“I’m not Lillian,” she says. Again, her eyes search for Tristan. “Please, you have to believe me. I’m a version of Lillian.”
It takes a moment for the three of us to get what she’s saying. She’s talking about parallel worlds. Alternate selves. Multiple universes. I can’t believe she expects me to swallow this. It’s insulting that she thinks I’d be so gullible. And something else keeps gnawing at me. It’s the way she keeps turning to Tristan. Did something happen between them that Tristan didn’t tell me about? That’s ridiculous. But still …
Then Lillian brings up the shaman, shocking me out of my mounting bitterness. I didn’t think she’d ever admit to that.
Caleb turns to me. “Is it true?” he asks. “Did a shaman go to the Citadel?”
I tell them about how I asked the shaman from our tribe to come to the Citadel to help Lillian’s mother—not that there’s a cure for what she had. I thought it might help make Samantha feel better to talk to someone who didn’t think she was crazy. But all of that spirit-walking stuff the shaman used to spout is just a fairy tale. Caleb knows that.
Lillian isn’t swaying from her story. Now she’s talking about science, of all things, and even going so far as to admit that what she’s saying is impossible. She’s really selling this. Even Tristan is starting to fall for it.
She keeps looking at him like she knows him, like she expects him to suddenly come to his senses and let her go. She looks at Tristan like he’s the one she’s always loved and trusted.
“How am I supposed to prove to you I’m not the evil witch I look exactly like?” she asks, her teary eyes working Tristan over mercilessly. She must be doing it on purpose to get to me. She wants to turn me against him. I can’t take another second of this.
“You know how, Lillian,” I reply. “Let me in your head.”
“Ro. Be serious,” Tristan says. He’s so nervous his voice cracks a little.
He and Caleb argue against it, which I’m sure Lillian knew they would. She planned this perfectly. The only way for us to know the truth is for me to ask her who she is in mindspeak, where no one can lie. I don’t have to let her claim me, but I do have to let her touch my willstone in order for us to share a moment of rapport. In that moment she could do just about anything to me, and I may not be strong enough to resist her. A part of me is begging for it to happen. To finally be rid of the weightless ache.
Caleb won’t let me. He pulls rank and says it’s for the sachem to decide. Relief battles with disappointment.
We leave Tristan to guard her while Caleb and I go to see Alaric. My eyes keep straying back to her, even as I walk away.
“You have to calm down,” Caleb tells me.
“Calm down?” I say. I can hear the hysterical edge in my voice now that Caleb has pointed it out. “If Elias killed your father—”
Caleb stops and puts a hand on my shoulder, turning me to him. “I’m trying to help you, brother. You’re making stupid choices.”
“I know I am,” I admit. “How am I supposed to be calm about this?”
“No idea,” Caleb says. “But find a way.”
As I follow my stone kin through the trees, I try to pull myself together. I’m fighting the urge to go back and force her to admit that she is Lillian—that she recognizes me as she does Tristan. How can she manage to look at me like I’m a stranger to her? And the way she spoke to Tristan—so intimate, like he knew all of her secrets.