Although I keep his hulking figure in the corner of my eye, I scan the dark hallway for something . . . anything. The sheen of a marble bust makes me lurch toward it and haul it off its pedestal. The weight drags my arms down, making me stagger forward.
I grit my teeth, plant my feet wide, and heave the bust up. My elbows scream as I raise it like a tennis racket. Sweat running down the sides of my face, I wait for Maman’s god to come closer, wishing she’d been into miniatures instead of larger-than-life men.
When he’s too close for comfort, hopefully close enough for me to reach, I twirl, creating the momentum I desperately need considering how my arms shake. When I spin back, I let the bust fly. It hits him, but nowhere near the place I was aiming for.
It crashes into his ankle, which immobilizes the giant. His huge, pinkish-brown head bows to stare at what I’ve done, which is blow off his foot. He sways, but before he can tip over, which would’ve been quite ideal, he releases his broken sword and drapes a massive arm around one of the columns holding up the vaulted ceiling. The clay hilt, that had once held a long blade, shatters into chunks at his remaining sandaled foot.
The building shakes, and flecks of sky-colored plaster drizzle down. And then larger pieces, one so big it bears the entire body of a cherub, halo, cloud, and all.
If the roof caves in, he might die, but so will I.
He releases an indignant rumble that makes the marble tremble underfoot. I lock my knees, but when the shaking gets too violent, I lurch toward another column and hug it.
As the plexiglass case filled with kindling falls with a jarring crunch, I map out all the exits: the broken veranda, the emergency fire door at the end of the East hallway, the window behind the suit of armor. It hasn’t blown out but with a punch of the sword—
The sword!
I pitch myself toward the armor, slamming into it so violently I go down with it. As I land, my eyeballs feel like they touch the back of my skull. Body rattling, I pry the sword loose before flipping onto my backside and scuttling like a cockroach, scanning the hall for any changes, but the giant’s still cuddling the column.
Thank freaking all that is magical that my bust blasted his foot off.
I straighten, feeling braver now that I’m armed and the warlord is immobilized. As I advance toward him, the ground stops shaking, but the plaster’s still peeling off the ceiling and drifting down like sheets of snow during an avalanche.
“Not feeling so proud now, Ares, huh?”
Under the lip of his helmet, his eyes rove over me. They don’t glitter like real eyes, because they aren’t real.
He isn’t real.
And yet, when I’m going to plunge this sword inside his chest, I’m going to feel real satisfaction.
He growls, and then in one surprisingly fluid stroke for someone made of clay, he rips his shield off his vambrace and frisbees it toward me.
I dive sideways. My head ricochets off the marble, crackling the edge of my vision. I blink and blink, then heave myself onto all fours, knuckles of the hand clutching the sword smarting from where they met stone. Something wet and warm drips over my lids, then down the sides of my nose.
Crap.
As I force myself to stand, I wipe it away, knowing it’s blood without needing to see the crimson stain.
Doesn’t matter.
It’s just a flesh wound.
The shield lays smashed a body’s breadth from where I fell. The ochre chunks poking out from underneath the kindling Slate had mistaken for wands when I’d given him a tour of this building.
Thinking of Slate steels my rattling spine.
I roll my shoulders back and face the warrior again.
55
Slate
“Stop it, you two. Stop!” The way Gaëlle speaks, with such desperation, makes me think this isn’t the first time she’s tried to get boys to stop acting like boys.
Sweat drips into my eyes. Warmth and pain radiates through my upper body. My sweater’s stained a deep scarlet. I’ve been beating myself bloody trying to move the damn bookcase.
Adrien, too, has open wounds on his hands, and a sheen of sweat across his blistered forehead. He closes his eyes and sags against the massive piece of furniture, looking utterly defeated.
The clock is still ticking. The ground still shaking.
Bastian’s cell phone died fifteen minutes ago, so I have no idea what’s going on out there. All I know is that Rainier was sending the whole freaking fire brigade up to Fifth.
A dull thud comes from the other side of the bookcase.
“Stay away from the doors!” yells a muffled voice. “We’re coming in!”
Relief and impatience flood through me in equal parts. “About fucking time.”
56
Cadence
Ares’s mouth opens around another roar, displaying toothless gums. I guess that if my mother didn’t sculpt it, it doesn’t exist. He reaches to his head and pops off his helmet like a Lego hat, then bowls it at me. I duck.
“You’re getting predictable, Ares.” I scan the rest of his attire. Besides a toga, and one sandal, he’s weaponless.
Before he decides to strip and strangle me with his clay dress, I launch myself at him, sword pointed straight at his chest. He swats the air, the back of his hand catching the blade, sending it and me flying sideways. I go down on one knee, speckling blood all over the pale stone. My joint feels like it’s popped out of its socket, and yet I manage to stand, so it must have stayed put.
I hobble toward the monster, rethinking my strategy of going for his chest. It’s not like he has a heart to pierce. I circle him. There is no way I can reach his head to saw through his neck. He twists around the column, hopping on one foot. The column chips from his weight, but astonishingly, it holds up.
My gaze locks on his remaining foot. Clutching the sword with both hands, I run at the giant and swing the sword into his calf. The impact rattles my wrists and makes me utter a string of obscenities, but I hold on. Hold strong.
The clay fissures and then his ankle snaps off.
Ares’s livid howl reverberates through the cavernous building as he slithers like a snail down the column, spiderweb cracks shooting up his shins when they connect with stone.
He crumbles and crumbles.
I did it.
I defeated the Quatrefoil!
I did it.
Tears stream down my eyes, mix with the blood still gushing from my forehead. I want an unobstructed view of my victory, so I wipe them away, smearing my cheeks, pasting my hair to my throbbing skull.
The leaf glistens and falls with a clank amidst the debris of clay. I step toward it and then lean over and clasp the warm, smooth metal. I want to kiss it. I want to spit on it. I want to stomp it under my boots. I want to hug it.
In the end, I just hold it with both hands.
A thunderous crack sounds next to me. The column breaks in half along with every other column balancing the vaulted ceiling. And the ceiling . . . the beautiful ceiling painted with cherubs and clouds collapses over me.
I waged a battle against a monster and won.
I will not lose to plaster.
I run toward the window just as it explodes, thankfully, outward.
Before I can reach my escape hatch, something glances against the back of my skull.
I stumble. My ears ring, and my tongue tastes leaden.
I press my palms into the shuddering ground.
My leaf?
Where’s my leaf?
I crawl, my palms scraping through the debris. Before I can spot my prize, something heavy slams into the base of my spine, flattens me. I try to get up, but the world spins, and spins.
Quiet and dark.
Flecked by pinpricks of light.
Stars.
I see stars.
And then I see nothing.
57
Slate
I turn off my phone. All is in order.
Bastian will receive everything I o
wn when I die at moonset, which according to him, is at 4:43 p.m.
Thing is, I don’t even give a fuck about dying. Because it’s been almost four days, and Cadence is still in a coma. Her face is covered in cuts and scratches. She’s got a black eye and a gash through her right eyebrow.
Miraculously, no broken bones. But hell, I’d beg for broken bones over this unconscious shit. A clear bag of IV fluid hangs above her, and countless machines beep, their pattern never changing. She’s breathing, yet she barely seems alive.
There might not be a hospital in Brume, but the fancy university clinic more than makes up for its absence. The rooms are so new they sparkle, and the bathrooms . . . they rival mine back in Marseille. If the University’s short on funds, this place is why. If only they’d allocated ten euros of the cash spent on decorating this joint to replace the hairy soap-on-a-stick in my dorm’s toilettes hommes with liquid soap dispensers.
Two hours and thirty-six minutes.
You deserve to die, Rainier told me when Cadence was transported in here.
I didn’t disagree. No matter what kind of weird shit he did with my money, no matter how easily he left me to the sharks in the system, no matter how often he’s lied, it doesn’t matter.
I put on the ring. I started this whole mess.
And then the one time I needed to be by Cadence’s side, I forced her to go off on her own. And she ended up here.
When the fire brigade broke down the temple door, I set out like a doped-up racehorse leaping out of a starting gate. On the temple steps, a paramedic was shining a pen light into Bastian’s eyes and asking him questions. He was conscious and answering accurately.
Still, I asked him to list the foster parents we’d had. Once he’d spoken all their hateful names, I’d raced across the quad toward a site of such destruction that my heart didn’t beat once on the way there.
The Beaux-Arts veranda was gone, thousands of shards of glass glinting like diamonds on the snow as the firefighters swept over the area with their flashlights. The building itself had caved in, now resembling a Roman ruin with its smashed pillars, uneven sections of gray limestone walls, and arches of tenacious ceiling.
Two men grunted as they lifted a slab of slate roofing.
“We have something!” one of them yelled.
I ran toward where they stood. When I reached them, reached her, my breaths stopped short in my lungs. For an eternity, I stared down at her unmoving body. And then something in me snapped, and I lunged. Before my fingers could brush over her bloodied cheek, seek out her pulse, Adrien and one of the firemen cuffed my arms and hauled me back to let the paramedic do his job. I spit obscenities at them, roared to be released.
“Slate, calm down. Cadence would want you to calm down.”
“Calm down? Are you fucking kidding me? How am I supposed to fucking calm down, Prof?”
“I have a pulse,” the man kneeling beside her exclaimed.
I stopped fighting and gulped back the jagged lump stuck in my throat.
“Should he be touching her?” Adrien asked.
I was about to go off on him when I understood what he meant. If she was clutching her piece, he’d be cursed.
“Too late now,” I murmured.
They dug out her legs, then brought over a stretcher and laid her unresponsive body out. Her red coat was white with powdered plaster, her leggings dark with blood, and her fingers limp, devoid of any golden leaf.
“Could she have put it inside her pockets?” Adrien asked.
I grazed both. Empty.
I wanted to accompany the firemen wherever they were taking Cadence, but Adrien tipped his head to the rubble of glass, snow, and stone. “We need to find it.”
We spent hours, Adrien and I, on our knees. At some point, Bastian and Alma joined, and even though I growled at them to get the fuck away, they didn’t.
The sun was rising when we finally gave up, my death warrant signed and sealed.
But, like I said, doesn’t matter.
As long as Cadence lives . . .
Rainier rolls up to me now, an odd gentleness to his voice. “There’s rooftop access in this building. Gives onto the rocks below.”
His blue eyes, so many shades darker than his daughter’s, stray to the bay window with a panorama of the mist-cloaked, icy lake. It’s such a different view than the one from his office. Perhaps because the clinic’s perched on Fourth, and his manor—Cadence’s manor—sits on the lowest circle of this town.
“If I were you, I’d go up there and jump.”
I take a serrated breath in. “The world will be rid of me soon enough, de Morel.”
His eyes flash. “Oh, it’s never soon enough.”
He’s not wrong.
His voice grows soft again, soothing. “I’d do it now, Roland, while you’re still in control. Because later, when the poison’s in your system, and you’re writhing in pain, you’ll wish you had.”
He’s got a point. There’s nothing worse than losing control.
I take the stairs, the slap of my boots echoing on the concrete, and push open the heavy door to the roof. Snow curls about in the wind, whirlpools of powdered sugar at my feet. The air whips through my hair as I make my way across the frozen tar. I hold my breath until I reach the edge.
The mist unspools like windblown clouds, offering a glimpse of the jagged rocks on the sandy shore below. It would be easy to step off. It would mean I decide what my last moments look like, not some evil poison in my blood. It would mean no more pain. No more anything.
I lean forward.
But then I step back, too much of a coward to take my own life. Or maybe I’m too much of a fighter. And I know Bastian will never forgive me if I don’t stick around until the very last second.
Bones cold as icicles, I return to Cadence’s side.
Rainier’s gone.
I sit in the transparent plastic chair next to her bed, accidentally banging the finger with the ring against the armrest. Pain lances up my arm from my newest injury. The one Bastian gave me yesterday.
The day after Cadence . . . after she . . . lost consciousness, Bastian, along with Adrien, Alma, and Gaëlle pored through the salvaged documents in the library. The temple had taken a beating, but it still stood, proud and cupola-less at the heart of Brume.
The following day, Bastian crawled around the astronomical clock like a bug, on the hunt for something. I wasn’t sure what. Maybe a bottle-opener made to pop Bloodstones off rings. He found nothing.
And yesterday, he came at me with industrial-sized bolt-cutters that didn’t even dent the golden band. In a last desperate attempt, he closed the cutters around my finger. Let’s just say it felt like the groac’h’s needle-sharp teeth had made babies with the guivre’s noxious fire. Blood had spewed everywhere. Bone had crunched like crispy crackers. And then, because even the nastiest messes need a cherry on top, Bastian had vomited. Definitely rated in the Top 5 Weirdest Moments of Slate Ardoin’s Miserable Life.
Anticlimactically, my goddamn finger didn’t come off.
Instead, before our very stunned eyes, my skin and bone knitted together. What should’ve been a savage amputation became nothing more than an ugly bruise.
The ring has cursed me, and cursed me good.
Gripping the handrail of her medicalized bed, I study Cadence’s beautiful face, so still, so pale. An angel’s face. I reach out and wrap my warm fingers around her frosty ones.
“Come back,” I whisper. “Please, princess, come back.”
The machines beep in the same constant rhythm they’ve done since she was plugged into them.
“Come back to me, Cadence.”
Her eyelids flutter but stay closed. They’ve done that a lot so I don’t hold my breath.
I tug on my sweater collar.
I need air.
I stride out of the room, almost smack into Nolwenn.
Her face is lined with a hundred more wrinkles than the last time I saw her.
I
gesture to Cadence’s room. “She’s . . . she’s the same.”
Nolwenn nods. “It’s you I came to see, Marseille.”
“Me?”
She takes a step closer and whispers, “It’s important.”
I sigh and run a hand through my hair. “Okay.”
There’s no one in the waiting area on this floor, just a handful of empty armchairs. A student nurse is working behind the desk, earbuds in, head bopping. She looks up when we enter the room, but Nolwenn waves her away. We walk to the farthest corner from the desk. Nolwenn sits, crosses her legs, pats her puffy blonde hair, and clears her throat. She gives me a quick smile, and I see she’s got lipstick on her teeth.
I’m debating whether to tell her or not but am brutally interrupted by a confession that pins my lips shut.
“I’m the one who sent you away from Brume.”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say but not this.
I find my voice. “So, the mystery of how I ended up in foster care’s finally solved.” The irony that I get closure minutes before I’m set to die isn’t lost on me. “Do you know how fucking awful it was?”
She flinches as though I’d slapped her. “I’m sorry, Marseille. Back then, we thought anything would be better than you being here. We had no idea what you might endure. I’m truly sorry.” Between the purple smudging her eyes and the red rimming them, she looks it.
A flash of anger sparks through me, then settles into cold indifference. It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing fucking matters anymore.
Still, I ask, “Why?”
“Amandine asked me to.”
My whole body feels hollowed out. “Amandine de Morel? Cadence’s mother?”
“Yes.” She puts a hand to her helmet of hair again.
“So Rainier knew the whole fucking time where I was . . .”
It’s not a question, but she must think it is because she shakes her head and says, “No.”
Of Wicked Blood: A Slow Burn Romantic Urban Fantasy (The Quatrefoil Chronicles Book 1) Page 39