chapter Eighteen
Revelations
I put a hand on a gasping Emily’s waist to usher her to my room. I had a feeling no one from the Division needed to hear our conversation. We were no more than through the door when she turned on me.
“Where did you get this?”
I watched her, not the stack of papers in her hand violently shaking in my direction. “We—” I stopped myself. “The Division has information-gatherers. Spies.”
She threw the stack to the floor, where it landed soundlessly on plush beige carpeting. “And they found them with Council. Do you know what that means? Do you?”
I stared at her. I had a feeling my idea of what it meant and her idea of what it meant were on two different planes.
She took a step toward me, a threat in her voice. “It means your people did this, Aern. Not the Division. Council, the ones we’re supposed to trust.”
My instincts told me to back slowly away, but my mouth had other ideas. “You know they aren’t to be trusted now. You heard the report. Morgan has figured out a way to sway our own kind—”
“No,” Emily said. “Not now. This isn’t a new report. My mother, our mother, was taken before Morgan got this sway—”
Emily suddenly grabbed her middle as if she’d been punched in the gut. “Oh no,” she groaned, shaking her head.
I reached for her and she put up a hand between us. “No. No, Aern, I… Oh no.”
“For the last time, what is it?” I was hovering over her where she hunched forward, my hands helplessly waiting.
“Nothing,” she said, waving the hand she’d held up. “Nothing, I, I have to…”
Her words were lost to me as she leaned over to pick up the papers. She was wearing clothes Brianna had gotten for her, clothes I presumed were Emily’s usual style, and the hem of the fitted Henley that had rested at her waist rode up to reveal the skin of her lower back.
“Christ,” I said. “Oh, Christ.”
Emily’s head turned to find me, momentarily distracted from her own agitation. She opened her mouth to ask “What?” and then her eyes, her wide, sea-glass-green eyes, followed mine and she realized what I’d seen.
My stomach turned. “Tell me it’s only a tattoo.”
She straightened, face pale despite having just righted herself.
I stepped closer. “Emily, tell me. Tell me you got a tattoo. Tell me you stayed out late, fell in with the wrong crowd, made some bad decisions, tell me you woke up with this and have no idea how it got there.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Ancient blood rite symbols? I don’t think so, Aern.”
I could see that she was embarrassed at my reaction, but I couldn’t stop myself. I grabbed her waist, spun her around, and moved her shirt aside to bare the top of an inked design on her lower left side.
She glanced back at me over her shoulder. “It’s not, it wasn’t like that, Aern. My mother. She… I told you about her. You know.” She was mortified now, having to explain her crazy mother’s ideas. “She did it when I was too young to argue with her.”
But her mother wasn’t crazy. She was a prophet. I swallowed hard before running my thumb over the design.
The words were stuck in my throat, choking me. All of it, the whole ordeal would have spilled out, but something like a single weak cough was all I could manage.
Emily turned slowly toward me, the gravity of my reaction sinking in. This wasn’t about some tattoo. This was something else. Something about the ancient symbols. Something about Brianna. “What?” she whispered, half afraid to find out more.
My hands were still at her hips, frozen there, my thumbs resting on the bare skin above her jeans. The bare skin of the chosen.
I fell to my knees in front of her, pulling her down to face me. Her mouth hung slightly open, unsure whether to brace for hurt or anger or fear. I had trusted my room was secure. I had trusted we had privacy. I’d said anything I’d needed to say here freely, but not this. Not these words.
My right hand freed her waist to curve gently around the base of her neck. I pulled her in, the image of those same symbols carved into Brianna’s wrists clear in my mind as I pressed my cheek to Emily’s and whispered the words that could never be taken back. The words that would ruin her.
“Brianna is a decoy.”
Emily stiffened under my hand, but I held her there, my lips moving swiftly, my voice all but silent.
“Your mother hid your mark. You were born with the symbol, I can feel it on your skin. The tattoo is only a cover. Brianna’s are as well. She put them on the inside of her wrists so they would find them. So they would stop looking before they came to you. There’s a curve beneath the symbol of the serpent that spirals up and right. She traced the ink to the left and down. It’s a small change, but that’s all she needed. She marked you as merely Brianna’s blood, but she knew they’d find her first. She knew Brianna would be their target.”
The hands Emily had braced against my arms curled tighter as we stayed there. When I’d said all I could say, my head fell forward, resting an inch above her shoulder. Not touching, not now.
Everything had changed. In one instant, the constant we’d lived with our entire lives was gone, swept from beneath us in a heartbeat. It was Emily. Emily.
A long moment passed before I noticed her mouth moving silently beside me. I’d been lost in my own revelations, been shifting my own realities. I carefully eased my head back to see her, and caught the forms of several ancient words. Another prophecy.
She was repeating back her mother’s teachings, aligning them to her situation. Finding her truth.
Her lips stilled and she looked at me. But she didn’t see me. Her green eyes were hollow, a vacant stare from someone lost and mislead.
“I need to see Brianna,” she whispered, her voice hoarse.
I nodded, helped her to her feet. There was nothing I could say. Nothing to be done. This was a blow that could not be softened. This one shouldn’t be eased.