Oh, the gentle way she pressed her palm to his face…
I remember what the keeper said to me right after I read the book… When I’d screamed at him that my mother was alive and free and she could have come back for me.
He told me it wasn’t that simple.
He never once told me that her heart had been failing because of me.
“The keeper did what he was supposed to do,” I say, speaking around the tightness of my throat. “He took her heart so the metal it was made of couldn’t be misused. He had no choice. That metal was infused with Blacksmith magic. It had to be contained. Just like Ryuji said. All of it gathered up and?—”
“Take the crown.”
It’s such a sudden impulse coming from outside of me that I freeze.
Then, very slowly, I draw back the fur covering the keeper’s chest, exposing his left hand where it rests against his heart.
That oh-so-small ring he wears on his finger.
It gleams at me, drawing me in as it always does.
My voice is cold with fear now. “Ryuji said that all of the dark metal, except for my mother’s heart, was destroyed. He was talking about the hammers of the most powerful Blacksmiths, wasn’t he?”
I pin Halle with a stare, but she doesn’t answer me.
Her form flickers between dead and living, her face rippling between fully charred and that of a woman who has unwanted wisdom.
“Metal like that…” I continue. “Metal of the kind that was used to create my mother’s heart. How could it ever be destroyed? All you could do is contain it. Put it somewhere nobody can reach it.”
What better place to hide dark metal than on the head of the keeper in a realm from which he should never have been able to escape?
“Then I came along,” I say. “I gave the keeper the power in my heart in exchange for vengeance, unwittingly bringing that metal out into the world. Unwittingly bringing into the world the power I absorbed, and now…”
Friction grows in the air around me.
My pack is suddenly tense. Halle is like a stone. Jonah has taken a step closer.
“Temptation,” I say, repeating what the keeper said to me. “Take the crown.”
I reach for the keeper’s hand, slowly extending the claws of my left hand at the same time.
Take the crown that isn’t a crown.
All of its power calls to me, all of the vengeance that the keeper promised me, right at the tip of my fingers.
A hammer waiting to be claimed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
How badly I want to take it.
How badly I was drawn to this crown when I first saw it on the keeper’s head in that black-marbled place that he said belonged in a throne room.
But…
I didn’t.
I didn’ttake.
When I met the keeper for the first time, instead of wresting the power from him, Igave.
