32
THE THING ABOUT LEANING
SAERIS
IT HADN’T BEEN angry tension I’d sensed behind Tal’s door.
It had been sexual.
For fuck’s sake.
I stared dutifully up at the ceiling as we followed the Keeper of Secrets into his chambers, determined not to witness any more of Tal’s naked form than I already had. My cheeks were on fire. “Where were you back there?” I hissed, clouting Carrion’s arm. “What happened to ‘I’ll make sure no one messes with her’?”
Ow! You’re so fucking violent! You had that entire situation under control.
And far be it from me to break up the beginnings of a cat fight. She’s gone now, anyway. She scurried off real quick the moment your man showed up here.”
There was a tone to his voice, something that sounded decidedly nefarious.
When I glimpsed him out of the corner of my eye, I saw that his eyes were not on the ceiling. They were fixed ahead and moving down, down . . .
I hit him even harder this time. “What are you doing?”
“If he didn’t want anyone admiring his bare ass, then he would have thrown on a robe before he came to the door, Saeris.”
“Can you just stop—”
Tal turned around. My eyes shot back up to the ceiling.
“It’s commendable that you’re trying to protect my modesty, Saeris, but Carrion’s right. I have none. I really don’t care if he’s checking out my ass.
Unfortunately for you, Swift, my sexuality doesn’t lean in your direction.”
“That’s okay. The thing about leaning is that it’s very unstable. The ground could shift, and you find yourself leaning in a completely different direction at any moment. I, myself, have experienced all kinds of leanings.”
Tal smiled a little dubiously at him. “You’ll be the first to know if the ground shifts beneath my feet.”
Carrion sighed, walking past my maker. “It’s all right. It would have happened by now if it was going to. That kind of thing usually occurs on sight where I’m concerned.” Clearly, now that the possibility of sex was off the table, he’d lost interest in my maker. He pointed at the open doorway in front of us.
“What the hell’s going on in there, then?”
“Some friends and I were enjoying a glass of wine,” Tal said in a vague, noncommittal kind of way.
Seven naked Fae females sprawled out on an unbelievably big bed in the room beyond. They were in various stages of undress; I’d spent enough time at Kala’s to be very accustomed to seeing women wandering around in their bare skin, but this was different.
The women at Kala’s used sex to their benefit. It paid their bills and kept them safe, and there was nothing wrong with that. But there was a hunger in the room up ahead that I’d never witnessed at Kala’s. The Fae females on that bed were watching Taladaius like they had been starving all their lives, and he was their first chance at a real meal. Their desire clouded the air until the room was thick with it. It felt as though the whole place would combust if someone mistakenly lit a match.
One of the females in the center of the bed started kissing the female next to her, touching herself between her legs as she did so, and Carrion dragged his bottom lip through his teeth. “What does a person have to do to secure an invitation to one of your wine soirees, Taladaius?”
Tal’s silver hair fell into his face as he bent to collect a shirt from the floor.
When he straightened again, slipping his arms in the shirt, he was smirking wickedly. “Oh, you’re welcome anytime, Carrion Swift. You can join us for a glass now, if you like. But these females have been friends of mine for a while now. They’re used to a certain level of . . . conversation. D’you think you can . . .”
His eyebrows hiked halfway up his forehead, his eyes drifting down to Carrion’s crotch. “Keep up?”
I’d seen Carrion charm the most beautiful women in the Third out of their clothes. He’d managed to talk me into his bed, and I had put up a valiant fight, too. I’d never seen him back down from a challenge, but Tal’s implication—that the women on that bed were used to a certain level of pleasure that apparently Tal was more than capable of proving to all seven of them, all by himself? Yeah, that made the smuggler blink.
“Hm. I’m pretty good at conversation, but . . . maybe not so versed in talking to that many females at once.”
Tal tried not to let his smirk get away from him, I could tell. He clapped Carrion on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Daianthus. Practice makes perfect.” He kicked his way into a pair of pants that looked like they had been discarded on the floor in a hurry, biting the tip of his tongue as he carefully fastened himself into them.
Gods almighty, this was terrible. “Maybe we should come back later,” I said.
The females on the bed had all started touching and caressing each other, their soft moans urging Tal to return to them. He held up a finger as he walked backward toward the open doorway. “Just one minute.” He closed the door behind himself, and the room erupted into giggles and even louder moaning.
Carrion and I looked at each other awkwardly.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
“I’m trying not to hear anything right now.”
“He called me Daianthus.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, well, I mean . . . you are a Daianthus.” Poor Carrion. Ever
since we’d discovered who he really was, we’d kept calling him Swift. No one had thought to ask him if he wanted to be referred to as his proper name: Carrion Daianthus. It was a Fae custom, I’d learned not too long ago, that parents didn’t name their newborns for a full year after their birth. It had started as a practical matter—a long time ago, a high percentage of Faelings didn’t survive their first year of life, and naming them felt like an invitation for ill luck to visit them. If Death didn’t know the name of a child, then how could he possibly find it and carry it away? Many thousands of years had passed since then. Faelings almost never died during infancy now, but the practice of the nameless child remained out of long-standing tradition.
Rurik and Amelia Daianthus never got the chance to name their firstborn son. He had been called Carrion by the woman who had saved him from the quicksilver pool back in Zilvaren. Carrion, because she hadn’t known what that word had meant, and some guards had called him that as she’d snuck him out of the palace. And Swift, because she was a Swift, and the moment she had laid eyes on him, squalling and naked, he had become hers.
“Do you want to be called Daianthus now? I can tell the others. It is your right. And it’s not as though we’re keeping your identity a secret or anything.
You did announce it to everyone back in the maze. That cat is definitely out of the bag.”
Carrion rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. “No, it’s fine. Swift’s only one syllable. Daianthus is three. It’d be a mouthful for you guys to spit out when you’re yelling at me. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
“Carrion.”
“Swift’s fine, Saeris. That’s as much my name as any other. I’m happy being who I’ve always been.”
“I get that. I understand. Listen, Carrion. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you properly since you got back, but, well, Fisher told me about Gracia, and, well . . .” Gods alive, I was bad at this. The second I said Gracia’s name, Carrion shut down. I saw it happen.
“It’s fine. You don’t need to say anything, Saeris. She was an old lady. A
grumpy one. She was bound to die eventually. I’m used to it. I’ve had to be. We don’t need to—”
The door to Tal’s bedroom flew open, and the pale-haired male strode through it with purpose. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, discreetly cleaning away a thin trail of blood from his chin. “All right, then. I presume you need to discuss something with me? I doubt you would have been lurking outside my chambers otherwise. What is it?”
What with the tricky conversation I’d just utterly botched and the sight of all those naked females in Tal’s room, I’d temporarily misplaced our reason for coming here. “Fae females, Tal?”
The vampire met my eye, unabashed. “Absolutely. I prefer my bedmates warm,” he said. “They’re here willingly. They’d never go home and I wouldn’t know a moment’s peace if I didn’t force them to leave. I assure you, the exchange is voluntary and mutually beneficial. But I think you know all about
that.”
The blood trade.
The females got high from Tal’s venom and had the most intense orgasms imaginable, and Tal got to feed. Just a little sip from each of them was probably enough to sate his hunger, and they had the time of their lives. I supposed that did sound mutually beneficial.
“One of these days, I’m going to stop feeling like I’m on the back foot, here,”
Carrion grumbled. “Why are you blushing, Saeris? You do not blush.”
“Never mind that. Just . . . I can blush if I want to, okay?” I exhaled, slow and steady. “Tal, the door to the tomb was barred, and those two idiots from your tavern were there waiting for us.”
“You have a tavern?” Tal had just risen even higher in Carrion’s estimation.
My maker ignored the remark. “Yes. I told them to do it. I heard from Lorreth that Belikon’s advisor and a handful of his guards slipped through the silver while you were in the tomb last. I can’t have Belikon’s guards—or anyone, for that matter—just showing up in Ammontraíeth. It made sense to lock the
door and post Anterrin and Khol there. I had to find something for them to do, didn’t I, since Lorreth maimed one of them.”
“And that was supposed to keep magic users out? A locked door?”
“No, obviously not. It was supposed to give Anterrin and Khol enough time to alert me as to what was happening, so I could deal with the situation in a manner I saw fit.”
“Shouldn’t I be dealing with any issues that come through the quicksilver?”
“Yes, Saeris, you should. But since you keep disappearing off with your mate and not telling me where you’re going, I have to be ready to take matters into my own hands, don’t I?” There was no malice to his words. No ire. He flashed me a beatific smile and started walking toward the door to his chambers. “I found this when I went to inspect the tomb for structural damage first thing this evening.” He reached the side table by the entrance to his chambers and used a black silk scarf to pick up the weapon sitting on the polished wood.
It was one of the blades Belikon’s men had been carrying the other day. I had barely been able to affect them. They possessed unnatural properties—it had made my temples pound to even try to read the metals with my power.
Everything about the weapons had felt wrong. Even now, this one pulled at the light and leached the air from the room.
“I do not like this dagger. Touching it nearly put me in the ground for good.
It made me . . .” He pondered the ceiling, frowning. “It made me want to peel out of my skin and throw myself into a burning lake of fire. It’s evil, and I do not want it in my chambers any longer.”
He thrust it out at me, gesturing for me to take it. I hadn’t felt the way he’d described when I’d fought Belikon’s guards, but then again, I hadn’t touched any of their daggers with my bare hands. It probably wasn’t wise to do so now, either, just in case. Maybe it was like a god sword. Maybe only its owner was supposed to touch it like that. I accepted the dagger from Tal, using the silk scarf to protect my hand the same way he had.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know what it is. Orious called it a null blade.”
“Never heard the term,” Tal said. “It doesn’t really matter what it is, I suppose, just so long as it isn’t here anymore. You need to throw it into a very
deep pit or something.”
“And where might I find one of those?”
“Beyond the western ridge. Ride for thirty minutes in that direction and you’ll find plenty of holes in the ground.”
There was a knock at the door. Tal opened it, and a bone-thin female with razor-sharp cheekbones and eyes as black as coal stood on the other side of it.
She wasn’t Fae. Wasn’t a high blood, either. There were strange, frilled gills at her elongated neck; however, it looked as though they had been sewn shut. Her straight black hair hung like a sheet of silk to her shoulders, hiding her mutilated gills for the most part. She bowed her head, surprise flashing over her face when she registered my presence. She was halfway to the ground when I reached out and caught her by the elbow.
“Please don’t do that,” I told her. “Not right now.” I’d well and truly had enough of all the kneeling for one day.
The female’s eyes widened, but she didn’t protest. “My apologies, Your Highness. Lord, I’m sorry to disturb you. I came to tell you that I had as yet been unsuccessful in tracking down the venerable queen for her fitting, but it appears that the fates smile upon me tonight. I’ve found her here with you.” The female placed her hand on her chest and bowed slightly, and the light caught on her metallic, talon-like fingernails. Her fingers were twice as long as mine and half as thin. There was something unnervingly spiderlike about them.
“My fitting?” I asked.
“Yes. For the ball tomorrow night. Come in, Yanica. You can take her measurements while she’s here. She’s bound to slip away otherwise. You should measure him up, too.” He gestured to Carrion.
I smiled distractedly at the female as she floated into the room. Once she was inside and had begun unraveling a black roll full of sewing implements, I
turned on Tal. “I’m sorry, what ball?”
“The Evenlight Ball, of course. Don’t you celebrate that in Zilvaren?”
I was about to say no, of course we don’t, but I wasn’t able to. “We do, actually. But it’s a festival, not a ball,” I admitted.
“Madra stands on a dais and addresses the whole city for an hour,” Carrion added. “Ranting and raving about the dangers of magic and how mythical Fae monsters are trying to infiltrate the city to corrupt us and steal our children.” He grinned, waggling his fingers.
I rolled my eyes at him. “After that, she gives everyone a double ration of water and a bowl of greasy stew, and then there’s music. It’s the only day of the year when people don’t have to work.”
“Sounds delightful,” Tal said dryly. “It’s a little more fun here. Food. Wine.
Dancing. Sex. Historically, there have been no grand speeches. You could change that if you’re feeling homesick, but I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re already pretty unpopular.”
“I can’t attend a ball right now, Tal. I don’t have time.”
“You’re mistaken. You don’t have a choice. The Evenlight Ball is nonnegotiable. The ruler of the Blood Court presides over the evening and must officially open the celebrations. The party cannot begin without their official say-so. If you don’t attend, you will be openly shirking your position as queen here and letting everyone know exactly what you think of Sanasroth and the Blood Court. It wouldn’t be a good look. And even if all of that wasn’t the case, it is even more vital that you attend this year’s festivities, since the Evenlight Ball is now doubling as a selection evening.”
“Selection evening?”
“Yes. We’ve held only one before. Until fairly recently, there was another Lord of Midnight, Xarris. He was killed by his own brother after some pointless disagreement. A selection was held, and that’s when Malcolm named Algat as a Lord and Keeper of Records. We must have another selection, so that candidates who wish to present themselves to become the new Lord of
Midnight might be considered.”
“I’m not overseeing that. I can’t be in charge of making that decision.”
“Well, then, your mate should have considered that before he killed Ereth.
Not that I’m complaining, of course. Ereth was a repugnant zealot with really bad breath. But now there are only four Lords of Midnight, and there have to be five, which means that, yes, you have to hear people’s petitions, and you have to select a new one. My advice? Do it quickly. The high bloods will get antsy if they have to wait too long to indulge their appetites.”
My mouth fell open. “Tal!”
“And then there’s also that small matter we discussed at the Fool’s Paradise not too long ago,” he said, leaning in close. “The ball is the perfect opportunity to take care of that as well. I would consider it a personal favor to me if you could see your way to sticking around long enough so that can be taken care of, too. And I did save your life, so . . .”
I was fucked.
Royally so, it would seem.
I gave up. “All right. A ball.” I threw my hands up, exasperated. “I’m going to a ball. Great.”
“If you could just lift your arms again for me, Your Highness?” Yanica, with her silky hair and metallic fingernails, made me jump. She hadn’t made a sound as she’d crept up behind me. Her scent hadn’t given her away, either. She didn’t smell of anything at all.
“I’m sorry, Yanica. I don’t have time for a fitting right now. There are other matters I need to attend to. I’m sure you’re an excellent dressmaker, though.
Can’t you just eyeball it?”
The female stepped back, nearly dropping the measuring tape she was holding. “Eyeball? I’m sorry, Your Highness. Far be it from me to correct the illustrious queen, but I am not a dressmaker. I am the royal master tailor. I have served this court faithfully for the past two hundred years. It is my privilege and right to dress the Blood Court’s nobility. The gown you wear tomorrow
evening is a showcase of my talents. It must fit you like a glove. I’m sorry, I—I cannot just guess your measurements. An ill-fitting garment will bring shame to my household and my name.”
Tal said nothing. Carrion slid his hands into his pockets, giving me a shrug.
“Sorry, sunshine. I don’t think you can really argue with that.”
Grudgingly, I let the woman take my measurements.
The null blade thrummed in the scabbard on my thigh as I climbed. By the time I reached the library, my leg was numb from my hip to my knee, and I wanted to cry. My runes ached, pain shuttling up and down my arm in waves. I wanted to be rid of the weapon just as badly as Tal had, but without knowing exactly what it was or what it was capable of, hurling it off a cliff felt like a missed opportunity. Orious had said that all Belikon’s guards were equipped with these things, and after what had transpired in the tomb, it was pretty obvious we were going to have to face them again. There would be more guards. More null blades.
This was an opportunity, and, as uncomfortable as carrying the blade was, I didn’t really have a choice. It needed to be studied.
Carrion had stayed back at Tal’s chambers to be measured. He’d said something about going to fetch his sword, too, but had promised to catch up with me as soon as he was done. On the stairs, the sound of my footsteps was my only company.
When I arrived at last, the library rang with a deafening silence. Fisher’s scent hung thick in the air, telling me exactly which direction he had gone when he’d come up here earlier. But before I headed into the stacks, I needed to take precautions.
“Algat?” My cry bounced around the vaulted space.
Nothing.
“Algat!” The Keeper of Records had been very clear when she’d told me I
should only visit the library during the hour right after dusk and the hour directly before dawn. She was in no position to tell me what to do, but even so, if I was about to go toe-to-toe with the old crone, I’d prefer to know about it beforehand, especially since she was probably furious that I’d taken a book from
the library.
The female didn’t come.
I took off and headed for the stacks. I hummed as I went, trying to ease the disquiet in the back of my mind—the urgency to rip the null blade from the scabbard and hurl it as far as possible. It was an awful sensation, one that couldn’t be described, but the knife was full of hate. It wanted to cause harm.
Fisher’s scent grew stronger as I wound through the rows and rows of books. Every step I took drew me closer to him, and with it, the tension between my shoulder blades eased. It was like this now: a rope pulled taut between us, and the farther apart we were, the tighter it pulled. It was only when we were together that I felt like I could breathe properly. He was clo— “Oh!” I pressed my hand to my chest. “Hello.” I’d jolted back, surprised, but the sudden movement up ahead was only one of the library’s stargazers. The paper bird hovered in the air about two feet from my face, flitting from side to side as it watched me. I took a step forward, and it hovered backward in concert with my movement. Its tiny head seemed to cock to one side, its wings flapping a mile a minute.
“Inquisitive little creature, aren’t you?” I extended my hand, curious to see if the bird would alight on the end of my finger, but it darted back and away.
“Oops. Sorry. It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
It flew off.
“Okay. Bye, then.” It was a wonder. I was sad to see it go. But when I went left, turning down another row of books, there were three stargazers there, hovering, waiting for me.
“Huh. Are we playing a game?” There was a note of suspicion in my voice now. Foley’s warning hadn’t wandered far from the forefront of my mind. He’d
said the birds were guileless things. Easily coerced. I wasn’t concerned about the birds themselves. Foley had also mentioned malcontent witches, tricking them into stealing my hair, and it was that idea that gave me pause.
I shifted my weight into my left foot, resting my hands on top of Erromar and Selanir, where they hung at my hips. “Are you going to let me by?”
As if they understood what I had said, two of the stargazers moved to the left, the other to the right, making room for me to pass.
“Thank you.” Slightly bemused, I kept walking, turning down another stack —where another five stargazers were waiting. Over my shoulder, the three I had just passed were following close behind. “Okay, this is getting a little creepy, folks.” More of them darted around the corner. More, suddenly swooping over the top of the stacks and diving down. Tens of them. Hundreds. They gathered overhead, flocking in a circle, the rustle of paper wings growing louder until it
was all that I could hear.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
And then I ran.
Bone-white missiles zipped past my ears as I careened through the library.
Left. Right. Right again. Left. The stargazers buzzed my head, swooping, snagging in my hair, teasing it loose from my braid. They crashed into me, pinwheeling to the floor and sliding, only to take off again, whirling around my head.
I swatted them away, batting them out of the air, but they only rose again. I spun left and collided with a pile of books that had been stacked haphazardly on the floor. They crashed to the ground, skidding in every direction, nearly bringing me down with them, but I kept my feet. I charged forward, emerging into a small clearing amid the stacks, and my frustration finally won out over
my alarm.
They were birds.
Paper birds.
I stopped running and shielded my eyes with my hands, peering through my
fingers to assess the situation. There were so many stargazers now, hundreds of them; they flew around me, faster, faster, faster—a vortex of them, whipping around and up toward the library’s rafters like one of the dust devils that tore across the dunes back in Zilvaren, only much, much bigger.
It . . . it was beautiful.
Cautiously, I lowered my hands and took it all in. The stargazers formed a tunnel, and I was at its center. The birds stirred the air, creating a breeze that blew my loose strands of hair around my head.
I’d never seen anything quite so lovely—or magical—in all my life.
If crows had their murders and vultures had their wakes, then the spectacle of these stargazers, moving harmony, could only be one thing: a constellation.
“Impressive . . .” The thought was whispered out loud, and the birds reacted.
A single stargazer broke away from the wheeling mass and dropped from the air like a stone. A split second before it hit the floor, it pulled up and hair-pinned in the air, coming right at me.
It happened too quickly; I didn’t get my hand up in time. The edge of the stargazer’s wing sliced my cheekbone, leaving a bright sting of pain in its wake.
“Ahhh! What—” This was the second time one of them had cut me. “That really isn’t nice,” I hissed. I prepared for what would come next—the raining hail of angry stargazers all set on drawing blood. Death by a thousand cuts—but none of the other birds fell from the cyclone of flapping wings. The air seemed to thicken with tension. The birds flew faster. Faster still. They flew so fast that it became impossible to discern one bird from another, and the entire mass became a fluttering, rushing mass of white.
Craning my neck, I looked up and shook my head. “What . . . the hell . . . is happening?”
At once, the cyclone stopped dead. The birds began to fall out of the air, spinning or else nosediving, just like the first bird who had cut me and fallen, lifeless, to the steps outside the library. I watched, speechless, as the first birds to hit the floor began to unfold, their wings snapping open, their bodies, their
beaks, until they were crumpled sheets of paper. Others unfolded midair and floated down much slower, like fat flakes of snow. The world became fluttering, creased sheets of paper.
I plucked one out of the air as it drifted past my face, and there, on the paper, were lines and lines of elegant, slanted handwriting.
In most cases, the power is too great. The Alchemist will need to surrender . . .
My heart pounded.
I plucked another sheet of paper from the air. . . . often painful. Historically, it was recommended that a counterbalance be used as a kind of Alchemical overflow mechanism . . .
The writing spoke of Alchemical magic. All of the pages—so many pages!— were full of text about Alchemy. My mind would not comprehend it. I’d picked the library at Cahlish clean. Both Algat and Foley had confirmed that there were books on Alchemy in this library here, but neither of them had considered the stargazers.
The birds had been here for centuries. Longer than anyone could remember . . .
And all along, they had been the pages of a book.
Fast as I could, I started to collect them from the floor. Sheaves and sheaves of paper. They were wrinkled and yellowed by time around the edges, but the writing had been on the inside of the pages; the words there, written in black ink, had been protected by the stargazer’s folds. I’d collected half of the pages from the floor when they started to rattle in my hands. I clamped the pile between my fingers, determined to keep hold of them, but then they were ripped free by some invisible force.
“No!” My shout echoed around the library. “Please!”
The pages didn’t listen. They flew through the air and tumbled one over the other, gathering into a ball. Before my eyes, they organized themselves into a single, ordered pile . . . and then they were a book.
Navy blue cloth cover.
Thick.
A tiny silver butterfly was stamped in foil on the front cover.
Other than that, there were no gilded edges. No fancy woven tassel.
It was a plain bound book with no extraordinary embellishments . . . and it landed on the floor at my feet with a thump.
Holy gods.
I held my breath as I picked it up. The spine creaked as I drew back the hardcover, as if it were any old book that simply hadn’t been opened in a long time.
For you, gods blessed.
Thank you for loving my boy.
—E
A single droplet of blood marked the page below the writing. Bright red, it was still fresh. Mine. The stargazer had cut me because it had wanted to test my blood. To make sure I was who it thought I was—who it had been waiting over a millennium for.
That first stargazer had nicked me, too. But I had backed out of the library, and . . . the stargazers could not exist outside of their sanctuary. It had lost its magic before it could confirm who I was . . .
Holy.
Fucking.
Gods.
Edina’s book. It had been here, all along, waiting to find me . . .
“Saeris?”
I spun around, pulse flying. Kingfisher stepped out of the shadows, and without thinking, I quickly tucked the book behind my back.
His cheeks were red, his hair ruffled, as if he’d been outside in the cold. A small smile played over his lips as he saw me and stopped, leaning against the wooden bay of shelves next to him, tucking his thumbs into the belt at his waist.
“Everything okay? I heard you cursing like a pirate back here.”
“Yes, everything’s fine. I—”
Find it. But do not tell him about it. I mean it. It’s important. He can’t know about the book. Only you. Do you understand?
Edina’s voice echoed through my mind. Memories of her, cloudy-eyed and desperate as she’d spoken through Everlayne back in the bedroom back in Cahlish. She hadn’t just asked me not to tell Fisher about the book. She had commanded me not to.
I looked upon my mate’s face now and saw the tired shadows beneath his eyes. He had just gone through hell and back for me. Yes, we badly needed the silver he and Carrion had brought back from Zilvaren, but that hadn’t been the only reason he’d gone back to my city. He had gone for me, so that he could bring Hayden here. He would go back there again, even though he hated it—I
wouldn’t even have to ask.
And that was as far as I got.
I produced the book from behind my back and held it out to him. “Your mother told me about a book,” I said. “Back in Cahlish, when she told me I had to seal my runes. She told me I needed to find it, and that once I did, I shouldn’t tell you about it, but . . .” I shook my head, holding it out to him. “That doesn’t feel right. Here. I found it. This is the book.”
Fisher’s smile slowly faded, but it didn’t disappear altogether. It took on a sad edge as he pushed away from the bookshelves and slowly came toward me.
Pensively, he took the book and opened it. Turning past the first page with the note to me and my droplet of blood, his eyes skipped quickly over the text there, before he set his jaw, letting go of a long, deep breath. His eyes shone bright as mirrors when he closed the book and handed it back to me. The next thing I knew, he was cradling the back of my head in his hand and pressing a kiss against my forehead.
“The book is for you, Saeris,” he whispered. “But thank you for sharing it with me.” He drew back, not even bothering to hide that his eyes were filling with tears.
I looked down at the book, brushing my fingers over the foiled silver
butterfly stamped onto the front cover. “But . . . don’t you want to read it?” It made no sense. If there was a whole book full of my mother’s handwriting, I didn’t know what kind of crimes I would commit if it meant I got to read it.
This was a message from the grave. A hand, reaching out from the dark. And Fisher didn’t want to take it?
That heavy, sad smile reappeared again. “No,” he said softly. “This is what she wanted. I trust her. And I trust you, Little Osha. Whatever revelations might be in that book, they’re for you and you alone. You’ll know what you need to do with them.”