by Kat Colmer
I pulled away. “Am I…reading this wrong?”
Something flashed across his eyes. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On whether you want this”—his gaze dropped to my lips before lifting to peer at me through his lashes—“to be exclusive.” The words were a roundhouse to my core. The corners of his mouth lifted in a grimace of a smile. “Best to be clear about expectations from the start.”
My lungs caved, crushing my heart in the process. “I see.”
And I really did see. It didn’t matter that we had the potential for something lasting, something real; Jonas had no intention of changing. He’d rather face demons than entertain the thought of a relationship with me.
I swallowed, the burn of disappointment sliding deep. “In that case we better get some rest.” I grabbed my plate with a surprisingly steady hand and walked to the bin. “We have another ambush to plan tomorrow.” I scraped the egg mess into the garbage. Then, head held high, I walked out of the kitchen without a backward glance in his direction.
Avoiding Jonas for the rest of the day wasn’t difficult. The headache was only half feigned, and I wasn’t lying when I said I couldn’t stomach any dinner. I had no appetite. Disappointment can do that to a body. How could I have read the situation so wrong? God, I honestly believed he felt something more.
There was no point wasting energy on it. Sleep, specifically the oblivion of a long, dreamless night, was the smartest course of action.
My bedroom door opened, and Beth slipped inside just as I reached for the off switch on the bedside lamp. “I don’t know what’s going on, but Jonas is acting weird. So spill. You two have a fight or something?”
I toyed with the idea of lying to her, but the way she leaned against the door, arms crossed, lips set into a tight don’t-bullshit-me line, I was too tired. Tired of lying. To her. To myself. Tired of pretending I could handle whatever it was that had taken hold between Jonas and me.
I sighed, pulled myself up on top of the sheets, and sat back against the wall. “I reminded Jonas there was another solution to our demon problem.”
“About bloody time!”
“Wait, what?” Definitely not the reaction I was expecting.
Beth pushed away from the door. “Oh, come on. Anyone with eyes can see the two of you are hot for each other.”
I sat up straighter on the bed. “I thought you said the thought made you want to barf?”
“At first, totally. The idea was a shock.” She dragged the chair from across the room over to the bed and sat down. “But no matter how you look at it, the end result is a win-win: you’ll be safe from the Groth Maar, and Jonas will finally be involved with someone worth hanging around for.”
I shook my head. “He won’t.”
Beth’s brows bunched. “What do you mean?”
My limbs felt loaded and heavy. “He made it clear we wouldn’t be exclusive.”
Beth’s mouth fell open. “You’re shitting me?”
“Nope.” Beth knew, after watching the train wreck that was Mom and Dad’s marriage, I’d never start anything with a guy who couldn’t spell the word commitment. I’d rather take my chances against Elymas.
She stood and started pacing. “What an ass. I can’t believe he’d—”
“It’s okay. We both know Jonas is missing the serious relationship gene.” I attempted a smile. It felt out of place on my face. “So it’s back to the original plan. We go back to the mansion.”
Expression deflated, Beth sank down on the chair again. “I don’t get it.” Her forehead creased. “I could have sworn this had turned into something serious for him.”
“Yep, me, too.” I closed my eyes and allowed my head to fall back against the wall, exhaustion closing in on me all of a sudden. “Especially after he said he’d die for me.”
“He what?” Beth’s incredulous voice filled the room.
I kept my eyes closed. “Back at the mansion, while Elymas had me cornered, he asked Jonas if he’d die for me.” Tension gripped my insides just thinking about it. I shifted on the bed. “Jonas told him yes. Stupidly, I thought that meant he felt more than just friendship for me when, really, it’s just an over-inflated sense of responsibility for causing this mess.”
“Sense of responsibility? I don’t think so.” Something in Beth’s tone compelled me to open my eyes and look at her.
“Do you know why he hops from one girl to the next the way he does?” She clearly wasn’t expecting me to answer because she rushed on. “He’ll never admit it, but he’s running from the kind of emotion that drove Dad to wrap his car around a tree. Jonas has never forgiven Dad for leaving us without any parents. He blames Dad’s all-consuming love for Mom for the suicide. He’s never said it, but I know he thinks it was the depth of emotion that pushed Dad over the edge. That’s why he’s never allowed himself to feel strongly about anyone.” She leaned forward and grabbed my ankle. “Don’t you see? He’d never say he’d lay his life down for someone out of a sense of responsibility. Read between the lines, Cora. This is as close to a declaration as Jonas might ever get.”
My lips parted on a gape. “So why would he lie? Why make it look like all he wanted was a good time?”
Beth leaned back in her chair and locked her gaze on mine. “I don’t know. But something’s not adding up.”
Something fluttered behind my rib cage. Something resembling hope. Just like that, my energy returned, surging through my arms and legs, making my hands and feet sting. “I have to talk to him.” I leaped off the bed and made for the door.
The lack of light under Jonas’s bedroom door stilled my hand just before I knocked. Maybe I should wait till tomorrow? If he was asleep already, I didn’t want to wake him. He needed a decent night’s rest. We all did. But seriously, I wasn’t getting any sleep if I didn’t have this out with him.
I raised my hand again, then put my palm flat against the smooth wood; what exactly was I going to say to him? I couldn’t just come out and ask him if he…loved me.
Why on earth not?
Because…I didn’t know if I had the guts to be honest about my feelings for him if he turned the question on me.
But what if Beth was right? What if his reluctance to get close to anyone was tied to his father’s suicide? In that case, accepting that his feelings for me ran stronger than friendship would have scared the tan off his skin. Was that the reason for his thoughtless brush-off in the kitchen? Before I could reason my way out of it, I rapped my knuckles against the door.
“Jonas? You awake?”
Nothing. I waited a few seconds and knocked again.
“Jonas, we need to talk…about before.”
Quiet. Down the hall from inside Helena’s room a body turned, rustling the covers. If I kept this up, I’d wake her—one complication I didn’t need right now. Resolute, I reached for the door handle. I needed answers.
I cracked the door open just enough to slip inside. The room swam in darkness, but a sliver of light stole its way through the blinds. Enough to show me Jonas’s bed was empty. And undisturbed.
I scoured my memory from earlier that night: he’d mumbled good night, then left the kitchen, tension pulling at his shoulders. The soft thud of his footfalls as he climbed the stairs still echoed in my mind.
The skin on my neck prickled. I slipped back out into the hallway. Maybe he couldn’t sleep. I rushed down the stairs, only half attempting to stay quiet. He’ll be downstairs, nursing a cup of something to help his mind shut off.
But when I rounded the corner and skidded into the kitchen, it was dark. And empty.
No.
“Leo!” That was my last hope. Please let him be talking to Leo.
In the living room, the neatly folded blanket and pillow we’d given Leo earlier sat on the end of the couch.
No. Please no.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
I didn’t have time to answer. I dropped to my knees on the floor by the bed. My breath left me in a painful rush. Two of the swords were gone.
One of them the Sword of Absolom.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jonas
The Corolla’s headlights sliced the coal-black darkness ahead, the shafts of light shuddering and jerking with every pothole we hit as we sped through the national park toward America Bay for the second time that day. The car’s cabin hummed with an uneasy silence. This trip had been Leo’s idea, his smartest move of the day. Or his dumbest; I hadn’t decided yet.
“You can stay in the car. I don’t expect you to go in with me,” I told him.
He didn’t take his eyes off the road as he answered. “You promised Cora you wouldn’t go in alone. I’m not going to make a liar out of you. I’ll be fine.”
Not if he repeated this morning’s performance. The memory of him standing among the rosewood and marble, pathetic in his inaction, flashed across my mind, and I debated arguing with him. But I left it alone. It was thanks to Leo that I wasn’t breaking my promise to Cora; with Leo there, I wasn’t going in alone. I figured guilt had pushed him to make the offer. I hadn’t dwelt on it; it was a way to do what I had to without betraying my word.
She’d be furious when she realized what I’d done, but hopefully by then it would all be over, the page torn out of that blasted book and with it all danger to her removed. She’d be safe. That’s all that matters—Cora safe. I’d deal with her anger once the danger to her life was nonexistent.
That was the easy part. The hard part would be convincing her my asshat response in the kitchen had been a lie. It had killed me, that lie, knowing she was willing to give us a chance, even if it was only to cover her with my Protection Charm.
She’d done well, though, masked her shattered look almost as soon as it appeared. Still, I’d always hate myself for putting that pain in her eyes.
My hand shot into my hair. I pulled, hard, wanting the sting to obliterate the injustice of it; I’d had no choice. Not when Beth’s life was on the line.
C4RL1N. I’d always assumed Mom’s car crash had been an accident, but could the Groth Maar have been involved? If so, how? The journals made it clear that the demons couldn’t kill a Guardian’s mate. Why would they even want her dead so long after she’d already married Dad and had Beth and me? It made no sense.
Beside me, Leo tugged on a section of seat belt near his neck. The light from the dashboard mottled his face a glow-stick green, making his pained expression more severe than it was.
“How’s your back?” I was still pissed off with him, but those cuts had looked damn painful.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, more to himself than to me. He tugged at the seat belt again, pulling the collar of his T-shirt away from his neck at the same time. Plain black tonight, no stupid slogan splashed across it. Shame Beth wasn’t here to appreciate it.
The Corolla slowed, and the halo-like haze of lights doming the treetops near the Groth Maar mansion drew my attention to something much darker than Leo’s T-shirt.
We climbed out of the car and retrieved the khopeshes from the boot. The stifling heat of the day was gone, but the humidity remained, pushing in on my skin, making me work harder for each breath. For a moment I questioned the wisdom of doing this tonight; I was tired and though the throb in my jaw was now more annoying than painful, it was a reminder I wasn’t completely healed. But if the prof was right, Elymas wouldn’t be, either. And he wouldn’t be expecting a visit this soon.
I led the way around the side of the building, and we crouched behind a scrub of bottlebrush.
“How do you want to do this?” Leo’s voice was steady, but he gripped the hilt of his khopesh so tightly his knuckles gleamed in the dark. I tipped my head at the far side of the mansion. “The library window. With any luck they won’t have boarded it up yet.” And if that failed, there was the cellar. They had no way of knowing that was how we got in this morning.
My guess paid off. The library window was as we’d left it: shattered, gaping open, small shards of glass jutting from sections of the frame like the jagged teeth of some nocturnal animal. Glass crunched beneath our soles as we stole under the broken window. Although light shone from other windows around the building, the library was seeped in ink-black darkness. There was just enough residual light for me to make out the slender shape of the lectern in the alcove—and to see there was nothing resting on top of it. No surprise there. Leaving the Book of Threads sitting by a broken window would have been stupid, something Elymas was definitely not.
I slapped at a mosquito on my neck, secured my grip on the Sword of Absolom, and, ignoring the growing tightness in my gut, swung a leg through the glassless window frame. The icebox temperature of the place engulfed me within seconds. It seemed colder than this morning, so cold the sudden drop in warmth and humidity stung my eyeballs.
Cautiously, we slunk through the alcove, past the bare lectern and into the center of the marble room. We stood there, shoulders hunched, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark. Slowly, the hazy edges of bookcases and the fireplace began to materialize.
“Now what?” Leo’s hoarse whisper came from beside me.
Good question. The dark made searching the room difficult but not impossible, at least not with the help of the torch app on our phones. I had nothing concrete to go on, but something told me the Book of Threads was still here, still inside this room.
“We look. Start with the bookshelves. Elymas is arrogant enough to hide the book right under our noses.”
Resigned, Leo nodded and, swords in one hand and lit-up phones in the other, we turned for the bookshelves nearest us. The ridiculousness of the situation wasn’t lost on me. If I lived to tell this story, this was the part I’d laugh at. Yeah, right.
Unease scraped a sharp fingernail down my spine as we scanned the volumes in front of us—I couldn’t shake the feeling we were being watched. Remembering the cherub faces on the ceiling, I lifted my head and looked up. All that met me was a blanket of darkness.
It’s in your head. I shook said head and returned my eyes to the bookshelf. Beside me, Leo’s breath suddenly came a little faster than normal, almost as though he’d anticipated the familiar voice that drifted out of the gloom behind us.
“What one man sees as arrogance, Mr. Leander, another recognizes as confidence…and innate superiority.”
Leo and I spun around. At the same moment, flames flickered to life in the fireplace on the other side of the room, throwing a bloodred glow across the marble floor, up the walls and over the heavy wooden desk—the front of which Elymas leaned against. The left half of his face remained in shadow while the firelight cast an ever-moving haze on the right, enough to reveal a self-satisfied and, regardless of what the bastard said, arrogant smirk. Right there, I vowed to wipe that smirk off his Ken-doll face if it was the last thing I did on this earth.
Behind the desk, blanketed by the last of the shadows, movement drew my eye—Baptiste and Clay.
So much for our unexpected visit.
“I must commend you, though, Mr. Leander. What you seek is indeed right under your nose.” Elymas pushed away from the desk and moved aside, giving us an unobstructed view of what sat on it: The Book of Threads next to a gleaming, bronze-bladed khopesh much like the one Leo clutched in his trembling hands.
Everything in me tightened at the sight of the book.
So close. So damn close.
My gaze flitted between the book and the khopesh beside it, reminding me that Elymas wasn’t about to give me what I wanted without a fight.
Elymas rounded to the back of the desk, his movements fluid and sure, making me question if he felt any discomfort from the w
ounds Cora had inflicted on him earlier. What if the professor was wrong about Elymas’s healing rate, and he was already fully recovered? He’d been wrong about Elymas not expecting us to show up tonight, so maybe he was wrong about this, too. Shit. I needed him wounded, needed every advantage I could get.
I shifted from foot to foot and inched one hand down the hilt of the Sword of Absolom, sliding my fingers along the sharp blade. One cut and the advantage is mine.
At least I hoped it was.
Hands spread on either side of the Book of Threads as he leaned over his desk, Elymas ran his gaze along the khopesh in my grip, eyes halting when they reached where my fingers pressed against the edge of the blade. Did Elymas know I was aware of his weakness, this glitch in his supernatural firewall?
“You have something of mine that I’d like returned.” His violet gaze lingered on the Sword of Absolom in my hands for a moment longer before he shifted his pinprick pupils to my face.
The self-assured smirk on his face was a fuse to my anger. “So why don’t we trade?” My gaze flicked to the book on the desk, then straight back up at Elymas. I wasn’t stupid enough to take my eyes off him for long.
Head tilted and lips pursed, Elymas regarded me with an expression of mock consideration. “An interesting idea…but I think not, Mr. Leander. You see, you’ve caused me considerable grief when everything should have been so simple. If you’d just followed your usual pattern of behavior we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I didn’t expect you to care enough about any of your three choices to end up in this predicament. Nevertheless, I owe you a small measure of thanks; it has been centuries since I’ve had the pleasure of killing a Loose Thread.”
His eyes never leaving mine, he stroked the flat of the khopeshe’s blade in front of him. “The act is so much more satisfying than merely watching a Guardian choose unwisely. This morning’s events are only a minor setback. Once I’ve dealt with you, I’ll look forward to seeking out your lovely friend.”
He smirked again. Darker this time, if that was even possible. My stomach turned. It was hard to believe this monster had once been human, that he’d once loved someone—then killed her in a jealous fit.