Chapter 20
RHIANNON
Lara ran wiry fingers through her short, dark hair, sending it flying in all directions as I told them what Eryx and I had learned.
The one-time love of my life looked good, but wan, like she’d been fading while I was gone.
It occurred to me that she too had been going through a lot.
Both of us thought we’d found an answer to the Consulate’s decline in the mysterious Mother and her organization.
Learning that we’d been manipulated up and down, in dozens of ways, by the island hadn’t just fucked me up.
What the Admiral and my own mother had done turned Lara into a veritable serial killer.
And while the people she’d killed needed killing, I knew all too well what a toll it took on the soul to do that work. And I’d just left her.
I braced myself for the guilt I was sure would come next. But it never came. Yes, I’d left Lara, but she’d known I was going and she hadn’t offered to come with me. Eryx had.
“That’s so fucked up,” she said when I finished speaking.
Ember nodded. “It really is.”
I was glad Briony wasn’t home to hear this story.
Perhaps we’d be gone, back to Oleander Cottage, before she could find out just how bad things had been.
The hedge of roses had affected them as well.
It had caused all of them to forget we existed for over three months.
The math didn’t add up. By my count, we’d only been at the Cottage for a few weeks.
Calypso, who had been making tea while I told them what had happened, finally set the tray down on the table. “Kara and I ran into something like this a few years ago.”
We all looked up at her, rapt with attention at the mention of the Aradios Maere’s commander, Kara Asterion.
Calypso was the newest among us, and we were all still getting to know her, though everyone else had more of a chance to do that than I had, at this point.
She pushed a strand of her long auburn hair back behind her ear before pouring the tea.
“It wasn’t as complex as what you’ve described at Oleander Cottage,” she said as she handed out teacups, fixing everyone’s tea just how they liked it.
“But the way you described the finger-trapness of it all... that’s the same as what we encountered.
It was a house, like the Cottage, built over a significant site to the Thaumas. ”
Aradios was the City of Miracles. The miracle workers were strongest and most plentiful there. It made sense that the spirits there might retain the kind of power to form something like what we’d seen at the cottage.
“Was it a burial site?” I asked, wondering if there was a connection to the Ossuary.
Calypso shook her head. “No, but it was the site of one of the first Massacres. So in that way, it was very similar.”
There had been several years of mass murders when the Trinity lost control of the Three Cities and the Authority rose to power.
Humans had been keen to weaken parapsychs permanently, though they had stopped short of eliminating us altogether.
The ostracization came later. First, they’d murdered us in droves.
It made sense that those places would be deeply haunted in similar ways.
Lara shoved her other hand through her shock of dark hair, mussing it irrevocably. “Why did anyone build over those spots? Seems like a recipe for disaster.”
Ember sighed. “There was so little space for us after the Massacres. You know that.”
Lara shrugged, grief heavy in her eyes. “I guess I can’t blame people for making do with what scraps the Authority gives us.”
Sera padded into the kitchen, still wearing an oversized pair of lavender silk pajamas.
She looked better than she had when she and Max returned to us in some ways.
Healthier. But from the way Calypso frowned at the sight of her, I could tell there was more to her appearance than just sleeping late.
“Is there a cup for me?” Sera asked.
Ember nodded, fixing Sera’s tea for her. The petite Maere came to sit next to me. She was the shortest of us. So short, in fact, it was almost comical. Her fingers barely fit around the mug Ember handed her.
When we were reborn into human bodies, the majority of us had grown to be nearly as tall as we’d been in our first lives, and our people tended to be on the taller side in comparison to humans.
But Sera had not been reborn exactly as she had been before.
Later, we’d learned there was one in every cohort that had turned out to be a bit different than in her first life.
It was an odd phenomenon, and we’d never quite puzzled out the why of it.
When the five of us were seated around the kitchen table, a restless energy in me settled. The magic of our swords connected us to the island, but also to one another. It always felt right to be together.
Tears welled in Ember’s eyes, a softness there I hadn’t seen in centuries.
She had the same chaotic energy she always had, but it was tempered now with a depth of feeling I couldn’t quite identify.
Her hand stretched towards mine. She wiggled her fingers, her long oval nails shimmering in the light until I took her hands.
“I am so glad you’re here,” she murmured, the sound of tears lingering at the edges of her voice.
“Me too,” I replied. And I was. “But I can’t stay. Whatever this is with Oleander Cottage, we have to solve it.”
Calypso nodded. “We do. The house in Aradios… we waited too long.” Her teeth bit into her full bottom lip and she swallowed hard. “The spiritual energy there. It opened a door that shouldn’t be opened.”
Everyone’s eyes snapped to her. None of us knew why Calypso had been so willing to trade places with Max and come here. Was this why?
“What door?” Ember asked, letting go of my hands. Her eyes were alert, sharp.
Everyone at the table had shifted position, even Sera.
Time contracted, and I felt the way we’d been throughout the ages, sitting around tables just like this, in castles and cottages, in taverns and libraries.
Max had been there then, but that did not take anything away from the rightness of Calypso being here now.
“A door to the underworld. To Tanith’s domain,” Calypso replied. Her voice dropped lower. “On the island, we never knew each other well.”
That was true. In our past life, the rest of us had mostly moved in circles with one another.
We were friends. But Calypso had been a cloistered priestess in Tanith’s temple by the sea.
She had been one of death’s handmaidens.
She likely understood the metaphysical aspects of the underworld much better than the rest of us.
If that had been the case, why had she gone to Aradios?
Calypso continued. “But during my time in the temple, we learned that doors between the underworld and the living must stay shut, as the condemned dead long to return to the world of the living.”
The condemned dead were the ones whose souls were taken to perform penance for the ills they’d done in life, or so legends said.
But Calypso spoke about it as though it were true.
“Necromancers’ power comes from the underworld, from their soul’s connection to it.
They are what keeps the balance between the realm of the living and the underworld. ”
I groaned as I understood. “If a necromancer wanted more power though… if they were unscrupulous…”
Calypso nodded. “Yes, they would want more access to the underworld, to the essence of their power. But that would require opening a door to the netherrealm. And once open it wouldn’t just be the condemned that would come through. It would be all of them.”
All of the dead there had ever been. The idea was confounding.
Sera’s mug slammed down on the table, her eyes bright with fury. “The living realm would be overtaken. There are too many dead.” I hadn’t seen her look so alive in a long time. Even before the fire, something in her had faded, I realized.
Ember and Lara both stared at her as well.
We saw it, the Serafine we’d known before.
Before she’d fallen in love with someone who could love her, but never return her feelings in kind.
My heart broke for the two of them. Max and Sera hadn’t meant to hurt one another so deeply, but they had.
These long lives we had were riddled with mistakes.
“What did you do?” Sera asked, and the strength in her voice was reassuring. “To stop the door from opening? I assume it was about to open, or you wouldn’t mention it.”
Calypso nodded, smiling faintly. It was standard practice amongst the fifteen Maere of the Three Cities to never reveal the foibles of their cohort. What happened in our own cities stayed there. We complained about the Trinity not sharing information, but we’d grown just as secretive.
“The house had been a problem, much like the one we have here. Sucking people in, not allowing them to leave. Pulling them into the underworld, which to the living appears fractured, though to the dead, I think it is more whole, more real. The magic of it is…” she shrugged.
“Somewhat unknowable. It’s not for us to understand. ”
My heartbeat nearly stilled, my skin going ice cold. The world beyond Oleander Cottage’s front door… it was not a loop. Not really. Nor was it a spell or an illusion. It was the underworld. We had gone into the netherrealm. Fed it with our energy.
And it had fed us in return. We had eaten the netherrealm’s food.
There were all kinds of stories about that kind of thing, but they all had one thing in common.
Once you ate of the underworld, you became a part of it.
I couldn’t think of what that might mean for us now. The stories were just that, stories.
This was real. With or without the key, Oleander Cottage was a portal to the underworld—and sooner or later, the dead were going to get out.
Even now, they were barely contained. “The Ossuary,” I breathed, horror dawning on me.
“Magnus was trying to open a door to the underworld, through the Ossuary.”
Ember’s eyes fell shut. “Fuck.”
Lara snorted, smirking at me in that old way.
The way she had before we’d fallen for each other and nearly ruined each other’s lives.
It felt like the most worn-in sweater in the world—cozy, completely unsexy, but pure comfort.
My throat caught on emotion. Being here with them was good.
Everything worked just a little better when we were together. When we were in sync.
Sera drained her mug, frowning. “It seems obvious why he’d do it. He was morally bankrupt and power hungry. But what about the payments he was receiving?”
All five of us were silent. It didn’t immediately make sense.
Movement out the corner of my eye distracted me.
Stanley, Avaline’s poltergeist cat, came around the corner from the butler’s pantry, making his way into the kitchen, his black fur gleaming in the lamplight of the gloomy day.
He hadn’t shifted into any of his more disturbing forms today, and looked like an ordinary black cat.
Like most poltergeists, he was practically corporeal.
“Stanley,” I murmured, the pieces clicking for me. “Did you die at Oleander Cottage?”
The cat stopped in his tracks, right in front of the dishwasher and sat down hard on his big furry butt. He yowled piteously. Somewhere towards the back of the house, a door opened. Avaline and Eryx entered. Eryx’s icy eyes were worried.
“He says Magnus killed him.” Eryx looked to Avaline. “Did you know that?”
I’d never seen Avaline Reyes look truly sad, but then I didn’t know her very well. Her red lips turned down, as she bent to scoop the ghost cat into her arms. He rubbed his face against her cheek as she hugged him close. “It was brutal,” she whispered. “Magnus Necroline was a monster.”
Eryx turned away, having gone a shade of green. It took something quite terrible to turn a spirit into a poltergeist, and whatever the little soul had shown him disturbed him.
“Don’t tell me,” Ember whispered. “Please.”
Avaline and Eryx both shook their heads, but she was the one who spoke. “He doesn’t want you to know the particulars. Not any of you. I don’t think he really even wants us to know.” She stroked the back of the cat’s head. “You wanted to tell Ares, didn’t you?”
Stanley yowled again, then sprouted bat wings and an additional head, which hissed. Av smiled. “Yes, we’ll tell him when he gets back. You promise you won’t show Briony this? The poor kid’ll have nightmares for months.”
The cat growled, as though to say, I would never do such a thing. He loved our little teenage Maere-to-be.
Eryx glanced at Av, his face going a little green again. “Did you see it?”
She nodded, setting the cat on the kitchen counter. “I did.”
Eryx didn’t keep us in suspense. “The money he was taking… Stanley saw several of the exchanges. He was taking money from Archibald Blaire the First.” My heart sank as he paused, frowning. “They’re onto a third one now, I think.”
It was always going to come back to this, wasn’t it?
No matter how I tried to run from my problems, they always caught up with me.
Archibald Blaire the Third was a concern for the Consulate, and for good reason.
Blaire’s family had been connected to nearly every case of parapsych exploitation for nearly three centuries.
And that was just what the world knew about.
What happened in secret, in the Aslyum, but elsewhere as well—Blaire operated dozens of black sites—was so horrendous I’d about lost my mind in Aradios.
It was important work, but I was no longer equipped to do it.
Not if I couldn’t actually do anything about it.
The Consulate had never wanted to use my skills as an assassin. All they wanted was information. Always more information, and never any action. I’d grown to hate my job as Orphium’s assassin, but working for the Consulate without actually doing anything about the shit I learned had been worse.
Lara swore. “The Senator that founded the Asylum. That fucker.”
“But why?” Calypso asked. “What does that have to do with all of this?”
Eryx’s eyes met mine, and I knew he’d clocked me. He knew I knew more about Blaire than what I was saying. “We won’t know the answer to that until Rhiannon and I return to the Cottage.”