He blinked, somewhat confused by my question. But I got the feeling it wasn’t the question he was startled by—it was me asking.
He sighed, tapping ash from the blunt into the ashtray balanced on the arm of his chair. “I spent a good while picking apart that day trying to figure out if anything out of the ordinary had happened beforehand… I was with Caidan in the training pits with our Weapons Master getting the shit kicked out of me. I wouldn’t know if my pain was her pain.”
“Do you have any idea if she was going to meet up with someone in the city?”
“Why do you want to know?”
I wasn’t ready to share what I was beginning to suspect about my mother, that she had a secret life in Ascendria, one that involved a Horned God. Nor the suspicion she’d met with someone from another House.
It could be something, or it could be nothing.
My silence drew a response from him. Annoyance flecked his voice. “I don’t know. The last time I saw her was over breakfast, and she was wearing one of her sundresses, like she does when she spends the day running errands for the staff.”
I frowned. What did that even mean? When we were kids, it was something adults said to us all the time—I’m off to run errands.
My brother continued speaking. “Maybe she was off wandering around the garden centers like she always did. And if not that, she could have been walking the lakeside trails. Maybe she did end up having lunch with Marissa. I don’t know… She probably wanted some alone time.”
Mom often went to the city with one of us, and sometimes Aunt Valarie would go too, but there was one day a week she’d go alone. Our aunt looked after Ferne, and Dad always hadbusiness to attend to with the Novaks, and the rest of us had lessons with our governess or Weapons Master.
Except for Jett, who was glued to her hip, my siblings and I grew bored with the hours she spent endlessly at the nurseries fussing over new plants and flowers. Sometimes she’d stroll around the lake, talking to the gardeners and hearing about their landscaping designs, the changes they implemented every season, the shifting of plantings, and ways to sculpt space with greenery. So we were quite happy to stay at home during those visits to Ascendria.
The daybeforeeverythinghappened, she’d tripped over Caidan’s skateboard, fallen down the grand staircase and fractured her back. Lying on the floor recovering, she tried to get my shy aunt to agree to come along with her to the city the following day. She hadn’t arranged to see Marissa. I remembered that. So, on the day she’d been abducted, it seemed to be a genuine visit to Ascendria for herself.
Yet…
That day in question still didn’t add up.
It was there.
Hidden in my brain.
She’d been up to something, orperhapsit had come upon her unexpectedly.
What I learned from the memory long buried inside my head, resurfacing from its murky depths, was that I’d been five years old when my mother had visited a Horned God. And the golden threads of magic wavering in my recollection meant she had healed someone.
First, you need my help. I came as fast as I could, Florin.
“There was something that day,” Jett said slowly. He had his head tipped back on the armchair, staring deeply up at the glass-stained mural, his brow creased in reflective thought. His fingers rapped a beat on the armrest. “I dunno… I was so hot and sweatyand tired from duking it out with Caidan in the training pit. After lunch, I passed out for a few hours.” He took a hit from the blunt, letting the smoke wisp from his mouth like mist. “You ever fall in your dreams? Like that rushing feeling of physically falling and you jolt suddenly awake?”
“Yeah.”
“The way I woke up was like that. But it wasn’t falling… It was this swift electric shock that went through me, like lightning, I suppose, stuttering my heart. I’d put it down to Caidan and his asshole roundhouse move, repeatedly slamming me in the chest with his kick.” His eyes narrowed. “Butnow…thinking about it, it was like a faint echo of what it’s like when Mom’s tortured with fire, or ice shreds her skin, or her bones are stretched and quaking.”
My mouth went bone-dry.
Jett didn’t speak very often about what was happening to Mom. He kept the specific pain she was enduring at any given point in time to himself.
He lowered his gaze, met my horrified one, and startled. Swallowing thickly, he realized he’d said too much.
“And today?” I asked quietly, my pulse racing.
There had been beads of sweat on his brow in the Great Hall this afternoon, and his hand had been trembling. Which meant our mother hadn’t been okay.
His jaw tightened as his gaze swept downward to his fingers holding the blunt, streams of white vapor coiling through the air. There was a strain in his voice when he replied. “It’s brief moments, nothing big or overwhelming, a dull ache if you will. Like she’s tired and recovering from…” He glanced toward the fire, and his eyes blazed with hatred as he stared at the flames licking its stone belly. He suddenly rose from the armchair. Flossie jumped to the floor and scurried beneath the table. Histone was sharp and cold as he stalked past. “She’s alive. That’s all that matters.”
He yanked the library door open and slammed it shut behind him.
Amber light stretched and flickered over the pocked and blackened hearth where I stood, rolling everything around in my head. Had Jett picked up on something that had happened to Mom while she was in Ascendria? She seemed fine when she arrived at the Novaks’ to escort me home. I remained there for a while longer, finishing the whiskey, wondering how Mom was, how I was going to uncover what she’d been up to in Ascendria, what the fuck Sirro was up to with this Yezekael… When a sensation, irritated and dry-scaled, slithered down my spine.
