Page 13

"Rules," Sissily commanded. Her finger came up and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. "One. If you start bleeding from anywhere that isn't your nose, I'm closing it, and I don't care what it's saying to you."

"Fine."

"Two." Second finger. "If your eyes go white again, same thing."

"They did that once." I argued but she ignored me like I hadn’t spoken.

"Three." Third finger, and there it was, right on schedule. "If it tells you to go somewhere, we talk about it before you go there. Out loud. With sentences."

"Hecate help me, you're worse than Amber."

"Say it, big jerk."

"We'll talk about it. Out loud. With sentences." I put both hands flat on the cover. "Happy?"

"Not remotely." She settled back on her heels. "Go on then." She hand waved me off like she was the queen allowing a peasant to entertain her.

River snorted and my lips twitched for a second before I remembered what I had to do and it sobered me up.

I opened the book.

The voices came in all at once, the way they always do. A whole crowd of them talking over each other in a language that isn't a language, male and female and neither, layered so thick that they stop being sound and become a pressure behind the eyes. So many days of ignoring them turned out to have been noticed. They were not what I'd call pleased about it. Not because I understood them but because I could feel their displeasure deep in my bones.

"Okay," I whispered feeling like an idiot for talking out loud to a damn book. "Okay, I'm listening. I'm here."

The pages flipped past under my fingers on their own, faster and faster, and the candle flames on the windowsill leaned in toward the book like they were trying to read over my shoulder.

Then everything stopped.

The pages settled. The voices dropped out of the shrieking layered mess into a single one, and it filled up my whole skull. It was the worst thing I have ever heard because it sounded exactly like a normal woman speaking in an ordinary room.

"You have been asking the wrong question child."

"I haven't been asking anything." My voice came out from very far away. "That's rather the point. I've been ignoring you."

"You ask what your grandmother wants. You ask what the Council will do. You ask how to keep the wolf's children in school." A pause, and the pause had weight to it, like a room full of people turning to look at me all at once but it was just the three of us present. Cold sweat trickled down my spine. Hecate help me. The cursed thing was reading my mind. "You have never once asked where he is."

Everything in me went cold and then very hot at the same moment.

"Where who is?"

"You have asked it, in fact. Once. You were eleven years old, in a bathroom, with a towel against your face."

I stopped breathing.

I want to be clear that I have never told anybody about that. Not Sissily. Not Danika. Not one living creature has ever known about the night after Sasha Airborne opened my face up with air magic, when I sat on the tile floor of a bathroom with a towel pressed to my eyebrow and asked the ceiling why my father had never once come to look for me.

"Hazel." Sissily's hand landed on my knee. "You're crying."

"Shut up," I said, without any heat at all. Then, to the book: "Say it again." Through clenched teeth.

"He is not dead."

The candles all went out at once.

Not blown out. Every flame simply stopped existing, and the room dropped into that thin blue dark you get on the second floor of an old house at night. I heard River move for the first time since we'd sat down.

"Where?" I got out through clenched teeth.