“Alara, please—you don’t want that. Adriel is lying to you. He’s just using you to get back at his father.”
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“That man isnothis father,” she growls, her face hardening to stone. “He’s a coward who wanted his son dead but was too weak to do the killing; he left him to rot on the Church’s doorstep so that the clerics would do it for him, murder Adriel when they found out about his power. But they didn’t find out—just like they didn’t find out about mine. They didn’t look at us too closely in the orphanage, butIsaw him,Ifelt the power in him, andIkept him safe.Iam his family—not that Orange waste of bones.”
“Then why isn’t he trying to keepyousafe?” I ask, coming at her from a different angle. “If he loves you as much as you love him, then why would he poison the Gray? Why would he take away your gift?”
“Of course you wouldn’t understand—you still call it agift.” With another charm, Alara compels her acolytes to pick a table and gets to work. “Ourgiftsare such a perversion that even the shadows want them gone. Why else do you think they try to shatter us?” The air fills with a fresh chorus of pain as she begins the nasty business of shoving needles into arms. “Once we’re free of them, we’ll no longer have to rely on an In-Between. The shadows will welcome us home.”
So that’s the lie Adriel’s been feeding her, then, the way he’s chosen to twist the dogma.
“That’s not true, Alara—it’s just not true,” I say, though I fear I’m arguing with a lost cause. “We can’t live without magic. If you do this, you’ll die. We all will—the Gray, too. Tell her, Chase—tell her what happens when you take magic from a Hue—”
“Enough!” Alara doesn’t want to hear it; she’d much rather shut me up with an Orange crystal and a magical noose.
“Let him go!” Cemmy yells, but another crystal silences her, as well, and the torrent of expletives Chase begins to spew.
“And why should I do that?” Alara only tightens her grip on my air. “If we’re all going to die anyway, then what difference does it make if he chokes to death? Or if your full-blooded friend here dies a little early?”
I’m granted a modicum of relief as she turns her attention to Saleen.
“You wouldn’t happen to be a Red, would you?” She fishes out a Violet crystal and asks the magic to check. “Oh, good. I was avoiding your prickly kind until last; you’ll save me a trip upstairs.”
“What—?No.” The blood preemptively leaves Saleen. “No, you can’t,please!” Her feet start moving of their own accord, propelling her towards one of the two remaining tables. “Please, I’m not a Red.I’m not a Red. Cemmy—Chase—help me!”
But she is a Red, and so she knows, better than anyone, that compulsion is the hardest spell to break, that while we remain in Adriel’s void, Alara’s crystals will ensure that all we can do is watch, helplessly, as a needle is shoved mercilessly into her flesh. As her life begins to drain into a screaming initiate.
And more than anything else, it’s the satisfaction grinning Alara from ear to ear that tells me there’ll be no changing her mind or Saleen’s fate.
She believes Adriel’s truth. Unerringly. With her whole entire chest.
She’s going to destroy the Gray for it.
There really is nothing more intractable than faith.
CHAPTER 32
RAYA
Adriel doesn’t subdue us with magic, it’s the shadows he uses to suspend us high above the ruined tower, Akari pinned beside me, our colors deadened to hollow silence.
“Like old friends, we meet again, full-bloods,” he says, though there’s nothing friendly about the silk in his voice or the chill in his smile, the way he’s appraising us like a pair of pinioned butterflies, as if he’d like to rip our wings off one by one. “But I’m afraid that this time, there’s nowhere for you to run—isn’t that right, Father?” That word is curdled milk on his tongue. “Why don’t you tell our guests what’ll happen if they try?”
A groan of agony escapes the councilman as his own shadowy bonds splay his arms out wide, bowing his body to the point of collapse.
“I know what he did to you, Adriel,” I say in a bid to talk him down. “I know that he threw you away and that the pain of it drove your mother to suicide.”
“Ah, so you’re familiar with our history.” Adriel seems entirely unfazed by my knowledge of his past. “How the great Lars Denata was so ashamed to learn he’d sired a void that he gave away the child his wife so desperately wanted. For what a colossal embarrassment it would have been for him had the Council found out, how it would have derailed his lofty ambitions. Would you like to tell them why, Father? I’m sure they’d love to know the reason they’ll be losing their magic.”
“You are an abomination,” Denata spits through the pain, his precarious position doing nothing to dull the hate in his eyes. “I was merciful, considering what you are. The edicts demanded I kill you the second you failed to register a color. But I didn’t. I gave you a chance.”
“You gave me to a Church that despised my power more than you did!” Adriel growls. “You hoped that they would do the killing for you, but instead, they taught me exactly how to claim my birthright. If only you knew the depth of the records they keep, Father, how much information the Church has squirreled away in its archives. So maybe I should be thanking you, after all.” With a curl of his fingers, Adriel lowers the councilman so that they’re nose to nose and fear to anger. “I might have never learned to use my power if you hadn’t placed me with them. I might have never learned just how afraid your Council is of voids.”
“That’s because you’re a threat.” Denata’s face puckers as his bonds give another savagely hard tug. It’s almost impressive, actually, how even trapped and tortured, he sticks so adamantly to the party line. “You don’t belong in the Gray.”
“You’d like to believe that, wouldn’t you?” Around us, the shadows start swirling faster, roaring louder, as if responding to Adriel’s fury in kind. “You’d like to believe that you’re superior on account of your magic, when the truth is, all magic is the result of the Gray being stripped into its constituent parts. Perverted. It’s your kind that’s the real threat, Father; magic is the cancer that needs to be stamped out.”
Well, now, he sounds exactly like Denata did at Ezzo’s trial, when he declared the same to be true of Hues.
