“You still can’t hear her?” I asked Baz, panic bleeding into my voice, though there was no great reason for it. Wherever the specter was going, it had to be better than being locked up for an eternity in the cage where we’d discovered her. And what light could she possibly shed on the truth of Teo? My expectation that she might have answers was just me grasping at flickering flames. Possibly, it was Hope herself surging to fuck with me. A man, even one who claimed he was an emperor, shouldn’t have been able to contain the demigods. They were demigods, for dragon’s sake.
Baz’s brow scrunched. “I still can’t hear her, but there is a way. Even so, we’ll be fortunate to get a few minutes with her before she’s gone.”
Though I dearly wanted to, I didn’t waste a single one of those minutes cursing out the blasted castle that had kept us away.
“How do we do it?”
He looked at me. Those ocean eyes sucked me in as readily as the ghost’s.
“Do you trust me?”
There was that question again. I felt every set of eyes, including the phantom’s, boring into me.
“Of course I don’t trust you.” I worked not to squirm afterward. It was true, it had to be true. I could not trust my number-one enemy.
Relief swept along our friends, who’d drawn closer. Baz, however, didn’t bother to conceal his disappointment. His scowl was biting.
You do remember that we’re enemies? I wanted to tell him. I nearly killed you. Our families despise each other so completely that the D’Arcos and the Rubors, when mentioned together, are synonymous with hatred.
Never was there a man I was meant to distrust more. He knew this already.
He rolled his eyes at his friends, who surrounded us in a tight semicircle, with Marina at my back. “At least don’t get in our way,” he said.
“We won’t,” Night said.
“Unless it’s to stop her from doing whatever deceitful shit she’s probably planning on doing,” Zi said.
“That,” Night said.
Moncho and Lev grimaced like it was taking everything they had to remain standing at their commander’s side, but there they stood, Lev in clothing still damp and Moncho bloodstained and smeared. Ed’s hands rested on her weapons belt. Félix alone appeared relaxed. Marina’s hands were stuffed inside the pocket of her frock, from which she could pull a variety of aid, thanks to her goblin magic.
Baz might have forgotten we were enemies, but none of the others had.
He extended his hand to me. The Rillis rope coiled on the floor between us like a snake that would strike without warning.
Despite the seconds slipping by, I had to ask. “What’s gonna happen?”
“We’re going to experience her darkness. Whatever’s left of it. She’s letting go of her torment.” He smiled slightly. “I think she’ll be able to rid herself of enough of it that she’ll go to the Etherlands when she passes through the Ethers.”
I could have asked about the dangers of exploring the darkness of a ghost who’d died a slow, agonizing death alone in a cage, but what would have been the point? Now that she was free of the cage, she was fading too fast, and I was going to do it despite the risks.
I clasped Baz’s hand. Marina gasped. It was her you’re being rash and irresponsible gasp. I was well familiar with its inflection. She was my friend, but she’d been a servant all her life. In front of so many people she didn’t trust, she wouldn’t express her reservations. But oh, did she ever have them.
Baz reached for the phantom’s hand, and the phantom snapped out her arm, fast, as if she, instead of the rope, were the snake, and latched on.
At once, Marina and the Bazrians, along with Baz’s chambers, vanished. Mauldrene’s constant accompaniment silenced without so much as a vibrating twang of a string. Even her omnipresent shadows were absent. In their place was an even more profound darkness. It was primordial. It was everywhere and nowhere.
I recognized it. It called to me. This wasn’t the ghost’s darkness. It was mine. It was all of ours. It was magnificent and terrible. I wanted both to fold myself into it forever, and to run as far away from it as I could get.
Glowing with a dimming, golden light, the phantom stood before Baz and me. Here, she appeared alive, as I imagined Rafaela had looked when she was seventeen years old, before she’d honed her edges into cutting blades. Baz stood to my left, beaming brightly, and completely naked, which seemed wholly unnecessary when the ghost was fully clothed. Her dress, with its puffy bell sleeves and train of tulle, spoke of trends long passed, but at one time her dress had been the pinnacle of fashion.
“Why must you be naked?” Baz grumbled to himself as if pained.
“That’s a very good question,” I said, while admiring the incandescence of my skin.
“I need to focus.”
“Then focus.” It was undoubtedly saucy of me to say, when I was having difficulty keeping my gaze from traveling below his face. I didn’t need the distraction either, and a naked Baz was distracting to a fault.