what I might need. And you are coming with me.”
For a heartbeat, two, three, I am utterly still.
Then my lashes flutter over dazed, drying eyes, aching with bloodshot, and I watch her hand dart from box to box, stealing all sorts of supplies and shoving them into the canvas bag.
“The gondolas are running, your father won’t get here until dinner time, and if we move now, we can pack a bag, take anything of value, and get to VeVille before the curfew shuts down the gondolas. There will be no other time—it needs to be today.”
Still, I am stagnant in the shock.
I think that’s what is happening to me.
Shock.
I can’t think straight.
I can only watch as she moves for the next cupboard, on the other side of the entry door, and she rifles around, stealing.
Serena carries on, “Today is the only day it’ll work. Security at the veil is expecting people to come through,” she says with a look over her shoulder at me. “Your father, Mr Younge, maybe even your mother. Maybe the Sinclairs, or the Stroms—who knows how many are on their way after that?”
Silence has my tongue.
I’ve stopped watching her.
I turn my gaze back to the cupboard, the door wide open, boxes out of place, and a syringe hanging from the shelf.
I reach for it.
The metal is cool against my fingertips.
“My print will get us out of here. I can use illusion on us both, and I can do it with anything, paper into documents, into passports. I’ve been practicing,” she rambles on, threads severed, and it’s a frantic breathy voice, a side of Serena I’ve never seen before.
“I can do cash, too. But that’s tricky, because illusions fade, and fake cash is trackable.
I’ve been saving, though. And you have jewellery with you, yes? ”
Snowboots thud heavy on the floorboards.
I look up as she advances on me, determination firming her face.
“I’m leaving now,” Serena reaches out for me, for my hand. “Will you come with me, Olivia?”
“You won’t get far.” The truth dulls my tone. “They’ll track you.”
Still, her hand is outstretched, and her face is firmly determined. “Not if I reach the rogue first.”
“What rogue?”
“A shield witch.” Serena lifts her chin, and pride rinses over her.
She really has thought of everything.
And still, that hand is offered to me.
I don’t take it.
My mouth parts around uncertain answers.
I should.
I should run away with her. Live a little life that she promises. A life free of the destruction all around me, like vampires feeding off of me at every turn.
And yet, I hesitate.
My heart sinks to my gut and sways like a boat on waves.
“I…”
Her fingertips touch mine. “You will never be free while you’re with them. You will never be accepted—or happy.”
My grip firms around the syringe.
The hard metal digs into my palms, and the needle pinches me.
I look down.
A bead of blood swells from my middle finger, then rolls down between the others, until it reaches the curve of my pinkie.
A sinking sensation weighs me down.
Because I watch the regular glimmer of my blood—and I wonder if it would glitter with magic if it was midnight, and the wash of the moonlight came cascading in from the tall windows.
My eyes shut, slow.
Three phials already in the briefcase, the witchdoctor at the academy never allowed to treat me here—
“Olivia. I’m going with or without you. And you don’t have time to think on it. It’s literally now or never.”
Still, I hesitate.
This life is all I have ever known.
I am not so sure two aristos witches can survive out there on their own. I have never done laundry before, or washed dishes, or cooked dinner or paid a restaurant bill, or even ordered for myself at a restaurant.
But then my brother flashes in my mind.
How he stood there, turning his clenched cheek to me after Dray struck me down to the floor.
He is our father, a replica of him, in more than appearance.
And my father will come to Bluestone, and he will take me home, and he will punish me for what I’ve done—he will see it as an evil, as a tantrum, not as the desperate escape that it is.
And still…
If Serena is right, and Dray doesn’t end our engagement over this, then all of it will have been for nothing.
I answer, and I know that answer comes from a place of fear and impulse.
But it’s a word that softens Serena’s face with relief.
“Ok.”