Chapter 3 — The Whole World Says It's You (2)

Her thumb found the silver needle inside her cuff — the Lumen's fastest tool for executing dark things.

She raised her hand.

The whole room was holding its breath. Somewhere behind her, the vampire bartender had stopped breathing entirely, which for him was a statement. The werewolf DJ slowly lowered one hand from the decks.

The tip touched his throat, right over the pulse.

He did not flinch. He looked down at the needle, and then he smiled. "You know, I had a secret I was going to tell you tonight."

"Tell it."

"The evidence you've been chasing —" He leaned down, voice dropped so low it was almost breath, as if afraid of waking something. "My own people left it in your hands on purpose."

The needle in her hand trembled, just once.

"Someone is using your hand to kill me." He said it levelly. "And I needed to know if the person holding the knife was you."

The air in the room turned to stone.

She opened her mouth. She wanted to press, to argue, to sort out what was true and what was theater. But right then the vein on her wrist seared like someone had pressed a red-hot iron to it, and the pain ran up her forearm and into her chest.

The same second, her phone detonated with a call.

She looked down at the screen on reflex. Her whole body locked.

Caller ID: Margaret Sterling.

She answered. The voice that came out was not her grandmother's. It was a stranger's, cold and flat.

"High Elder Margaret Sterling was attacked in the Sanctum ten minutes ago. No survivors on arrival. Confirmed dead."

Evelyn's pupils shrank. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

"The extermination order against Kaelen Varga has your signature on it. The Council now charges you: consorting with the monarch of the Night, and murdering your own grandmother."

The call ended.

She lowered the phone. She did not throw it. She did not break it. She set it down on the low table with the care of a woman handling a fragile thing, and her hand was steady, which was the worst sign of all. When Evelyn Sterling's hands went steady, the storm was already past her and inside her.

The world rang in Evelyn's ears. She looked up and saw Kaelen's face had changed too. The amusement was gone, burned off, and underneath it was a cold fury she had never seen on him.

"Someone moved," he said. "While both of us thought we were the ones playing the board."

"My grandmother —" Her voice came out raw. "She's dead."

He was quiet for a beat. Then he reached up and gently pushed the silver needle away from his throat.

"You didn't do it," he said. He said it like a fact. "I believe you."

Evelyn stared at him, eyes hot, and did not shed a single tear. "Why? The whole world says you stole the Core. The whole world says you killed her. Why do you believe me?"

"Because someone has spent a thousand years trying to make us enemies." He paused. "And today, when you put that needle to my throat — your hand was shaking."

Evelyn went rigid all over.

The whole city chose that moment to shudder. Buildings swayed. Glass cracked. Up on the streets above the Well, the streetlights blew out in a long line down the avenue, one after another, and rain fell out of a clean sky for the second time in three days. Somewhere far below, a low sound rolled through the ground, like something huge waking up.

The curse.

The room around them had emptied while they were not looking. The werewolf was gone. The vampire was gone. Even the anonymous bidders had understood, the way animals understand before humans do, and fled up the stairs to the laundromat. Abyss Hall held exactly two people and one hellhound under a sofa.

Her blood was screaming now, burning, surging toward the man in front of her, out of her control. She heard her heartbeat and his heartbeat sliding into the same rhythm, like two caged animals hitting the same wall.

"This is the curse," he said. His voice was low and steady, the way a man states a weather report he already knows by heart. "The closer we stand, the madder it gets. The more we feel, the harder it kills."

Evelyn's head snapped up. "You knew."

He looked down at her, and in the gray of his eyes was a thousand years of night she could not read. "I told you. We've met before. Long, long ago."

He bent close. His forehead almost touched hers. Thunder rolled over the windows, and his voice came through it, clear as something carved into bone.

"Every disaster the curse brings? I'll take it all for you."

The first backlash hit him one heartbeat later.

A black crack opened across his chest, out of nowhere, and blood bloomed through his shirt. He made a low sound and dropped to one knee — but before she could reach him, he lifted a hand and forced that dark power back inside his own body, shoving it home.

"Don't touch me." His voice was rough. "Touch me and it gets worse."

Evelyn stood still. She watched him kneeling in the middle of that storm of disaster, bloodied, still smiling at her.

Outside, the rain hammered the windows. The streetlights kept dying, one after another, up the avenue, as if something with a slow, deliberate hand was switching off the city. The floor under them rose and fell. The curse was not done. It was only beginning.

She curled her hands into fists until her nails bit her palms. She thought of her grandmother's last warning — don't get closer to that man. Her grandmother had known. Everyone had known. She had been the last one told.

Fate is just a coward's excuse for surrender.

Except tonight she hadn't lost to fate. She had understood, all at once, what it meant:

She had been hunting in the wrong direction.

Completely, utterly wrong.

And the person who had assembled her puzzle for her was on his knees in front of her, bleeding, absorbing the first blow that should have landed on her.

He looked up at her. The blood on his shirt was black in the dying light. The gray eyes were clear, and tired, and very, very sure of something she was only beginning to understand.

"You came here to kill me," he said.

"I did."

"You still could. The curse is busy with me. The needle is still in your hand."

She looked down. The needle was still in her hand. She had forgotten it was there.

"Kaelen Varga." She knelt down, keeping half a meter between them, and looked him in the eyes. "I want you alive."

"And then?"

"Then —" She lifted her eyes to the rain-lashed, lightning-crossed sky over Manhattan, and a hot, unfamiliar light kindled in the green of them. "Then I help you tear this sky down."