Chapter Forty-Nine
The next day crawls forward, Dominik’s threat of breaking again like a dark cloud in the distance. As hours pass, that cloud grows closer. After having her arm reset, resting, and taking a pain tonic, Briar has settled herself in the Illusion kitchens. She will give the signal.
In the meantime, Kassandra and I practice, our geniuses straining, my body tumbling into the wall, off the sofa.
We practice until we hit the target every time.
We argue, in hushed tones, over the envelope of black powder that sits on her glass parlor table.
I urge Kassandra to sleep, to gather her strength; she refuses, and so do I.
She washes in her bath, and I wash in the communal faeries’ chamber, finding each other once more, dressed anew.
In the early afternoon, the note from Briar comes, delivered by a red-faced Benji. I pour him a water as Kassandra reads. She thanks Benji, and I hug him and shoo him downstairs again. When he’s gone, when we are alone, Kassandra meets my eye.
“Dominik and his bedfellow are awake and have requested tea,” she says. “Briar managed to slip in the tonic.”
I let out a breath. “It should grant us an hour.”
Kassandra kneels beside the glass table, her saffron dress fluttering around her like a tulip. Leveling a stare at the pile of black powder, she folds Briar’s note into a square with sharp corners. I crouch down next to her.
“We should take as little as possible. Just to be safe,” I say.
Briar’s note hovers over the pile of black, then cuts it in half. Kassandra looks at me. “Have you ever had the powder from the coca plant?”
I pause. “Yes.”
Her eyes narrow. “When?”
“Two years ago when I was cleaning up after your two hundred fifty-eighth birthday party. There was some left on the dining room table and I wanted to try it.”
She leans back. “You jest.”
“I do not.”
My mistress searches my face, not finding what she seeks. Then Kassandra shakes her head, laughing.
“You’re moonstruck,” she says. “You don’t go around doing random vices off messy tables!”
I quirk a brow, nod toward the black powder.
“This is different,” she says.
“Because I wiped down the glass this morning?”
Even before the end of my sentence, my lips are tugging up into a smile. She gives me another gentle nudge, and I quite like being pushed around by a bratty fae in this way.
“Okay,” she asserts, wiping her eyes with her free hand, Briar’s note still in the other.
“Okay,” I repeat.
“We need every advantage,” she says, almost more to herself than to me.
It affects your genius directly, Carter had said.
“If they use this to hold us down, then we can use it to break their grip.”
Kassandra nods, forming two small lines of black ash. Rolling up Briar’s note, she hovers over one line, then snorts. Tipping her head back, she sniffs, blinking.
“How do you feel?” I ask after a moment.
“Fine.”
When Kassandra glances at me, her eyes dilated to black, terror pierces my chest. With a sinking feeling, I recognize this expression.
How many times have I seen it on Maxian, Dominik, Hector, and other High Fae of the Upper Court?
I thought it was simply the look of violence, but now I understand it to be something else: unnatural power.
Kassandra hands me the rolled-up note, and I position one end over the black line, the other by my nose. Then I sniff, too.
My nose burns, as if I’ve inhaled ash, as if smoke expands my lungs.
“Breathe through it,” Kassandra says.
I try, but the thick, oily sensation wriggles up my sinuses and into my brain like Reign magic.
My heart pumps harder as my blood thickens to muck, my genius struggling to flap the oily magic off its wings.
This is not the merriment of the mirthroot, the giddiness of hemp, the sultry seduction of wine.
This isn’t even the racing feeling of coca powder.
“Open your eyes,” Kassandra demands.
The room bombards me with a myriad of brilliant, sharp colors.
I inhale, and I can smell the soup in the kitchens below, hear the pulsing of Kassandra’s heart next to mine, feel the spiderweb of veins beneath my skin, pinpoint the crumb of bread beneath one of my knees, crushed into the carpet.
When I reach for my genius, it shoots through me, a black raptor with heaving, beating wings.
It is so much more.
And I experience everything.
Kassandra rises. Her tawny dress now radiates like a star, my black tunic a pit I could fall into.
“Would you like to take a stroll in the courtyards, my lady?” I ask.
“It’s such a lovely day.” She licks her lips. “I would love to.”
—
The outside is overwhelming. The emerald trees pop; the red flowers resemble droplets of blood.
Kassandra brings her parasol, shading herself from the sun. I tug at my tunic, thick and dark and entrapping.
“Stop tweaking,” she grits out through shining teeth.
“I’m not—”
We pass by an Illusion guard to whom she gives a smile.
I smile as well, though it feels more like a grimace.
We promenade around a hedge, crunch down a path that winds toward Dominik’s wing.
We reach the northern wall, which casts a dark, cool shade across the plant life and the garden of Kassandra and the king’s first date.
Kassandra takes a seat on the northern bench that abuts the ivy-covered wall.
I stand beside her. Her eyes flick up to the top of the walls that surround us, where Illusion guards with bows across their backs patrol the area.
I pull out the novel Kassandra requested and hand it to her.
She sets down her umbrella and undoes the leather strap.
“I used to come here as a child,” she whispers, eyes on the page before her. “I figured the best place to hide from Dominik would be right under his nose. Many guards will remember this.”
She doesn’t exaggerate.
Halfway up the ivy-covered wall at our backs is the balcony off Dominik’s bedroom.
My mistress reads for a few minutes, tugging the plane in bits and pieces toward her. She layers its power along the back of her white-gloved hand. I reach for my genius, coaxing it, explain to the thing what will happen, what is needed. It flaps uncontrollably, its blackened wings heavy and thick.
We should’ve practiced with the powder in our veins, but there was no time and not enough powder.
I extend my awareness to the plane around me, the lush, vibrating energy.
The garden hums with life, with strain, as branches are clipped, seeds planted, weeds removed, trees isolated from their root system in individual mounds of soil, carved for the aesthetic of control.
It is bursting with life that screams at its confines, and I can sense the ivy sucking the moisture from the brick behind me.
I extend my genius toward it, wishing to say hello.
The plant recoils, disgusted. The rejection weighs down my heart with oil.
“It’s time,” Kassandra mutters, resting her gloved hand, pulsing with power, on the seat beside her. I lean forward, my fingers brushing hers.
“I’m here,” I say.
She takes a breath, eyes never leaving the open book in her lap. Yet her attention distends, a bubble of Illusion magic snapping around me, strong and bright. The black powder is working to boost her genius. Others will see her attendant standing in the shadows behind her—but I will be above.
“Good luck,” she whispers, then swallows. “And Avery? I—”
I do not give her time to say goodbye.
Instead, I reach forward, my genius barreling down my arm, sparking against the plane, and I grip her hand.
With every ounce of strength I have, I clutch her, our geniuses colliding, slipping over each other like blood, like oil, like the pain I carry in my ribs, an anguish that is all my own, that was wedged there by her, from her, a darkness that did not originate with either of us, a knowing that only we share, a furious, desperate, weeping desire to be good, to fail and try again, over and over—a stumbling through time and life, together.
Magic sparks between our palms, tunneling into the plane, a darkened mass of teeth and nails and pulsing murder, and I dig claws into it, heaving it toward me as she shoves.
Suddenly I am afraid.
In the seconds I have left, I brush my free hand against her ribs. A final goodbye.
Kassandra stiffens, but it is too late.
The mutilated magic descends upon me, and chunk by chunk, piece by piece, it tears me apart.
Familiar sensations rush through my hair, my stomach, my legs as they melt away, my existence woven into the plane itself.
As I lace up and up and up, the garden falling away from me, something sticks to my side, something like a chipped diamond wedged into me, a painful pinching when I try to breathe.
So I don’t breathe.
I don’t speak, not as a scream slams against my teeth, cutting my tongue, as the mangled magic ribbons my body back into existence and I collapse, wheezing, in the shadow of the balcony.
Panting, I press myself against the wall.
I scan the patrolling guards. A foolish decision to do this during the day, but we refused to go another night of breaking.
Birds chirp in the garden below.
Someone turns a page.
I blink and the book is before me, my gloved hands gripping its binding as my genius—like a slinking silver cat—circles my ankles, its tail flicking an Illusion into the air.
I blink, and a part of me is crouched by the balcony banister, rolling a silver ball of magic before the glass doors, another wall of Illusion to hide the brunette faerie, strong and muscular, sensitive and soft, and I hate that I admire her.
I shake my head, once again pressed to the brick and glass doors, a faint shimmer of Illusion magic blocking me from the view of the guards.
You idiot! Kassandra hisses in my mind. Why did you do that?
My lady?
You took a piece of me with you!
How?
The fuck if I know! But I can’t be in three places at once. My head—