The world went mad. The newscasters and the internet fell in irrevocable love with him. Luvic stole everyone’s heart the second he dropped to his knees and kept himself from sobbing at a little girl’s feet.
Jagger howled with laughter.
“Look at him!” he shouted in admiration, banging his rocklike fist into his hand. “Look at him. Killed his siblings, and they love him for it.”
Justice stood to the side, not smiling, not laughing, not eating sweets. “They don’t actually know he killed his siblings.”
Justice wanted very badly to kill Luvic. It was clear in the way he clenched his fists and kept his gaze narrowed on the screen.
Jagger barred his serrated teeth. “Is it better to know who does the killing?”
Justice’s skin lost its color, and he very carefully turned so he wouldn’t accidently look at me.
It’d been like that since I was let out of the conjurer’s cage. Justice avoided looking at me. Avoided talking to me. Avoided me, period. I wasn’t sure if he couldn’t look at me or if he couldn’t look at what he’d done to me.
Or maybe it was that he was afraid to see himself through my eyes. If he never looked at me, he wouldn’t have to know how I felt.
Griff was the opposite. He looked at me all the time. That was almost worse. I caught him during meals, while I stalked through Hell Gate, while talking with Jagger, always looking at me. The first time he saw me, his eyes went wide, his face lost all its color, and he started to cry.
He stumbled away. Ran right from the room.
After that, whenever he looked at me, his eyes got watery and he blinked too much, trying to clear the tears away—but he never cried like he did the first time he saw me as a mine.
Poor Griff was having a hard time.
Justice was a mine.
I was a mine.
He was the last nine.
I don’t know what he saw when he looked at me. I don’t know what made him cry. I didn’t ask.
I figured it was the same thing that had made his mouth go flat and his eyes limpid when he first saw Justice as a mine.
His Justice light had gone out. The spark in his soul had fled. Every happy, hopeful Justice thing in him was gone.
I think innocent, cautious, puppylike Griff saw what I didn’t want to.
It was something I’d been avoiding for two weeks.
But as I looked in the mirror and braided my hair, preparing for tonight’s celebration and my formal initiation as a mine, I admitted to myself what Griff knew the second he saw me: the old Mari was dead.
There was no going back.
There was only going forward.
2
I gripped the glass of iced tea and pretended the condensation beading on the cup could cool the heat burning in my blood. It couldn’t. The ice had melted into tiny, ineffectual slivers, and the tea was now watered-down and lukewarm.
Rou’s kitchen was always hot, especially in the summer. The old Victorian-era cook stove and its blazing fire baked the stone walls and floors like an ancient kiln. It burped and belched heat. In the winter, it made the kitchen the only place in Hell Gate that was toasty and cozy-warm. But in the summer, especially July and August, sitting in the kitchen was like squatting over the bubbling lava-hot geysers in Yellowstone while the steam peeled the skin off your bones.
Hot.
It was worse now, though, because Rou had been cooking for days in preparation for tonight’s celebration. The oven fire was blazing full tilt, and the heat should be completely unbearable—but being near Roumelade made almost anything bearable.
I took a long drag of the tea, swallowing nearly half the glass.
