“That salamander that was coming at you… I dismissed it.” He shook his head. “That was the first time I ever… I still can’t do it reliably, but a powerful enough burst of emotion can overwhelm an elemental. From there, I just… experimented. Puzzled out the rest of it.”
“And started to regain memories of a childhood with William Cartwright, whose father studied this unique ability.” Olivia pushed hair from her eyes. She heaved a sigh and shook her head, casting her eyes skyward. “It’s hard to just dismiss all of Albany’s horseshit nonsense about luck and fate and being a god when so much of this tangle is the result of things crashing together, all at once.” She looked down into her tea, and then made a face and set it aside. “I barely like this awful grass-water hot,” she said. “I’m not sure why I’m trying to drink it room temperature.”
He cracked a small smile.
“I wish you’d told me,” she murmured.
He laughed at that, quietly. Bitterly. “I wish I had, too. You’re right. It might have prevented this.” He shook his head. “I never—I never could have imagined that—that it could be used to make someone do something. To…” He thought of Fernand. Of that scar in the wood. He shuddered, his gorge rising. He would hate Rachel Albany for the rest of her life. And his own. “You would have pieced it together. Realized it all earlier. That’s what you do.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe I felt that I was betraying Will,” Chris said quietly. “I already couldn’t—wouldn’t give him what he wanted. Wasn’t protecting his father’s work the least I could do?” But that didn’t feel right. He toyed with the handle of his teacup and then sighed. “But, I—no. No, I think I just liked having a secret. I think I just—what if I wanted to use it? On you? I couldn’t if you knew. If you knew, I don’t think you’d want me to use it at all.”
“Why do you think that?”
Because Olivia understood implicitly the thing Will had been trying to tell him for months. And Chris had known that. Had known what she’d say. What she’d think.
“Because everyone has a right to their own emotions,” he said quietly.
She nodded slowly. “As horrified as I am that it took… what you know now, about Miss Albany, to realize that…” She frowned and shook her head. “It’s monstrous, Christopher. I’d rather be dead. And I do mean that. I would rather someone rip my immortal soul from this fleshy shell than let someone muck about in my mind.”
She looked at him.
He swallowed.
“Did you ever do it to me?” she asked.
“No,” he said. Relieved beyond belief, now, that he hadn’t. He didn’t know if she’d forgive him, and he… he couldn’t take that. Not now. Not when so much else was lost, and even more was on the line. “At least, not consciously. I don’t know if I do it without intending, or not. There’s so much I don’t know.” He thought of Doctor Cartwright’s notes going up in a puff of smoke. “So much I probably won’t ever know, now.”
Silence fell. He could practically hear Olivia trying to make peace with it all. So little mattered to her, in the end. Not propriety. Not empathy. Not even human life evoked much reaction. But autonomy? Agency? The sanctity of a feeling?
Those things mattered to her very much.
“Will knew,” Chris said eventually. “He told me never to do it.” He realized a moment too late that he said Will knew, and not Will knows. He told himself not to think about that. Not to examine it.
“Well. Will is smart. A bit of a wanker, but smart.” Olivia’s gaze flicked in his direction, and then away again. She cleared her throat quietly. “I’m sure he’ll be all right.”
Chris closed his eyes tight. The well of tears that he thought he’d run dry threatened to climb back up his throat again, and he swallowed hard. “If he is,” he said quietly. “He might not even want to speak to me again. And maybe he shouldn’t. We fought before I left. Fought hard. Rough. He—I—”
Olivia was quiet.
Chris took a deep breath.
“I’ve been an idiot,” he said. He buried his face in his hands. “I’ve been such—such an idiot, Olivia! Gods! Thinking—thinking it should be Rachel, it should be Rachel. I cared for her, and she was safe. Normal. Hah!” He laughed, bitter wrenching half-sobs that clawed at his throat. “She’s—the worst person I could—I could possibly—and Will. Will, who is always there for me, who is always at my side, who is loyal and good and who I just keep hurting because I have this idea in my head, this—this idea of what love is, of what I am, and I’m not! It’s not! Love—love is—it’s not my parents, who barely seemed to tolerate each other! It’s not that idiocy with Rachel! It’s not you and Kolston and your affair. Love is Emilia sodding Banks! How does it matter that Maris is a woman?”
His hands dropped from his face. He ground his teeth so hard he thought they might crack, but he’d start crying again otherwise, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t stand it. He had nothing left to give. There was nothing but cotton balls inside of him.
“I would say it doesn’t,” Olivia said softly.
“The best man I ever knew was like me,” Chris murmured. “And I never knew.” He laughed. It came out a bit hysterical. “The woman I was chasing after is the one who killed him! Gods, Albany might be right after all. It’s all fate. It’s all connected.”
He didn’t want to think about Albany. The casual cruelty he’d exhibited when he shot Will. The way he’d taunted Rachel, who deserved it, and yet it had hurt to watch. The fact that wherever he was, right now, he was with Rosie.
For an instant, a dizzying, horrible instant, the world outside seemed to press in. It climbed through the windows. The cats and the books and the pillows and the blankets and the tea all disappeared, and he was back out there, surrounded by faces he couldn’t trust and a future that was as uncertain as it had ever been, and far more terrifying. He began shaking again.
Olivia set down her cup.
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head and lurched to his feet. Abigail mrowled and took off in an orange blur. “I—” he said, but didn’t know what he was doing. Just that he suddenly needed to be moving, to… to….
To what?
To get out there? To save Rosemary? To… what?
“I don’t know what to do,” he said, wobbling on his feet. “I don’t know what to do, Olivia.”
She was there.
She helped him sit back down. She carefully arranged the blanket around him. She stood back and looked down at him and then sighed.
“You…” She made a strangled sound and threw her hands in the air. “Oh, hell. You should stay… stay here. For now. For tonight. I—it’s not—you… just… I think you ought to stay here.”
She turned and swirled out of the room in a flash of purple and fuchsia. He knew that she didn’t want to look at his face. To be seen making such an offer. Such a concession. The most private woman he’d never known, opening her home for him, because….
Because she loved him.
“Olivia,” he called.
She stopped, one hand on a door frame. She didn’t turn back to look. “Mn?”
I love you, too. No, that would only hurt her.
Instead: “Thank you.”
Her shoulders sagged, and she looked back with a smile. “Yes, well. I—yes. The couch is very warm. There are blankets. I—good night, Christopher.” And then, pausing again. “… just shout if you need me. I’ll be here.”
wo days later, Chris walked into an interrogation room.
Hannah Burke, with lips pursed and head high, pulled out the chair for him and allowed him to slip into it. He folded his hands on the table. His thoughts were racing. He couldn’t help but think of the day, six months ago, when Will had helped him sneak into this very room to meet with Francis Livingstone. The good doctor had warned him about Garrett Albany, that day. Chris couldn’t have possibly imagined how relevant the warning would become to his life.
“I shouldn’t a
llow this,” Officer Burke said, her voice tight. “I wouldn’t if I didn’t think it could get us information. It’s against all regulation. Also, I don’t like you.”
Chris actually managed a weak smile at that. “Still?”
“Always,” she said, like a promise. “You can never change that you’ve gotten inside of William’s head. Perhaps the worst hasn’t come to pass. Yet. But…” She shook her head. “I’ll be watching from the double-sided mirror,” she said. “If you attempt to slip any message….”
“I won’t,” Chris snapped. “Believe me. Whatever past might exist between the prisoner and me…” He shook his head. “There’s nothing there, now. She could rot in here for all I care.”
He almost entirely meant it.
Rachel Albany wore a jumpsuit. Her hair was loose around her shoulders. He’d never seen it so stringy. There was a smudge of dirt on her cheek. Her face looked hollow. When she sat across from him, her cuffs rattled.
It was, really, very much like that meeting with Livingstone, after all. This time, he hadn’t come looking for assertions of innocence.
He hoped for the opposite entirely.
She met his eyes. She looked tired. Some of the life had been sucked out of her. But there was hope in her eyes, and despite everything she’d done to him, to Rosie, he hated to snuff it out.
He hardened himself against her.
“I need to understand why,” he said.
She lowered her eyes to look at her hands. She opened her mouth, and he cut her off roughly. He could see her response so clearly, and he might reach across the table and fucking strangle her if she said it.
“Don’t you dare say that family is family,” he said, his voice a rough growl. “I don’t want to hear shit about how blood is blood. Your little cult doesn’t impress me, Rachel. Your family isn’t worth your loyalty. And, as I’ve been thinking these last days, comparing the father whose name I bear and the man who truly raised me, blood isn’t anything. It’s not even as thick as piss.”
“You’re angry,” she said.
“Oh, you can tell?”
He watched her throat work. Her eyes closed and then opened again, slowly. She curled her hands against the table. Her chains rattled. “I can’t explain why,” she said eventually. “I wish I could. I wish more than anything that I could tell you where Garrett is, save Rosemary, fix everything. Gods know, he’d deserve me turning him over after he just left me the way he did.” She paused. “Has… has there been any sign of them at all?”
No.
“Why do you think I’ll tell you anything?”
She flinched. And then nodded. “I… yes. That’s fair, isn’t it?” She buried her face in her hands, the chain dangling between her wrists. “Ah, Gods. Mother Deorwynn. I can’t… I can’t even imagine how much I’ve hurt you. I’m sorry, Christopher. I want to make it better, I want to fix it, but I can’t.”
“He has something on you,” Chris said, remembering what Albany had said during their standoff.
“Yes. He does,” she said, and then sighed and shook her head. “But all the gods forgive me, it’s not just that. He’s spent our entire lives making it impossible for me to ever be free of him, but he’s my brother. You’re wrong, Chris. Blood is thicker than water. It’s thicker than anything. Garrett is a monster. He’s gone so far down this awful road that I’m not even sure he can come back. He has so much hate in him. For Tarland, for categorization, and… and apparently, even for me.” She spread her hands helplessly. Her chains rattled. “But when I was just a tiny, vulnerable girl, my big brother protected me. The way that you protected Rosie. If he lost his soul to shield me from the world… how can I betray him?”
“Because he left you and laughed in your face! And if that’s not enough, Rachel, at least think of the greater good!”
“I do! My biggest concern right now is that I can’t talk to him anymore, trapped in this cell as I am! I’ve been the angel on his shoulder for years, talking him out of his worst plans, keeping him sane.” Her lips twisted into an imitation of a smile. “Mother Deorwynn, the moment I leave the city, three months later he orchestrates that nightmare at the Piffleman’s Gala House!”
And he’d brought her there that night. Another coincidence. The red string of fate. Everything leading up to a moment of change.
He shook the thoughts off. Albany’s madness was affecting him.
“He’s evil,” Chris said.
“No one is evil.”
“He gave you up and fucking delighted in it!”
She looked down at her hands. Hunched her shoulders. “Yes,” she murmured. “He did.”
“And now he has Rosemary.”
She said nothing.
He ran a hand through his hair. He was exhausted already, and he’d barely said half of what he wanted to. “Will he hurt her?”
“I don’t think so.” She met his eyes again, and they were dark with shame. “He’s half obsessed with her. Ever since White Clover… he’s been the way you saw him. Rambling on about fate. About being chosen. About Rosemary being the key to everything.” Those eyes pleaded with him. “I didn’t lie to you, Chris. Yes, I was reporting to him. Yes, I brought her to him when I thought he really would kill that hostage, and gods only know who else, besides. But I kept her as far from him as I could. I hid as much as I could from him. I never wanted this to happen.”
“Until you delivered her right into his hands.”
“Desperate times,” she whispered.
He barked out a harsh laugh. He hated the words. They sounded like something his father would have said. While collecting that godsdamned list, perhaps, which had started all of this nonsense, apparently! “Were you in my room?” he demanded. “Did you—drug me, somehow? Come into my room while I slept, asking about the list?”
“Yes.”
“How did you possibly—the day that happened, you weren’t even there! Livingstone had just been arrested! You were doubtless off with your brother!”
“I had Mister Spencer do it. I told him about how you had been the night Combs came to the estate. I said that you needed sleep. He was easy enough to convince. He didn’t know it was also a paralytic.” Her lips pulled down into a frown. “It was just about the list, at the start. We just wanted to know what your father had known.”
Chris shook his head. She was a stranger. The wise, beautiful, caring woman he’d been so bedazzled with was a fake, just a shadow-play she’d used to draw him in and make him dance for her. “Gods,” he said. “What an idiot I am. Was anything real?”
She looked up abruptly, and she reached for him, forgetting her chains. They caught, and they rattled. Her face crumpled. “Yes,” she said. “What I feel for you—it was not some—some plan. If Garrett wanted you seduced, he’d have sent Katie! Have you looked at me? I’m plain. I’m standoffish. I have no sense of style. I’m nothing. I’m a sparrow. And you—you’re everything I’m not.”
“Miss Woodruff wouldn’t have been able to play with my emotions,” Chris snapped.
“Neither can I! I can’t write you, Chris, and you can’t write me! We can’t even both write the same person at the same time! Not even unknowingly. And that’s—that’s part of why—don’t you see? Everything I felt was real. Everything you felt was real. It might have been the realest thing either of us has ever experienced!”
“No,” Chris said. “No.” He was done with this. He could barely remember why he’d come in the first place. “None of it was real because you are not real. The Rachel Albany I—felt things for, she is a fiction.”
“She’s not. She’s me. Chris… please, I—”
“You killed Fernand.”
And really, that was the end of it. That was the only thing that mattered. He really didn’t know why he’d come, because it would never change that one thing. She couldn’t take it back. She couldn’t change it. She couldn’t rewind time and go back to that day and not spend six months being a person who hadn’t done that. She had
killed Fernand.
He shouldn’t have come.
He stood up.
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no,” she begged. “No, please don’t go. I need you to understand.”
“I think I understand fine,” Chris said.
“Christopher—”
“I hear they intend to try you for murder. For Roger Greene, and for Fernand Spencer. It’ll be hard to sell, perhaps, considering you never touched them, but there’s always Mabelle’s death if nothing else sticks. I hope they convict you, Rachel Albany. Truly, I do.”
“They’ll want to kill me,” she whispered. “Noose or cloudling, either way….”
“And I’ll recommend leniency,” he said. “So will Olivia. So will Maris—who might live, by the way, no thanks to you–and William and all the other people I know connected to the police and to the law. You’ll live, and you’ll rot in here until you help us find Rosemary. Then, maybe, we can help you further. But if anything happens to her… well. Leniency won’t really be on my mind.”
“Don’t go,” she said again, her voice sweet and quiet in the dark.
And for just a moment, he didn’t want to. She’d been abandoned and cut off like a bad chunk of meat. The truth was, despite how she’d destroyed the things that mattered to him most, played with him, tricked him, and made him into a fool, she was still Rachel.
That was the hardest part of all.
He swallowed hard. Closed his eyes. Took a deep breath.
“Officer,” he called. “I’m ready to go.”
He left Rachel silently pleading with him, her sad eyes boring into his back.
On this way out, a uniformed officer pressed a crumpled piece of paper into his hands, looking straight ahead the entire time. As soon as he was out on the street, he pulled it open.
So, as it happens, I’m a right bleeding idiot, it began.
Well, it would have to wait. He had a full day planned.
His next stop was the hospital.
He still hated it. The scent of antiseptic, the white walls, the nurses and doctors and assistants all clothed in white with their three linked rings over their hearts, a remnant from when doctors served the church. He still thought of that night, when he’d run through streets in his bare feet and nightshirt, a thirteen-year-old boy who had just witnessed a catastrophe. He’d found the nearest hospital, Deorwynn’s Heart, and it had been filled with the screams of the dying and the bodies of the dead. He’d seen horrors no child should ever witness that night, and he’d just wanted to find his mother.
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