34. The Weapons Room #2
“Well, do you have any reason to believe I would lie to you? Because there are walls of scrolls inside this very fortress documenting times that the Sisters have hunted and killed demons in cold blood because they broke onto Virtus lands without the supposedly all powerful Legion of Light noticing. And I know for a fact that those people they broke out of prisons were innocent! Unfairly convicted and left to rot in those awful places when all they were guilty of was little more than making some powerful man blush, or more often than not, accidently witnessing someone important sinning, and then needing to be shut up for the privilege.”
But prison hadn’t shut them up enough.
So they’d closed them all down and found a way of permanently shutting these people up.
My face goes hot and my limbs start to tremble.
Those driven mad in the academy before being sold to the demons, never to see Virtus soil again.
I gasp.
All of my marks.
Irritation crawls up my spine, because if I don’t lean into irritation at Khali, then that would mean facing the puzzle that’s clicking together inside my head right now. It would make it too real and I’m not ready to confront it.
So I confront my best friend on this island instead. “You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Sure, so whoever told me that the sisters were responsible for my mothers death was wrong?”
Khali hesitates. “Either that,” she says carefully, “or they were lying.”
My jaw tightens as I recall my father finally telling me who was responsible for her death after years of asking him, desperate for someone to blame.
I’d not long lost my wings and was struggling to find a reason to not take a running leap out of the turret window.
Whether he’d meant to or not, my father had given me a reason.
Vengeance.
Then he’d turned me into his blade. His secret assassin.
The person who didn’t even exist to him outside of doing his dirty work.
I shake the unwanted thoughts away. “And what makes you such an expert?” I snap.
She meets my gaze steadily. “Seraphina—”
“No,” I cut in. “You’re very confident for someone dismissing the cause of the worst day of my life. Those responsible for taking the only person I ever loved and who ever loved me.”
“I’m not dismissing it.”
“You’re telling me everything I’ve believed about that day for years is wrong. So go on, what makes you so sure? Let’s start with the prisons, shall we? How could you possibly know who the Sisters let out of Virtus’s prisons? Were you there?”
Khali watches me for a long moment. “Because one of them is my sister.”
The words land like one of us dropped a blade. I blink. “Your what?”
She exhales slowly. “My half sister,” she corrects. “Eurya.”
“You’re lying.”
“I swear to you, I’m not. It’s actually Eurya who suggested I get to know you in the beginning.
The Sisters know you weren’t really in the academy, Sera, Silver told them what happened in the alley in Virtus as soon as they arrived back at Vulcaris.
How the girl who ran from them had been hiding while you’d taken her place in the carriage. ”
The sting is instant and all consuming, so much so that I can’t even bring myself to be concerned that they know I was never in the academy.
“So what? You’re friends with me because your sister told you to be?” My heart hurts worse the more her words sink in. “What about Az and Reiva? The alliance?”
I run a hand through the braid Khali did in my hair this morning, as she does every morning, slowly teaching me how to do them myself.
“Did she tell you to braid my hair too?”
“It’s not like that—”
“Like what? Like you pretend to be my friend every day so you can spy on me? Because that’s exactly what it sounds like. I hope you found something juicy. Something worth all the fakery?”
“I’m not fake. Far from it. You know I can’t stand Lilliana, the queen of fake. Besides, it’s not like they thought you were a threat or anything, though maybe they should have given what you told me about your mother's death and where you lay the blame.” She arches her brow.
“They obviously thought I was enough of a problem to have you spy on me.”
“No one was spying on you. You intrigued them, that’s all, no one more so than Silver himself, who isn’t easily intrigued.
The Sisters know that, and they thought it was quite remarkable.
Taking the place of someone else, what with knowing how your kind feels about ours before you come to the island and get to know better. ”
“You pretended to be my friend…”
Why does it hurt so much? It’s not like I had liked any of their kind when I’d agreed to an alliance with them either.
But I’ve gotten to know them and actually care for them now. The idea of her or Az or Reiva not making it through a game sickens me as much as it did Diana. Hell, even Garrick’s death stung and sleeping in a bunk without him and Diana plagues me every night.
"No one's pretending to be your friend, Sera, I swear it,” she says. “Eurya mentioned that Silver was intrigued by you, and asked what I thought of you. To do that she suggested I spend some time with you. That’s all. I liked you before she even mentioned it, from the moment Z left you in the line with those other nephilim. Getting to know you was no hardship, and the alliance thing was my idea, nothing to do with Eurya or the others, though Eurya agreed you could be a good ally in the games given what you did in that alley.”
“Your sister is responsible for killing my mother.”
“No. She’s not. And whoever told you that the Sisters were, knew that they were lying to you. The Sisters would never kill an innocent human. They wouldn’t.”
“Sure, the daughters of high demon princes wouldn’t kill an innocent.”
“Their mothers are archangels. Not that it matters, they don’t claim to be all good or all bad anyway.
Besides, I’ve been around them for years, long before I worked in Vulcaris.
Ever since Eurya heard our father bragging to the other princes that he’d gotten some human woman pregnant several years before.
A sex worker from Luxuria who’d followed Eurya through a hellgate during one of her early missions. She’d been… distracted.”
I frown, remembering what Silver told me about how Eurya had the wings torn from her back when she’d accidentally traveled to Luxuria instead of wrath’s circle of hell to see her father, Satan, and ask him to heal her.
Could it have been the hellgate they opened to get out of there?
By ‘distracted’ did Khali maybe mean she’d been injured and busy helping Silver escape that awful cage?
Khali starts polishing her sword more vigorously.
“It took her a long time to find me,” she says. “I was in my insufferable teenager phase by the time Eurya eventually tracked me to a Virtus village where my mother had left me several years before on the steps of some hostel.”
My hand covers my mouth and the sword I’d been polishing to within a millimetre of its life crashes against the stone floor.
Surely not.
Thought you didn’t believe in coincidences?
“Tidecrest?”
Khali nods. “How do you know?”
“You’re the girl from the hostel that my mother and I used to stay at. You left when you were what, fourteen?”
I watch the recognition fill her eyes. “Twelve, but I looked older.”
“Nurse Etta never sang that song again after you left.”
Khali gasps. “I wondered how the hell you knew that song! You’re the girl with the mother that Nurse Etta had a soft spot for.
She’d let you both stay for free most nights because you could rarely cover the room fee and she said she couldn’t live with herself if she put you out on the street.
She used to say she wished she had more food to spare too, but she already had one unexpected mouth to feed—”
Az kicks open the door with a bang, another stack of swords on his shoulder. Reiva follows, and they drop the heavy weapons onto the table.
Az’s gaze assesses the pile of swords left over from their last trip, and he drags his hands through his hair. “I was joking when I called you polishing princesses. What the Hell have you pair been doing all this time? Comparing notes on your favorite fucking tiara’s or something?”
“Something like that,” Khali murmurs, obviously struggling as much as me to get her head around the fact that we’d met in what feels like a past life. “Something like that.”