? ? ?
Lara waited until she was sure her father had left the house. He had never explicitly stated that the locked room at the far end of the hall was private, off-limits, but the fact that it was kept locked implied those things pretty heavily. And she had always wanted to leave her father his secrets.
That didn’t seem like a safe thing to do anymore. She placed her hand over the lock and curled her fingers counterclockwise. The lock opened. Lara held her breath, waiting for alarms, for wards, for anything to happen. When nothing did, she stepped inside.
Broken pieces of white plaster were scattered over the floor. She knelt, picked through the fragments—an arm, part of what might have been a wing—then shoved as many as she could find together in a pile. Spoke a word that left a sticky aftertaste in her mouth and clapped her hands together. The fragments re-formed, and an almost-complete facsimile of the Angel of the Waters stood in front of her. Lara folded and unfolded her hands in patterns of magic, but as far as she could tell, there was nothing particularly remarkable about it. She loosed the spell and let the pieces fall back to the floor.
Then she raised her hands, palms out and open, and searched for the presence of any magic in the room. It was a room that should have been rife with it—traces left over from Miles’ practice, from spells being performed. Instead, the room felt as sterile as it looked. Only one place—the cabinet—registered a presence, and even that felt strange. Heavy somehow, a block or lump.
None of it made sense.
The lock for the cupboard was biometric, and while there might be spells that would open it, Lara wasn’t aware of them. She looked around, checking to see that everything was as it had been when she came in, then left, locking the door after her.
Then she texted her brother: We need to talk.
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Verenice Tenebrae had built herself a hermitage in a Brooklyn brownstone. It was full of luxuries—rich colors and sumptuous fabrics, elaborate carpets, leather chairs with cashmere throws. Every room was as well-appointed and comfortable as she could make it. Shadows had not been a place of comfort. Now that she could indulge, she did, and felt no qualms over it.
Even among all the luxury she had gathered to herself, what Verenice liked, more than anything else, was the quiet. The House of Shadows had been loud, had been constant, had pressed on her like a suffocation. There was never any relief, much less peace. She could have quiet here, and she did. Some days, there were no sounds at all in the house beyond her own footsteps, her own breath. Those days, still, were a miracle to her.
She had quiet, but she was close enough to hear the whispers of the Unseen World when she wanted to.
She had thought about leaving the city. About leaving the entire Unseen World behind. Had actually left the day after she signed her final contract for Shadows, had gotten on the first available plane and flown across the Atlantic and then gone to the Isle of Skye because it seemed very far away and because she had liked the name.
Skye had been very far away, and very quiet, and she had stayed there for a year, putting herself back together. She had relearned who she was when there was no one who had the power to force her to be someone else, and then she had decided who she wanted to be. Then she had gotten on a plane again and come back.
One of the things she had learned about herself was that she liked her enemies where she could see them.
Also, she had clung to the hope that someone else would be able to open the House’s doors and walk free. She wanted to be there, to help them negotiate that liminal place between fully bound and not yet free that had felt so perilous and strange to her when she had first emerged. She had waited and waited. For years, and then decades, through two more victories of House Merlin in the Turning, through that House renewing its compact with Shadows again and again, and there had been no one.
When Verenice thought of the House of Shadows, when she woke from the dreams in which she was forced to return, when she sat up, breathless and panicked in her bed, she thought of it as a maw, toothed and hungry and endless. Eventually, she gave up hope of it ever spitting anyone else back out.
Then Sydney.
Verenice lived on the periphery of the Unseen World by design—close enough that she could watch those who lived in it, detached enough that they would mostly forget her existence. Sydney had walked into the center of that world like she owned it. She made the air around her electric.
It was a terrifying thing, having hope again.
Snow fell as Sydney stood on Verenice’s doorstep, turning the branches of the trees to black-and-white sculptures, blanketing the city with quiet. Sydney lifted her face to the flakes, stood as they clung to her eyelashes, as they gathered in her hair.
“You haven’t been out long enough to have seen snow before, have you?” Verenice asked. She watched Sydney turn in a slow circle on her porch, face lifted to the falling snow, and tried to reconcile this woman who looked scarcely out of her teens with the terrifying avatar of power Ian had described to her when he’d visited earlier this week. “It was like channeling all of that magic was nothing to her. I could see the effects of it—she was shedding actual fucking sparks from her hands—but she was . . . fine,” he had said, his eyes focused far away, as if he were still in that room that had gone from living forest to stone statues in the time it took Sydney to stop a woman’s heart.
The images didn’t mesh, but Verenice knew well how little images mattered.
“I left Shadows this summer.” Sydney held out a hand and let the snow pile on top of it, then shaped the snow into a star and flung it—sparkling—back into the sky. “I’d seen snow, of course. There are rooms now, open to the sky—you know how the House shifts. And there was magic that required being outside of the House, especially once Shara decided that if I earned my way out, she was going to use me here in the Turning. It wouldn’t do for me to be ignorant. But being on the island, even outside, and being here, they’re different.”
“Yes,” Verenice said. “They are.”
“I’d never thought snow was beautiful before. It was just another form of cold. This—this looks like feathers falling.” Wonder in Sydney’s voice, her eyes lifted to the sky.
“I do have warm enough coats that I can have this conversation outdoors, if you’d like to walk in it,” Verenice offered.
“Thanks. But no—I’ll walk later. I think this is a conversation better had inside.” She followed Verenice in.