My hands slide off Vessa, sidestepping her. “Then forgive me if I refuse to stand aside and watch as this world bleeds you dry.”
Vessa
With so much on everyone’s plates handling the fallout from the heated banquet and preparing for my induction, Axe appoints me to pursue Maurleen’s disappearance. It’s irrepressible—the weight of what, in just six days, I am to be responsible for in this new leadership role. How much I will have to learn. And quickly, at that. For now, I try to focus on what is most imperative.
I crack open a fresh notebook, comb through the archives of my memories, and pour out every passage I can remember. To my frustration, my recollections of the visions are cloudy, mostly just fleeting depictions of the nightmarish ways other oracles had perished, Wyatt on harrowing missions to pursue rogues, and moments of me in the spotlight, living out my greatest dream. Nothing that might indicate what she’s planning now.
But I was never privy to all of Maurleen’s visions to begin with. Besides, it’s impossible to decipher when the other glimpses into the future will occur.
Drumming my fingers along her farewell letter, I stare down the snowflake inked on the bottom of the page. My finger traces along each point. That’s when it jumps at me. The message it conveys. It isn’t the intricate design I should be dwelling on. It’s the cold. Ice.
Before her death, Lyndi told me that the Underworld’s portal shifts once every thousand years, to mark another millennia of the Blood Master’s suffering. It is said to resurface in a place that mirrors its true landscape below. If the Circle’s portal is lost underwater, Maurleen must know where the next portal to Somnium will emerge. If it hasn’t already.
The intuition is enough to satisfy Jabir, who works alongside me with a list of cross references between Axe’s private lycanclients and the names of those he put in prison, searching for any kind of connection that could have incited active rogues to become vampire mercenaries. He and Axe believe that they’re bound to find a lead in the intersecting databases.
I don’t doubt that Maurleen is determined to be the first to find the portal. But that wouldn’t spook her enough to torch her diary. There’s only one reason she would flee without warning. She saw something far more disturbing.
But why not tell me?
Axe’s sistergrimaces as she clutches a handful of soggy brown leaves. The cart between us is packed full of rusted hand tools and buckets of spent vegetation.
As we work to restore the greenhouse back to its former glory, Demi lectures me on growing plants not just for leisure, but for sustenance. How planting deepens the spiritual connection with nature. I find myself leaning in close to listen, like one of the succulents potted against the window, bending towards its source of light.
Outside, Nell unveils a large statue in the quad. She and the schoolteachers have the children crafting backdrops for my induction ceremony. Cutouts of the moon and stars are pasted on glittering, midnight blue cardboard. One adorable student even attempts what appears to be a luna moth, with fuzzy pipe cleaner antennae. A group of teenagers hollers in their direction as a disc sails by, nearly colliding with the display. As they chase it down, Nell hollers loud enough to make their shaggy hair stand on end.
The two of us chuckle. A knowing smile pulls on Demi’s lips. “My mother used to scold us just like that. Especially Axe and the older boys. Always trying to prove himself.”
“You know, for as long as I’ve been staying here, no one has really spoken of your mother. What was she like?”
Demi sets down her shears and hooks a golden lock behind her ear. “She was cherished by everyone, especially the children. On the battlefield, she was a master spear wielder, as was Tesni’s mother. When she wasn’t fighting or reading or entertaining the young ones, she would spend hours in prayer, mumbling to that statue. Occasionally, I would join her. There were times when I often wondered if the goddess ever whispered back.”
I nod, noting how the two women who brought us into this world could not be any more different. But the haunting feeling that festers in us daughters—the ache for our mothers taken from us too soon—that, undoubtedly binds us.
When the herd of boys scatters, I ogle at the alabaster figure. A maiden donning robes and a beaded headdress holds a crescent in one hand and a long, dangling ribbon in the other. At her feet rest two wolves.
Demi gulps loud enough for me to hear. “I haven’t seen that shrine in decades.”
“Your goddess, does she have a name?”
She shakes her head. “Her name was lost to the ages. It’s been said that was the price she paid for a place among the other gods.”
“Not the price for coercing a human to take her own life?”
Demi frowns. “The bride’s death was not in vain. Had she completed the marriage ritual, the demons of Somnium would’ve swarmed our realm. Instead of giving her blood for that purpose, she offered it to the gods, allowing Terris and the Luna goddess to close the portal indefinitely and to imbue theunsealing spell into a talisman. Of course, that was after the goddesses bottled up Clethra’s power and hurled it back to hell.”
A talisman? Could she mean the necklace Lyndi passed onto Maurleen?
Demi hands me a damp rag, which I take and press against the dusty windowpane. “This curse . . . I still don’t understand why she chose me. After thousands of years and countless other women in my lineage.Me.Why?”
Her eyes glimmer as she looks upon me. “Why not you, Vessa?”
Dominik’s confrontation from the other night still weighs heavily on me. Why offer to give me a way out just as I’ve made my choice? Why, unless he truly believes I have no right to be a part of this family?
I turn to Demi with a heavy heart. “Is it selfish to want this, knowing I very well could endanger your lives? Your happiness?”
Slipping off her gloves, she takes my hands. I gaze into jade eyes, scanning for any detection of resentment.
“Did you ever consider that maybe the Luna Goddess gave this fate to you, not out of spite, but because she knew that you are the only one strong enough to defy it?”
