I couldn’t look.
“That can’t be done to an earth elemental,” he said.
“We need to think about this.” I pushed him away. “I need to think about this.”
My gaze lingered apologetically on his, then I headed for the place I always went when feeling my darkest: the bathroom.
I closed the door behind me and took a long look in the mirror. The woman staring back couldn’t be me. She was a husk of her former self—a lost child or a silhouette of who she might have been. Sobs fought to break through my anger. I splashed cool water on my face and tried to steady my breathing. Leaning back against the wall, I slid to the bathroom floor.
Did Ivory think killing Charles would protect me from his world? If she would just forget about me, Charles and I could be together without worrying about her trying anything like this again. There had to be a way to make her forget.
Paloma came to mind. She’d said I could come to her with anything. ‘Anything’ included what? Certainly not blood-sucking creatures of the night. I hadn’t even told her about the voices. Would it be wrong to subject her to the knowledge of this world, especially given how the Cruor dealt with people who found out about them?
Suddenly I was in the bedroom, phone in hand, the memory of walking there like a dream. My fingers dialed the numbers and the receiver rang in my ears. I willed myself to hang up, but my body would not comply.
Paloma’s voice came over the line. “Sophia?”
Had I said it was me? “Yes,” I managed.
“Sophia, is everything all right?”
“There’s a problem,” I said. “With Ivory.”
I could almost hear her frown through the phone. “I was worried this might happen. I’ll come straight over.”
The line went dead.
Chapter 20
THE CHILL OF WINTER leaked through the cracked bedroom window. The backyard fence rotted near the bottom, decaying from the moisture of dirtied snow, and a clammy chill crawled over my skin. Darkness would be a relief from what the day had revealed.
Something crinkled and shuffled outside the door. A clock ticked. All these things overpowered my senses, and yet they didn’t really matter.
I was still sitting on the bed, phone in hand, when Charles brought Paloma into the room. She smelled like roses and fabric softener, not incense and hot ceramic. The hem of her long flowing skirt flickered against the burnt yellow light of the room. I felt drugged.
Charles returned the phone to its cradle and draped a blanket over my shoulders. I’d been shivering, but not from cold.
Paloma kneeled down and cradled my face in her hands. Her eyes looked more tired than usual, her usually vibrant skin faded and grayish. “Charles told me what happened.”
“Ivory is a…she’s a…”
“I know.”
“You knew?” Everyone had known but me? Somewhere beneath my barriers, hurt and anger threatened to surface.
“It’s my job to know.” She lowered her hands to her lap, and for the first time ever, I noticed her fingernails. She’d always seemed so put together, so light and worry-free. But her fingernails were so horribly bitten—a lifetime of worry showing from the habit—that scabs formed where her nails had been chewed to the quick.
I pulled the blanket tighter around me, shielding the torn, bloodstained fabric at the shoulder of my waffle-knit sweater. “You run Sparrow’s Grotto, in Cripple Creek. That is your job.”
Paloma trapped her bottom lip with her teeth and cast Charles a pained, watery gaze.
Charles wrapped his arm around me. “Paloma called on her way over. She’s a generational witch, like you. She works to make sure things like this don’t happen.”
Not very good at her job then, is she?
My friends weren’t my friends. My mentor was more than a mentor. This wasn’t the town I’d grown up in, and this house—this house that had once been a library—was nothing more than an empty shell, the walls with little purpose beyond hiding a truth I’d have rather not known.
For a moment, I thought of the world outside, going on without me—a world where elementals did not exist because people didn’t know about them.
My brow tensed, and I turned toward Charles. “Paloma knew about me, too?”
He offered a weak shrug; of course he wouldn’t know. I shouldn’t have directed my question toward him with Paloma standing right there. Talk about rude. I gave her an apologetic look, imploring her with my gaze.
She sighed heavily. “I wasn’t sure. Even if I had known, there would’ve been no way for me to tell you. A witch must come to the realization on her own. I did my best to guide you in that direction. Your recent ritual had been my first key intervention. The rest was up to you.”
I suddenly understood why she’d given me the eyebright instead of agrimony. That one herb was likely the cause of my gift coming to the surface.