Chapter 29 Ares
ARES
I felt the Echo before Ember said anything, so I stood at the threshold of Cromvale’s office when she called out. The spirit whose path across the office repeated was familiar to me as my own mother's face.
All of the blood rushed out of my head as I watched the ghost. “Amanita?” Ember followed me as I walked into the office. “Amanita?” I said again, hoping that by saying her name, she might hear me, might recognize my voice.
I had only been a child when my parents were killed, but Amanita had been my mother’s best friend. She’d been visiting the shop the day my parents were executed, same as she did dozens of times a month. Just passing time gossiping with my mother, arranging flowers and laughing.
“Amanita,” I pleaded again.
This time, she flickered halfway across the room. I didn’t want to yank on her aura. That could be disorienting for spirits, and the way she looked, locked in grief like this… I couldn’t cause her more harm. She was repeating something in that voiceless way that so many Echoes had.
“Can you read her lips?” I asked, looking back at Ember.
Her kaleidoscope eyes were heavily hooded with grief, perhaps for me, but mostly, I thought, for Amanita. She nodded, swallowing hard before choking out, “She’s saying, the safe is a decoy. It’s under the rug.” Ember shook her head. “I don’t understand, Ares. This isn’t where she died, is it?”
“No,” I murmured. “She died in the flower shop with my parents.”
“Amanita Erebis,” she whispered, surprising me with her knowledge. “But how… why is she here? Loopers tend to stay near something important from their lives, or their deaths, right? Cromvale’s ancestors probably weren’t even born when your parents and Amanita died.”
I inhaled deeply. This was what came of keeping secrets.
Of keeping the Trinity’s knowledge siloed within each dynasty.
“That’s not exactly true. Echoes don’t always start out as loopers.
Sometimes they start out as Shades, going where they please, and sometimes even seeking out aspects of their old lives. ”
Ember drew in a slow breath. “Are you saying she might have found out something so disturbing she got stuck like this?”
She was so smart, so quick, I didn’t even have to try to explain things further to her. I loved it. “Yes.”
“But what rug?” she asked. “There’s not a rug in this place; not that I’ve seen, anyway. Is there one in the bedroom?”
I shook my head, then drew a sharp breath in. “But I didn’t get to the closet yet.”
I spun on my heel, running through the apartment, Ember close behind.
There was no telling how little time we had left, and we’d come up empty thus far.
When we got to the closet, it was there.
A plain black rug in the middle of the walk-in closet, with an incredibly heavy-looking stone table standing atop it.
We glanced at one another and then worked to move the marble table.
For mortals, it likely would have been too heavy to move. But for Ember and me, it took just a little effort. When the table was off the rug, we pulled it back, working in perfect time with one another. Below the rug, there was a trapdoor.
Ember stared at me for a long moment before bending down to open it.
Both of us were silent, my pounding heart and the trapdoor creaking open the only sound in the apartment.
I glanced up as the door opened, movement distracting me.
Amanita stood opposite me, behind Ember, her tear-stained face full of relief.
A smile stretched her heart-shaped face into an exhausted, but happy expression.
You found it, she said before she started to fade.
There wasn’t enough time. There was never enough time.
My emotions hadn’t caught up yet. I hadn’t had time to process this, to try to pull the feelings I’d had to abandon, along the long road of my life, up from the depths.
Amanita would be here and gone before I had a chance to say what I needed to—to feel what I needed to.
“Tell my parents I love them,” I whispered, dredging as much feeling as I could into my voice.
Numbness threatened to pin me down in this moment, but I staved it off the only way I knew how: By talking about the one person I always trusted, that I knew as well as I knew myself.
“When you see them, tell them that Eryx is just like Papa. I tried my best to make sure he would be a good man. That he would be strong enough to withstand this world, and all its horrors. Everyone who knows him loves him.”
Ember’s hand clapped over her mouth as I spoke. Tears welled in her hazel eyes, clinging to her long lashes. Amanita nodded, then looked down at Ember, whose focus was so closely narrowed on me.
And what about you, Ares? Amanita asked. The tears had disappeared, and she was translucent—the way spirits whose business on the mortal plane always looked when they were not long for the world. What shall I tell them of you?
I shook my head. “There is nothing to tell. Eryx is my greatest accomplishment. Roman will have told them the rest.”
Ember’s breath shuddered through her as she listened to me. The tears in her eyes fell onto her cheeks in streams now. She shook her head at Amanita, but could not seem to form words as her fingers stretched toward the spirit.
My mother’s best friend seemed to understand something of her intention though, because she smiled gently at Ember, a comforting expression that seemed to soothe her, at least a little.
I will tell them you found the love of a good woman, Amanita said, placing her fingers under Ember’s chin. It will please your mother to know it.
Amanita’s relief was palpable in the closet as she dissolved into thousands of glowing particles, breaking apart and then faded into nothing.
She would be at peace now; whatever was behind the trapdoor was the thing that tied her to this place.
I looked down to see only one thing in the space below: a manilla file folder.
Ember glanced at me, wiping tears from her eyes, before pulling a set of rubber gloves out of her jacket pocket.
Ember Verona was everything I’d hoped for. I had no idea how long I’d been falling in love with her, but now that I saw myself through Amanita’s eyes, I knew it had been longer than the past few days. Years. I’d been watching her, longing for her, since the inquest into the fire.
Since I pulled my head out of my ass and realized the harm I’d done. The mistakes I’d made in service of my people. For the past twenty years, I’d been searching out ways to make things better, and she’d been here all along. Right by my side, annoying the shit out of me—the answer to everything.
The love of a good woman. Yes. That, but also a partner in this lonely life. The chaotic complement to all my desire for order.
Ember pulled another pair of gloves from her pocket and handed them to me, before bending down to lift the folder out of its shallow hiding place.
She placed the folder on the marble table we’d just moved, and opened it.
I went to stand next to her. The harsh overhead light in the closet was unpleasant, its dull whine making my ears ring.
There were several photographs inside the folder.
Some were old, over a hundred years old, by the looks of things.
The photograph from the wall—of the lot where the old florist shop had been—was among them.
There was also a document, a single piece of paper that showed a web of dates.
Ember pressed her gloved finger to the day my parents died, her eyes flicking over the other dates on the web.
She touched several that had black slashes through them, her eyes narrowing. “All of these are days after Lara’s kills.”
“Days after…” My mind raced. “These are the dates the murders she prevented were supposed to occur?”
Ember nodded, frowning deeply as she pointed to one of the earliest dates on the web. “This is when the swords were stolen.”
I looked through the photographs again. They were all from different, empty locations. None were familiar to me but the one where my parents’ shop had stood. As Ember looked at them, she began to shake her head. “No…”
“What?” I asked.
“Someone is playing a very long game,” she murmured.
“Ember,” I insisted, suddenly desperate to know what my parents had to do with any of this. “What do you know?”
She held up a finger, then took her phone from her pocket. She snapped several photos, then closed the folder. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
Just after she spoke, Stanley appeared again, still in his two-headed, bat-wing cat form. He sent several images to me telepathically—CCTV footage of the Senator in a cab.
“There’s no cameras in this place, but we’ve tripped an alarm,” Ember hissed. “Senator Cromvale is a devotee of Chiore.”
My blood ran cold at the name. On the island, Rhiannon had reacted badly to my question about the destruction of Chiore’s temple. “What is the truth about Chiore, Ember? What did she do to the other gods?”
Ember swallowed hard. “She forged a weapon that could end a true immortal’s life. She swore it was to keep balance, but she wielded it like a threat.”
“How do you know Cromvale is devoted to her?” I asked, desperate to see what she did.
Ember let out a frustrated noise, something between a growl and a squeal.
“These places. In Orphium’s ancient past, before you were born, before the Consulate or the Authority, they were all her temples.
Humans sacrificed parapsychs to her. Fed them to her flames for favors.
She was the only god who did not create parapsych children. She created the monsters.”
The monsters. The Ceti. The Kraken. The multitudes of creatures that inhabited the vast wastelands between the three territories. If they were her children, what did that mean? And why would anyone worship such a god?
I remembered the fire in the flower shop after my parents had been murdered. Fury mounted in my veins—had they been a sacrifice? “What did they hope to accomplish by this?”
Ember leaned forward, taking my hands in hers, pushing me towards the door. “Do you remember the way that Fairchild moved the night we rescued Briony?”
I nodded, but pulled back, reluctant to leave until I understood what we were dealing with.
“That wasn’t a Thaumas-made miracle,” she hissed. “He sacrificed something, someone to Chiore for the power, and he obviously meant to do the same to Briony. There have always been rumors that the Chiorics liked to sacrifice young parapsychs because Chiore liked the taste of potential best.”
That was impossible. Or at least I’d been led to believe it was impossible to reach the Saints, let alone gods. I shook my head. “Are you saying what I think you are?”
Ember placed the folder back in the shallow divot in the floor, then closed the trapdoor. “Do you think I’m suggesting that some sect of the Authority worships Chiore?”
Truly, I hadn’t gotten quite that far, but that was the gist of what I’d been thinking, so I nodded. Ember kicked the rug back over the trapdoor, moving quickly to the table. We moved it back into position together.
I touched her arm. “Is the story about Chiore’s weapon true?”
Ember sighed. “No one knows. A group of Maere left the island before the mists descended. They were supposed to hunt the weapon down. No one’s heard from them since.
” That didn’t make me feel any better, but it also didn’t make me feel worse.
Her forehead shone with a gleam of sweat. “Cromvale will know someone was here.”
I nodded, then glanced up. Several baseball bats hung on the wall, and vaguely I remembered that Cromvale had played in college. I grabbed one, tossing it to Ember, then pulled down another for myself. “Then I think we need to make it difficult to tell what we meant to do here.”
A slow smile spread over her face. “Let’s go.”