A pulse of embarrassment thrummed through me. We hadn’t been close as kids, but it’s not like I’d never noticed him. He’d sat across the table from me at dinner, nose stuck in a book, ignoring Maud and me while we chattered, a million times.
His weight seesawed on the seat before a calm descended over him, and he resumed his perfect posture. “It’s an unexpected side effect of bonding to a wraith.”
Thinking on the shadows that whirled in his eyes when his temper rose, I had to admit it made sense. What other changes, too small or seemingly benign to notice, had the wraith inflicted on him? There must be other costs to wielding such power. I was shocked his mother allowed him to initiate the bond.
Linus studied the blades of grass stuck to the tops of my feet with dew. “Does it bother you?”
“Your eyes?” I glanced between them, weighing memory against reality. “No. I was just curious. My memory isn’t…” Trustworthy? Reliable? Accurate? I had no memory of resuscitating a man. What else had I forgotten? “Most of my life from before is intact. Or it seems to be as best I can tell. All the rest is a blur. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when a memory is true.”
“You’ve only been out for a few months,” he said gently. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Recovery takes time.”
The kindness did it, snapped some tether reining in the temper his mother had unleashed down in the Lyceum, and I had to fight the sudden urge to stab him in the eye with his own pen, because that would get me a passing grade for sure.
The Grande Dame had twiddled her thumbs while I was sentenced, and she would have kept on twiddling until she received my death announcement and laid claim to the rest of my inheritance if I hadn’t proven more valuable to her alive.
This act of Linus’s was good, too good. There was no way someone like the Grande Dame had produced a thoughtful, kind heir instead of a raging psychopath. There had to be more he was hiding from me, just like Volkov. And just like Volkov, I was sure the truth about him would sucker-punch me eventually.
Paranoid. Yes. I was. I liked to think I’d earned it the hard way.
One final sweep of the borrowed pen, and the effect was instantaneous. His swollen nose emitted a crunching sound, and his eyes watered as the bridge realigned while I watched.
“I think we’re done here.” I capped his pen, stuffed the bag of ice in his hands, and walked out. “Night.”
“I meant the wraith,” came his answer.
The wraith? Oh. That’s what he had been asking if I minded, not his eyes.
“It doesn’t matter, does it?” I stopped outside the bathroom. “You’re here now, it’s here now. It’s not like I can separate you two, and it’s not like I invited either one of you.”
I walked out before I said something I would regret. The fact remained that I needed his help, now more than ever if he was serious about returning my magic to me. Huffing out a breath, I made a promise to myself that tomorrow I would behave. I would be polite, gracious, and absorb every crumb of information he was willing to feed me until I was bloated with knowledge, until I could stand on my own and protect what was mine.
Too wound up to go back in the house, I trotted around to the front porch and plopped down in the swing. I toed off the planks, dropped my head back to stare at the ceiling fan whirring overhead, and let the chill in the night air cool my temper.
I was free. I was home. And the Grande Dame had just given me another weapon to add to my arsenal.
Linus was here to educate me, and what I wanted to learn most was what had really happened to Maud the night I was framed for her murder. Still aching from her loss and stunned by my change in circumstances, I hadn’t dwelled on the specifics of my good fortune. But that was before I learned Maud had been keeping secrets from me, secrets that might one day cost me the freedom I had just won.
It was time I learned the truth. About her death, Mom’s life, my father’s identity. All of it.
Let the Grande Dame have her schemes. I was hatching a few of my own.
May the best necromancer win.