Guardian of the Gate (14 page)

She narrows her eyes as if she is not sure whether or not to believe me, and we stand that way a moment in uncomfortable silence before Sonia’s shoulders finally relax and the air escapes her mouth in a rush.

“I’m sorry.” She rubs her temples, wincing as if in pain. “I am so tired. So very tired of the horses and the woods and the endless fear of the Hounds and the Souls.”

“We are all tired. But I promise you that I knew nothing of Dimitri until just a while ago.” Sighing, I try to keep hold of my own frustration. My own exhaustion. “I cannot do this any longer. I am going to bed. We’ll no doubt have another long day tomorrow.”

I do not wait to see if they agree before turning to change. It doesn’t matter if they want to keep talking or not, for if we do, if I am forced to listen to their complaining and petty resentments a moment more, I fear I will scream. Tomorrow I will speak to Sonia about Luisa’s betrayal. It is not a conversation to which I look forward.

Later, as I settle into the blankets in the silence of our tent, I think I will be awake for a long time reliving the danger of
the previous hours. But they have taken their toll, and I am asleep almost as soon as my head hits the ground.

I have the sense that I have been deeply asleep for some time when I awaken within a dream. I am certain that I am not traveling, though my dream feels very real. In it, I am standing in a circle, my hands clasped with faceless individuals on either side. A great fire burns before me, and across the licking flames I see others enshrouded in robes and clasping hands in the same manner.

An eerie chant arises from the center of the group, and I am surprised to feel my own mouth move, to hear words, at once foreign and familiar, emerging from my lips in time with the others. I feel myself falling into a trancelike state, and I have almost given myself over to it, have almost stopped asking questions within my own mind, when a terrific crack tears straight through my body. I cry out, my own eerie chant suspended even as the others continue as if nothing is wrong at all. As if I am not, at that very moment, being torn in two by some invisible intruder.

I pull away by instinct, stumbling toward the fire as the hands that once held mine close together, trapping me within the circle of robed figures. Stumbling farther forward, I fall to the ground in a heap as the pain rips through me again. Even in my dream, I smell the grass, sweet and musky, under my body, and I use my hands to try to push myself off the ground. To get my feet underneath me once again.

But it is not my fall nor my effort to stand up that jolts me
out of my dream. No. It is my hand braced against the hard earth. Or not my hand, exactly. My wrist and the medallion that encircles it.

The medallion that has rested safely on Sonia’s wrist since we left New York a year ago.

Until now.

I am comforted by the sight of Sonia’s face so near to mine when I awaken from my dream. Despite the recent tension, hers has been the face of friendship since the dawn of our quest to end the prophecy.

I sit upright, my hand clasped to my chest as if to quell the runaway beating. “Oh! Oh, my goodness!”

Sonia places a hand on my arm. “Shh. Hush, Lia. I know. I know.” She presses me back against the pillow, and there is something sweetly sinister in her voice. Something all the more frightening for its innocence. “Just rest, Lia. It does not have to be so hard.”

I am at first confused. Her words seem a bunch of gibberish that I don’t have the coherence to decode. But in the end, there is no need for words. In the end, it is the medallion,
clasped around my wrist just as in my dream, that tells me all I need to know.

“What… what is this? Why is the medallion on my wrist, Sonia?” I do not take the time to find the clasp in the dark. Instead, I rip at the velvet ribbon by which the medallion hangs until it forcibly breaks loose of its clasp and falls to the floor of the tent.

Sonia scrambles in the darkness, digging through the blankets that line the floor of the tent. I begin to understand even before she finds it, but when she does, when she crawls back to my side, the medallion in hand, I know for certain.

“Wear it, Lia. Just for a while. It is for the good of everyone, not the least of which is you.” Her eyes shine in the darkness, and in that moment, I know horror far beyond anything felt when facing the Souls, the medallion, even Samael himself. In that moment, seeing Sonia’s angelic eyes glittering with madness is the worst punishment of all.

I do not know how long I stare into the blue of her eyes trying to reconcile the Sonia I know with the girl in front of me, the girl attempting to use me as the Gate through which evil itself might pass. But when I finally come to my senses, I scoot back toward the wall of the tent.

And then I scream and scream and scream.

“I thought it was you.” My words are directed at Luisa, who sits near me by the fire.

We are alone for the time being, bundled in blankets against
the cold while Edmund and Dimitri subdue Sonia in the other tent. I have not seen either of them since they pulled her kicking and screaming away from me.

Luisa looks surprised. “Me? Why?”

I shrug. “You were acting strangely — disappearing at odd times, seeming… angry and withdrawn.”

She moves closer to me, taking one of my hands. “I knew, Lia. I knew something was wrong with Sonia. I asked her about it, but she only became defensive.”

“But… I saw you. Scrying by the river.” Even under the circumstances, I am embarrassed to admit that I was spying.

But Luisa seems not to care. “I
was
scrying. I was trying to see something that would tell me about Sonia. Something that would help me convince you.”

“Why didn’t you simply tell me, Luisa? Warn me?”

She sighs, dropping my hand as a look of regret passes over her exotic features. “You would not have believed me if I came to you with only suspicion. Not about Sonia. I was waiting until I had proof.” Absent from her voice is the bitterness to which I have become accustomed over my closeness with Sonia. Now she sounds only sorry.

A wry laugh erupts from my mouth into the night. “Well, we have proof now, don’t we?”

It is not a question that requires an answer, and we both know it. I do not know what to say about Sonia, and Luisa clearly feels the same way, for we sit in the almost-silence of the crackling fire without speaking. I can hear murmured voices coming from the tent, but I do not attempt to decipher
the words spoken among Edmund, Dimitri, and Sonia. They are simply a backdrop to my own convoluted thoughts.

The sound of boots crunching across hard ground an-nounces Dimitri approaching from the darkness outside the light of the fire. When I turn my head, he is there.

“She’s quiet for now,” he says, and I know he is referring to Sonia. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” I do not have the words to tell him that I am
not
fine. That I am shaken to the very core by the realization that the Souls may turn even my most trusted ally against me. That the medallion no longer has a safe place to reside until we find the missing pages.

Dimitri sits on my other side, and Luisa leans over to look at him. “How is she, Mr. Markov?”

“If I’m going to speak to you of such matters, I insist you call me Dimitri,” he says.

I shrug when she glances at me for approval.

“All right, then. Dimitri,” she says. “How is Sonia?”

“She is… distraught and not in her right mind.”

“What do you mean?” Luisa asks. “Does she realize what she tried to do? Does she remember it?”

“Oh, she remembers it well and without apology. She was ranting about why Lia should wear the medallion… about why she was doing the right thing in placing it on Lia’s wrist while she slept. We tried to talk sense into her, but it seems the Souls have her well in their grasp.”

“It cannot be.” I shake my head. “Sonia is so strong.”

“Even the most gifted among us would struggle to keep the
Souls at bay.” Dimitri’s eyes are sympathetic as he explains. “They must have known she had the medallion, just as they must know she is your friend and confidant. None of us should be surprised, really, that it has come to this.”

But I am surprised. Sonia has always seemed stronger than the rest of us. Better, somehow, and surer of her gifts and her place in the prophecy. It is almost a sacrilege to imagine her working to the good of the Souls. I do not say it aloud, though. It will only make me sound naive.

“So what do we do?” Luisa asks Dimitri. “About Sonia? About Lia and the medallion?”

“We have to keep Sonia away from Lia for the rest of the journey. And we have to try and keep her calm.”

“How do you propose doing either given her state of mind?” Remembering Sonia’s fevered pleas, her shrieks as Dimitri pulled her out of our tent, the task seems anything but simple.

“I’ve ground mistletoe into her tea. It will render her complacent enough, I think, at least for a while,” Dimitri says.

I remember something I read during one of Father’s many lessons in the library at Birchwood. “Isn’t mistletoe poisonous?”

Dimitri shakes his head. “Not this variety. It is an ancient plant known to induce calm and found only in these woods and on the isle of Altus. We should be able to locate enough to see Sonia through until we can get her to the Sisters.”

Luisa nods. “All right. What about the medallion? Having it on Sonia’s wrist is the only thing that has kept it from Lia all this time.”

Dimitri drops his gaze to his hands, and I know he is thinking, trying to come up with a way to keep the medallion near enough for safekeeping while also ensuring my own safety from its power to use me as the Gate.

I stand as an idea takes hold and a surge of restless energy begins to work its way through my bones.

“How long do we have until we reach the island?” I direct my question to Dimitri, hoping he is more familiar with the woods than I.

He furrows his brow. “Well, it is difficult to say for certain. It depends how quickly we travel.”

Luisa sighs. For as long as I have known her, patience has never been one of her stronger virtues. “An approximation will likely do, Dimitri.”

I catch a glimpse of annoyance before he turns to me to answer. “I would guess about three days. Why?”

I do not answer his question right away. Instead, I ask one of my own. “Who has the medallion now?”

“Well… I do,” he says.

“May I?” I hold out my hand, but asking is a formality. If it belongs to anyone at all, it is to me.

“Are you certain that is a good idea, Lia?” I hear the fear in Luisa’s voice. It is an echo of my own, but I know there is no other way.

“I’d like the medallion, please.” I want to believe I see admiration in Dimitri’s eyes, but perhaps it is only resignation.

In any case, he reaches into his pocket and pulls something
from it. The breath catches in my throat as I glimpse the black velvet ribbon trailing from his hand. I have observed it, of course, on Sonia’s wrist. But seeing it safely clasped on the wrist of someone in whom I had infinite trust is different from seeing it unencumbered. There can be no doubt that it seems far more dangerous for its freedom.

Dimitri hands me the medallion, and I shut my eyes as my fingers close around the whispery velvet. That, together with the cold metal of the medallion, is more familiar to me than my own soul. Recognition ripples through me as a mixture of hate and terrifying need slams into my body. It takes effort to open my eyes. To bring myself back to the present and gather my thoughts.

All of that and I have not even clasped it against my skin.

Still, I cannot dwell on that which cannot be changed. What has to be done, however painful, however terrifying, however impossible it may seem.

I wrap the ribbon around my right wrist and lock the gold clasp. The mark is on my other wrist, but I know that is no guarantee of safety. The medallion has found its way back to my wrist in the past through circumstances more far-fetched than this.

When she speaks, Luisa’s voice shakes. “But… Lia, you cannot wear the medallion. You know what could happen.”

“I know better than anyone, but there is no other way.”

“Perhaps you could give it to Edmund or… Dimitri? Anyone but you…”

I do not take offense to her words. I know that she seeks only to protect me, and she knows that I am most vulnerable to the pull of the medallion. My cursed role as Gate has seen to that.

“No, Luisa. I was fortunate to have Sonia look after it for a time, but I cannot put off my responsibility to it forever.”

“Yes, but…” She looks from me to Dimitri and back again. “Dimitri?”

He holds my gaze. I do not know what he sees there, what makes him stare straight through me until I feel all the secrets of my soul are laid bare, but whatever it is, he sees it with certainty.

“Lia is right,” he says. “She should be the one to secure the medallion. It belongs to her.”

He does not flinch, and in this moment, without a shred of doubt in his eyes, I feel the stirrings of something deeper than physical attraction. Deeper even than the strange connection that has bonded us almost since the beginning.