XXXVIII
I stared out the window, watching the dark trees blur into a solid wall of black. I was shaken, embarrassed by my indecision, and so furious I could taste metal. With every bump in the road, the knife pressed into my side—an unyielding reminder of the choice he had handed me.
The choice I hadn’t taken.
A wave of shame rolled through me.
I hesitated.
I, who prided myself on being decisive, on taking control, had frozen with his afterlife in my hands. He had given me the ultimate out, and I had chosen the mystery of him instead. The answers he might have.
And he knew it.
The anger was there, a low coal burning in my gut, but it had changed. It was tangled with something far more dangerous now.
A grudging, infuriating respect.
He hadn’t manipulated me. He hadn’t threatened me. He had laid his existence in my hands and trusted me not to crush it.
And I hadn’t.
What did that make me?
I shifted in my seat, the old leather groaning beneath me.
Heaton didn’t seem to be suffering any crisis of conscience. He drove with one hand loose on the wheel. The disparity between his stillness and the storm inside me was infuriating.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?”
My voice cracked the silence like a whip.
He didn’t look at me. His eyes stayed on the winding road.
“What would you like me to say, October?”
“I don’t know.” The frustration boiled over. “Anything. Something. You handed me a knife and told me to stab you, and now you’re just . . . driving?”
For a long moment, the only sound was the tires dragging over asphalt.
Then he sighed.
“I gave you a choice,” he said, voice low and even. “You made it. The conversation’s over.”
“Hardly.”
I turned in my seat to face him, the knife in my pocket a cold, reassuring weight.
“We’re just getting started. What does this actually mean? This tether. This bond. How much of me can you feel?”
A flicker of annoyance crossed his face before the haze of Ghost Flower smoothed it away.
“It’s not mind reading, if that’s what you’re asking. I can’t hear your thoughts, October.” His mouth curved. “If I could, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
That was a small mercy, at least.
“Then what?” I pressed. “What is it?”
“A soul bond isn’t poetry, Madeline.”
He tilted his head back against the seat, eyes half-closed, as if listening to some distant current only he could hear.
“It’s a circuit. It takes the tether my soul has with the earth and grafts it onto the electrical grid of your body.”
I stared at him. “So, you feel my . . . nervous system?”
“Yes.” His voice dropped lower. “And I feel what your body does with energy.”
His eyes flashed to my jacket pocket.
“I can feel the spike in your heart rate when you lie. The impulse in your hand when you think about reaching for that knife again.”
A slow, dangerous smile touched his mouth.
“And I felt the heat in your cheeks this morning when you thought about last night.”
My breathing stalled. The words left him too easily, as if the Ghost Flower had dulled whatever part of him usually knew when to stop. Every point of contact I had with him—the seat beneath me, the charged air in the car—suddenly felt electrified.
He wasn’t in my head.
He was in my body.
A silent, terrifying passenger.
“See?” he said, dark satisfaction threading his tone. “I don’t need to read your mind. Your body tells me everything I need to know.”
Cold dread seeped into my bones.
“Can you control it?” I asked. “Manipulate what I feel?”
He shot me a look, silver eyes hard as flint.
“I can’t make you feel something you don’t already feel, October. But a strong tether can be amplified.”
He let the word settle between us.
“And that is dangerous. For both of us.”
“Dangerous how?”
“A stronger bond means less privacy. More vulnerability.” His gaze flicked to the rearview mirror, checking the empty road behind us. “Under extreme stress, impressions leak through. An image. Raw intent.”
The car felt impossibly small. A cage made of glass and steel.
“So, I have no privacy.”
“You have the privacy of your thoughts,” he countered sharply. “What you don’t have is the luxury of lying to me. Not really.”
“So, when you asked me to stab you,” I said, testing the theory, “you already knew I wouldn’t do it.”
He finally looked at me.
A long, steady look that was both terrifying and strangely intimate.
“No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know. I could feel your conflict. Your fury. Your fear. But the decision?”
His eyes held mine.
“That was all you. That was the one thing I couldn’t feel.”
The admission landed hard. It sat in the small space between us, heavy and uncomfortably close, like a touch I didn’t know how to return. I looked away, fixing my eyes on the pines beyond the glass. I needed air. Distance from the sharpened silver edge of his stare. Distance from my own head.
From him.
I needed to think about something else.
Someone else.
My voice was barely a whisper when I asked, “What about Ford?”
The shift in the car was instantaneous. The air, which had been thick with strange intimacy, turned cold. Heaton’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, his knuckles whitening.
“Ford,” he repeated.
The name sounded like a brick in his mouth.
“Ford is now a liability.”
The word hung between us, sharp and ugly.
“What happens if he keeps digging?” I pushed, my voice gaining a desperate edge. “Are you going to hurt him? Is he in danger because of me?”
A harsh, impatient breath left him.
“He’s in danger because he cares. He’s looking for a girl who vanished, and he’s asking questions in a world he doesn’t understand. That makes him a loose end.”
His jaw worked.
“And the Lanterns are very good at tying up loose ends.”
My blood ran cold.
“So, you’re going to hurt him?”
He shot me a look of pure frustration.
“I’m not looking for another enemy, Madeline. But your guard dog doesn’t know when to stop.” His attention returned to the road. “He’s a problem because he’s a beacon of normalcy in a situation that is anything but. A flashing neon sign pointing straight at you.”
I stared at him, mind racing.
He hadn’t answered the question. Not really. He hadn’t promised to keep Ford safe. He had described only the problem Ford presented.
My voice shook, but I forced the words out.
“As long as he’s useful to you, he stays alive. Is that it?”
“As long as he’s useful to you, he stays alive,” he corrected, eyes fixed on the road ahead. “But make no mistake. Every call he makes, every person he talks to puts him higher on their list. And my ability to protect him is limited.”
The words found the softest part of me and went cold.
Ford.
My stubborn, loyal, wonderful Ford was in danger because of me.
Because of this.
My hands went slack in my lap. The anger I had been holding like a shield suddenly felt pointless, small against the sheer scale of the problem. We drove in silence for another mile, the weight of his warning pressing down on me until I broke.
“None of this makes sense. Why me? Why my dad?” I turned to him, desperation sharpening my voice. “This is bigger than some missing person’s case, isn’t it?”
Heaton gave a short, grim nod.
“It always was.”
“Then tell me. What is the Aetherium Compass? What does it actually do?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“It’s a compass,” he said at last. “But it doesn’t point north. It points to power—thin places, saturated objects, anything the dead have touched too long. Your father was using it to hunt for a legend.”
“What legend?”
“A pair of blades,” he said. “Old ones. Part and Prise.”
The names meant nothing to me, but the way he said them made my stomach tighten.
“What do they do?”
His eyes cut toward me.
“Together, they become the Giltbone. A weapon made to sever a spiritual connection.”
His voice went quieter.
“Permanently.”
Sever a spiritual connection.
For one wild, reckless second, hope sparked in my chest. This bond between us—the thing that gave him access to my pulse, my fear, my intent—could it be broken?
“So why do the Lanterns care?” I asked. “Why are they hunting him for it?”
Heaton’s knuckles went white on the wheel.
“Because they don’t want to sever connections, Madeline. They want to control them. For them, a map to those blades isn’t a key to freedom. It’s the ultimate weapon of control.”
He glanced at me, his silver eyes grave.
“If the wrong people get that compass, this won’t just be about your soul anymore. It becomes a war for all of them.”
Panic cracked through me.
“Here’s the plan,” he said, eyes locked on the road. “I’m taking you home. You’re going to walk inside that house and act normal. You will answer the questions they ask you, and you will volunteer nothing.”
His silver eyes flicked to mine.
“Nothing.”
I swallowed hard.
“You will rest,” he continued. “You will eat. You will let them think this is over. Then, when the world is looking the other way, we’ll figure out what your father was hiding in the dark.”
He let the silence stretch before adding the final rule.
“And you do not tell Ford. You do not tell anyone. Keeping them in the dark is the only way to keep them safe.”
He didn’t say it, but we both knew the other reason. He had to keep me close. And the tether ensured I was always reachable, whether I liked it or not. The plan wasn’t just about finding this weapon; it was about managing me.
“So,” I said, leaning back as exhaustion settled into my bones, “is this how it works now? You give the orders and I follow? Is there a chapter on that in the Physics of the Bond handbook?”
Heaton huffed a soft breath.
Almost a laugh.
“Madeline, I burned that handbook the minute you called me a jerk. I believe we’re officially improvising now.”
I stared out at the road, my reflection a pale, haunted oval in the window. My mind looped through snarling teeth, gold light, the hounds coming out of the dark.
Then, because if I didn’t ask now I might never stop imagining worse, I turned back to him.
“What were those things last night?”