Chapter 12 #2
Everything did. It was like the world had gone gray around me. Tears streamed down my face without a sob or even a whimper. I tried to turn away from Eryx, but he caught my wrist in his hand the moment I said, “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m even real anymore.”
Slowly, Eryx lifted my fingers to his lips, so gently I barely felt the contact.
“Seems real enough to me.” He moved my hand to his heart, waiting for me to register the slow, steady thump before asking.
It was a kind of opening—the kind I recognized.
Vague and tentative, so that if I said no, he would recover.
My heart ached at the thought. “What about me?”
“Very real,” I breathed. I wanted him to touch me. To feel things for me. I wanted to feel things for him. To protect each other in this hard world. But maybe he was right, in a way. Maybe that wasn’t for people like us.
He nodded. “Two monsters. Very real.”
Too real. I swallowed, and then ever-so-gently pulled my hand back and said the thing I feared most. “I don’t want to force Ember and Ares into having to tell us no,” I whispered. It felt far too much like my heart was breaking the moment I said it.
Eryx swallowed so hard I could feel it in his hand. His jaw clenched. “You think they would deny us the happiness they have?”
I ripped my eyes from his. “Ember knows I am not capable of loving anyone the way she can. She knows I’m not good at this. That I’ll hurt you in the end. That it will cause problems and Eryx… we have eternity to deal with one another. I just… I can’t be the cause of more trouble.”
He let go of my hand, the motion gentle, but it still felt like someone tearing at my soul. That had come out wrong. I was trying to say something else—something that might bring us both hope. But it had come out sounding like I didn’t want him.
When I looked back up, his face was calm in that heartbreaking way he had of burying himself. “Understood.”
A part of me railed against the ease with which he accepted my statement, but that was unfair of me. I couldn’t expect him to fight for me after what I’d just said. All the same, despite the unfairness of it, I wanted him to. I didn’t want him, of all people, to let me push him away.
But maybe it was a relief for me to do it. Maybe he hadn’t realized that somewhere inside my foolish head, I thought the way he looked at me might mean he wanted more than a meaningless affair. And now he knew what I’d been thinking, and he was relieved.
I knew full well I was assuming too much, letting the worst of my thoughts get the best of me. It wasn’t a healthy way to operate, but all my coping mechanisms had gone out the window the day we got our swords back.
The day I realized in a kind of horrible finality that my own mother not only did not love me, but didn’t trust me. She’d never been able to see me as her child, just a tool, and when I’d disappointed her, she had even less use for me. It had fucked me up more than I ever imagined it could.
I might never get over it. Talking about my feelings had never been my strong suit, and I was still bad at it now. I ate the last of my toast, and drained my coffee cup. He finished the bacon, quietly making himself a cup of coffee, but not looking my way even once.
It was too much. I wanted to fix it, but I didn’t know how. When I finally spoke, he didn’t turn towards me. “I’m going to look over the library again. Maybe there’s something we missed.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “I’ll do the dishes, and then I am going to try Magnus’ office again. Yesterday, I thought it almost opened. Lunch is already in the fridge. The bacon is for salads.”
He’d made lunch as well? He’d been making most of our meals and cleaning up after them as well.
It was odd, but such a relief. I wasn’t a good cook, and he was excellent at it.
If the world were different, he could open a restaurant, we would be free to fall in love, and I could do what Cassandra Necroline had always wanted to: garden.
What would it be like to feed people, to grow things, to nurture life, instead of all this death? I shook my head as I handed him my dishes and backed out of the kitchen before I hurt either of us even more. Eryx had been wrong about himself. He wasn’t a danger to me. I was a danger to him.
It didn’t matter that he was one of the most lethal men in Orphium.
Under all that hardness and stoicism, he was a sensitive soul who blamed himself for far too much.
And I was nothing but a selfish bitch who ruined people’s lives with her arrogance.
I choked down my bitterness and shame, trying to focus on the task at hand.
If I didn’t, I was going to drown in self-loathing.
The library was dark and gloomy, only a little brass sconce to light the way.
Shelves painted a deep, dusky rose were filled with books on gardening, etiquette and cooking.
There was not a single piece of fiction, nor was there even one book on any subject other than homemaking, which left me wondering who the hell Cassandra Necroline had been.
The books were lovely enough. High quality.
But there was a kind of studied sameness about the selection that was boring.
Too boring. Nothing a man like Magnus ever would have thought twice about looking inside.
From what Eryx had told me so far, his uncle had held some kind of unreasonable disdain for his wife, dismissing her at every turn as unintelligent and useless.
If she’d wanted to hide something inside these books, she could have.
I pulled one down. It was simply titled, Entertaining.
I paused, listening to the sounds of Eryx in the kitchen.
The running water, the soft clink of porcelain as he washed them by hand.
There was an early model of a dishwasher in the cottage, but he showed Cassandra the respect of treating her dishes carefully.
The distinct memory of holding his body as he shook with grief for the woman he’d lost crossed my mind.
I’d been right to push him away. Hurt him now, so my sharp tongue and never-ending demands wouldn’t ruin him later.
He deserved a softer kind of love than mine.
Someone who could understand the complexity of what he did and nurture his feelings with grace, rather than stomping all over them in an attempt to explain herself.
My cheeks were hot with shame. Why do you always have to ruin things?
How many times had Mother hissed that at me?
How many times had I fumbled through conversations as a young woman, not knowing what I’d done wrong—or even that I’d done something wrong until I found out later that I’d made someone uncomfortable, or been outright rude.
I’d seen a therapist that Lara had recommended in Aradios for a while a few years back. It had helped for a while—until it didn’t. But I’d picked up a few tricks for moments like these. I closed my eyes and counted backwards from ten. Beating myself up wasn’t going to help anything.
If I wanted to be useful, I needed to focus on the books, rather than feeling sorry for myself.
There was nothing unusual about Entertaining, so I put it back.
Methodically, I pulled each book down, looking inside and then replacing it.
With the house watching, I didn’t feel as though I could be haphazard with Cassandra’s belongings.
Somewhere near the middle, I hit gold. Inside a copy of a book called Hothouse Flowers: Cultivating Rare Beauty, a chunk of the pages were hollowed out and a single skeleton key sat inside.
“Eryx,” I managed to croak out, feeling suddenly weak in the knees. “Come look.”
He strode into the room in smooth, powerful strides, drying his hands, concern on his face. I held up the key. “I found this.”
He stepped forward, taking it from me and examining it a bit more closely. “It might be to the basement door.”
I nodded. “Go try it. I’m going to keep looking.”
But there was nothing to find; a minute later he called up to me, “It’s not to the basement.”
I sighed, and kept searching as Eryx returned. He leaned on the secretary and watched me as I continued on. “Want me to help?”
I shook my head, turning. “I’m almost done.” A few more books, but all were normal. “Nothing.”
He handed the key back to me. “We’ll figure it out.”
“We will,” I agreed, trying to inject some hope into my voice.
“Guess I’ll finish the dishes,” he said, pushing off the desk.
The desk. “Wait.”
He raised an eyebrow as I pushed past him.
The key was a little large for a desk, but now that I saw them both, I understood.
Cassandra had changed the lock on her secretary at some point.
She’d put a stronger one on it, one meant for a door.
One that would require Magnus to destroy the desk, rather than just jimmy the lock, if he wanted to snoop through her secrets.
My breath caught as the key turned. I glanced up at Eryx. His expression was so open and earnest I nearly took back everything I’d said at the kitchen table. But my tongue wouldn’t form the words, so I turned the key the rest of the way. The slanted cover to the secretary popped open.
The interior of Cassandra’s desk was neat. Organized. A day planner and several pieces of correspondence sat in the usual spots, along with some lovely stationery with her monogram on it. Pens. A beautiful old tube of lipstick—the kind you could still buy inserts for.
Eryx ran his hand along an empty top shelf inside the desk’s opening. He stopped suddenly, pressing a finger down very gently until an invisible panel popped up. The whispers that had gone so quiet for the past few days hissed like a den of vipers. Eryx and I glanced at one another.
I leaned towards the desk to get a look at what the panel had revealed, my head uncomfortably close to his.
Inside the hidden space lay a plain black notebook.
I lifted it out and opened it. I recognized Cassandra’s handwriting immediately from the recipe box I’d gone through earlier this week looking for clues.
Both of us let out a breath, surprised that we’d found anything.
We waited for the house to react. To disappear something, or for something in the air to shift.
Nothing happened. Well, nothing happened to the objects in the room.
The whispers were clearer now. Swim in the depths, some said.
Others warned, Beware the Ossuary. And still others I could not make out.
A shadow fell over the library. I glanced up at the window. The woman from the day we’d tried to leave, veiled and dressed in corpse garb, stood outside, pressing gloved hands to the window. I was so startled, I nearly shrieked at the sight of her.
Eryx stood, crossing his arms and shaking his head.
“Don’t do that,” he said in a strange, low voice.
There was a tenor to it, just beyond what I could hear, some note that was not meant for the living.
I’d heard stories about some necromancers having a voice for the dead, but never actually heard one use it.
The phantom disappeared, blinking out as suddenly as she’d appeared, the whispers silencing along with her. “Was that Cassandra?”
Eryx shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s possible, I suppose.”
That wasn’t particularly comforting, so I moved on. “What was that about the Ossuary?”
Eryx covered his mouth with his hand, his eyes widening.
He looked around the house, as though he thought he might find something else.
Or perhaps he did see something I couldn’t.
He pointed wildly towards the door we’d decided probably led to the basement, and then his eyes went straight back to the desk.
To the place where he’d pulled the notebook from. “It’s here.”
I frowned. “What is?”
He laughed, but there wasn’t a shred of joy in his eyes.
“This is the City of the Dead, Rhiannon, and this property was once the Necroline Dynasty’s seat of power.
” His arm reached past me into the hidden panel in Cassandra’s desk.
“During the Massacres, there were too many dead to bury, so Roman took what he could of them and laid them to rest deep beneath the fortress.”
He pulled another key from the back of the hole and held it up before my face. It was larger than the desk key, simple and ancient, made of a metal that seemed to swallow light. “This is the key to the Ossuary. It’s been missing for nearly a thousand years… kind of like your swords.”
The parallel between the two scenarios was not lost on me. Had the two incidents been connected? And why did Cassandra have the key locked away? I chose not to ask those questions right now. “Do you think it opens the basement door?”
He shook his head, looking past me. “It’s too big, but we’re onto something. Do you want to read that while I look through Magnus’ office again?”
I nodded, gazing down at the notebook. “I do.”
He placed a hand on my shoulder, nearly hesitant with his touch. “We’re getting somewhere, Rhiannon. Finally, we’re getting somewhere. We should celebrate.”
Relief flooded me at his words, though I couldn’t tell why. I smiled. “Okay. What do you want to do?”
“Dinner. Out. Tonight. We’ve got the fancy clothes now, after all.” He was right; we’d been “shopping” a lot to keep ourselves busy, and none of the things we brought home had disappeared. “You in?”
I nodded. “Yes, I’m in.”
“Good. I’m going to finish the dishes and then try some of the other doors with these keys. I’ll call for you if I find something. Want to go at seven?”
“All right,” I agreed, my heart racing.
Was this a date? I tried to let the words form in my mouth, but he was gone, leaving me with the notebook—and the feeling that I wasn’t ready to go back to the world just yet.
As I looked up to pull the desk chair towards me, I found it occupied.
A tall, blonde woman with a similar build to mine sat in it, arms crossed, nearly transparent, not a hint of corpse garb in sight.
Instead, she wore a pretty tweed suit, tailored perfectly to her curves. Her short hair waved gently around her face, which was twisted into a deep frown. “There’s nothing of use in the notebook. Just my grocery lists.”
I nodded, grateful for the tip. “Who was the woman in corpse garb?”
Cassandra didn’t answer me. Not about the other spirit, anyway. “He isn’t like his uncle, after all,” she said, before disappearing from sight. Her voice wasn’t quite done with me though. “You’re a fool to let him go.”