Cerise turned to William.
“If you bargain for the journal, you will die,” he said. “If you go to fight Spider, you will die, too. Don’t. Don’t do it.”
“I don’t have a choice,” she said. “I can’t live knowing that I had a chance to keep thousands of people from dying and I did nothing.”
CERISE clenched her teeth. Her heart pounded in her chest. Her mouth tasted bitter. Erian. Of all people, it had to be Erian.
Her legs had turned to wet cotton. Her chest constricted. She wanted to bend over and cradle the hot knot of pain in the pit of her stomach, but the entire family was here, watching her, waiting to see what she would say, and she held it in.
William stood alone, in the middle of the room, his face pale. She looked into his eyes and saw it all: pain, grief, fury, fear, and resignation. He thought she would leave him. Why not, everybody else in his life did.
“You’re a Mirror spy?” she asked softly.
“Yes.” His voice was low and ragged.
She sighed. “I wish you had mentioned it earlier.”
It took a second to penetrate. Amber rolled over his eyes. Shock slapped his face. It lasted only a moment, but the relief in his eyes was so obvious, it filled her with anger. Anger at the monsters who had damaged him, anger at Erian, anger at the Hand . . . Her hands shook, and she clenched them together.
“I love you,” she told him. “When I asked you to stay with me, I meant it.”
“He’s a changeling,” someone said from the back.
Cerise turned in the direction of the voice. Nobody owned up. “I’ve managed the family’s money for the last three years. I know all of your dirty secrets. Think very carefully before you start throwing rocks at the man I love, because I will throw them back and I won’t miss.”
Silence answered her.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Glad we got that settled. Why don’t you talk between yourselves.” She turned and marched out on the balcony and walked away, around the corner, out of their sight.
Outside the heat of the swamp enveloped her and she exhaled. Tears wet her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She tried to wipe them off, but they just kept coming and coming, and she couldn’t stop.
William came around the corner and grabbed her.
She stuck her face into his chest and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop the tears.
He clenched her to him.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” she whispered. “I asked you point-blank back in the swamp, and you didn’t tell me.”
“You would never have let me come with you,” he said.
“We’re trapped,” she whispered. “I just want to be happy, William. I want to be with you and I don’t want anybody to die, and I can’t have that.”
He gripped her shoulders, pushing her away so he could look in her face. His eyes were driven. “Burn the journal, Cerise. Listen to me, damn you!”
“Too late,” she told him. “You know it’s too late. The Hand will come for us, if not now, then in a week or a month. You said it yourself: they can’t afford to let any of us live. And even if they did, if they use the Box, it won’t just mean war. It will mean the end of the world in the Weird, because they will make these creatures and then they won’t be able to control them.”
“Let me handle it,” he told her.
“Twenty agents against you alone? Are you out of your mind?” She wiped her tears with the back of her sleeve. “If I offered to go up against twenty agents, you would pitch a fit. We have no choice.”
He hugged her, his hands stroking her hair. They stood together for a long time. Eventually, she stirred. “I have to go back. It won’t be okay, will it?”
William swallowed. “No.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. She turned around and went back to the library.
Inside familiar faces waited for her. Aunt Pete, Aunt Murid, Ignata, Kaldar. Grandmother Az sitting in a corner, letting her run the family into the ground. Cerise sat at the table and braided the fingers of her hands together. Gods, she wished for guidance. But the person in the sky, the one she always asked for advice, was apparently running around in the woods, killing things at random.
Her grandfather had murdered her grandmother. If she thought about it too long, it made her want to rip her hair out.
Richard was off, too, gone to blow off steam.
Who am I kidding? she wondered. Richard would never be all right. None of them would ever be all right.
“It has to be the Drowned Dog Puddle,” she said. They went to gather berries there every year to make the wine. It was a big family affair: children gathered the berries, women cleaned them, men talked . . . “What else could it be?”
Murid said, “Nothing else. Vernard didn’t know anything else.”
The question had to be asked and so she asked it. “What do we do now?”
“What do you want us to do?” Murid’s clear eyes found her, propped her up like a crutch. “You are in charge. You lead and we follow.”
Nobody disputed her words. Cerise had expected them to. “We must destroy the Box.”
“Or die trying,” Kaldar said.
Aunt Pete shook her head. “We all benefited from Vernard’s knowledge. We studied his books, we learned from him, we made wine together. He was family.”
Cerise looked to Kaldar. “Kaldar?”
“They’re right,” he said. “I hate it, but we must fight. It’s a Mar affair. Our land and our war, and it won’t be done until we’ve chased the freaks from our swamp.” He hesitated and scowled, deep lines breaking at the corners of his mouth. “I’m glad we have the blueblood. I don’t care if he is a changeling. He fights like a demon.”
They blocked her on every turn. Cerise turned to Grandmother and knelt by her. An old word slipped out, the one she used when she was a child.
“Meemaw ...”