Chapter 58
I lost at poker that night.
The cards in my hands were meaningless, the math of them jumbled. The other girls kept talking about our mysterious visitor, and wondering who Jessica Anderson could be. Nura and Frankie insisted that I looked nothing like the picture Crystal had shown them; Aaliyah was noncommittal.
I should have changed the subject, told them to forget Crystal. But I couldn’t stop listening to their theories about another version of me.
Those other Jessicas in the little graveyard had been my first friends.
I itched to tell Sebastian about the skull, but he was still away on his mysterious off-campus business, not answering my texts. So I waited, losing crooked stacks of quarters, until it was time to meet Sebastian.
He arrived at the Physics Lounge twenty minutes late and wearing a dazzling smile—until he saw the crow skull on the coffee table, pale in the darkness.
“Not my best gift,” he said.
“I loved it.” Hiromi had loved it.
“Didn’t Garrett burn your stuff?”
“Come here.”
Sebastian sank onto the musty couch, kissing the scars on my nose. I peeled off his jacket, unbuttoned his shirt. Ran my fingers down his flank, over the faded burn marks, gifts from his father that were still pink when he joined our family.
Hiromi had been undiscovered territory; Sebastian’s body was as familiar as my own.
I knew every freckle, every scar, the extra cartilage in the concha of his right ear.
We’d fought, wrestled, raced each other; danced, climbed, and endured together.
I knew the different scents of his sweat, from heat, exertion, or fever.
I licked his lower lip, tasting the clean salt of his haste to get to me, then lightly bit. His hands slid down my body, my nerve endings humming. I opened my mouth to his, tasting caraway, sugar.
Beatrice’s cookies. He’d gone home today?
I pushed away the question, kissing him deeper, his hand between my legs, sliding into wetness, until all I could feel was my heartbeat there, my shallow breaths. Waves building, nerves blazing.
The sensation grew too big, too intense, too quickly. My lips moved against his. My thighs clenched hard, squeezing his fingers as the climax spilled over me.
I pushed his hand away, then settled against him.
“Are you back?” he asked, stroking my cropped hair. “You went away for a second.”
“Yes,” I said. Like drifting from shore.
The moon rose before we spoke again, its light trickling through the smoke. Sebastian lay in my arms, in beautiful disarray.
I bent to kiss the scar under his bottom lip. “What was that smile when you got here? Because you went home for cookies?”
“For this.” He reached for his jacket and pulled something from the pocket: an antique American flag pin, the blues and whites faded to bare metal, the red stripes somehow still pristine.
I sat up. “Isn’t that your…”
He shivered with triumph, like after his curae, covered in rabbit blood, and placed the flag pin on the table beside the crow skull.
I should congratulate him, but my stomach twisted. “Who?”
“Upper Falls needs a new mayor.”
My panic slowed. Not someone who would haunt him. “Why? He’s always been so cooperative.”
“I was careful to make it look like an accident.”
It took me a moment: careful. My impatient cousin had performed his first assignment for Care. Make mine a big one.
The mayor, whose great-great-grandfather had signed a blank piece of paper. Who approved Morton construction projects, delighted in the blueberries we sent him every summer, and made sure that the Upper Falls police never crossed our property line.
His successor, the deputy mayor, was a sworn enemy. Uncle Cyrus had dispossessed her family of their land before I was born. The Mortons hated nothing more than conflict in our own backyard.
If they ever found out it was Sebastian…“Very careful, I hope.”
He beamed. “It was so easy, Jess. I knocked on his door and invited him for a walk—straight to the nearest cliff. He couldn’t say no. Not to a Morton. This is going to work.”
“What is?”
Sebastian reached out, snagged a bottle of Physics party wine from a side table crowded with plastic cups and molecular models. “Grandmother will never let me run for office. No Morton politicians.”
“Too much exposure.”
“That’s our weakness—we’re so afraid of being seen, all our power flows through the incorporated. Without them, we’re paralyzed.”
“So the plan is to push them off cliffs, one by one?”
He drank. “Think like an accountant, Jess. How would you burn down the Wilbert-Lees?”
I pondered everything we’d collected—bank accounts, property deeds, trusts. Copies of keys to houses, cars, safe-deposit boxes. Even her mother’s diary.
“I’d sell off their assets, empty the accounts. Set their houses on fire, after canceling the insurance.”
“What Arabella did to the Belmonts, more or less.”
I shut my eyes—the warehouse fire, the missing money, the brakes failing on the family car. The Belmonts’ disasters had been acts of Care.
Arabella had only stopped when our family started to suspect.
“But she didn’t ruin them,” I said. “You can’t empty every account without a bank employee picking up the phone.”
“Details.” Sebastian pulled away from me, stood, and walked to the windows.
The lights on the footpaths below filtered up through the smoke, gleaming on his body.
On his thigh was the old scar from crawling beneath the barbed wire in the poppy field.
“That’s why we need you, and all the other young Mortons we can get.
Uncle Max created a shortage of accountants, people who understand the system. ”
He lifted one of the wooden molecular models from the side table.
Ms. Delicato was humming in my ear. Automate the transfers, divide them into smaller amounts for fewer security alerts. Get the money offshore, into shell companies only we caretakers could access.
We moved their money all the time—why not simply make it…disappear?
“Only Grandmother can access the Morton Trust,” I said. “We can’t steal from ourselves.”
“What do we bury in our basement? Gold?” Sebastian quoted, and dropped the wooden molecule on the floor, where it shattered into atoms that skittered in all directions. “The Mortons aren’t merely money. We are empire.”
“We’d rebuild,” I said. “But, yeah, it might take years, a whole generation. Do you think that fixes the world?”
“Without us at the wheel, maybe the world fixes itself.”
A small gyre of pain started in my heart. “If evil took a year off, imagine what good could do.”
Sebastian looked at me. “Is that a quote?”
“Not anyone famous.”
He shrugged, turning to the crow skull on the coffee table. The beak was pointed at him. “I thought Garrett incinerated that.”
“One of Hiromi’s friends kept it. She left it on my door today.”
“She came to Helshire?” Sebastian sat down heavily, put a gentle hand on my bare leg. “Too bad. We’ll have to kill her.”
I stared out the window, the one I’d crawled in the night I’d murdered Peter. Outside, the sky was black again, the moon and stars obscured by smoke.
Hiromi had no family, only friends. Sebastian wanted to erase another piece of her.
“They were close,” I said. “Her showing up dead will restart the whole Lyon case. How about we just scare her off?”
He grunted. “She thinks her friend was killed by a cult leader, and she’s still looking for answers. Not the type to scare easy.”
“I killed her friend.”
“She’s a loose end, Jess.” He took another drink of wine. It smelled garishly sweet on his breath, like cheap candy. “The family hates loose ends. Like Gertie said, we have to give them what they want. Keeping hidden is the first task.”
There was a yell outside, seven floors below. Ordinaries in the smoky dark, having fun. Everyone was bored with staying inside.
“We can’t kill Crystal.”
“We can’t let her wander around campus, asking why you disappeared after your girlfriend’s murder. Orrin could show up tomorrow to punish Faraday, and run into her. And maybe Crystal’s already called the NYPD to say she’s found you, and they all collide.”
I pulled away from him, angry at last. “If we keep killing people, how are we different from our families?”
“We only have the tools they gave us.”
I stared at him.
“Jessica,” he said. “If this gets out of control, Elizabeth will ask why you let it. You don’t want to answer that question. You want to be a good little Morton. Crystal is triage.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“Doctors use triage,” he said. “Rescue workers too. How do we save the most people? By saving you, and protecting what you know about Arabella, Bianca, me, the rest of them. Slay the rabbit, spare the child.”
So this was our new loyalty. Nothing was more important than Care.
“Let me talk to her first,” I said. “I don’t look the same, or act the same. I can convince her she’s in the wrong place.”
“Make her think you’re someone else? That’s never been your forte.”
“I am someone else.”
He kissed me on my forehead, chin, lips. “You always were, Jess.”
I wanted to believe him, to imagine that part of me had always cared. But on the ledge outside those very windows, I’d talked Peter into losing his grip. When he’d fallen, only pride had rushed through me.
“I have to try.”
“Then try. Whatever you need to stay like you are.” Sebastian picked up his flag pin from the table, put it on his lapel.
“Why do you have that?” I asked. “You didn’t kill him for the family.”
“Blooded is blooded.”
I shook my head. Blooding was Morton and Lindqvist, Wolvaardt and Seth. It was our families and their sickness, their need to empty us of care.
It was the ecstasy of my first murder, perched on that window ledge.
Sebastian was smiling at me. “Are you annoyed that I’ve finally caught up with you?”
“Don’t wear it. It’s dangerous.”
“No kidding,” he said. “But before I take it off, say the words.”
“What words?”
“The ones I’ve always wanted to hear.”
A memory came over me, biting him badly during a vicious game of Bunny Hunt. The smell of hay and rotting wood. Sebastian smiling through the pain, afraid to show any weakness. His otherness.
All he’d ever wanted was to be a Morton. We were cruel, broken, and destructive, and yet I was still proud to be one too.
I picked up the crow’s skull and pricked my finger with its needle beak. A plump red drop welled in the darkness.
“With this blood,” I touched his left cheek, “I mark you a true Morton, the last Sebastian.”
I smeared another faint streak of red under his right eye.
“Forever one of us.”
“My last tears.” His face was blissful. “These tears of blood.”
“Fides cum cura,” I ended, hoping my change to the Latin was correct. Sebastian smiled, leaned forward to kiss me, and took the crow’s skull.
He crushed it in his hand.