“Do I look different?” Ander asked.
His eyes creased when he smiled. His hair was a thousand shades of flaxen gold. But Ander wasn’t an old man any more than Eureka was an old lady. They were teenagers. They were growing up and changing all the time and it couldn’t be stopped or slowed.
“You look like you,” she said.
He smiled. “You look like you, too.”
What did he see when he looked at her? Was her darkness swelling as visible as the shadows lifting from him?
He reached for the teardrop crystal that had absorbed her other pendants. He gasped and quickly drew his hand away, as if he’d touched a flame.
“From the gossipwitches?”
She nodded. “The locket, the thunderstone, and the ribbon are inside.”
“I can’t tell you how free I feel,” Ander whispered. “There’s no more risk in caring for each other. We can be together. We can go to the Marais. You can defeat Atlas. I can be with you the whole time. We can do this, together.” He touched her lips. His eyes swam over her face. “I love you, Eureka.”
Eureka closed her eyes. Ander loved a girl he thought he knew. He loved that girl very much. He had said it was the only thing he was sure of. But he could never love the person she truly was, a descendant of darkness, more evil than the most evil force Ander could imagine.
“That’s great,” she said.
“I have to kiss you again.” He drew her close, but her heart wasn’t in it. Her heart could never be in something so right, so good.
A violent rapping interrupted their kiss. Eureka jumped away from Ander and spun around. A shadowy figure leaned against the entrance to the Bitter Cloud holding an umbrella over its head.
Her heart quickened. Was it Brooks? She yearned to see him again—even though she knew he was bound to evil. Or maybe she yearned to see him because he was bound to evil.
“Who’s there?” Ander put his body between Eureka and the figure.
“Only me.”
“Solon?” Eureka wiped rain from her eyes and discerned Ovid’s lithe frame. The robot’s left hand had sprouted an orichalcum umbrella. Its face bore the loving, aged features that the lost Seedbearer had worn at his death.
“ ‘O a kiss, long as my exile, sweet as my revenge,’ ” the robot said in Solon’s voice. “That’s Coriolanus. Shakespeare already knew what you are learning, Eureka: the soldier can return from war but he can never go home.” The robot tipped its umbrella toward the Bitter Cloud. “Let’s talk inside. I’m waterproof, so rain makes me lonely.”
Ovid collapsed the umbrella as they entered the cave through the hall of skulls. Water streamed past their feet, the flood flowing toward the salon. The Bitter Cloud was desolate now and filling with salt water, nothing like the fascinating chamber of curiosities it had been when they arrived. The air was cold and dank.
Claire was throwing fistfuls of colored mosaic tiles in the air. William used his quirk to retrieve them before they hit the rising water.
“Eureka’s back!”
The twins splashed through deep puddles as they ran to her. William made it into her arms, but Claire stopped short of the robot and looked at it distrustfully.
She hunched her shoulders. “Why does Ovid look weird?”
“It looks like Solon,” William said into Eureka’s shoulder. “It’s scary.”
Cat sat in Solon’s cockfighting chair with her eyes closed. Eureka poured some of the witches’ salve into her hands and massaged it over the bees, which now crawled all over her friend’s scalp. Cat flinched at first, then gazed up at Eureka. Tears dotted her eyes.
“Are they gone?” she asked, patting her hair.
“No.”
“It doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Good.”