Chapter Nineteen - Evie #3
“I found you in a fever once,” She said quietly.
“Another time in a war. In a body too weak to keep you long. In a life where you almost reached the coast before they buried you in someone else’s grave.
” Her mouth tightened. “And every time, the thread failed before it could draw taut enough to sing.”
My throat felt tight. “You knew,” I said.
Cindralis looked back at me, almost incredulous. “Evie,” She said, “I have been trying to get you back to him for centuries.”
I took a step back. “What?”
She watched me absorb it, patient and a little grim.
“I pulled where I could,” She said. “Nudged choice when I could, but thread-work is delicate from a distance, and your lives were constantly being shortened, redirected, dulled, broken.” Her eyes went faraway for half a second. “You would be amazed at how much damage can be done with enough time.”
A chill moved over my skin. I frowned. “Wait.”
Cindralis stood perfectly still, even her snakes stopped moving, and my heart kicked.
“There was a moment,” I said slowly. “Back on Earth. With Azazael. When I saw what had been done to him and I thought—” I stopped.
Was it a thought? No. The memory shifted the second I reached for it. I looked at Her, but Her face gave me nothing. But something in my stomach dropped anyway.
“You,” I said.
Cindralis tilted Her head.
“I didn’t force you to choose it,” She said quietly. “I touched a thread that was already singing.”
But that wasn’t a denial.
Anger flashed hot and immediate. “You pushed me.”
“No.” Her voice stayed calm. “I steadied what you had already decided.”
“That isn’t any better.”
“No,” She agreed. “It rarely is.”
For a second, neither of us moved. The corridor felt tighter now. The breeze dropping in temperature.
Then, very softly, She said, “And still, you came.”
I hated that She was right. Hated it more because some part of me understood exactly what She meant. I had chosen. Even if She had sharpened the edge of it. Even if She had made one path brighter than the others. I had still walked it.
“You don’t get to sound noble about manipulating me,” I snapped.
Something like pain flickered through Her eyes. “I know.”
That took some of the wind out of me. Damn Her. I looked away first, furious and shaky and suddenly too aware of the dark around us.
“Why tell me now?”
“Because now you are here,” She said. “Now the walls have begun to answer you. Now the pattern is moving fast enough that withholding truth would do more harm than giving it badly.”
“Comforting.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
A sound moved faintly through the corridor behind me. It didn’t sound like footsteps. It was more like the walls resettling their attention.
The snakes lifted their heads again, tasting the air again. Cindralis’s expression changed at once. “We are nearly out of time.”
Ice raced down my spine. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” She said, Her voice lowering, “that the passages are no longer as empty as you hoped.”
I turned slightly, looking into the dark behind me. But there was nothing. And yet every nerve in me knew She was right.
When I looked back, She was watching me with that same terrible mixture of urgency and old affection.
“You’ll come back,” She said.
It wasn’t phrased like a question.
I frowned. “Am I supposed to trust you now?”
“No,” She said. “But you should at least listen. And consider.”
“Yeah,” I said flatly.
One corner of Her mouth lifted. “Close enough.” Then Her gaze flicked once more to my middle, and that strange softness returned. “Try to eat,” She said.
I stared at Her. “Excuse me?”
“Try to eat,” she repeated. “And when your body objects, remember that not every protest is injury.”
That was somehow even less helpful than before.
“Oh my god.”
“Not him,” she murmured.
Then the smoke began to gather around Her.
“Wait,” I snapped. “Absolutely not. You do not get to drift out of here after all that and leave me with some weird little riddles and a cryptic diet plan.”
That got an actual laugh out of Her. But the smoke climbed higher, veiling Her shoulders, then Her throat.
Her eyes stayed on mine. “Soon,” She said.
“That is not a time.”
“It will have to do.”
“Cindralis—”
But She was already fading, Her shape loosening into white smoke and pale gleam, the snakes dissolving last, whispering softly as they disappeared.
And then I was alone again. I stood there in the corridor breathing too hard, staring at the place She’d been, with nothing left but the cold and the dark and the echo of a word that had somehow hurt worse than any answer.
Darling.
Behind me, far down the passage, something shifted. I turned toward it, my pulse jumping. And from very far away, muffled by stone, I heard Mara pounding on the seam and shouting my name.
“Evie!”
Shit. I’d been gone too long.
The corridor seemed to snap back into focus all at once. I looked once at the space where She’d vanished from, my pulse still too fast, my head full of too many impossible things. Then I turned and ran.
The passage felt longer going back. Maybe because now I could hear Mara hitting the wall again and again, each thud more frantic than the last. Maybe because I was suddenly, violently aware of how stupid this had been.
Maybe because Cindralis had left me with enough half-answers to haunt me for the next hundred years and not nearly enough time to ask questions.
I reached the seam and slapped my palm to the stone. And nothing happened.
“Come on,” I hissed, but still… nothing.
I let go of the wall and took a deep breath in through my nose and pushed it out through my lips, once, twice, and a third time. My pulse slowed with each breath. Then, I placed my palm on the wall again.
Open flashed through my mind. And then—
Gold flashed under my skin, and the seam split open.
I stumbled through it so fast I nearly tripped over my own feet and caught myself on the edge of the table. Mara whirled. The second she saw me, everything hit her face at once—relief, fury, fear, enough anger to power a small country.
“Oh my God,” she snapped, crossing the room in three fast steps. “What the hell is wrong with you? I thought you had been caught… or… worse.”
“I’m fine.”
“That is such bullshit.”
She grabbed both my arms like she needed proof I was solid, then looked me over so quickly it would’ve been funny if her hands weren’t shaking.
“You were gone forever.”
“It was not forever.”
“It was long enough.”
That landed harder than it should have. Because beneath the anger, plain as daylight, was fear. Real fear. Fear for me. And something in my chest softened before I could stop it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mara blinked, like she hadn’t expected that to come out of my mouth either.
I sighed and wrapped my arms around my middle. “I should’ve come back sooner.”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
“I know.”
“You absolutely should’ve.”
“I said I know.”
She folded her arms and glared at me, but the edges of it were already fraying now that I was standing in front of her and not dead in a wall somewhere.
For a second, neither of us spoke.
Then she asked, quieter, “What happened in there?”
Too many things. Cindralis. Secrets. Lifetimes.
That curious little braid comment still needling at the back of my skull.
But when I looked at her, I decided, instantly, that Cindralis was mine.
Not because I didn’t trust Mara. I did. More than I wanted to admit.
But Cindralis felt too strange, too fragile, too loaded with things I didn’t understand yet.
If I said any of it out loud now, something else might hear us. So I lied.
I made my face go blank and shrugged one shoulder. “Nothing.”
Mara’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing?”
“Just the same dark corridor.”
Her expression said she was nowhere near buying that. She tilted her head. “Did you see that thing again?”
That hit too close to the truth, but I kept my face steady. “Nope.”
That came out a little too fast, and Mara noticed. She stared at me for a second, and I could practically feel her deciding whether to call bullshit. So I gave her more.
“I took one of the other turns,” I said. “It twisted around more than I thought it would. I got turned around for a minute.” Which wasn’t technically a lie, just not the important part.
Mara kept looking at me, long enough that my skin started to itch. Then, finally, she let out a slow breath through her nose.
“Okay,” she said.
But she said it like she didn’t quite believe me, and that made two of us. She stepped back and dragged a hand over her face. Some of the fight had gone out of her now, burned off by panic and relief and the fact that I was standing here intact enough to be irritating.
“I have to get back,” she muttered.
I frowned. “Already?”
“It’s nearly time to bring food. If the Votaries find me in here…” She didn’t finish the thought, but I knew.
“Wait.” I glanced around the room, at the same honey-colored glow spilling over everything, the same hush that never changed, never dimmed, never brightened unless He was near. “How do you even tell what time it is when it’s always this same stupid light?”
Mara gave the tiniest shrug, like the answer was both obvious and completely unhelpful. “I just know.”
I stared at her.
She moved toward the veil, then paused and looked back at me. There was still suspicion in her face, still worry. Still, the faintest edge of I know you’re not telling me everything, but she let it go. For now.
“Please don’t go back in there by yourself,” she said.
“No promises.”
“Evie.”
“I’m kidding.”
Her brows lifted.
“I’m mostly kidding,” I amended.
That got me one last flat look, but this one was thinner around the edges. Softer. Then she slipped out through the veil, and the room went quiet again.
I stood there for a second, staring at the veil, making sure she was gone, before I turned back around and looked at the wall I had just come from.