“Move. Now.”
He let go, and I opened the door and started down the stairs. When I saw my attacker, my heart thudded with a strange pressure, shock coursing through my body. My eyes were lying to me. This had to be some horrible mistake.
Ivory, now chained in our basement, couldn’t have been our attacker.
She kept her gaze down, the fringe of her lashes casting shadows onto her cheeks. Blood splattered to the floor in front of her. More crusted beneath one ear and clotted her hair against her scalp. Chains weighed against the bubbling flesh of her wrists.
I turned toward Charles, dread sinking deeper into my stomach, my gaze pleading for him to correct my assumptions.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, his voice full of apology.
Adrenaline wore off and pain took over, but this pain came more from the tightening around my heart than the wound on my shoulder. What was happening?
Ivory’s hoarse, tear-smothered voice broke the silence. “Sophia?”
“No,” I said sharply. I wasn’t doing this. I couldn’t talk to her.
I ran back upstairs to the kitchen, to the one place I sat every morning until the nightmares of my slumber disappeared. Recently, my nightmares had all been of my ancestor, the ghost of her dead body hanging from the gallows, but this nightmare was far worse.
This nightmare was real.
As my trembling hand drew a chair from the table, the chair legs rattled against the linoleum. Charles crossed the floor and filled a kettle with water.
I gazed at my hands, not really seeing them. “I heard her.”
“Of course.” His soft voice soothed the edge of my anxiety.
“But that would mean…she is…” The pain had been too severe for me to tap into my ability. I’d assumed our attacker had been Cruor, but that couldn’t be the case. “What is she?”
“You already know,” Charles said, pouring me a cup of chamomile tea. “She’s an earth elemental.”
“I sure as hell didn’t know.” My words sounded accusatory, and part of me wondered if they should. How could she be Cruor? I blew out a deep breath. “Why would I know that?”
“After that night at Club Flesh—” He set my tea on the table and stared out the window. I followed his gaze, but the yard was empty, the trees bare. “She didn’t tell you?” He shook his head. “She said she would tell you everything. You said she told you everything.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” I said. “She told me about the Cruor. Not that she was one.”
Had I been too absorbed in my relationship with Charles to notice what was going on around me? I thought back to all the conversations Charles and I had. None of them had been about her. All of our talks had been about the people I feared, not the people I trusted.
Charles turned toward me. “Haven’t you ever ‘heard’ her before?”
I rubbed slow circles over my temples, trying to think. “I haven’t seen her in months, since before I understood my ability.” I shook my head. “Are you certain?”
Charles nodded.
“Then she’s a dual-breed, like you.”
“Not like me, no,” he said. “She’s protected herself from the sun through Ankou magic.”
“Can they do that?”
He shrugged. “It appears so.”
I stared at the rings of the wooden kitchen table, trying to make sense of everything. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“I trusted she had.” Charles tucked his hands deep into his pockets and gave me a look that told me he had more to say, but didn’t want to say it. And since he didn’t seem sure he wanted to say it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.
“What about her aura?” I asked. “You would’ve noticed something off about her, right?”
“Aura-reading is more complicated than that.”
“Is it?” I asked, eyes brimming with tears and heart overflowing with hurt and skepticism.
Charles swallowed. “You know things are different for me. I am not a pure Strigoi—I cannot use my abilities with the same strength. And I hardly have the training. Auras are complicated. Red might mean life-force, raw passion, or anger. Orange might mean sensuality or lacking reason. Green, healing or envy.”
“She was all of those?”
“Mostly red, though always a bit muted. The Ankou magic may have affected her aura.” His eyes searched mine. “Now do you understand?”
I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I needed to rein in my emotions if I was going to make sense of all this.
“I’m sorry, Charles. I just don’t get it. Why was she trying to attack you? What do we do now?” I stood to pace the kitchen but a dizzy spell hit and rooted me at a standstill. Ivory’s name echoed in my thoughts, and I sunk back into the kitchen chair. “Can’t you remove her memory of us—use influence or something?”
Charles knelt beside me and grabbed my shoulders. I knew he wanted me to look at him, both by reading the thoughts in his mind and also from the way his head dipped slightly to bring his face closer to mine.