“Yes, Kate.”
I needed to figure out exactly what she was before I saw Curran, because I didn’t understand it myself and I didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings. I knew what I did and what I didn’t do. If I made it into a “believe me because I am me and you know me” argument, he would give me the benefit of the doubt, but I didn’t want that. I wanted to prove to him with absolute certainty that I hadn’t enslaved this woman. I hadn’t crossed the line. I’d ridden an elephant up to it and run back and forth along its edge while a mariachi band played in the background, but I hadn’t crossed it.
“What kind of language was that?” Holland asked.
“What?”
“When you were talking to her on the bridge, asking questions, what kind of language was it?”
What was he on about? I spoke English.
“I’m going to have to write a report,” Holland said.
I looked at Derek. “Did I speak another language?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look at me.
“What did it sound like?”
“It hurt,” Ascanio said.
“But do you remember any actual words?”
“Estene kari la amt-am. That was the last thing you said,” Derek said.
You’re no longer a slave. Oh fuck. I understood it. I’ve been speaking it. All this time I thought my magic was saturating my words. Fuck.
“Put ‘language of power’ into your report,” I said.
“Okay,” Holland told me.
The Milton ER was our first stop. We left Adora there. I paid for the first twenty-four hours of treatment and told Adora to stay there until I came and got her. The medmage spelled the cut on my face closed and told me to not expect miracles in regard to whether it would scar.
We walked into Beau’s office headfirst. It barely fit through the double door. The sheriff of Milton County looked at the head, looked at us, assessed the sorry state of his deputy, reached into his desk, and extracted a feather.
“This was found where the horses were. The two brothers identified it as belonging to the winged devil.”
I took the feather. It was long and glossy, a pure black that seemed to swallow the light, except for the very tip where a thin orange-red flared as if someone had dipped the feather into liquid fire. Only one being had feathers like that—Thanatos, the angel of death, with black wings and a flaming sword.
As soon as I got to a working phone, I’d need to call Teddy Jo.
“You need to tell Curran,” Derek told me as we walked back to our cars.
“Stay out of my relationship.”
“I don’t want you to turn into someone else,” he said quietly.
“I won’t.” Back in the woods when he was screaming in my face, I’d wanted to crush every bone in his body. I’d stomped on that urge before it went anywhere, but it was there. There were few things that terrified me. That did.
? ? ?
I HAD TO do a dozen things. I needed to call Teddy Jo. I needed to speak to Sienna. I needed to look through my notes on my father to see if I could find any reference to what Adora might be. Instead I dropped Ascanio off near his mother’s house, dropped Derek off at Cutting Edge, and turned around. I drove through the city as the sun slowly rolled toward the horizon. By the time I got to the Keep, the heat of the day had begun to ease. Evening was coming.
I walked into the Keep, identified myself to the sentries, and one of the guards walked me to the medward. New rules. Jim had decided I shouldn’t be walking around the Keep unescorted. It didn’t even bother me. I’d gone numb.
They’d put Andrea in a corner room, the one with large windows. I walked in. She was eating fried chicken and Raphael was holding Baby B.
Andrea saw my face and stopped eating.
“I’ve come to hold the baby,” I told her.
She nodded to Raphael. He got up and gave his daughter to me. I took Baby B. She stirred a little in her sleep and snuggled against me.
“The other room has the rocking chair in it,” Andrea said, pointing through the open double door. “There’s a nice window there.”
I went into the other room and sat in the rocking chair by the window, Baby B in my arms.
“Is everything okay?” Raphael asked quietly in the other room.
“Things are kind of fucked up right now,” Andrea said. “I’ll tell you later.”
I rocked Baby B. It was just me, the baby, and the slowly dying evening.
I wasn’t sure how much time had passed.
Someone walked in. I listened to the steps. Julie.
“Hi,” she said behind my back.
“Hi.”
She came over and sat on the floor by me.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Derek talked to me.” Julie sighed and hugged her knees. “Derek is a dummy. Why is it that guys can’t keep a secret?”
“It was a pretty big secret.”
“Well, it wasn’t his to tell.”
“When did you find out?” I asked.
“Roland told me when you went to the Black Sea.”
“Is that how long you’ve been talking to him?”
She nodded.
“He’s poison.”
“I know.”
I looked at her. “Why, Julie? Is it power? Is it knowledge?”
“It’s because I love you,” she said in a small voice.
“What?”
“You’re twenty-eight,” she said. “Voron left Roland’s service almost thirty years ago. The last up-to-date information you have on him is thirty years old. When Voron died thirteen years ago, you lost even that. Roland has done a lot in thirty years.”
“I don’t need you to spy on Roland for me. It’s too dangerous. You’re sixteen years old. He is over five thousand years old, possibly older. You can’t trust anything he says. You can’t even trust anything you see there. He’s manipulating you and grooming you.”
“Yes,” she said. “He is. He would be manipulating me and grooming me anyway. He wasn’t going to leave me alone, Kate, so at first I wanted to learn as much as I could to shut him out. Then . . .”
“Then?”
“You’re right. I’m sixteen years old. He doesn’t remember what it’s like to be sixteen. He doesn’t understand it. To him everyone is a child. His own childhood was long and happy. He was a pampered prince. But I starved on the street. I learned how to read people and manipulate adults when I was ten.” She bit her lip. “I kind of thought he would be more subtle about it. Maybe if I didn’t have you and Curran, or if he had gotten me really young like he did Hugh . . .”
“You keep thinking that you’ve got this, but you don’t, Julie.”
“He manages what he shows me,” Julie said. “But I’m not you, so he doesn’t manage quite as much. You’re his daughter, his precious jewel. He’s so proud of you. I’m an expendable tool. He wants to sharpen me, use me, and then throw me away when I’ve served my purpose, just like he threw away Hugh. He’s less careful with what he lets me see.”
“All the more reason not to interact with him.”
“You could order me not to do it,” she said.
“I won’t. It’s your life, Julie. You’re a person. As much as it makes me freak out, you have to be free to make your decisions, even the wrong ones. But I think it’s dangerous and stupid, and I will tell you so.”