The eerie energy lingers, but Raffaele has no way of explaining it to those who cannot sense it. His eyes stay fixed on the water. He hasn’t slept, having spent the night at his writing desk, poring through what papers he still kept from his recordings, trying to solve the puzzle.
Lucent looks like she is trying hard not to show the ache in her bones. “Well, some of the villagers are saying there are reports of a similar event along the Domaccan shoreline.” She finds a comfortable spot amongst the rocks and sits down. “Sounds like it’s not just concentrated here.”
Raffaele leaves Lucent’s side and heads down to the edge of the water. He pushes back his sleeve and dips a canteen into the surf, letting it fill. The touch of the ocean makes his stomach churn just as much as it had the night of the storm. When the canteen is full, Raffaele hurries out of the water to shake off its poisonous touch.
“You’re pale as a Beldish boy,” Michel exclaims as Raffaele passes him.
Raffaele holds the canteen with both hands and starts making his way back toward the palace. “I’ll be in my chambers,” he replies.
When he returns to his quarters, he pours the contents of the canteen into a clear glass, then sets it on his desk so that it is drenched in light from the window. He opens the desk’s drawers and removes a series of gemstones. These are the same gemstones he once used to test the other Daggers, that he had used on Enzo and Lucent, Michel and Gemma. On Violetta. On Adelina.
Raffaele lays the gems in a careful circle around the glass of ocean water. Then he steps back and observes the scene. He reaches out with threads of his energy, searching for a clue, coaxing the stones.
At first, nothing happens.
Then, slowly, very slowly, several of the gems begin to glow from within, lit by something other than the sunlight. Raffaele pulls on the energy strings as he would when testing a new Elite, his brow furrowed in concentration. Colors blink in and out of existence. The air shimmers.
Nightstone. Amber. Moonstone.
Raffaele stares at the three glowing stones. Nightstone, for the angel of Fear. Amber, for the angel of Fury. Moonstone, for Holy Moritas herself.
Whatever presence Raffaele felt in the ocean, it is this. The touch of the Underworld, the immortal energy of the goddess of Death and her daughters. Raffaele’s frown deepens as he walks over to the desk and peers at the water in the glass. It is clear, shining with light, but behind that is the ghost of Death herself. It is no wonder that the energy feels so wrong, so out of place.
The Underworld is seeping into the living world.
Raffaele shakes his head. How can that be? The gods’ realm does not touch the world of mankind—immortality has no place in the mortal realm. The only connection the gods’ magic has to the living world is through gemstones, the sole, lingering remnants of where the gods’ hands had touched the world as they created it.
And the Young Elites, Raffaele adds to himself, his heartbeat quickening. And our own godlike powers.
Even as he stands there, turning the mystery over and over in his mind, he finds himself looking in the direction of Enzo’s chambers, where the ghost of his prince still lingers after having been pulled up from the Underworld. After having been torn from the Underworld.
A Young Elite, ripped from the immortal realm and dragged to the mortal.
Raffaele’s eyes widen. Queen Maeve’s gift, Tristan’s resurrection, Enzo’s . . . could it have caused all this?
He goes to his trunks and pulls out several books, stacking them in a precarious pile on his desk. His breathing has turned shallow. In his mind, the resurrection plays over and over again—the stormy night at the Estenzian arena, the appearance of Adelina disguised as Maeve, shrouded behind a hooded robe, the explosion of dark energy he’d felt in the arena’s waters that came from somewhere beyond. He thinks of the lack of light in Enzo’s eyes.
The goddess of Death had punished armies before, had taken revenge on princes and kings who became too arrogant in the face of certain death. But what would happen if a Young Elite, a mortal body doomed to wield immortal powers, one of the most powerful Elites Raffaele had ever encountered, was taken from her domain? Would that tear the fabric separating the living and the dead?
Raffaele reads late into the night. He has ignored the others’ knocks on his door all day, but now it is silent. Books strewn around him, volumes and volumes of myths and history, mathematics and science. Every time he flips a page, the candle on his desk flickers like it might go out. He is searching for a specific myth—the only reference to a time when the immortal realm touched the mortal that he’s heard.
Finally, he finds it. Laetes. The angel of Joy. Raffaele slows down and reads it aloud, whispering the words as he goes.
“Laetes,” he murmurs, “the angel of Joy, was the most precious and beloved child of the gods. So beloved was he that he became arrogant, thinking only himself worthy of praise. His brother Denarius, the angel of Greed, seethed with bitterness at this. One night, Denarius cast Laetes from the heavens, condemning him to walk the world as a man for one hundred years. The angel of Joy fell from the light of the heavens through the dark of night, into the mortal world. The shudder of his impact sent ripples throughout the land, but it would take more than a hundred years for the consequences of that to manifest. There is an imbalance in the world, the poison of the immortal touching the mortal.”
Raffaele’s voice trails off. He reads it again. There is an imbalance in the world. The poison of the immortal touching the mortal. His finger moves down the page, skimming the rest of the story.
“. . . until Laetes could look up at the heavens from the place where they touched the earth, and step through once more with the blessing of each of the gods.”
He thinks of the blood fever, the waves of plague that had birthed the Elites in the first place. The blood fever. Ripples throughout the land. Those plagues had been the consequence of immortality meeting mortality—they had been caused by Laetes’s fall. He thinks of the Elites’ powers. Then he thinks of Enzo, returning to the mortal world after having visited the immortal.
How had he not seen this before? How had he not made this connection until now? Until the poison in the ocean had given him this clue?
“Violetta,” Raffaele mutters, rising from his chair. She will understand—she felt the poison in the ocean first. He throws on his outer robe, then hurries to the door. As he goes, he thinks back to when he had first tested Adelina’s powers, how her alignments to the Underworld shattered the glass of his lantern and sent the papers on his desk flying.
This energy feels like Adelina’s, Violetta had said when her feet touched the ocean’s water.
If what he thinks is true, then they would not only have to face Adelina again . . . they would need her help.
When Raffaele turns the corner and enters the hall where Violetta’s room sits, he halts. Lucent and Michel are already standing outside her door. Raffaele slows in his steps. Even from a distance, he can sense a disturbance behind Violetta’s door.
“What is it?” Raffaele asks the others.
“We heard a wailing,” Lucent says. “It didn’t sound like a normal human cry . . . Raffaele, it was the most haunting sound I’ve ever heard.”
Raffaele turns his attention to Violetta’s door. He can hear it now too, a low moan that makes his heart clench. It does not sound like Violetta at all. He glances at Michel, who shakes his head. “I don’t want to see,” he mutters, his voice soft. Raffaele recognizes the fear in his eyes, the wish to avoid the image of what he is hearing.
“Stay here,” Raffaele says gently, putting a hand on Michel’s shoulder. Then he nods at Lucent and steps into the room.
Violetta is awake—or she seems to be, at first glance. Her dark waves of hair are soaked with sweat, strands plastered against her forehead, and her arms are bare and pale against her nightgown, her hands desperately clutching her sheets. Her eyes are open, Raffaele notes, yet she is unaware that he and Lucent now stand beside her in her room.