Rou dropped a plate of butter cookies onto the long, scarred wooden kitchen table and pushed them toward me, giving me a motherly smile.
She was deeply wrinkled. Centuries-old and faded. Jagger called her his “worn-out wishbone.” Her beauty was a distant, diamond-bright memory.
It’d been weeks since she nearly died and evaporated into a cloud of steam. Although she’d condensed and reformed, she was still watery-translucent, like the edges of a spring puddle leaking into mud and grass. Her hair, once river-brown, was now the gray of water reflecting rain clouds. Her skin, once the color of silt and gravel at the bottom of the river, was now as pale as fragmented sandstone. All the same, she was still Roumelade and the only one in all of Hell Gate who treated me the same as she ever had.
There was comfort in her pragmatism and practicality. She accepted cruelty and kindness in equal measure and never bothered to see anyone as anything but what they were.
Her only failing, I suppose, was loving Jagger even after he’d proven his indifference to her.
But just like the rest of us, she’d made a bargain. And being Rou, she’d made the best of it. I can’t say I’m not glad. She was a good mother to all us wards.
“Eat them all,” she said, tapping the plate. “If you’re going to die tonight, you’ll at least die with cookies in your stomach.”
I nodded. If I’d been my old self, I would’ve smiled. But tilting my lips up and feeling the skin stretch still felt unnatural and odd. So, instead of smiling, I grabbed a cookie and ate it in one bite.
Delicious.
It was made with fresh butter and rosemary from Rou’s rooftop garden. It crumbled then melted in my mouth.
Once I’d swallowed, I said, “Thanks,” and grabbed another.
If Griff were in the kitchen, he would’ve said, “Die? Tonight? Aww, Rou, don’t say that.”
And then Rou would’ve said, “Why not? Not saying it doesn’t make it less true. It’s more likely Mari will die her final death than live. She loves dancing with death, doesn’t she? Have a cookie.”
And then Justice, if he were there too, would’ve said, “Mari won’t die. She’s the best lockpick the world has ever seen.”
Then Rou would’ve flicked his ear, and . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. None of that happened, because since I became a mine, Griff and Justice had avoided me and the kitchen.
The kitchen was changed.
There were black scorch marks on the walls from when Luvic had set Hell Gate on fire. They reached up the stone and tile like the inky, seeking tentacles of a colossal squid. When Rou set to scrubbing the char and ash away, Jagger told her to leave it. He liked the reminder of Luvic and the Bard’s vengeance.
Jagger was strange like that. Even though Luvic’s fire had killed twenty-five of Jagger’s people and had nearly killed Rou, it didn’t upset him. Instead, it gave him a keen, knife-edged pleasure that lit his flat gray eyes every time he walked into the hot kitchen. I suppose it was because, being a Leggerock, life didn’t have meaning to Jagger. A rock doesn’t care when a row of ants is crushed on its surface. It doesn’t notice when a worm crawls over its stone and shrivels in the too-hot sun. Why would a rock care about a life extinguished?
But Luvic retaliating? That told Jagger the conjurers found him worthy of attention. It told him they were willing to play a game with him. They were ready to engage. So twenty-five creatures dead was a tiny admittance fee he didn’t think about at all.
How many centuries had he waited for this opportunity? Too many. The scorch marks on the kitchen walls were the scratched notches marking the days, and now that he’d caught the conjurers’ attention, he was almost gleeful.
I couldn’t feel the glee in him—being a mine didn’t give me access to his emotions—but I could see it in his gray-black eyes. Growing up with a monster gave me an almost supernatural ability to read even the most minute changes in Jagger’s expression and his body language. I think psychologists call it “hypervigilance.” I call it “staying alive.”
While I couldn’t read Jagger’s emotions—not like I could read Finn’s when we were connected by the callback rings—I did have other new abilities and changes.
First, even outside the kitchen and the late-July heat, I was always hot. Jagger’s blood burned through my own and replaced my essence, so I felt a constant poisonous heat burning through my veins.
Second, my will and Jagger’s were now one and the same.
Let me explain. Do you know anything about trees? For just a minute, think of Jagger like a tree.
As a nine, I’d felt the seed of Jagger inside of me. I’d sworn an oath to him by the blood of my hand on my dying breath. With that oath, he’d yanked out a bit of my soul and replaced it with a seed of himself. But as a mine, that ratio was swapped. Before, he was the seed, and I was the tree. Now, he was the tree, and I was a tiny, dormant seed hiding beneath the dirt.
I’d always thought as a mine, his will would subsume my own. I was wrong. It was more like . . . Do you know anything about trees? I already used the oak analogy, but have you met any forest spirits? Any tree spirits?
New York has a lot of trees. Last I heard, there were more than five million trees growing in the city. Not all of them have animating spirits wandering around. In fact, most of them don’t. But sometimes, you’ll meet a tree spirit.
Not like Winnie. She’s a living creature born of the grief and tears that soaked into her executioner tree’s bloody heart. And not like the tree creatures either, born of hundreds of giggling, laughing children who climbed their branches and loved them for decades before their trunks were struck by lightning or chainsawed down and ground into mulch.
I’m talking about spirits, like what Rou was before Jagger pulled her out of the East River. They’re rare, but they’re here. You can find them on the edge of the Meer in the northernmost corner of Central Park, in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden by the Japanese Hill-and-Pond, in Astoria Park under the elms, and perched on the fountain near the old man who plays the accordion for coins and applause in Washington Square Park.
