Chapter 17 Saskia
Ibelieve you.
It’s the first thing I tell Lucan when I make it back to my housing unit, dig through my drawers, and throw the necklace over my throat.
But, I press, because I can feel his shock flare through our connection, and I know he’s bound to have some self-satisfied remark up his sleeve, I only believe that the Guardians are bad. I don’t necessarily believe that you’re good.
Never said I was, Lucan replies smoothly. But I’d never pretend to be good, either.
Great. Then I don’t feel bad about taking you with me.
Not that they could actually hurt you if they catch me with the necklace, right?
Or could they? For a moment, I pause to wonder what would happen if the vial against my chest was shattered—destroyed.
Our connection would obviously cease to exist, but would something happen to Lucan, too?
Would it hurt him? I never got around to asking him how the necklace actually works. But now is not the time.
Now, there might never be time.
Lucan seems to be tracking each of my thoughts with increasing uneasiness as I continue digging through my drawers. What do you mean if they catch you? he begins slowly. What are you doing, Saskia?
I fish out one of the other forbidden objects, bringing it up to my face until I’m staring through the hole in the center of the silver, tarnished bow. I’m going to the Blood Moon Palace to see if this key of Diggory’s lets me in.
More shock ripples into my veins, nearly halting me in my tracks. What? Are you insane? A low rumble emanates from his throat. I might not live within those Walls, but even I know you can’t just walk right up to the palace in the middle of the night.
Oh, I’m not waiting for nighttime. I’m going right now.
I tie up my hair in a knot, using the mirror to make sure all of my dark red pieces are in place.
Then I readjust my cloak and debate whether or not I should keep my scarlet badge on.
For the first time, the sight of the badge fills me with disgust. It’s just another marker of control—of how the Guardians have dictated every part of my life. Even who I’m supposed to love.
Saskia, stop, Lucan tries to command, and I swear I hear the start of him panting. As if he’s begun to run. As if he can actually get to me. Let’s talk about this.
There’s nothing to talk about. I turn away from the mirror and drop the key into my inside pocket, my fingers trembling.
There’s probably five hundred things to talk about, actually. You seem to have missed several crucial steps between warranted disbelief and… whatever the hell this is.
I start toward the door. This is me doing the right thing.
This is objectively you doing the wrong thing, little nightmare. All you will accomplish is getting yourself killed if you go right now without preparing.
I want to scream at him for daring to tell me the truth but trying to stop me from chasing it.
You keep it up and I won’t take you with me after all, Monster.
He ignores my threat. You can’t throw yourself right into our enemy’s hand without a strategy.
I can do what I want.
No, you can’t. His voice wrenches at something buried deep within my bones. You can’t do what you want because the Guardians have taken away all of your choices. That’s the point.
There is no point unless I do something. My eyes squeeze shut.
Do something, then, he growls. But let’s make a plan first.
There’s no time for a plan! I scream in my head, my hand grasping my bedroom doorknob. My mother might be dead right NOW!
There it is. The secret that has finally burst from the deepest cracks in my heart.
The reason I’m so desperate to be Chosen—not because I care about worthiness or honor, but because I’m sick to my stomach about what might have happened to my mother since the very last time I saw her leaning over a balcony, waving to me from high, high above.
Lucan’s surprise bolts through me for only a moment before his tone cascades into something low and soothing. Like he’s urging me to step away from the edge of a towering rooftop.
Talk to me, baby. His mind skips, almost like that slipped out of his mouth, but he continues softly before I can fully process it. Sit down and tell me about her. I want to hear.
I pause with my hand still clasping the doorknob.
Nobody—not once—has ever asked me about my mother after she followed the Third Guardian into the Blood Moon Palace almost ten years ago, her chin high, her steps slow.
It’s as if the Chosen Ones are as much of a taboo subject as they are an honor.
People want to congratulate you for your loved one being ripped from your arms, but they don’t want to ask how it made you feel. How you’re coping.
How it feels like grief.
Now the Monster, of all people, is asking me to sit down and tell him about her.
I release the doorknob, slumping down onto my knees until my forehead is resting against my door.
My mother was sick.
A decade’s worth of a carefully-built facade crumbles away as I pick through the past I have tried so hard to keep at bay, even from myself. Lucan is silent, but it’s a heavy kind of silence. The kind that tells me he’s listening.
My mother was sick, but nobody else noticed besides me.
I saw the bags under her eyes and the way she was slowly losing weight and begged her to go to the Healing Center, but she refused.
I began to wish that I was a professional healer so that I’d know how to analyze and mend her.
But then right before I turned fifteen, right before we could start requesting apprenticeships…
I scrape in a deep breath. My father died, and she was Chosen not long afterward, and I was alone.
Of course, nobody considered me parentless—not when every other fifteen-year-old left their family unit within the same month that my family left me.
As soon as my age group received our blue badges, we were whisked away to new complexes, where we roomed with each other and cycled through different apprenticeships so that the Guardians could begin to monitor our skills.
In the flurry of excitement, nobody cared that my life had changed so drastically.
Everyone’s life had changed drastically.
And just as it is today, just as it’s always been since the Guardians took over, it was improper to ask unsolicited questions.
Especially about a girl’s dead father and Chosen mother.
Your father died?
Lucan’s question is prodding, but gentle. There’s also a shiver of empathy there, and I remember how he said that his own father had died, too.
Yes, I whisper, my forehead sinking into my hands. I saw it happen. It… nobody knew why he had died, just as nobody knew my mother was sick.
I still remember the sounds my father made when he took his last breaths, though.
His face has blurred in my memory, and I can’t recall anything about his other features, either: whether he had soft or calloused hands, how tall he was, or even what shade of eyes he had.
I just remember those last few breaths. Labored.
Wheezing. Then a horrible gurgling as he crashed to his knees in the middle of our housing unit, scrabbling at his throat while my mother screamed.
He was the first person to die on my watch, and the last. Ever since the Guardians approved my request to become a healer, I’ve ensured nothing like that has ever happened in front of me again.
None of my training or hard work has helped save my mother, though.
I thought maybe the Guardians had taken pity on her, I continue in a whisper.
I thought they knew she was sick and needed a reprieve from her assigned job after watching my father die.
I thought they’d Chosen her to help her heal.
But whenever I saw her waving from those balconies, she looked like she was slowly getting worse—her movements slower, her face paler.
And then she stopped appearing at all about three months ago.
Before three months ago, I never missed a Sanctuary Sunday. I always made sure to make the trek to the Blood Moon Palace so that I could catch a glimpse of her face. In return, she never missed a Sunday, either. She always made sure to shuffle out to the balconies and raise a trembling hand.
Then, right before the last Choosing, I looked up and she was gone. I spent that entire Sunday pacing back and forth beneath the balconies, searching the Chosen Ones for a sign of her face, but she never came out. And she didn’t come out the next Sunday, either.
I was so worried she was on her deathbed somewhere in one of those palace rooms, I murmur. I thought if I was Chosen, too, I could heal her and slowly nurse her back to health.
Now, I keep seeing Belinda’s expression flit across my mind, that split-second of determination in which I could have sworn she was going to try to barge through the palace doors by force.
That same determination has grown in me.
I don’t have to be Chosen to get in, especially if I have the right key.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m too late, anyway.
That my mother is already dead.
She might still be alive, Lucan says, and a scoff catches in my throat.
I’m serious, Saskia. My ancestors didn’t get to study the vampires much during the chaos of their short battle—his tone leaks bitterness—but they did observe that a vampire’s bite didn’t kill their victims right away.
They didn’t know if death came slowly or if…
something else happened to them, but she might just be incapable of coming to the balconies for some reason. But still breathing. Still alive.
The clinical side of me tucks that information away, where I can observe it later. Every other part of me snags on the new word he just let loose, one I’ve never heard before.
Vampires?