She pours a second glass of wine and glides toward me, holding it out. “Drink with me.”
I take the glass, sniffing it as she waltzes around the living room, the fine hairs at the nape of my neck twitching. Like Cadence, I can taste something foul and slippery in the air. It unleashes a stampede in my stomach, a swishing, stomping garble of nausea andemotions. Carefully, I walk to the table and set the wineglass down. “What are you celebrating?”
She moves lithely across the floor as if dancing with an invisible partner. “It’s a new day, kitten. I’ve been given a gift—one that can never be taken away.”
I narrow my eyes. Arla’s words are always fraught with meaning she expects you not to recognize until it’s too late. “What gift?”
If Brennan’s no longer here, then she can’t be siphoning his telekinetic power. So, either she’s lying, or something else is going on.
“Mm?” Her eyes roll back in her head. She’s limber, bordering on sloppy. I think she’s drunk. She must have already gone through another bottle of wine before starting on this one, maybe more.
“Whatgift, Arla?” The speakers make a ghastly noise as I bring her music to a screeching halt, killing the power to the stereo.
She turns and faces me, agitation written all over her face. “The final ingredient, kitten.”
My mouth falls open. “You translated Rudzitin’s rite.” I don’t have to ask. I know by the superior glint in her eye, the looseness of her movements.
“All that I need of it, anyway,” she says. “Which isn’t much, as it turns out. Quite boorish really. Full of tedious details that only someone without our talents would think were necessary—allZabrielthis andCursielthat. Ugh, so many names. And the geometry! Really, whoever needed so many hexagrams to do anything?” She shakes her head. “Bindings, as it turns out, are deceptively simple. They all follow the same recipe, more or less. Even one of this magnitude. Rudzitin just missed a critical ingredient in his pigment. Re-create it therightway, and I can simply trace over what’s already written.”
“Bindings?” I could have guessed as much—had, really. The Fathom is bound to her well, her room, her condition. But hearing the word brings the candle I pulled from my grandmother’s fireplace flickering to mind—i-n-d.As inbind. I was a fool not tosee it sooner. It was never a love spell. It was a binding, the lashing of a heartless man to her side.Forever. But what was my grandmother doing all those years later? Was she, like Arla, reenacting her first rite, attempting to make the spell hold, the man stay? Did she doom us all time and time again when she could have simply let him go?
“What is it?” I ask, my voice giving a little. I clear my throat. “The final ingredient.”
“An eye for an eye, kitten,” she says, laughing. “One answer for another.” She takes a large gulp of wine. “What was he like, your father?”
“Is that your question?” I’m not sure where she’s leading me, but it’s clearly not somewhere I expected.
She frowns. “No. Mine was a ballbuster who thought of nothing but money. Every man in our county feared him. He was petty and vengeful and focused like a laser. Impossible to please as it turns out.”
I gathered enough from Brennan to assume as much, and I don’t want her to realize I know about what happened to him. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She narrows her eyes at me. “Are you? Don’t answer that. That’s not my question either.” Walking over to a console, she sets her wineglass down. “Here’s my question: Did you do it?”
“Do what?” She can’t mean what I think she means.
“We’re more alike than you might imagine, you and I. We share something the rest of them don’t. Do you know what that is?”
Murder,the voice whispers inside me.
“The stain of powerful men,” she answers herself. “It’s like a birthmark across your soul. It changes who you become.” She looks down, her face stricken with emotion I’m not used to seeing on it. When she meets my eyes again, the steel is back, holding her together. “I won’t ever be that weak again.”
Her insistence on keeping the Fathom is making a jaded kind of sense. I can understand the desire to be invulnerable. But I know it’s folly.
“So,” she says, regrouping, “I’ll ask you again. Did you do it? Did you kill your grandfather, your mother, all those other people?”
“Not on purpose,” I say quietly. I remind myself what Levi said about my grandfather, his responsibility for what happened. I spread it over my guilt like medicine.
She almost looks pleased. “Sure, kitten,” she says. “Sure.”
“Your turn,” I say. “What’s the final ingredient?”
Arla walks to the table, pours herself more wine, and crosses one arm over her midsection. “Blood.”
The dead snake dropping to the vanity, the red smear etched into the candle. This I should have known. “Blood.” Brennan and Aaron come to mind and my heart sickens inside me.
“Don’t go getting any ideas though. You haven’t asked therightquestion. You haven’t asked whatkindof blood. Turns out there are four types of blood when it comes to magic. Binding spells require a specific one. You have to know it to be successful.”
“You mean like O positive or B negative, that type?” What if this could be part of how I free the Fathom? Maybe it calls for the same things as the binding but in reverse, a way of canceling out the energy of what was done before.
