Not this time.
Compared to the rest of the house, this room was stark, with bare wooden floors, an iron bed and one chair in the corner. The only indulgences I had allowed myself were the paintings that covered the walls—oils done by my father, watercolors of my own, most mounted in gilt-edged frames, although a few simply hung by tacks. I followed the paintings around the room, my gaze lingering on each for a few moments, allowing myself to remember.
The most beautiful one hung directly across from me. Done by my father at the age of fifteen, it didn’t have the execution he would achieve later in life, but the subject matter was unique.
It was Lily. In the forest, pretending to be a faery.
She hovered over a patch of northern shooting star, their slender stems bending beneath the weight of delicate lavender flowers. The background deepened to a wall of coulter pine and incense cedar, sprinkled with weathered rocks and juniper moss. But the most lovely part of the painting was Lily, herself. Pale skin, a halo around her face, her wings iridescent and translucent. If you stared at the picture long enough, you could almost see her wings move, blurring in the afternoon shadows.
Whenever I looked at this image, I could understand how my father had been so easily enchanted. I found myself wishing that she had been the one to keep me here, that hers was the curse.
It was my own private faery tale, the one that kept me grappling at the edge of sanity.
But then my gaze drifted, as it always did, and I saw the rest of the paintings. All induced by the Darklings: that odd muse-like quality they had, leaving traces of inspiration behind like dusty fingerprints after they had stolen your dreams. I had counted the paintings once. Not including the one of Lily, there were somewhere around forty total—all of the same subject and yet all different.
They were all of Ash, the Great Beast, wearing a variety of skins throughout the past century. Most showed the Darkling with spine erect, shoulders back, chin tilted with an arrogant gaze—as if he dared the viewer to see past his fa?ade. But a few of the paintings captured his torment, bowed stance, gaze lowered, expression unreadable, as if he were trying to remember exactly what he had lost, where it might be, so he could recover it somehow. All the skin tones were different, and the hair as well, sometimes curly, sometimes straight. Still, the look in his eyes always remained the same.
A guarded expression.
And an unquenchable hunger.
I wondered if he looked at everyone that way, or if he saved that particular gaze for his prey.
I walked to the window and glanced down. A small crowd of teenagers huddled at the end of that woman’s driveway, that Madeline MacFaddin. Like they were waiting for her. I wondered why.
She was going to be my distraction. I knew it already, could feel it thumping through the floor when I saw how Ash had stared at her when she returned for her credit card earlier.
It was the same look he’d had when he gazed at Elspeth’s mother.
I should have warned her. I sighed. But whenever I had tried to say anything, Ash would freeze my vocal cords. Still there might have been a way. Too late now.
Too late for her.
Not too late for me.
I lifted the bedspread, peeked beneath the bed, just to make sure it was still there, that I hadn’t imagined it. Another long sigh, then I sank back and sat on the floor.
My suitcase, all packed. Ready and waiting. Gas in the car. A pocketful of cash.
As soon as they were all distracted, I was going to escape.
Chapter 41
A Ravenous Glare
Thane:
The Driscoll mansion grew larger as I approached, until it consumed the horizon, six gables and towering turret, mullioned windows and wraparound porch. It was a dark, faceless silhouette, all features erased by the fast-approaching night—all save the yellow glow, warm as a fire on a winter night, that came from an open window upstairs, Ash’s bedroom.
The room where Elspeth slept.
Anger and humiliation shivered across my skin as I crossed the threshold, as I shook the short flight out of my wings with a hasty snap. River at my side, we both paused in the lobby, lifted our heads to sniff the air.
I was supposed to leave—some swaggering threat of banishment that my father would fight and lose in the twisted Darkling court, another dark stain on my family crest that would be traced back to me. We were all supposed to leave, but I couldn’t—not when the Hunt was so near, when the moon hung in the sky like a temptress, demanding obeisance. I glanced out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the cavernous room.
At that moment, the moon wooed me with a dark song of harvest, wrapped about me with smoky tendrils, enveloped me with an ache that sank all the way to my marrow.