“Does he know who the Horned Gods were that came for her that night?”
Shaking his head, locks of hair swayed across his forehead. “Apart from Lyressa, of course, he claims neither he nor Lyressa knows the identities of the other two that accompanied her.”
“Do you believe him? He could be lying.”
He gave it some thought, sucking at his teeth. “I do. For some reason, he’s rather fond of my mother.”
“He is?”
It surprised me Master Sirro was charmed by the Crowthers’ mother, and a small smile lit my mouth, only to fade away when Graysen said, “There are circles within circles inside the world of Horned Gods. Many of them are unknown to us as they are to them as well. Sirro doesn’t know who the fuck took her.”
My empty glass made a gentle chinking sound against the granite counter when I placed it down before wandering over to the threshold of the room. I stood in the open archway, letting my skin bask in the dying rays of the sun, and the gentle sundown breeze tease my damp hair, but mostly I drank in the air, trying to breathe through the despondency that had writhed around my chest and coiled tight.
Graysen was busy sorting through the neatly stacked t-shirts and arranging them into color order and then shade order, intent on the task, too intent. Perhaps he too needed to work through the feelings this conversation was stirring between us. “Did you try to get an invite to the last Witches Ball?” Surely, they tried seven years ago.
His shoulders stiffened as he glanced upward, meeting my gaze. “We did.”
“You found someone of interest as your offering?”
He nodded, pausing in his work, now wary.
“Who did you find?”
“Someone.”
I frowned. He was being deliberately vague. I turned around to face him fully. “What happened?”
“We didn’t get an invitation.”
I knew it, deep in my bones, I knew it. “You’re lying.”
His jaw sawed. “We faltered last minute. We couldn’t do it.”
My lips pinched into a thin, mean line as I crossed my arms over my chest. Yet, they could with me.
“Soon after, we realized who we’d found wouldn’t have gotten us an invitation anyway.” He placed a shirt on the growing, folded pile and drew away from the bed, pacing closer to where I stood. “We can only hunt our own kind to tempt the Witches. Seventh son of a seventh son, all that kind of bullshit. Murderers, easy enough to find, and we collect them anyway for their tithes and sacrifices. Broken Shards, rare as fuck, but still not of interest.”
“Why do you think they’d want me?”
“The Witches don’t extend invitations to the Houses. They don’t want us there. None have been invited during the last seven hundred years. Everyone tries. Every one of us hunts mortals. And we did too. Until we unearthed something.” He stood next to the wooden dining table and loosely gripped the back of a chair, his brows slanting over eyes that had gone dark with thought as if he was mulling over how to tell me. The sound of his fingertips drumming against the wood was loud in the room, and it matched my racing heart as I waited with bated breath, wondering what he was going to reveal.
“To an extent, we’d be right,” he said carefully, slowly. “They do want humans… Humans with something curious about them. But the Witches, with their whims and fancies, are more intrigued withus.”
“What do you mean?”
“We found two references to invitations hidden amongst the rambling of old tomes, and both cases shared one similarity.Their offering belonged to one of the Upper Ranks. They were one ofus.”
Us—the word clanged through me.
“There was a House, long ago, that received an invitation. Their offering was a child, four years old, a daughter of a House.”
My stomach roiled with nausea. “A child?”
“Yes.” He quickly added, perhaps knowing I was about to ask which family. “Upper House Buchanan. A century later, it was annihilated in a House War.” He tapped his fingers against the wooden chair. “The girl’s mother was the House’s true heir, and she died while giving birth to a daughter with flawless black hair and skin as white as fresh snow, eyes as blue as a fall sky without a single fleck of another color to mar them. Her father locked her away behind a wall of adamere with a wet nurse. Neither sunlight nor moonlight touched her skin. And when she was four years old, he offered her up to gain an invite to the Witches Ball. Though we think there was interest in her unique qualities, we’re hedging our bets the Witches were tempted purely by the betrayal.”
My stomach sank. “Betrayal?”
He prowled closer to stop flush in front of me. His height towered over mine. He stared down at me with something close to pity shining in the depths of his eyes. “It’s an interesting quality, especially coming from the Houses there to serve their needs. I suspect the Witches are simply intrigued by the betrayal by one of our own kind. Innocence stolen and used by another.”
