“He likes it,” Delphine had flippantly replied.
That should have been the end of it, but something sparked in Celeste that wouldn’t allow for that. “You’rehurtinghim. No one likes being hurt like that.”
For perhaps the first time, Celeste’s words had managed to stop Delphine short. The woman turned, lip curled in both amusement and disgust. “How in the Abyss would you know?”
Celeste stood under Delphine’s disdain, and she did the only thing she knew to do: she shrank. Tugging in her shoulders and dipping her head would perhaps save her from the worst vitriol, and even if she could muster a response, it would be shorn into ribbons.
“You,” Delphine had gone on, voice falling low as her shadow prowled closer, “have no place tellingmewhat to do. I’ve sacrificed more than you could possibly know to give you everything you have, and you’ve done nothing in return but be constantly incompetent and ungrateful. You should be ashamed of how little you understand after all this time. The fact I tow you around with me everywhere, provide for you, protect you from the harshness of a realm thathatesus, is as much a burden as it is an embarrassment, and yet I endure it all for mysister.”
Celeste remembered only cowering, arcana crackling at the edges of her presence, prepared to be struck if she dared retort.
But then Delphine let out a sharp laugh, waved a threatening but flippant hand through the air, and turned away. “But how can I really be upset? No man has ever been infatuated with you, and I doubt they ever will be, so how could you possibly understand?”
Perhaps it had been that dig, or perhaps it had been Celeste’s embarrassing affection for her older sister’s boyfriend, or perhaps just a growing desire todo the right thing, but she had made her decision then. That night, she secretly severed Delphine’s enchantments on Damien, and he finally escaped the temple after moons of imprisonment and torture. Celeste knew from experience that escaping abduction did not inspire a desire to return to it, and there was no amount of pathetic that she could play at to convince Damien to help her now, even if she told him she’d been the reason he was finally freed.
She had taken too long to help him, and that was unsettling. It was only that it had been nice to have someone around who was marginally kind to her, even if it was in a piteous way. Damien, at the very least, always said thank you when she brought him the meals Delphine allowed, and he murmured on occasion that Celeste didn’t deserve being berated for the calamities she caused.
But Celeste was not Delphine. She did not bind people up and force them to stay under proclamations of love.
Love.
She shook her head. Celeste hadn’t actually been in love with Damien. In fact, she’d probably never really beeninlove ever, but…
Celeste flipped through the rest of Delphine’s journal. There were a few pages filled with ingredient lists and some vague theorizing about imp blood. Another had measurements for the depth of the lake south of Briarwyke, and there was a page dedicated to listing metals and their usefulness in potentially piercing a divine shield, but her written words stopped there. She checked again, and then once more, and finally a third time so frantically that the pages crumpled and tore under her frenzied fingers.
How could there benothingelse? No quickly scribbled note? Not even a private entry? Delphine had written every word contained in that book, she’d even sketched out half of a seemingly useless map of tunnels, and intentionally left the journal for Celeste, but none of those words were reallyforher,toher. Celeste had written Delphine numerous letters since she’d left, full of apologies and begging for forgiveness, but had never heard back, and yet she had always hoped…
“You were my sister,” she said quietly to the emptiness of the pages. “You said that mattered. That it was important.”
“Sister?”
Celeste swung around, hair nearly catching in the black flame. She hugged the journal to her chest as if it could protect her with its thickness of blank pages and gaped wide-eyed at the sepulcher. That hadnotbeen Delphine’s voice, but no one else had ever called her that.
“Is it really you?”
Across the chamber, in one of the coffin nooks, sat a jar. Well, an urn, she had thought, meant for storing remains. But remains didn’t speak.
“Youarethe sister,” the voice said, and there was a whisper of an unseen smile in it. “I have heard so much about you.”
Celeste cocked her head. “How do you…who would mention me?”
“Yoursister, of course.” It was the jar speaking, Celeste was sure now. It should have been spooky, a talking urn, but she was rather comfortable around spooky things what with being one herself.
“She’s dead now.” The words were pulled out of her, blunt and odd as was often her way, and when they left her mouth, the heft of them almost made her knees buckle.
“I know. I felt it when she died, losing my chance at freedom along with her life. I am sorry for your loss. Our loss.” The voice sounded sincere. It was smooth and deep, rumbling up a throat it did not have. “But I am not sorry she is gone.”
Eyes tracked on the urn, Celeste slipped the journal back into one of the nooks and crept around the slab in the chamber’s center. She didn’t want to talk about Delphine anymore. “Who are you?”
“A prisoner of your sister’s.”
Celeste swallowed, supposing it was impossible to avoid the corpse upstairs. “Oh, sorry about that.”
The urn was tucked only a foot or so into the nook at eye level. It had looked ordinary from afar, but up close there was arcana pulsing about the rim where the lid met the container.
“She would speak to me sometimes.” The urn’s voice—or rather, the voice of the thing inside the urn—grew heavier as she crept closer. “She said some horrible things.”
“Yeah, that sounds like her.” Celeste frowned, hesitating, but she couldn’t help herself. “Were they…were they about me?”
