I can’t shake the sense that there is something lurking beneath the surface of what she’s telling me, like the basement beneath Arla’s club. “What would you be punished for?”
She shifts back in her chair. “To gaze upon the immortal is a transgression in every language. To see beyond your horizon. To reach for what you were never made or meant to hold,” she says. Her light eyes bore into me. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I—I guess,” I stammer futilely, thinking she’s too high to know what she’s saying anymore. “Thank you. This has been enlightening.” I rise to leave, less settled than I was when I arrived, and pass the book across the table.
“Keep it,” she says. “I have more.”
I tuck it and the painting under an arm, Anneli following me to the door where I turn back with one more question. “You said energy is especially attached to art.”
“I did,” she confirms. “To create is to be divine.”
I rake my teeth across my lower lip. Before Thalassa, there was one painting that dominated my life, that stood at the center of everything I wondered about and everything I feared. A painting that should have been destroyed with the house, with my family,but like me, survived. With no explanation. “What about a portrait?”
Anneli smiles easily. “Well, that depends.”
“On what?” I can’t help asking.
“Who it’s of.”
WHENILEAVEAnneli’s studio, I sit in my car watching cords of cloud drift over the sky and chewing my lip until it aches, her words nesting in me like unwanted sparrows. I should head back to work, focus on the task at hand, stay at Aaron’s tonight, and try to forget everything Brennan and Anneli said today. I’m in enough trouble as it is. But instead, I take my phone out and dial Arla’s number. She answers on the first ring.
“We need to talk,” I find the courage to tell her.
“Not like this,” she says, low. “Come to the penthouse. We’ll talk in person.”
When I pull up in front of Medusa half an hour later, Jordan is waiting for me. He comes around and opens my door. “Go on in. I’ll park it for you.”
I bite back resistance and nod, climbing out with the keys still in the ignition. The green doors of Medusa loom before me, looking for all the world like they bar the passage to another realm, but when I clasp the handle of one and yank, it swings open easily. Inside, the cognitive dissonance of being in the club by day, where all its practicalities are laid bare—vacuum cleaners and scraping gum off the underside of tables, polishing lipstick off the glassware—sets my teeth on edge. Or maybe it’s that, despite these, I can still feel it ticking below my feet—a pulse, a beat to the magic of this place, the heart of the gorgon pumping glitter through its veins.
The daytime staff ignore me as I make my way to the elevator, climb its golden pulley to the top—Arla’s penthouse. She’s got the front door waiting open, and I find her seated alone on one of the sofas, windows of sea-foam gray hemming her in. She wears along dress of embroidered black mesh that grazes her ankles, and has a pale lip, more demure than I’m used to seeing her. She looks small backlit by the fireplace and the lackluster day without the others flanking her, so much smaller than I realized.
Her head rises. “Judeth, come. Sit.” She pats the velvet cushion beside her, a haze of melancholy stirring, as if she knows already what I’m here to say. “You work fast,” she tells me once I’m seated.
I wave off the compliment if that’s even what it was. “It just worked out this way,” I say passively. I still haven’t decided how much I’m going to tell her. On the drive over, I considered all my options—tell her nothing happened, tell her something happened but not all of it, or tell her everything. None of them ended well. The alternative—to not let her know I saw Brennan at all, however preferable—is impossible. She set me to this task like a well-trained dog, and she’ll corner me sooner or later for an outcome. I’ve always been a terrible if practiced liar.
Her hand grips mine. “Our Brennan?” she asks as if we are Victorian maids and he our wayward brother with gambling debts. Something wistful is suspended between her eyes, the fragile bud of hope. I can’t tell if it’s performative or unconscious.
I pull my hand out from under hers. “It’s not that bad,” I start.
And the sly creature I know slips back across her face like a Venetian mask. “Some ringing endorsement, kitten.”
My shoulders stiffen. I’ve not told her anything yet, and somehow I’ve already told her everything. “Look, he’s harmless. Just a little…confused. It was an accident,” I try again.
“Apparently not, if you’re here.”
I groan, every word I utter making it worse. “He wants the same things you do. He wants to be safe, to feel powerful. He wants the group. This little slip… It wasn’t intentional. His judgment is impaired right now. He’s paranoid but not dangerous.”
“How ‘little’ are we talking?” she asks, the vulnerability of before tucked back into its cage.
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there for all of it.”
She cocks a perfectly coiffed eyebrow at me, and I fold. Withoutmeaning to, I have brought Aaron into the discussion even if I haven’t named him. Just like Brennan warned me not to.
“Whowas?”
I fist my hands in my lap. “We were in a bar. There was an incident involving bubbles, nothing traceable, and…”
Her brow arches even more dramatically. “And?”
