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“But it sounds like Anna met Gabriel years ago and left him alone this whole time. She only just turned back up. I don’t see why there’s such a rush. We can talk to Gabriel and come up with a way around this.”

“Gabriel seems to think the danger is imminent. And I won’t do anything else to put you in harm's way, no matter what it means for me.”

A dark thought crept like a parasite into Iris’ permeable mind. Gabriel had said that the only two options were to erase Anna’s memories of them or for her to die. Suddenly, that second option felt a lot more tempting than it should have.

Immediately, she was disgusted with herself. Her eyes stung as they filled with tears, and for once she didn’t bother to wipe them away.

“Iris…” Blair held open his arms, and she collapsed into his warm embrace. He ran his hands up and down her back, rocking her gently. Her tears soaked the front of his sweater as his arms tightened around her. “Everything will be okay,” he whispered.

“You can’t promise that.” Iris closed her eyes against Blair’s chest. His heartbeat thrummed under her ear, strong and reassuring. “Stay with me tonight?” She leaned back to look at him. “We can pull out the futon and sleep by the fire. Please? I don’t want to be alone.”

Blair’s pale eyes shone in the candlelight, bright with worry. He twisted one of Iris’ curls around his finger. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Together, they went around to the back of the couch and carefully lowered it to the floor so that the mattress-covered wood beams lay flat. Blair put on the kettle as Iris padded over to the hallway closet. She layered the futon bed with a thick quilt and soft throw blanket, then retrieved her pillow and headed into Blair’s room for his.

She paused in his doorway, her gaze lingering on the neat space. Other than a few stray items he’d picked up over the last few months, Blair kept his room neat and sparse. A lump formed in her throat as she thought about his earlier declaration that he was going to leave to keep her and Gabriel safe.

She wondered if he’d avoided making his room his own because he wasn’t planning on staying very long. The thought made her stomach ache, and she hugged the pillows to her as she slipped back into the living room.

35

PROVIDENCE COUNTY, RHODE ISLAND

MAY 1814

The witch arrived at the almshouse in the dead of night, wrapped in a cloak so dark it might have been stitched from shadows.

She offered Lucy a safe home free from toil. Promised her good food, a bed of her own. Such a different life from the squalor of the almshouse, where she was forced to labor from dawn until dusk in exchange for a cot and contaminated porridge. Where she was whipped when she didn’t complete her chores before sundown.

Most irresistible of all, Lucy was promised secrets; secrets she’d been denied for her entire pitiful existence.

Obedience spoke in riddles twisted into the rhythm of prayers, and Lucy knelt willingly at her altar. This was back at the beginning of their so-called partnership, when the altar was draped in silk-soft roses—but it wouldn’t be long before thorns would spring out of the silk to pierce her skin, to wound her heart.

Lucy had always known she must have family out there somewhere, but the only clue in her possession was a silver signet ring with a crying heron that she’d had as long as she could remember. She ached to know where it had come from, where she had come from. She would’ve done anything for answers.

If only she’d realized how quickly anything could morph into everything.

For each spell performed on her tired body, Lucy was gifted a fact, a morsel of a story pertaining to her family. She tried to gather these scraps up in her arms, tried to clutch them to her heart, the only bits of her family she would ever hold.

Oftentimes the magic was painful enough to cause her control to slip, and the skin over her spine would tear apart like an envelope ripped through with a letter opener, slate-gray wings bursting free with the force of water expelled from an exploded dam. There were long moments in which she’d lay cowering on the floor, her wings wrapped around her frail body like a cocoon, and still the witch would refuse to lift the spell.

But the greater the pain, the richer the reward.

It was while in recovery from one such event that Lucy learned that she had a twin.

After another, she was told her family lived by the ocean.

She was born in Boston.

She had two older sisters.

Drip by agonizingly painful drip, Lucy was fed the secrets of her own existence, and each drop sustained her like blood dribbled on the tongue of a vampire.

Eventually, though, even secrets weren’t enough to distract her from the pain.

She begged Obedience to explain to her why she was doing this. Lucy had spent the past century working as every kind of servant. She thought she knew cruelty. But she had never experienced anything even close to what the witch subjected her to.

Obedience told Lucy she was teaching her how to sharpen her blade. Pushed to her limits, Lucy would learn how to strengthen her so-called abilities to protect herself and those she aligned herself with.