“But after—”
“After Sera healed me, with you fretting behind her and providing most of the magic—I hated you. You, always the knight triumphant, except this one time. You, trying desperately to reconnect the bonds. You, my only tether left. Seeing myself in a broken mirror of what I used to be as I looked at you. It was utterly, blindingly obvious—you had to go. And it was easy to blame you. You accepted the blame without a thought otherwise.”
The memory played in their minds—Constantine spitting out the words you killed my mother, get out—so vividly that I could see it. “You still accept the blame,” he said. “When it was quite obvious who was to blame.”
“Verisetti.”
“Right.”
“Con—”
He closed his eyes. “Revenge is easy. It was always easy. Not having connections is easy. Not having to deal with losing anyone else. Not needing anyone else again. Especially not anyone as close as you.”
“I would have shared all of it.”
“I know, and I hated you all the more for it. Broken toys don’t understand they are broken.” He looked down at himself, streaming with connections, and gave a sharp laugh. “And now look at me. It’s like a tingreal infestation, once she gets her hooks in you.”
Gratitude and love, fierce and sharp, pierced me from Axer. I blinked, slightly dazed, uncertain if I should be apologizing to one or hugging them both.
“And here you are again, and I can feel the bonds reconnecting, I let them reconnect, and it’s just my fate to be in the same position yet again,” Constantine said bitterly. “For I know how this will end. Losing the people closest to me. For all that I protected myself from it.”
Axer did something cautiously with his magic that made Constantine close his eyes then slump forward abruptly, chin dropping to his chest.
“I hate you,” Constantine said, but I could see the way he was pulling Axer’s magic into him, like a man who’d been starving for years.
“I know,” Axer said softly.
“I refuse to stop.”
“That’s fine.”
“We are cursed.” Constantine’s voice was resigned. “We are all going to die.”
“Or we are saved,” Axer said softly. “And we will all live happily ever after. That was always your ending. Better than my bloodthirsty vengeance.”
“I was a stupid child.”
Axer reached over and touched his forehead, slowly swiping his thumb across it in a mimic of what I’d unconsciously done on the Bloody Tuesday battlefield so many months ago. Ultramarine paint bloomed beneath his skin, and the scars beneath faded further. “We can be smarter adults.”
“Is that what we are?” there was the tiniest bit of humor underneath the resignation.
“It’s possibly too soon to tell,” Axer said, with the duplicitous earnest playfulness I never saw outside of when we were alone or with his inner circle.
It was funny. By exposing the scars between them, they had ripped away at the scar tissue. And while everything between them was red, raw, and inflamed, it also sought some sort of resolution.
The broken magic swirled around them in a different way than before. Before, they had been completely cut off from one another. Now they were two halves of a broken whole—the ripped edges on one side a match for the other's wounds.
“Stavros will be there,” Constantine said. “In some form. He’ll know when we get to the ferals.”
“Yes,” Axer murmured. Wards burst from him, connected through and with Constantine, layering around us. He looked at me. “What did you get from the Kinsky, Ren?”
I touched my cloak and pulled the burlap wrapped parcel free. Examining it, I carefully stuck my fingers inside.
“Darling,” came the resigned sigh.
Even Axer was looking at the burlap with a carefully controlled expression that couldn't hide both censure and excitement.
“Wait until she sticks her hand into rotting floorboards,” Constantine said idly to him. “You can’t hide that spike of adrenaline and anticipation. Death wishes, both of you.”
“There are two alarm wards in the twelve you have going between you,” I murmured, fingers running against the material inside. “I can feel each of them.” So easily, the way they were pulling from each other and layering their powers together. “What could go wrong?”
“Are you kidding me?” Constantine demanded.
I smiled, and stroked the connections which were inching closer together. “Yes.”
Though the outside of the case was scratchy, the inside consisted of a soft, protective coating. Stevens, Constantine, and I had created something similar in the lab, but there was a marker here that was different. Kinsky's magic instead of mine. It hummed harmoniously beneath my fingertips.
I pulled the object free to reveal a portrait. It was not an unexpected find, but I frowned at it, fingers moving carefully under the frame. “She’s looking elsewhere in this one.”
“The same woman, though,” Constantine murmured. “Always the same woman. No one’s ever known her name.”
I looked at him.
“Kinsky’s Muse. Artistic use of the word, only, as far as the world knows—nothing else was ever substantiated.”
“No one knows what happened to her or who she was,” Axer said. “I searched.”
It wasn’t a surprise that he had searched for anything Kinsky related. He had given me a set of Kinsky’s papers after all, and a deep well of knowledge surrounding Origin Magic from an outsider’s view. And he had been collecting and defending against it specifically since we’d started working together.
He’d just pulled my paint forward in Constantine.
Origin Elite—I wondered if he would pass that test, too, after today.
I thought about how Kaine had disappeared inside the other portrait a split second after the woman had ejected the portrait. It bothered me that Kaine could travel that way—a way that I had thought solely mine.
“Kaine hardly bothered with us really—he was almost solely focused on the painting,” I murmured. I tilted the portrait, watching the paint shift. The profile of the woman inside tilted back the slightest amount. “He sped up when it was being targeted, then defended it specifically. Defended it over grabbing us.”
“The Kinsky, the storage vats, the ferals, Stavros’s plans… The ties are here,” Axer said.
I regarded the portrait, trying to figure out what it was about this one that was different. The woman was standing in an empty kitchen, head turned away and barely moving as she seemed frozen in the motion of looking toward the window. It was the embodiment of an eternal sigh; the last turn as you watched your love leave.