CHAPTER 5 LYRA
LYRA
A hand-carved chess set and the table that held it were all that separated Lyra from Toby Hawthorne. The chess pieces were simple and smooth. The man who’d carved them, on the other hand, was a little rough around the edges.
“What do you mean Avery is missing?” Toby’s brown hair was overgrown and streaked with auburn. He clearly hadn’t shaved in a while. He also hadn’t bothered charging his phone, hence Grayson and Lyra needing to track him to his place in Texas.
“Technically,” Grayson told his uncle, “Avery left a note saying that she was not missing, and she told us not to look for her.”
Toby’s green eyes settled with almost palpable force on the chess set, but Lyra got the feeling that he was seeing something else, that Toby was somewhere else.
After four or five seconds, he stood, moving with an efficient sort of grace as he grabbed a messenger bag off the counter and crossed to the opposite wall, removing two items from the lone shelf that hung there: a leatherbound book and a small, rectangular parcel.
Then Toby turned again and strode toward the door.
His home was small and stark. A single room doubled as bedroom and kitchen, the chess table the only furniture in the room other than a mattress on the floor.
“You know something.” Grayson blocked Toby’s exit.
“Don’t try to Hawthorne me, nephew.” Toby’s voice was gravelly enough to make Lyra wonder how many weeks or months or years in his lifetime he’d spent not talking.
“Eve did this,” Grayson replied, giving his uncle no quarter. “Your daughter tried to throw Lyra to the wolves, and the wolves came for Avery instead.”
They didn’t know that, not for a fact, but Lyra still couldn’t help thinking, It should have been me. She was the one who’d tipped Eve off about calla lilies, the omega symbol, and Alice Hawthorne. She was the reason that the time for watching was over.
“Now would be a good time,” Grayson told Toby, his voice like tempered steel, “to tell us everything you know about your dead mother being very much alive.”
“Would it?” Toby replied. Hawthorne versus Hawthorne—it was a thing to behold.
“We know your mother faked her death.” Lyra was only capable of letting Grayson take the lead for so long. “We know she’s dangerous. We know she doesn’t work alone.”
They knew that Toby knew something.
The man stared at Lyra, hard, then made his way back to the table, taking a seat across the chessboard from her. “Tell me what else you know.” Toby Hawthorne’s eyes were intense—intensely green and intensely focused on Lyra’s.
Lyra didn’t even blink. She and Grayson had already agreed that telling his uncle everything was their best bet at dragging information out of Toby.
“We know that there are always three of them, whoever and whatever they are.” Lyra looked down at the chess pieces in front of her and chose one, a rook.
“The one in red is the Watcher.” She placed the rook down in the center of the board.
“Also called the Lily.” Lyra went for a knight next.
“The one in black is the Omega, also known as the Hand.” The tide of dark memories threatened to pull Lyra under, but she fought it, and her control held. “The Watcher watches. The Hand acts.”
Grayson came to stand behind her, his hand making its way to the back of her neck, anchoring her in the here and now.
“And the third?” Toby asked.
“The Woman in White.” Holding tooth and nail to the present, Lyra picked up one last chess piece: a queen. “She’s called the Monoceros, and her role is Judge.”
“Who are they?” Toby asked the same question that Lyra and Grayson had asked Odette Morales not twelve hours earlier.
“Women, exclusively,” Grayson replied, co-opting Odette’s answer as his own. “We’ve been told they believe that some situations require a guiding hand and others a gilded blade.”
The word blade hung in the air, and something else Odette had said came back to Lyra. If you know where to look, history tells the tale.
“You knew Alice was alive.” Grayson stared down at Toby. “How?”
“Three times my dead mother came to me,” Toby said quietly, “back when the world thought I was dead, too. First time, I was in bad shape. My mother saved my sorry life and tasked me with leading my father on a merry chase all around the world. I agreed for reasons of my own, but it obviously served her purposes as well.”
“And the second time?” Grayson was clearly beyond niceties and segues.
“The night Avery was born.” Toby closed his eyes. “I went to Hannah.”
The way Toby said the name Hannah—Lyra couldn’t even describe it. There wasn’t a single word in the English language that could describe a tone like that. Toby Hawthorne said Hannah like the act of saying it healed something in him at the exact same time it tore him apart.
“I was going to stay with her,” Toby continued, his voice low.
“Permanently. I was going to be with Hannah, be a father to her baby. Then my mother showed up and told me that by saving my life, by revealing herself to me, she’d broken a very important rule.
As long as I stayed dead, that didn’t matter, but if I tried to claim a life with Hannah and Avery, I’d be a liability, and we’d all be in danger. ”
“And you believed her.” Grayson did not phrase that as a question.
“It wasn’t a coincidence that I was there the night Avery was born.
I’d stayed away from Hannah for years, and then someone lured me back to her side.
” Toby reached into his bag and withdrew a postcard from inside the book he’d taken off the shelf.
Lyra stopped breathing the second she saw the image on the postcard.
A dark forest. A gothic castle. A girl in a white cloak.
Lyra stared at that cloak.
“My mother took one look at this postcard, and it was clear she knew who had sent it to me.” Anger and despair rolled off Toby in waves, aged to perfection like wine. “But all she said about the person who’d sent it was that it could have been worse.”
A white cloak, Lyra thought, staring at the image on the postcard. Not a black one.
Toby brought his index finger to lightly touch the figure in white. “My mother wore a red cloak the night Avery was born. Years later, the third and final time I saw the ghost of Alice Hawthorne, she wore white.”
Red. Lyra stopped breathing. And later, white.
Grayson stepped into Lyra’s peripheral vision, his hand dropping from her neck. “Lyra, the night your father died—”
Lyra didn’t even wait for him to finish. “Alice wore black.”
Toby reached into his bag and withdrew a phone. He pulled up an obituary, complete with photo. Alice Hawthorne. “You’re sure?” Toby pressed. “That it was her?”
Even though Lyra wasn’t able to summon up a single mental image of the woman in black, even though her brain was incapable of visualizing anything, ever, her body knew. Just looking at that photograph, Lyra could hear Alice’s voice.
You should not be here. But who is to say that you were?
“I’m sure.” Lyra swallowed and made the obvious leap. “Red, black, white. Watcher, Hand, Judge. The roles aren’t permanent. There’s a progression.”
Lyra did the math. Twenty years ago, on the night Avery was born, Alice wore red. Lyra was a year younger than Avery, and she’d come face-to-face with Alice on her own fourth birthday. Fifteen years ago, Alice wore black.
“Toby.” Lyra’s lips and throat felt far too dry. “The last time you saw your mother, when she wore white—how long ago was it? What did she say?”
“Was it before the old man died?” Grayson stared at and into his uncle. “Or after?”
“After… but not by much.” Toby stared at the chess pieces on the board.
“My mother came to me when the news about Avery’s inheritance broke.
She warned me again to stay away—for as long as I could.
” Toby’s voice was like quiet thunder, a deep rumble just barely controlled.
“She also told me everything happens for a reason.”
There was a beat of silence, and then Grayson spoke up. “Whose reason?”
Toby stood. “Exactly.”
“You think it could have been Alice’s doing?” Grayson looked from his uncle to the white queen on the chess board. “The old man’s will? Avery inheriting?”
“I think that the last time I saw Hannah, Avery was almost six.” Toby closed his eyes again, visibly willing the memory to sweep him away. “Hannah knew my mother was alive. She told me my mother had revealed herself to extend her an offer when Avery was a toddler.”
An offer. Lyra cut her gaze toward Grayson, wondering if he was thinking about what Gigi had told them, about the warning the duchess had given her.
Asks may be answered, invitations declined.
Gigi had been told that if she ever saw the Watcher—or anyone like her—again, she could say no.
Regardless of how the question was framed, regardless of what pressure was brought to bear, she could decline.
Decline what, exactly?
“What kind of offer?” Grayson’s focus was every bit as intense as his uncle’s.
“An offer that would have required Hannah to disappear.” Toby opened his eyes. “An offer that Hannah turned down, because she would never willingly have left her daughter.”
“Disappear.” Lyra felt that word in every inch of her body. “Like Calla Thorp did.” The current Watcher. Lyra had to look away from Grayson’s eyes to continue. “Like Avery?”
Was that what this was? Had they taken Avery for the same reason that, once upon a time, they’d taken Calla?
Calla, who wasn’t Calla anymore.
“Enough talk.” Toby seemed to reach a breaking point, or maybe boiling point would have been more accurate. “I have an Avery to find—by any means necessary.”
“I would suggest you start with Eve,” Grayson said, clipping the words. “Your daughter is in possession of a file.” That, as much as the fact that Toby had known Alice was alive, was why Lyra and Grayson had flown all the way to Texas.
“What kind of file?” Toby said, as he moved once more toward the door.
“My biological father shot himself when I was four years old,” Lyra said, drawing Toby’s attention back her way.
“He knew something about this group, enough that he attracted their attention. Enough that he killed himself rather than wait for the Omega—for Alice—to show up. I was there that night. The man was a total stranger to me, but he made sure I was there, and he laid out a twisted little game for me. A calla lily. Three. Omega. A Hawthorne. He was trying to tell me something.”
Something she’d had no business knowing. You should not be here, little one.
Lyra reinforced every mental wall she had. “I don’t even know my father’s real name. If there’s something in Eve’s file that could help us figure out who he was—he had to have come across this group somehow. If we can figure out how—”
“I won’t be any help on that front,” Toby cut in.
“Last night, I read Eve the riot act about coming after Avery and hauled her ass back to Texas. Eve responded by banning me from the Blake compound. She won’t even look at me right now.
I’ll be of more use elsewhere.” Toby shifted his gaze to Grayson.
“But I think we both know, nephew, that my daughter might be amenable to striking a deal with you.”