That depends on who’s chasing me.The thought surfaced at the same time that the clouds broke and a little beam speared down to glance off something half-buried in the soil at her feet.
Somethinggold.
A necklace.
She bent to scoop it up, before she could think twice. But she already knew its shape and form, because she’d glimpsed it thousands of times: a gold necklace with a little N.
“This is Noelle’s.” Her voice sounded too loud in the silence. “She never takes it off.”
“It appears that she did.” Cal was still studying her in a way that was making her feel desperate. His face had frozen into that same hard mask that he’d worn while speaking to his father.
She looked around the garden, at the empty forest. The trees were so thick that they became a blur in the distance, and she half-expected her sister to appear from behind one of them, but in her imagination, her sister’s face was gray and corpse-pale.
Nadine sucked in her breath, staring at a pine.
“Someone’s out there,” she whispered. “In the woods. Someone’s watching us.”
“No one’s there,” he said, with a brief glance.
“Isawthem.”
“Nadine.” Cal caught her before she could tumble into the hellebore. “Jesus.”
“The chain is broken.” She wasn’t sure why she suddenly felt so terrified, or why she was holding the chain in a death grip. “God, it looks like it was torn off. Like someone—”
Attacked her.
Cal said nothing but she found herself moving. He was taking her into the house. Into the library. She was glad it was the library and not the parlor. Sitting in front of all those dead things probably would have made her heart explode. She could feel the muscles moving beneath Cal’s shirt where she was gripping him, and she should have let him go and walked on her own, but she didn’t. Instead she breathed in the comforting cedar smell of him and closed her eyes.
He set her in one of the armchairs, before crouching down in front of her. All these ancient tomes and not a single damn one of them held the answers to the questions she needed.
“Nadine,” he said, infuriatingly, taking her free hand in his larger, warmer one and rubbing it gently. “Putting yourself through all of this isn’t going to save your sister.”
She felt the point of the N dig sharply into her palm. “Then help me.”
“You don’t want my help,” Cal said. “Not at my price.”
They have a library, she thought.Libraries have books.
Her eyes drifted, as if pulled by magnets, towards the glass case where the three books bound in Paris green cloth resided. The books that, according to Cal, had belonged to his great-grandfather.
One of them was still missing.
C H A P T E R
E I G H T
? deference to violence ?
She carried a lot of guilt. That was something people didn’t tell you about survivorship and death—the guilt. The feeling that, no matter how irrational, you should have done more to save the ones you loved. That you should have just knownhowto do so in the pits of your very soul.
For years, she had let that feeling consume her after the death of her parents. It was part of the reason she was here, now. Despite her fears of travel and going to new places alone, of being found by the wrong person as she had told Cal, she had come to Argentum determined to do whatever she could for Noelle because as a child, that agency had been denied to her.
She did not want to lose herself to that helpless overwhelming sense of grief ever again.
But she could feel it coming for her. As she sat in this spacious room, clutching her sister’s necklace to her breast like a small child, staring at the poisonous green books behind their sinister locked case, she could feel its approach like a ruinous tide.
Noelle might be dead, that little voice whispered.She really might be.
