30. Chapter 30 #2
A new wave of damned souls crowded the antechamber, though they seemed interchangeable from the last. I averted my eyes so I didn’t see much but flouncing skirts, heeled boots of fine leather, and gnarled, dirty toes, but their piteous moaning wormed into my ears.
I was careful where I set my feet this time so I didn’t slip on the blanket of coins.
Probably about time they started sweeping them up, isn’t it? I said, slipping out of the gate the Frost guard held open for me.
That happy job will probably fall to me, if my Mother ever lets me out.
The sky was a moonstone stretch of cloud. Hellhounds paced everywhere, the air humming with their low and constant growling as they moved around the meadow. I felt his anticipation ratcheting higher as Remy swung my gaze about, searching out his sister from between furry legs and lashing tails.
She was easy to spot, a bright spatter of starlight sitting cross-legged on the greenest section of grass.
She looked like a tiny deity, celestial, as though her true home was the night sky back in Frost. A hound sat beside her as if it feared for her safety, its entire immense body rising and falling with every breath as it gazed off toward the silent wood.
It whipped around at my approach, its great black face dipping so it caught my gaze in its furious stare, though it did nothing more than give me a mighty sniff and turn back toward the wood.
My arms were around Jessa in a heartbeat, my lips against her cold forehead, but it was she who spoke first, pulling away to get a better look at me as I sunk down beside her.
“I missed you,” she said with childlike simplicity, her cheeks flushed with frost.
He held her face in my hands as if he wasn’t quite sure she was real. “I missed you. I didn’t—” he broke off, swallowing the boulder in my throat, jittery and dazed in equal measure. “I didn’t think you’d remember me. You were so young when I left.”
“I thought you didn’t remember me,” she said, a delicate accusation in her voice. “You were gone so long I started to think I’d made you up.”
I felt something in my—his?—heart crack open. “I thought about you every day. I could never forget you.”
I suppose it hadn’t hit me until right then, when the mere sight of this child turned him nervy and disordered, that his anger and black moods, the storms of temper six years ago, had not been just fury that he’d been unceremoniously stuck with a human stranger but grief at having lost his family.
I felt silly it hadn’t occurred to me before, but I’d never thought of demons as having a family, let alone feelings other than spurts of explosive rage.
“Tell me what you’ve been doing while I was gone,” he said.
She told him about lessons (excruciatingly dull) and loneliness (I gathered that Frost demons had trouble conceiving and the circle had few children her age), how she wasn’t allowed to venture past the meadow. “You did all the time,” she groused. “Valic told me. I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”
“I had five older brothers who taught me how to sneak around.” He was petting her like a cat, smoothing the hair falling loose against her back.
“I’d come home soaking wet and filthy. Mud all over the snow in Frost like a path leading straight to my bedroom.
Mother was permanently furious with me. I’m surprised she didn’t get rid of me sooner. ”
“She said you had to go somewhere to learn a lesson.”
He laughed, unamused, but said nothing, letting my gaze drift toward the cliff bank rippling with grass.
“Did you?” When he looked back at her, she was looking up at me, frail yet intense, a forbidding gleam in her eyes. Shrewdness shimmered around her like an aura. “Or will she send you away again?”
He ground my teeth together. “Lesson received. I’m not going anywhere.” And it may not have been an outright lie, but I could feel it wasn’t quite the truth.
Jessa looked relieved by the answer. She ran a light finger over the rim of my ear, frank curiosity wreathing her fine little features. “Was it very strange, suddenly becoming a girl?”
“I’m not a girl,” he said, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or not. “She’s a girl. I’m who I always was.”
“Well, you look like a girl.”
“Hopefully not for much longer.”
Jessa leaned into me in a limp, sleepy heap, like a puppy. “She’s your friend, though, isn’t she?”
“I think so. When she’s not finding me incorrigible.”
Her lashes were icy against my neck when she blinked up at me, her thin, cold nose nestled into the hollow of my throat. “Mother doesn’t like that she knows my name.”
“I know. But I’d never have told her if I thought she’d use it against you.”
“I thought the fogs weren’t working for the longest time,” she said, “but I still tried calling her to me.”
“They worked.” My hand was moving up and down her back. “Maybe a little too well. Her village is covered with them most days.”
Jessa splayed the fingers of both hands, gazing down at them.
Mother-of-pearl veins on her arms, as if she’d bleed moonlight.
“I asked them to look for my blood out there. See if they could find you.” She wiggled her fingers, the nails shining like glass.
“Mother says it’s a good defensive magic.
She didn’t know I was doing anything other than practicing out here. ”
“I won’t tell her.” He gave her a reassuring little pat. “God knows I’ve kept my share of secrets from her.”
A shuffle of footsteps coming up from behind, and Jessa flicked a glance up at whoever loomed over us. “I have to go back inside now. I’m only allowed out here twice a day if I get through my lessons.”
“I love you.” He said it in a way that tugged at my heart, pulling her into another impulsive hug as she’d started to get to her feet, her cold little body wrapped up in my arms. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”
“Be good,” she said when he released her, one prim hand dusting her dress free of bits of grass. “Or Mother might not let you.”
And then the Frost guard led her away and no other guard swept in to take his place, leaving me alone on the grass beside a disinterested hellhound.
They’re not going to guard me out here? I asked, glancing around nervously. Black armor glinted from every angle. Hellhound helmets everywhere, red stones for their eyes flashing like fire in the daylight. Demon faces gazing out from between the carved jaws. Plenty of guards, but none approached.
I don’t think that thing around your ankle is a pretty decoration. I’m sure it tracks you somehow. My mother wouldn’t have given us free, unsupervised rein of the grounds. I tried warning you.
So what if it tracks us? At least you won’t be climbing the walls stuck in your room.
She’ll know where we are at any given moment, he said, as if this were intolerable. I don’t like it.
Is there anything you like?
I like my siblings. My hand reached out of its own accord, grabbing my kneecap. I felt ice in my palm through the tight fabric of my pants. I like you.
And yet you wouldn’t tell me your name for years, I said, watching my thumb press circles into my knee, unimpressed by this display.
You won’t tell me anything about why this happened in the first place, even though it didn’t just happen to you.
It may be your punishment but it’s turned into mine, too.
You might “like me” but sometimes it feels like you don’t respect me very much.
I respect you, he spluttered, as if I’d accused him of some gruesome crime, my hand thumping to the grass.
Not enough to tell me the truth. I have to beg for scraps of it.
It was as if I’d struck him dumb for a moment. What do you want from me, Des? You want me to paint you a fucking picture? My father was murdered. I was sixteen and angry. I did a lot of things that I’m not proud of anymore. I wasn’t even proud then, I just…I had to do something. Nobody else was.
What did you do?
It was like I’d asked an unanswerable question. I felt him grappling around for words and immediately discarding them as if he didn’t like their shape.
You don’t have to make it complicated, I said, blowing out a sigh of exasperation. You don’t have to try to soften it somehow or cast yourself in a certain light. Just tell me what happened. I’m not laying a trap, just asking for an answer.
He was quiet so long it felt like I’d made a request that was doomed from the start.
Generally every question I’d ever asked him over the years had stumbled over a cliff and died a spectacular death, splattered and ignored.
Of course he wouldn’t tell me; why would he?
I was an object to reside within until he could cast me off like a bad habit.
The alchemy of six years with him didn’t magically transform me into someone worth confiding in. I was only human, after all.
Stop, he said, half annoyed, half appalled, restless in that liminal pocket in my mind.
That’s not what I think. Gathering himself, fingers to his temples; were they covered in frost like his mother’s, his sister’s?
I went out to the In Between when the council was in a judgement session one night, he said, as though it cost him a lot of effort to grit the words out.
The guard is thinner at that time; they need to herd the damned into chambers and depending on crowd size that can take a while.
It’s mostly the hounds outside then, and they’re more concerned with intruders breaking into Hell or the damned sneaking out of it, not demons coming and going.
There was a big crowd that night, not many guards around.
So I climbed down to the In Between and threw open the gates.