Chapter Twenty
Olympia
Ihad to bring an entire stack of books from the library of House Avus to offer Jude in exchange for access to his House’s genealogy records over the last thousand years.
He scrutinized our offering almost as thoroughly as the acolytes who’d stayed up all night sifting through them to redact any private House business had, but he didn’t ask any questions when I sent Paxon off with the acolyte to continue their work copying Eximius’ journal.
Meanwhile, I sat myself down at another desk and waited for Jude to return with a thousand years’ worth of the records his House kept of births and deaths throughout the whole of Sanctuary.
“You’re lucky,” he informed me in that vague monotone I was beginning to get used to. “Records for the High Houses are far easier to come by than those of the lower rings. We try but not every birth and death are reported down on the Third, and especially not on the Deck.”
I nodded, reaching for the volumes before he could deposit them on the wooden table before me. I flipped the cover open before the dust had settled. Jude watched me for a moment longer, frowning with suspicion, but then shuffled off to go about his other duties and left me to my work.
Milo and I had spent the whole night we’d discovered the strange aging phenomenon flipping through the family records as well as Adelaide’s journals.
Then he’d gone to Isla who’d requested her own family’s records without having any idea why.
Milo had gone through them as well only to find that no such phenomenon existed in her House’s history.
It was only Avus and had only started around the same time our Patriarch had gone mad, therefore opening himself up to fall to the worst uprising in recorded history.
I wasn’t a scholar and I certainly didn’t see the appeal in living with my nose stuck in a book more often than not, but this was a mystery that surpassed academia, that existed outside of the library, and that might have affected me as well if I’d been the one Nascha named Heir.
With a shiver, I flipped through the pages, running my finger along the columns that held the year, going back all the way to 1891.
Then I began. Names and dates and information floated upon the page as I scanned them as quickly as I could.
The House of Harlowe’s data was more detailed.
They didn’t just have a name, birth date, and death date.
They also listed the associated ring, close family members, and cause of death.
It was the last of these that had me feeling nauseous as I reviewed the records from the time of the uprising.
Beheaded, burned, executed by hanging, strangled after torture.
It was barbaric. And yet, I couldn’t argue we were much better off now. The cycle seemed to be repeating itself.
Cosmo had beheaded a fifteen-year-old boy for his brother’s refusal to obey the call of our absent gods and had set off a chain reaction I knew was responsible for the increased vandalism down on the lower rings.
That spiderwebbed symbol of the rebellion was popping up more and more.
I couldn’t be the only one who’d noticed it.
Maybe this would bring us answers or maybe it would only create more questions.
Either way, we needed to understand our past if we were going to have any hope of dealing with our future, or so Milo said.
So I scanned through page after page of names long forgotten, people who weren’t recorded anywhere else from every ring, those whose lives had borne our own and we’d never even know them.
It was only halfway through the second book of records, midway through the early 2000s, that I took a break.
My vision was blurring from spending so long staring down at the tiny, crooked handwriting that had changed so often over the decades, but I’d found what Milo had suspected I would.
Or rather, it was what I didn’t find that was more of an indication of what we sought.
No one, in all of Sanctuary’s history up to the early 2000s since that was as far as I’d made it already, had ever lived for over a hundred years.
Except nearly every one of our female ancestors going back five centuries.
It defied all logic and yet, here it was in black and white.
Something was happening in House Avus, something that had begun nearly five hundred years ago, but how did one unravel a mystery so old?
“Is this what it’s going to be like during his reign as Patriarch?” a voice spoke suddenly beside me.
I turned in time to see Paxon perch on the edge of my desk. His gaze remained on the lone acolyte he’d left copying Simi’s sane journal several desks over for a moment longer before swiveling to me.
“Will we be spending all our time in libraries and dusty old alcoves researching obscure journals and textbooks?” he asked.
“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug, barely listening to my cousin’s complaints as I returned to the book before me and flipped another page.
“What does he have you working on?”
Pax leaned over my shoulder, peering down at the tome in my hands. I snapped it shut with a glare directed up toward him.
“Not everything is your business, Paxon,” I barked.
He held his hands up in surrender and took a step back but didn’t return to his own desk.
“That guy who barged in on Milo’s wedding,” he started instead and every muscle in my body tensed at the vague mention of Harrison. “Who is he?”
“Why does it matter?”
“The Bexleys, I get. Milo and Adrian got along. He wants to look out for them now that she’s gone. But who is he?”
“Her former roommate,” I muttered, standing up and pushing all the books in front of me back into a neat pile. “Her friend.”
“That’s it?”
My gaze snapped back to Pax and narrowed.
There was no way he knew. Paxon didn’t leave the First Ring unless he had to.
He hated working down here on the Second with Harlowe bad enough.
He wouldn’t slum it down on the Third for any reason other than being told to do so, and he hadn’t. I was sure of it.
“If you have something to say, just say it,” I ground out instead, crossing my arms and glaring at him.
“He came right to Milo,” Pax replied slowly. “Not the Guardians.”
“The lower ringers haven’t taken the Guardians seriously as actual law enforcement for generations. They know they’re always in somebody’s pocket.”
“But not ours. That Third Ringer came to Milo because he knew a Guardian wouldn’t intervene which means he already suspects who controls them now. He knows it's the Vipers. How would he know that?”
“The lower ringers aren’t as oblivious to our politics as you think they are,” I spat.
Pax’s eyebrows lifted slightly at my defense of those we deemed ourselves superior to but I ignored him and continued.
“Their lives are contingent on how we operate up here, the rules we make, the judgments we pass down. So when we’re at each other’s throats, they notice.
Don’t underestimate their intelligence by assuming they don’t. You know better than that, Pax.”
Chastised, Paxon looked away. He frowned as he watched the acolyte working a few desks apart from us.
“It’s just making me nervous, I think,” he said after a moment, his voice even lower than before.
“All these lower ringers having access to our House, to us, it isn’t right.
Everything in me is screaming that it’s wrong.
I know Milo’s trying something here, something new, and maybe something that will save us all from another House War. But I’m just…”
“Scared,” I finished for him.
His gaze shot to mine but he didn’t deny it even as his eyes burned into me with hatred for calling him out on his fear.
“We’re all scared,” I whispered. “We all have our own demons, Pax. Yours is your prejudice. Luckily, it’s something you can grow out of.”
With that, I slammed the final book shut and strode away from him.
“Tell Milo I found nothing,” I called back and then I was out of the little research alcove and into the foyer of the House of Harlowe.
I wasted no time getting out of that place.
That House and its inhabitants freaked me out more than any other.
At least with Viper, I understood their ambition, their power hungry goals and slippery politics.
Here, I couldn’t understand this desperate thirst for knowledge, this desire to hoard any and all information they could find to some end I couldn’t fathom.
They were quiet and thoughtful in a way that made Milo look like the life of the party. I hated it.
It was getting late. I’d spent all day in the House of Harlowe researching the birth and death records of everyone in this city for the last few hundred years.
My eyes were weary and watering from finally tearing them away from the page.
I thought if I had to read one more word, I might actually cry.
So instead, I focused on my target for the night, one I hadn’t visited in some time, and I turned in the direction of the House of Valin.
It wasn’t too far from Harlowe. I saw the little fence out front before anything else, the moon casting shadows through the short yard to the door.
After a brief glance next door to ensure all was quiet there, I snuck around back through the usual hedges.
The light was on in the kitchen, illuminating the back yard so well I had to be careful to stick to the shadows.
I slid against the brick wall, my back scraping against every jutting stone, until I was close enough to see inside.
They were sitting at the table in the kitchen, though it was smaller than the one in the formal dining room, nearly shoulder to shoulder with one another as they reached for the snacks piled in the center.
One of them laughed, the sound booming brightly in the night.
The mother patted her oldest son on the shoulder and gave him a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Then she turned and made her way toward the stairs beyond and up to bed.
My eyes scanned each of those remaining.
The oldest brother was alone this time, no acolyte by his side.
The middle brother had his wife beside him, hands brushing under the table but never touching, never intentionally.
And then, across from them, sat a figure I had to dare a few more inches across the window to see.
My breath caught.
Strawberry blonde hair and freckles.
Veronica.
What was this rebel doing visiting the Bexley house so late at night?
What was she doing sitting at their table, laughing with them and chatting like old friends?
My eyes shot across the yard to the dark house on the other side of the fence as my mind recalled the conversation I’d overheard between her and the man with the rebel tattoo called Wolf.
This was bad.
We’d warned the Bexleys about the danger and they’d gone and invited it into their own home. Did they not know who Veronica really was, what she was a part of, or had they associated themselves with her on purpose? Did Adrian’s family plan to join the rebellion?
Muttering a curse, I crouched down and slid across the rest of the wall before sprinting for the fence. With one strength-enhanced leap, I was over it.
Fists clenched at my sides, I made my way across the dark lawn with a few purposeful strides.
Dark thoughts and catastrophic doubts spun around in my mind until they became a vortex of fury.
She’s a rebel like the others. She hates my ring, my family.
She’s out to destroy everything I’ve ever loved.
And she’s using Dante’s former partner to do it.
I punched straight through the back window, sending shattered glass flying inside.
Paying no attention to the blood dripping down my knuckles, I gripped the frame and leapt into the house.
Breathing hard, I stormed through the dark residence, kicking the sparse furniture aside until I reached the room she was sleeping in.
A solitary mattress rested on the floor beside a small oil lamp.
Across from it, scattered on the floor, were papers. Letters.
I lit the oil lamp and watched the flame cast shadows on the wall for a moment before turning back to the pages. I reached for the first one, the one on top, and ignored the red fingerprints I left upon it as I read.
Veronica,
Secure the Bexleys now. The Culling went too far. We move in eleven days.
Wolf
I flipped to the next one to find it was also from Wolf. So was the next, and the next. Then there was one from a man named Oren who seemed to be a lover. Frowning, I folded them all in half and stuffed them into my pocket. Then I let my eyes trail over the rest of the room.
They were plotting against us now, making plans to “move”, to act.
Cosmo had gone too far, we all knew that, but turning your anger against an entire ring and using a lost girl’s grieving family to do so was low, even for these cretins.
So I grabbed the oil lamp, lifted it above my head, and threw it as hard as I could against the wall.
The oil splashed all over the carpet and mattress and ignited in an instant.
A fireball exploded before me, the heat blasting into my face so ferociously I wondered if my eyebrows were singed.
Then a trail of fire bloomed across the floor and over the mattress.
The wall caught next. Drywall cracked as the beams beneath began to splinter.
Flames dancing in my eyes, I finally turned away.
She wasn’t a Second Ringer. She wasn’t allowed to live up here. Now, she wouldn’t.
I strolled quietly through the halls to the front door and opened it from within.
Stepping out onto the street, into the cool night air, I headed down the walkway.
I left the door open behind me, let the sound of the crackling flames linger in the night, and waited for someone to notice.
It wasn’t until I’d reached the stairwell that they did.
Men in their pajamas came running with buckets of water and hoses that wouldn’t reach that far. Women gasped and tossed them more from windows and walkways. Somewhere, an alarm began to ring.
I simply took the steps two at a time back up to the First Ring, hoping little miss rebel would get the message I’d intended to send.
The Bexleys were fucking off limits.