CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lio hated the autumn. It was a forlorn and contradictory season, duplicitous in that it belonged only to the chronically melancholy and the earnestly romantic. He was neither, now, and as he grew more comfortable in the tea shop, his depressive moods depleted.
The two women were up in Theodora’s bedroom still.
The debris of noodle bowls and side dishes still sullied the sink – they had gone to the restaurant that Lio had spied from time to time at the end of the street, the one with the dumplings he had promised himself he would order the very moment Acanthi were warded from the city.
Lio sat beside Rupert, the radio crackling away with some play or other that the boy was listening to.
He dwelled on his arrival at the tea shop.
Find the wards. Break them.
It had been a decade since he had heard Opal’s voice. Yet, Lio had read that letter in his apartment in Kolldin as if Opal had whispered its words right into his ear.
He knew now that Cate had been the one to write it, to trick him, to feign surprise when he arrived at Caelin Forest to check Opal’s grave.
Theodora had convinced him of that, but over the years his fantasies had worn into him like monks’ feet on concrete and so, in spite of it all, he still dreamed of Opal.
You have to go. You have to hide.
After he had been thrown into the portal, Lio had returned to the coven anyway. It was Agytha who caught him outside the tent, her hands covered in blood.
Opal is gone, love. You know our laws. Our Catherine will not let you live if she finds you. Go, Lio. Change your name, if you must. I promise. I will convince Moira. The two of us will make sure Cate spares you. Opal is lost, pet. Do not mock her memory by joining her in death.
Lio rose from the living room. He bid Rupert goodnight. He cleaned his teeth and took a bath and as he eclipsed the landing beside the attic ladder, he heard the softest edge of a laugh above. That was Dot’s laugh.
It was a nice sound, Lio realised. And, in truth, he had come to recognise over the months that the girl was rather sweet. She was clever. She was neat and polite, and her face lit up whenever she discussed a topic she loved, and she loved many.
Lio gazed up at the attic room door. How could a single person be so interested in magic, or in runes, or in the city, itself?
This was the quality that caused Dot’s obsession with him, he thought, rubbing his eyes.
The girl did not like him, truly. Dot was a little desperate and a little lonely and did not like herself as much as she should, for why else would she blush so brightly at him?
He was, he realised, becoming endeared to even that.
The poor, doomed girl. Lio entered the small room he shared with Rupert, where he found the twin beds neatly made: one with blue striped sheets, one pale yellow.
Soon, this saga of entrapment would end and he would build a new life for himself here in the city, safe, finally, from the ghost that had haunted him for so long.
He should have gone to sleep.
But his heart ached on, so instead he made the fatal choice to look out of the window, and that was when he saw the raven on the sill, watching him.
It held an azure-coloured envelope in its beak.
Even in the darkness of the autumn night, Lio recognised that handwriting at once. The window was shoved open, the envelope clasped; the raven fluttered away.
And Lio tried to stop himself one final time, but he was a feeble moth and Opal was not some paltry lamp – she was the only true light to have ever kissed the earth.
The young man did not question if this, too, was a forgery, or whether Acanthi had charmed the raven to peck at the window.
He did not stop to imagine what outcome might arise from, again, opening a letter penned in the handwriting of a dead woman.
Lio ripped it open just has he had in Kolldin, hands shaking, feet gone cold from shock, overcome by an immediate, insatiable need to know if it was real.
But, this was not a letter. It was a packet spell.
And from the ripped envelope rose the scent of woodsmoke, gunpowder, incense and blackberry. He breathed it in and the room spun. He collapsed against the bed and fell into a terrible, nightmare-coloured sleep and when he woke the next morning to Rupert snoring beside him, he remembered none of it.