1.
She passed out at some point. Of course she did.
Claire couldn’t even find it in herself to be annoyed at the fact, really.
The human nervous system was not designed to take in the sight of one’s dead fiancé sprouting tentacles from his orifices.
Not designed to stay conscious through a car crash into the sea.
Part of her hoped she was dead, that she’d awaken into either bright light or eternal flame or endless, echoing dark.
But when she came to, Claire was in a room that she wasn’t familiar with, vaulted ceilings and austere oak beams like a cathedral, and she really wished she’d seen how she’d gotten there.
Not that there was much chance of her using that knowledge to get out again.
Not with Dierdre sitting beside her like next of kin by a hospital bed.
Elias’s aunt wore a delicate pink dress, one more suited to a spring wedding than to holding vigil in some underwater prison.
Her dark hair was curled softly around her made-up face, and her arms were crossed, one painted nail tapping impatiently on her bare biceps as she watched the doors at the back of the room.
Claire lurched up. Tried to, anyway, with her entire body aching and her head pounding, every inch of her car-crash sore.
The ropes around her arms and legs kept her from doing much other than painfully straining her neck.
No, not ropes—seaweed, slimy and slick but holding like iron, banded around her wrists and ankles.
But what the seaweed ropes held her to was worse than the ropes themselves. An altar.
This room was a church. Or close to one, at least. There was an altar, there was an aisle between wooden pews, all of them carved with that sinuous wave pattern that adorned the columns, the carpets.
The room was taller than it was wide, as if it never needed to hold many worshippers.
Stained-glass windows stretched from floor to ceiling, panels laid out to show dark tentacles reaching across the glass.
Through it, ocean, endless water, black and lightless, no life at all.
So she was underwater again. Deep underwater, deeper even than the main house. The glass should shatter, but physics didn’t count here, did it? Not when people were sprouting tentacles. Not when the Ashburys were planning to sacrifice her to a god.
That fear paled when she thought about being this far underwater, though.
It was fucking ridiculous, the way her heart drop-kicked her stomach, panic blazing quick and fierce at something so simple after what she’d just seen.
Bigger fears should outweigh these pedestrian ones, make them insignificant.
But it happened all the same, her breath coming fast, her lungs refusing to inflate all the way.
Someone had changed her clothes, out of the pajamas she’d worn when the BMW went over, but she was damp with sweat all the same.
Maybe Audrey could part with more of her Xanax.
Or was that against the rules? Were they playing by them, now that she was caught?
Dierdre watched her with something almost like sympathy in the dazzling blue of her eyes. Just almost, though. There was too much relief in it to really be sympathy, a starving person patiently observing the struggle of a rabbit in a trap.
“Sorry about that.”
Not Dierdre’s voice. Claire turned her head to see Audrey coming down the aisle with an unhurried gait, her face arranged in the kind of half grimace usually only seen on customers having a shit fit about coffee orders that weren’t exactly right.
Sorry to be a bother, but the cappuccino is simply too dry, surely you don’t expect me to not say something?
“I do hate the restraints,” Audrey said in the exact tone of voice Claire had been imagining, “but we need your cooperation, Claire, and you threw such a tantrum we couldn’t leave it to chance.”
“‘Tantrum’ is an interesting way to describe it.” Claire’s voice sounded like she’d drunk nothing but salt water for days. Maybe she had.
No, surely a whole day hadn’t passed. Four Stations, Ash had said, four days, and Claire felt like if they’d reached the last day—Ascension—she wouldn’t be alive anymore.
She thought of tentacles where limbs should be, a mouth made into a toothy, chewing maw. At least, she wouldn’t be alive like this.
The seaweed strained as she shifted on the altar. Stupid, trying to get comfortable on a sacrificial table. “Do the rules say that it’s fine to tie me up? Or is that like the drugs?”
“Rules can be bent,” Dierdre said. “In desperate circumstances. It doesn’t care.”
“Dierdre.” Audrey’s voice was sharp. Dierdre rolled her eyes but stayed silent.
“Oh, honey.” Audrey’s voice was softer when she spoke to Claire than it had been for her sister-in-law.
“Really, none of us are happy about this, so let’s not make it any harder than it has to be, OK?
” She approached the side of the altar and gently pushed Claire’s hair from her forehead.
“Can you do that, sweetheart? There’s no way out, not for any of us, so we might as well make it easy for each other. ”
Claire wanted to balk, but there was nowhere to go, and part of her, a sick part, still fought the urge to lean into the touch.
Motherly, gentle. A petting hand before the bolt between the eyes.
Audrey had cried last night, and maybe some of it had been for this, but she had no tears for Claire now.
Her eyes were dry, her resolve steely, even if her touch was sweet and her voice soft.
She’d made her choice, and all Claire could hope for was that it’d been a hell of a deliberation.
She knew better, though.
Audrey really did sound sorry, but it was light sympathy, the same diluted kind in Dierdre’s expression.
They might not like the methods, but they liked the results, and they certainly weren’t going to do anything that might jeopardize them.
They’d weighed who was more important, and it was them, every single time.
Ash said they gave to the sea in order to receive. Receive wealth, power, respect. Claire didn’t harbor any illusions of the Ashburys suddenly deciding to throw that away on her account. Hell, even Ash barely had. A half-assed grab at redemption.
Audrey was dressed in the same manner as Dierdre, like she was attending a garden party.
Her gown was fancier than Dierdre’s, though, sky blue and floor-length.
A corsage of slightly wilted lilies was strapped to her wrist, wafting their scent into Claire’s nose as Audrey brushed and brushed at her hair, the same vaguely comforting movement over and over and never really committed to.
It came to Claire in a rush, what Audrey looked like. The mother of the groom.
Her heart kicked her stomach again. She turned away from Audrey and angled her eyes, using long-neglected ab muscles to arch up and look down over her body.
A white dress. It didn’t fit. Too long and too large.
A giggle started in the back of her throat, ragged and chattering. She clenched her teeth around it, eyes watering.
Something hurt beneath the dress. Her hip, burning like a wound drenched in antiseptic. She vaguely remembered Elias—Not-Elias—reaching for her in the car, something latching onto her skin.
Audrey dropped her hand from Claire’s forehead and gingerly touched her side. Claire arched away, gasping, and Audrey clucked soothingly before glancing at Dierdre. “How’s the wound look?”
“It’s stitched.” Dierdre shrugged. “Not prettily, I’m not a damn surgeon. But I gave her some antibiotics, and if anything is seriously wrong, it’ll heal once she’s Worn.”
An unmistakable emphasis on the word, making it loom capitalized.
“As long as she can make it through the ceremony. And what comes after, when she and Wellington make it official.” Audrey said it in the same smooth, soothing tone she’d used before, as if Claire were an animal who couldn’t actually understand the words, only the cadence.
“He’s being unreasonable, still. I always told Wellsley he was too lenient with him, soft because he looked so much like Josephine. ”
Her teeth snapped on her sister’s name, a shark maw on a leg. A ripple in her veneer of softness.
“Is there no way the ceremony could be skipped, then?” Dierdre asked. “If that would make it easier?”
But Audrey was already shaking her head. “The skin has to be part of the family to make it work. Cared for. Otherwise you get…” She wrinkled her nose and waved a hand back toward the doors, indicating whatever lay beyond them. “All that. We learned the hard way.”
Claire had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but Dierdre nodded as if she understood. “Legally, she’s an Ashbury once they’re married. The whole consummation thing is just because Wellsley is a sick fuck.”
“Dierdre,” Audrey said again, sharper this time.
“A sick, feudal fuck. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wants bloody bedsheets, though I’m pretty sure he’ll be disappointed there.” Dierdre smirked. Then she shrugged. “Ash will come around. Wellsley himself wasn’t too keen on giving up Jo.”
Audrey’s eyes snapped to her sister-in-law, narrowed.
She seemed more bothered by the mention of her sister than by the proclamation of her husband’s character.
Dierdre’s shoulders stiffened, but she still didn’t look in Audrey’s direction, staring off into the stained-glass windows instead, that smirk still bending her mouth.
A diamond bracelet on Audrey’s wrist caught the light as she flipped a dismissive hand, spinning candle glow back through the gloom.
“Elias was the one who cared.” There was still a wound in her voice when she spoke of her son.
“I think that’s the whole reason It’s acting this way, honestly.
Leftover feelings from the one being Worn, and It doesn’t understand the concept of love. ”