I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I’d been reliving the scene at Sonja’s house again and again over the past twenty-four hours. Much of it had begun to blur in my mind. Images shifted and changed, blending together: A cup shattered against the hardwood floor, spilling blood instead of tea. Fallen books soaked the liquid up into their pages, the words inked in crimson. No, I reminded myself—that hadn’t happened; of course it hadn’t. But I imagined that Sonja’s eyes had been wide and staring when I saw her. Her eyes were a deep brown, almost black, I knew; I had felt that keen gaze often enough. The thought had followed me into sleep. My dreams had been a collection of fragments: Rosebushes wilting, Shane’s skin going silver beneath a sea of red stars. Sonja’s eyes, open and watchful. Seeing me.
I couldn’t have seen them, I told myself now. Her head had been turned from me. Her face had been hidden. Other details I couldn’t shut out: Her blouse, drenched red. The way she had clenched her arms against her.
She struggled, I thought. To the last moment.
“Whitticomb?” Mr. Alvarez said.
Deliberately, I gave myself a slight shake. I rubbed at my face with my hands, returning my attention to the present. Mr. Alvarez was asking me about Shane. And if the details were confused in my thoughts, Shane’s words were not. They were seared into my memory. Scalding to the touch. “He told me I was going to die,” I said. “He told me—I was a corpse taking air.”
Mom and Mr. Alvarez exchanged a look. She crossed the room and leaned down to hug me, so long and tight that I wriggled away, pushing at her hands.
“I don’t think he meant to kill me, though,” I added. “He said I was going to die, but not that day. He didn’t even hurt me. It was Leon he attacked.”
Mr. Alvarez sighed, turning and running a hand through his black hair—which was, for once, not spiked up, but sitting quite normally atop his head. He looked at Mom. “We should have seen this coming. You always believed he couldn’t be trusted.”
“But I didn’t think he was a threat. If I did, I’d have taken him out.” She snorted. “Clearly, I should have taken him out.”
“There has to be some sign we missed. When a Harrower stops being neutral, there’s usually some indication.”
I was still trying to reconcile in my head that Shane wasn’t neutral anymore. I’d been accustomed to think of him as harmless, if not precisely an ally. “He was acting weird the last time I saw him,” I said. “But not…homicidal weird.”
Mom and Mr. Alvarez both stopped to stare at me.
“Weird how?” Mr. Alvarez asked.
“Saw when?” Mom asked.
I decided to address Mom first. “Last week, Drought and Deluge. And you don’t need to give me a lecture, because I have more than learned my lesson, believe me. I will be enormously happy to never see Shane again.” To Mr. Alvarez I said: “He told me he hadn’t seen anything recently and that he was leaving town. And then he started destroying the mural of the Beneath he painted.” I thought of him scraping at the paint, shredding the skyline, his hands sliding into claws. It had been unsettling, but he hadn’t seemed hostile then. He hadn’t seemed threatening. He’d seemed almost…sad.
You are going to die, Kin-child.
I shivered.
“What about the other neutral Harrowers in the Cities?” I asked. “Do they know anything?”
“There aren’t any,” Mr. Alvarez said. “They’re gone. Some of them Drew killed, but most began to disappear around the time Susannah showed up. The rest have vanished since. Shane was the last.”
That seemed like an ominous portent. “Does that mean none of them are neutral anymore?”
“I don’t have any idea what it means. Except that we all need to be on our guard.” He sighed again, turning to Mom. “I’ve been in contact with the Kin at other Circles. They’re putting their elders under Guardian protection for the time being, in case the attacks turn out to be more widespread. But we need to figure this out. Why target the elders? Why take their bodies Beneath? What is he after?”
“I don’t care about why or what,” Mom said. “I care about where.”
Which meant, I supposed, she was sticking to her Find him, Kill him plan.
After Mr. Alvarez left, I followed Mom up the stairs to her bedroom and lingered in the doorway as she set about preparing to leave for the night. She exchanged her jeans for black pants and grabbed her Morning Star hoodie, tying her hair up in a bun.
“Where did the elders send Brooke?” I asked. In the immediate aftermath of the incident with Shane, I’d been too frantic to fully consider his claims about Brooke. But now the thought took hold, tightened its grip.
“I don’t know, honey,” Mom said. She zipped up her hoodie. “Away from the Circle. Somewhere safe. Are you worried because Shane knows who she is? Her powers are sealed.”
“He said they killed her.”
She swung back toward me. Her lips parted. “Then he was lying.”
“Are you sure?”
Her forehead knit. “He was probably trying to upset you.”
I hugged my arms. “It worked.”
The thought persisted. That night I lay awake, staring into the darkness of my bedroom. I pictured Brooke as I had last seen her: hunkered in a corner of her house, her face streaked with tears. When she’d looked up at me, her eyes had been swollen and red. She’d barely been able to speak through her terror. We’re your Kin, I’d told her. We’re here to help.
I’d believed that. Then.
Now, I wasn’t certain what to believe. As a Remnant, Brooke had been a threat to the Kin, maybe the greatest threat that existed. More dangerous than any demon. She’d had the power to tear open the barrier between worlds, and the Harrowers had known that. They’d craved that power, hungered for it. Hunted her. For seventeen years, Harrowers had searched for the Remnant. Verrick had restlessly stalked the Cities as he awaited her birth; the Harrowing he’d begun had led to his blood being sealed—along with my father’s. Iris and Tigue had killed Kin girls to find her. And Susannah. Susannah had had an army waiting, ready for her to cut a passage to the Beneath. Using Brooke’s powers, Susannah would have opened the Beneath entirely. I’d felt it within her, seen it in her eyes: the city overrun, Harrowers in the streets.
Susannah was only the most recent. She wouldn’t have been the last. Unsealed, Brooke would never have been safe again. And neither would the rest of us.
But a sealing could be undone.
Death was a bit more permanent.
In the morning, I drove to St. Paul to speak with Esther.
According to my grandfather, she was still feeling under the weather—which the events of the past few days had only worsened. The news of the elders’ deaths had come as a tremendous shock to her. She agreed to see me, however, and Charles led me into her sitting room, where she was resting in her large plush chair, drinking coffee against doctors’ orders. She had a book open before her, and a pair of bifocals sat on her nose.
She glanced up at me when I entered, removing her glasses and setting the book in her lap. “I take it you are not here to inform me that Lucy has agreed to consider my proposal.”
I sank into the seat across from her, looking her over critically. Now that she was out of the hospital, she seemed more like herself. Her face was less sunken, her eyes less vague. Her hair was impeccably groomed, and the familiar scent of the rose perfume she wore wafted to me. But there was still a sense of frailty about her that I was unaccustomed to. I noticed how thin her frame was beneath the business suit she wore. When she raised the coffee mug to her lips, her hands had just the slightest tremble.
“Nor are you here to offer me condolences on the deaths of my associates, I suspect,” she continued, after setting the coffee mug back on the little table beside her chair. She lifted her bifocals to her eyes once more, leaning forward and observing me. “I’m told you witnessed one of the attacks. Are you well, Audrey?”