Chapter 18 Ember
EMBER
The seminar was boring, as expected. Stuff anyone would know, but no actual advice about how to take care of a teenage girl in this day and age. Ares refused to sit next to me, and in the car on the way back to the Carlyle he was silent.
It wasn’t until we reached the elevator that he spoke to me. “I need to go get Avaline’s laptop, and then I’ll be up.”
There was no doubt he was uncomfortable about what had happened at the Suzerain, though I couldn’t parse out what was making him so itchy. “Was it the reconciliation that did it?” I asked on impulse as he turned to go. “All that bloodshed and violence?”
He spun, his eyes wild with some emotion I couldn’t gauge. My breath quickened as he stalked towards me. He stopped a hair's breadth from my face. “Do you think that’s something I should be proud of?”
I thought about it for a few moments. There was, of course, talk about how dangerous Ares Necroline was, that he was a brutal head of the Dynasty.
But Roman had been worse by far. The man had believed in governing through fear, after all.
When he was king of Orphium, this place had been a bloody mess.
He’d made the newly-forming Authority look gentle in comparison.
But Ares had changed things. He’d killed a lot of his uncle’s cronies, and tortured even more of them if his reconciliation was accurate. But his dynasty had come to heel. They’d improved under his rule and things were changing, if slowly.
“Yes,” I finally answered. “I do. Changing things takes a terribly long time and brutal effort. You’ve done your best.”
Ares breathed deep, his chest grazing mine. Our encounter in the laundromat thrummed in my bones, the memory a living thing. His pale green eyes narrowed as he bent over me, bringing his lips to my ears. “No, Ember, I’ve done my worst.”
Shivers ran through me, straight to the base of my spine, then lower. He straightened, his face a mask of intimidation. A Necroline prince, through and through—no, a king. It was wild how different the public version of him could be from the man I’d seen in private.
“And I would do it all again, if given the chance.” A cruel smile played at his lips as he turned away from me, his words haunting me as he walked towards the long back hallway that led to the business wing of the Carlyle.
Watching him go, my knees turned to jelly, relieved he couldn’t see the slump in my shoulders or hear the way my heart raced for him.
The way he spoke had shaken something loose in me.
Something I wanted to put firmly back in its place.
Something I could not have, could not even dare to want.
I closed my eyes against the storm of emotions brewing within me and waited for the elevator.
Upstairs, I found everyone waiting awkwardly for me in the parlor, which meant I had to pull myself together on the double.
I shooed them all away, motioning for Lara to follow me with the girl.
The child was still asleep as I showed Lara the room I’d made up for Sera, decorated in the soft silvery tones she’d always loved, with tiny little stars on the ceiling that glowed softly in the dark.
Lara set the girl down on the bed, pulling the fuzzy lavender blanket up over the girl’s feet. “Do you think she’ll be okay?”
I didn’t know much about teenage girls, so I shrugged. “I have no idea.”
Lara frowned as she left the room, leaving me to shut the door. “You did a nice job with the flat,” she said as we walked down the hall. After all her bluster from before, that was rich coming from her now. The praise still warmed me, though. I couldn’t deny that. “Can I see my room?”
My heart thumped with nerves as I pushed open the door across the hall.
Lara touched the brass light switch and several lamps cast their golden glow around the deep emerald tones of the room.
Lara walked to the wall of bookshelves that surrounded the windows, her mouth falling open. “These are my books…”
“They’re not,” I interrupted, not wanting her to get her hopes up. Lara was the type to annotate all her books with her deepest feelings and reactions. “Your books burned with everything else, but I did my best to replace them. I tried to find replacements for everyone’s treasures.”
Lara smiled, a soft and fragile thing. The first time I saw her, she’d given me that exact same look.
She’d been stuck in a pillory in her village square, the people she loved most in the world throwing rotting vegetation at her.
When we sensed her ascension, we came for her, but they’d already found her out.
The second she saw us, she knew we were there to be her family. To be the ones who would never leave her behind. Who would accept her for who she was. Or at least that was how it was supposed to work. My chest ached. Without Max and Sera, both Lara and Rhi coming home felt temporary.
It hurt too much to think of them leaving me again. As Lara flopped down on the giant bed, I backed away, whispering, “I am glad you like it.”
I turned before I could hear her respond.
I found Rhi and Avaline Reyes in the sitting room.
Rhiannon sat at the writing desk by the arched floor-to-ceiling windows, scribbling away in her journal, while Avaline sat on the floor, eyes closed.
I sat down in the green velvet wingback next to the writing desk and watched the necromancer for clues about what she might be doing.
Rhiannon set her pen down, sighing as she closed her journal. “Avaline is summoning spirits to safeguard the flat from surveillance tech.”
I nodded, but said nothing.
Avaline opened one eye, then grimaced. “Would it be possible for the two of you to go elsewhere? You’re making me nervous.”
Rhiannon placed her journal in her bag and nodded, rising out of the desk chair in a motion so fluid and graceful that I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Avaline had a similar reaction. Her cheeks flushed a tiny bit as she looked away.
I sighed as I followed Rhi out of the room. “Do you have to do that to people?”
She looked over her shoulder as she walked towards the kitchen. I don’t know how she knew the layout of the flat already, but it didn’t surprise me. “Do what?”
“Be all irresistible like that. You’ve got everyone under your spell,” I hissed as we entered the kitchen.
Rhiannon slid out of her jacket, revealing creamy pale skin.
She moved around the kitchen with that same preternatural grace as she ground beans for coffee.
Watching her was witnessing art in motion.
I sighed deeply, envying the way she moved through the world with such ease, utterly captivating anyone who came in contact with her.
It was a skill I did not possess. Rhiannon was a generous bolt of the finest silk, and I was as smooth as a cheese grater.
“Have you ever thought about why it is necessary for me to present this way?” Rhiannon replied as she dumped coffee grounds into the wildly expensive coffee maker I’d purchased with her in mind.
Her words snagged, catching on the corners of my perception of her. Rhi had always been like this, as far as I knew, and yet something in her words suggested it was a cultivated state.
She gestured to me. “You are messy. Irritating. Wild.”
A part of me wanted to argue, but her tone wasn’t insulting. Rather, it was tired, deeply, deeply tired. And nothing she said was untrue, so I nodded. She opened the refrigerator and took milk out, bringing it to the frother and measuring out enough for both of us to have generous helpings.
When the milk was going, she placed a perfectly manicured hand on her pristine decolletage. “And no one questions if you are elegant, intelligent, or capable.”
A sinking feeling went through me. I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I knew when my perception had failed me, and now was one such time. “In this life, I have always been different,” she said. “Even before I ascended. I was… bigger than everyone in my village.”
Humans had been smaller in size when we all ascended. I had been tall as well, but I’d never been as large as Rhi. Being different, in any way, when we were born invited scrutiny. I nodded, slowly starting to understand.
“I was too big, too loud, too beautiful.”
I smiled at the last phrase. Rhiannon would never go so far as to deny that she was, indeed, too beautiful.
But my smile fell away, quickly, remembering what life had been like for Sera when we found her.
Though she was a tiny thing, and did not have the same issue of size that Rhi had, she was, by society’s standards, the most beautiful among us. Ethereal, really.
And it had almost ruined her. If she had not ascended, it might have. It took her years to want to stay, to not mourn the death she anticipated as a release from all that had happened to her. I had never thought about what Rhi might have endured. She never talked about it.
Any visible difference, on top of what set us apart as parapsychs, had always been dangerous. And before we’d ascended, we were vulnerable. Far, far too vulnerable. Each of us carried those scars, but Sera and Rhiannon most of all.
“There is no use in looking backward, Ember. But my grace is not a joke. It’s how I survived.” Her eyes averted as she turned from me.
I rushed around the kitchen island before she could lift the pitcher off the frother, my arms going around her. She smelled, as she always did, expensive. Heavenly. Ever so slowly, one of her silken arms hugged me back.
“You are not a joke to me,” I whispered. “You’re a marvel. You always have been.”
She nodded once, a single tear sparkling in her left eye. When she blinked, it was gone, disappearing inside the most beautiful assassin I’d ever known. “I am so glad you’re here,” I said, my voice cracking. “To smooth out my rough edges.”
“Oh, Ember,” she breathed as I pulled away from her. She sighed, bringing down mugs. “I know this has been hard.”
I couldn’t voice the fears I had about what might happen next.
From inside her jacket, her phone rang. She was in the middle of making a beautiful froth of foam in my mug, so I fetched her phone for her.
When she answered, cradling the phone between her cheek and shoulder, she sounded different: Sharp, capable, and confident. “Yes, I understand.”
There was a long pause as the person on the phone talked.
I had tried, early on when she left, to find out who she worked with at the Consulate.
But the entire organization above the bureaucratic levels was so opaque as to be a complete mystery.
Humans assumed that the Maere and those in Trinity leadership knew much more than we did about how things were run.
“They had hex boxes.”
Another pause.
“Four.”
Yet another pause.
The truth was that the Consulate was run, at the highest levels, by parapsychs who went practically unnoticed in mundane life.
And to folks like me, they were simply voices on the other end of the line.
People who called to tell me my mistakes, and who I called to complain.
To be perfectly honest, it was all a lot of bitching and moaning.
“Destroyed now. Ember crushed them.”
A longer pause this time.
“Thank you, I will tell her.”
Rhiannon hung up. Checked twice to make sure she’d actually hung up.
Then turned her phone off entirely. As it shut off, her shoulders slumped, her hand flying to her forehead, her thumb and index fingers pinching the bridge of her nose.
She blew out a tightly held breath. “Your approval went through. You and Ares are the girl’s official guardians.
She’s to stay with you, though, wherever you choose to reside. ”
I breathed a sigh of relief, which surprised me a little. I hadn’t known I’d wanted the girl to stay with us until just this moment. “What about the Necrolines?”
She shook her head as she leaned against the kitchen counter. “They said nothing about punishing them.” She was visibly shaken. I wondered for the thousandth time who she’d worked for, and why she feared them so deeply.
My jaw clenched. “Then it’s confirmed. That Fairchild person was working outside the Authority’s official channels.”
“They know what he’s up to,” a voice said from the kitchen door. I turned to find Ares Necroline. “But he’s definitely running his own operation.”