“What is it?”
“Brennan,” she says to me.
“Brennan?” Brennan who lay on her lap this morning? Who called her “Momma” and “Your Majesty”? What could she want with him that she needs me for?
Her hand finds mine, and her fingers wrap around it. “I suspect he’s been disloyal. Tous.”
I pull my hand away, not liking where this is going. “What do you mean?”
She looks down, and for a moment I see vulnerability in the press of her lashes against her cheeks, the silky sweep of her bangs. She is suddenly so unbearably feminine it’s as if she could break from a word.
“People see what they want to see when they look at me,” she says quietly. Her eyes find mine, searching. “They see money. They see sex. They see power. But not you. You see… what? Madness? Arrogance? Or maybe delusion.”
“I don’t—” I start to argue, but it’s true. I’ve been suspicious since the beginning.
“Maybe that’s what you want to see as well? Maybe that keeps you safe.” Before I can respond, she goes on. “Brennan doesn’t see someone he wants tohave—a mother, a sister, a friend. He sees someone he wants tobe. That wouldn’t be so bad, but… There are rules, Jude.”
“Rules?” The word hunches over me, dark and ominous. So many years I lived in the shadow of my mother’s rules, not understanding until it was too late.
“You don’t think people like us can just exist in this world, do you? You’re not so naive as that.”
I swallow. “No.”Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.“History is not lost on me.”
“Good,” she says. “In one another’s presence, we are safe to be as we are, to bewhowe are. But apart from that, we don’t cast. You understand? We don’t use the magic. We don’t reveal our power. Not unless we’re alone. There’s a reason your trials were at night, in secret, at desolate locations.”
“The Space Needle?” I question cautiously.
“A calculated risk,” she answers. “No one would have thought there was anything supernatural about one light going out. We never expected… Well, it blew over anyway. Something I’ll have to keep in mind.”
“Amiscalculation then.”
“Perhaps,” she admits. “In any case, I have reason to believe Brennan is not being so careful.”
“How would you know?” It’s been the same with Calvin and my job, the same with Solidago. Somehow, sheknowsthings. The poster in the tunnel screams at me again—Oracle of the Pacific. Is Cadence the one informing her? But I don’t believe she’s to blame. She seems too gentle, too star-crossed for Arla’s cunning.
“I have my ways, kitten,” she responds, a bit of her usual swagger slinking in.
For a split second, the spell is broken, and I don’t trust that she’s bringing me into her confidence. I remember being dragged through the cemetery, drugged in her club at her request, left in the darkness of the underground to find my own way back. Thatjusthappened. But then, her eyebrows pinch together, a concern that’s hard to imagine on her radiant face finding its way into my heart. “What do you want me to do?”
“He likes you,” she says, biting her bottom lip. “He trusts you. Get close to him. Spend time with him apart from the rest of us.”
“See if he’s going on a magical rampage?”
“See if he’s putting us in danger,” she says.
My mother’s pinched expression as she dyed my roots for the hundredth time drifts back to me. If only I’d known then what became apparent the night of the fire. After I’d let my real color grow out, let my mother’s distance distract her from what I was old enough to keep up with on my own. After my grandfather found me in the room she swore me to never step foot in. After he called meAureliaand reached out to stroke my hair, pet my cheek, grab my neck. Suddenly, in that moment he stood over me, a manic desire overtaking him, I understood. She was trying to keep me from resembling her, trying to keep that beast of a man from seeing my grandmother when he looked at me, trying to prevent this very moment from unfolding.
The rules are there to keep us from danger. I didn’t believe that before, but I do now. And I can’t refuse Arla.
“Here,” Arla says, handing me my phone. “You’ll need this. I put his number in for you.”
I take it numbly, surprised but also not that she cracked my passcode.Of courseshe did. “And what if he is?” I ask her. “Putting us in danger. What can we do about it?”
“I don’t know,” she says, staring so intently at the door to the chamber that I think her eyes might incinerate it. “I’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
15RARE EDITIONS
It feels like a hundred years have passed since I last stood outside Orman Used & Rare Books. Staring up at the awning, it’s hard to believe it was only days ago that I was here, eating Korean barbecue and listening to Levi talk about geocaching, arguing with him about the cemetery. Being with the Fathom—I can’t think of it now without seeing that poster in my head—makes me feel like Rip Van Winkle, like I’ve been trapped in a fae court, sleeping off my mortal years. Time passes differently with them. The hours blur. The night stretches into oblivion. The dawn becomes an afterthought.
