Chapter 17
ERYX
Why hadn’t I been able to tell her all that had happened? At first, I thought I’d made the choice on my own. That fear had held me back. And perhaps it had. There wasn’t any part of what happened after our bath that I wasn’t afraid of. Maybe I had just gone cowardly.
I swore, clenching my fists, gritting my teeth, suppressing the urge to scream at something, to hit something.
But I didn’t do those things. If I needed to let my anger out, I did it with a punching bag at the gym.
I pushed breath through my lungs, long and slow, forcing my heart to slow and my mind to refocus. There had to be an answer here.
Something good had to come from all this.
I had to find a way to help Rhiannon, to get us both out of here before anything else happened.
There had never been a case of spirit possession from within the Maere’s ranks.
I hadn’t even known it was possible, though after what had happened to Briony, Ares and I probably should have looked into this.
If only my brother or Av were here now to help me think through this calmly. If the spirit decided to keep Rhiannon, to possess her forever … well, I wasn’t sure what that would mean for the Maere, for us, but worse, I couldn’t imagine what it might mean for Orphium. For the world.
Spiraling wasn’t going to help, though. I took a deep breath and looked again, though I’d searched Magnus’ office three times and found nothing of any real use. It wasn’t as though I was inexperienced in finding things that were hidden, but Magnus’ office had been carefully edited.
Too carefully edited, in my expert opinion. I’d been sacking other people’s personal spaces since I was twelve years old, and it was my view that anyone without anything to find had something to hide.
Before I was twelve, I’d learned from Roman that the majority of us operated under the erroneous belief that other people saw the world as we did, thought the way we did, and did things the way that we did.
When you searched a space, you had to try to come at it with a blank mind, rather than your own preconceived notions about what you would do.
It had served me well for centuries, but today all I knew was that Magnus had something to hide.
I sat at the heavy desk staring at the familiar, identically bound books that sat against the wall: a fraction of the Necroline Dynasty’s old ledgers. I’d already thumbed through them, looking for a hidden key or scrap of paper that would lead us to another clue. Nothing.
A sheen of sweat had broken out over my skin as my search had grown more fervent.
Anything to keep myself from thinking about what had happened to Rhiannon last night.
The danger she was in, just by being trapped here with me.
My thoughts took a desperate turn, racing through all the ways we might force our way out.
They were all reckless. All far too dangerous to try.
I needed to buckle down and get her out of here the reliable way. Solve the mystery of the cottage. Exorcise the primary spirit. Get Rhiannon out. Those were my objectives now, in that order. I turned my attention back to the ledgers.
If there was nothing obvious to find in the office, perhaps there was something less obvious to find, hiding in plain sight. Too often, in Orphium, violence was hidden under layers of bureaucracy or business.
I flipped through one of the ledgers, feeling frustrated and wishing again that Ares were here.
Not only would he have solved this mystery already, Ares was truly good at numbers, and though I typically collected our raw data, he was the one that always made the finances make sense.
It looked to me as though it had been the other way around between Magnus and Roman.
I tried to focus.
Though I wasn’t much good at knowing what to do with a budget, I was plenty familiar with what the local tithes looked like, and what yearly patterns were for every neighborhood in the city.
Some folks didn’t have steady work, and their tithing to the Consulate fluctuated.
Magnus had organized his ledgers in a similar system to what Ares liked to use.
The longer I looked through them, the odder they appeared to me, though I couldn’t say why. I stood, calling down the stairs, “Rhiannon, are you any good with numbers? Budgets, I mean?”
There was a pause, and then the sound of her footsteps as she came to the bottom of the narrow staircase. “Yes,” she answered. “I have a good head for figures. Want me to come up?”
“Please,” I answered, before returning to the desk to lay things out for her.
“It’s so hot up here,” she said as she entered the office, pulling her ponytail a bit tighter.
Her face glistened with a sheen of sweat that matched my own. The heat, and her mere presence scrambled my brain, sending my ability to focus on anything but her skittering to realms beyond my grasp. I tried not to appreciate the generous curves of her body as she sat down.
The way her plush thighs pressed together as she crossed her legs, or the muscles in her back, honed from years of work with weaponry. Another faint glow of sweat created a sheen on her decolletage. I had the distinct urge to lick it off her. I had to focus, but she was a terrific distraction.
She broke through my lust-addled haze. “Why don’t you sit for a few, and I’ll look this over.”
I nodded, sinking into the large leather chair in the corner of the tiny office.
Being around her had me either frenzied with need, or perfectly calm.
It was my desperation to enjoy every second with her, to drink it in so fully that when she inevitably pushed me away, I would have the memories of her.
Remember her this way. The words had felt like a threat, but were they? And why couldn’t I tell her what had happened?
As Rhiannon worked, she turned the pages of the ledgers so methodically for a few minutes that I was lulled into stillness.
A deep calm came over me. I never should have sent her downstairs.
Something about her aura had this effect on me, steadying somehow—and I could examine the room from a different perspective now that I was settled.
There was wallpaper here, as in most every other room in the cottage.
This pattern was a forest scene I recognized from old tapestries depicting a unicorn hunt.
My eyes got lost in the leaves and pine boughs.
The swirls of greenery changed, moved, the longer I stared.
I watched, fascinated, as the leaves on the birches shimmered, the needles of the evergreens glistening with snow.
The soft sound of Rhiannon’s even breath brought me back, the rustling of pages, the scratch of her pen on paper.
She must have taken up one of Magnus’ blank notebooks, but I hadn’t seen her do it.
I opened my mouth to speak, but found it stuck shut.
There was something on it, something covering it.
I tried to lift my arm to touch my face, but could not. A shadow crept slowly across the long narrow corridor of floor left uncovered by furniture in the room. There was no trace of the usual chill in the air that accompanied a haunting. In fact, the room was hotter than ever.
Whoever, whatever, cast that shadow was corporeal. It had come up the stairs without me noticing. How had I not noticed? How had I not heard something coming for us? And what’s more, how had Rhiannon not noticed?
The absence of a racing heart, or a pant of lungs was disconcerting.
My mind fought against my frozen muscles to move my body.
To open my mouth. Saints, even to simply turn my head.
But I could not. The shadow crept closer, its arm raised menacingly towards Rhiannon, but I could do nothing but wait for the hand to fall.
All these years. All this violence. And in yet another moment it truly counted, I was useless.
Powerless to use any of it for good. Just like I had been with Frannie.
Though my body didn’t react, couldn’t react, my mind screamed with futile rage, burning through the fear that kept me bound up in panic.
I blinked. It wasn’t much, but it was something, and it seemed as though my vision cleared, though I hadn’t realized it was blurred. The shadow paused, a finger emerging from the amorphous mass that was its hand. It pointed to a spot on the wall above the desk.
“Did you fall asleep?” Rhiannon’s voice, clear as a bell, woke me with a start. I practically gasped for air. She leaned forward in the desk chair, her hand touching my knee. “Bad dream?”
I nodded, suppressing the urge to grab onto her and keep her as close to me as possible.
My head had moved of its own accord. I could sit forward, swallow my fear.
She was all right; there was no one else in the room with us.
No shadow covered the floor. And most importantly, Rhiannon was still herself.
Breath heaved through my lungs as the chemicals rushing through my body that screamed Act! Act! calmed.
“Did you find something?” I asked, trying to keep my heart from racing.
Rhiannon’s eyes were concerned, but as my breath returned to normal her shoulders, which had been slightly hunched, relaxed a measure. Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t hurt her with the vox spiritus—the entity that controlled this house, this advanced spirit trap, had us both in its grasp.
Us, and how many other spirits? My heart ached for Cassandra Necroline’s spirit.
After what she’d endured in life, being married to my uncle, I hated that she’d gotten caught up in this now.
I had to save them both. I had to get Rhiannon out, and set Cassandra free from whatever monster controlled this place.
“Yes,” Rhiannon said slowly, obviously worried about me. “I think I did.”