Her forehead creases. “What sort of question is that?”
“The I-want-to-know-where-it-all-started kind,” I snap.
“Galeia was six months pregnant.” Halle’s voice conveys her bewilderment. “Obviously, you ended up there because she was taken there.”
Okay, so at least the timing of her imprisonment was accurate.
“What do you know of her capture?”
“That’s a second question,” she hisses up at me.
“If you insist.” I flick my claws across her face, leaving four little cuts.
“Fine!” she screams. “Cuts are not required. Ask your questions and I’ll answer them.”
“What happened before I was born? Tell me everything you know.”
“TheBook of Dark Magichappened,” she spits. “As soon as Taiven read the book, he changed. Until then, he was utterly in love with Galeia. Excited to be a father. But after he read it, he may as well have died right in front of her.”
That’s how Sosia described it to me: that Taiven died before her eyes.
Halle’s face is paling, but I don’t think it’s because of my hold on her. “I helped Galeia disappear. I promised her we would raise you together. I would keep you both safe. We made it as far as Philadelphia, but I never dreamed that was the worst place we could go. She went to the bathroom in a café and didn’t come back out.” Halle sucks in a breath. “I got worried and went in after her, and the air reeked of angel. That fucking pious stench. I searched?—”
Her voice chokes and she swallows. “I searched everywhere and when I found no trace of her, I stalked every angel who lived in that city, hoping to hear or see something.Anything. And then, finally, there was a whisper about the veil. Aprisonin the veil. That’s when I knew you were both lost.”
Halle shakes her head, her auburn hair catching and splaying across the pavement. “I never should have taken my eyes off her. I should have gone into that fucking bathroom stall with her.”
“And then?”
Her brow furrows. “What do you meanand then? I descended into darkness. Nothing was the same without her.”
“You seem so certain she’s dead. YetIescaped. Surely, she could have, too. Why have you not wondered where she is?”
Her eyes widen. “Why would you ask such a thing?”
“Just answer the question!”
Halle’s lips twist. “Because the pregnancy weakened her. She didn’t want anyone else to know, but she told me her mechanical heart wasn’t as strong as it once was.”
My ears prick at the mention of her heart—mechanical, just like Ryuji said.
“She was concerned about the amount of energy you were taking from her,” Halle continues. “She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to carry you to term. When she was snatched, she was already weak! She would never have survived imprisonment. Not all these years.” Halle snarls up at me. “But surely you know that already.”
Before I can respond, Halle’s eyes suddenly widen again. “Unless you were separated after you were born?”
And with that, she allows me to speak a truth. “Yes,” I say. “We were separated.”
“Dark saints, you don’t know what happened to her, then?” She stumbles over her words. “Did you even know about her heart?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what really happened to her.”
A sense of wariness has filled me at the way Halle described Galeia’s heart as failing. I believed that the woman in the cell wasn’t Galeia because she was supposedly near-immortal. But if her heart was weakened… could she have died?
But no. I remind myself: The keeper didn’t tether her magic. If she’d died, even with a weakened heart, he would have remembered it.
“If you wanted answers,” I say bitterly, “I don’t have them.”
“Well, you must be able to tell me some things.” She sounds more hesitant than before. “How did you get out?”
