Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (36 page)

A dark flicker outside caught my eye then, and as my heart sped up in panic a shiny black crow landed on the porch railing, tucking its wings gracefully behind its back. He looked through the glass and through the curtains directly at me and cawed once, taking off again.

I put the apple down and kept the knife as I stood up, my ears pricking to listen for the guards outside. They were still there, right by the furthest evergreen, where they always were. But it seemed odd that a crow would be skulking around at this hour. The sun was still a good hour away from rising and none of the other creatures outside had yet awoken.

The crow made another crass sound then, this time from the other porch.

I walked over and unlocked the door, sliding it quietly open, and the freezing winter chill crept in silently along my cheeks and hardened my skin. I wrapped my arms around my chest and stepped outside, looking down at the crow.

It cawed again, as if making a point.

“Shhh.” I put my finger to my lips. “You’ll wake the King.”

It flapped its wings heavily and rose off the ground, turning slightly to fly away into the shadows of predawn, so I grabbed my coat and my scarf off the rack by the door, slid it closed again and, tucking the apple knife into my pocket, took off after the crow.

Drops of morning dew on pines gave off a citrusy smell—one of my favourite things about this place—and I picked up a slight hint of rain on the horizon as well, perhaps as far away as the interstate. I wasn’t sure it would come as far south as this, but the chill in the air certainly made a compelling argument against that.

As I walked in my ugg boots over the bumpy, uneven forest ground, hardly able to see two feet in front, I started to wonder if following a random crow without reason was a good idea. Okay, so, no, it wasn’t a good idea. I knew that before I left, but for some reason I just got the sense that it wanted to show me something.

I checked behind me for the guards, but they hadn’t followed.

“Amara.” A familiar voice through the dead quiet startled me, even though I recognised it right away. I reeled back a little as a figure stepped out of the shadows behind a tree, rolling a shirt down over his bare chest. He approached me with quick steps and a friendly grin, bowing low as he reached me. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

“Scare me?” I touched the hollow between my collarbones, where my heart was racing so hard my skin pulsed. “Not at all.”

Drake laughed, looking at my hand on my chest. “I apologise, my dear. But I needed to speak to you without David hearing.”

“Why?” I angled my head to look back at the house, but it was sheathed in darkness.

“There are some things I need to say, things I need to tell you—”

“Like the fact that you’re a crow?” I said, putting it all together.

“I’m not a crow,” he stated, tucking his black t-shirt into his pants. “I can
become
a crow—much the same way Lord Eden becomes the dog.”

I looked at his hand for a blood garnet ring, like my dad’s.

Drake reached into his pocket and drew out a red stone. “I never had mine set into metal. I carry it in my pocket usually.”

“I
so
need to get one of those.”

“And you will,” he said, putting it away. “When we win back Loslilian.”

I folded my arms, half because I was cold, and the other half to look irritated that he’d dragged me out here in the middle of the night, when I’d be seeing him this afternoon anyway. “What did you come here to tell me—that couldn’t wait?”

“Amara, there is no way any one of the men that love you are going to leave me alone with you this afternoon so we can talk.” He buried his hand in his pocket, reaching forward with the other to unfold my hand from the warmth of my arms, then laid a warm coin in my palm. “I want you to keep this with you.”

“What is it?” I studied the small brass circle; it wasn’t a coin like any I’d seen before.

“It’s just a bit of metal. But I’ve used a watching spell, so that I might check up on you when I need to.”

“Check up on me?”

“I can see you—as if that coin were a phone and my, yes, it’s cliché, I know, but my crystal ball were the other end of the line.”

“And why would I give you the power to see or hear what I’m doing at any time?”

“Because I can better protect you that way. But you mustn’t tell David about it.” He huffed out through his nose, looking off in the direction of the house. “He disposed of my last spelled object.”

“The bracelet?”

“It was never a secret that I’d put a spell on it,” he said defensively.

“Yes, it was. You didn’t tell me. That means it was a secret.”

“You didn’t ask,” he said simply. “If you’d asked, I’d have told you.”

I bit my teeth together, the coin in my hand getting hotter and hotter, and slightly heavy with the weight of my anger. I dropped it to the floor and kicked it away. “No. I’m not keeping that thing.”

“Amara!” Drake scuffled around looking for it, giving up after a few seconds. “Why did you do that?”

“Because I don’t know if I can trust you. There are too many contradicting facts, Drake, and until I’m sure, I’m not giving anyone the power to see or hear what I’m doing whenever they like.”

He squatted down, obviously seeing the coin, and picked it up, dusting it off as he stood. I caught a whiff of his musky cologne then and it carried a grassy smell—like a mix of herbs—with it. “You can trust me, Amara. I am the only person in the world that you actually
can
trust—aside from David.”

“Prove it.” I folded my arms again.

“Ask me anything.” He spread his arms out wide as if to imply he was an open book.

So I thought of the one question I hadn’t yet asked—the one thing no one could tell me but him. “Do you still love Anandene?”

His arms dropped to his sides again and he exhaled a short, despondent breath. “I will always love her.”

I took a deliberate step back.

“However, the real questions is, do I want her resurrected?”

“Do you?”

“In truth?” He paused. “No. I haven’t done for some time.”

“But I thought that was the plan from the beginning—the reason she cast the spell that led to the plague, the reason—”

“It was. But it was her wish. Not mine.”

“But I thought you wanted her to be immortal.”

“I think, perhaps, I did—for a time. You see, when I fell in love with Anandene, I fell hard and I fell fast. It was messy and irrational; she was all that ever mattered to me. And because of that, I looked past her… transgressions—forgave them when I should have punished them.”

“Transgressions?”

“When I met her, there was no such thing as psychology—there was no one that could diagnose sociopathy by analysing the actions of another. But she brought horror to an otherwise beautiful world. Tortured small animals and delighted in the way they reacted to pain, hurt children for the thrill of their cries, and I was blind to it—saw only the sweetness of this girl I fell in love with.

“It took ten years after her death to realise I could live without her, and by that time I had already taken action to resurrect her, with the help of her mother—”

“Safia?” I said.

“So you know.”

“We’ve been connecting some dots.” I nodded. “Dad said Safia’s name was in their family bible as Anandene’s mother, but he wasn’t completely sure it was true.”

“It is,” Drake confirmed.

“And, so, Safia won’t let this be, will she?”

Drake shook his head. “I fell in love with another woman once—twelve years after Anandene’s passing. I went to Safia and told her I wanted out—wanted the key to my sister’s sarcophagus so I could resurrect her and end this—”

“Wait, Safia had it?”

“Has it. Yes.”

“But… I thought I had it.”

“You have a key, but it will not open her sarcophagus.”

“Then what does it open?”

“Her tomb—where we keep it. But in it lies only the skull. As you know, we hid another piece of bone in the dagger, so that only two on this earth knew where to find the last piece of my sister.”

“Where are the other pieces?”

“Only Safia knows—as an insurance policy.”

“So you tried to back out and now she’s forcing you to help her, and that’s what she held over you—all this time? Your sister’s bones?”

“It is one thing, yes.”

“And the other?”

“My daughter.”

“You have a daughter?”

“I had two. But she knew of only one.”

“Knew of?” That sounded very past-tense. “And, what, she doesn’t know about her now?”

“My wife was a hated woman. For all the evil she brought to the world, she did at least bring one good thing. But when my child was born, an assassin was sent to kill her. Anandene’s family took the child away and swore to protect her. A few years later she was brought to Loslilian, and the people were made to believe she was the child of Anandene’s brother—an ex-lover of my sister’s. It was never said, but only assumed that the child was Lilith’s—”

“Morgana?” Tiny bumps crawled out on my skin. “Morgana was
your
daughter? Not Lilith’s?”

Drake nodded once, his face tightly pinched with the pain inside of him.

And my heart broke a thousand times over then for what David had done to her. “Did she know? Did Morg know?”

“No.”

“So Safia threatened to kill her own granddaughter if you refused to help resurrect Anandene?”

He nodded again.

“Oh my God!” I covered my mouth, and Dad’s theory about Safia and her blood sacrifice fell away for a new one. “Is that why you really killed the children—she told you to avenge her granddaughter?”

“I wish it were so. I wish with all my heart that it had been an order, but it was a choice.”

“Explain it to me.” I looked right into his blue eyes, vibrant even in the dark. “I know there’s more to it. I need to understand.”

“It was not for revenge. It looked that way, but I was coming to kill them anyway.”

“Why?”

“It was the lesser of evils, Amara. Twelve had to die, and those children did not have parents to love them yet and so, would not cause as much harm to a heart as the loss of a child a woman had held to her breast.”

“But
I
loved them!”

“And yet you see my reasoning.”

My eyes drifted slowly away from his.

“I have taken many young lives in my time under Safia’s thumb, and I could bear it no more.”

“So it’s true—she needed their blood for her immortality.”

His eyes shrunk as he studied me. “How could you know that?”

“Like I said, Dad came to see me.”

He nodded in understanding. “Amara, I need to tell you something, and it will hurt. And it will scare you. But I want you to promise me you will listen—until I finish.”

“I promise,” I said with a very uncertain nod.

“I know about the child.” He bowed his head, motioning to my belly. “I know that she is soulless.”

My blood ran cold. “And yet you don’t plan to take my soul and put it in her body, do you?”

He shook his head. “I have fought a secret war all this time to see that Anandene never returns. But I almost lost the battle when Safia saw to your timely return to America that year—”

“
Safia
?” I shook my head at him. “That was you! You killed my mum and Harry. You forced me back into the guardianship of my father—”

“No. You had to
believe
it was me, so you would not dig any further. What you know already about that witch puts
everything
I’ve worked for at risk.”

“What do you mean?”

“To stop this madness—the resurrection of Anandene, the deaths of all my sister’s daughters—I must continually prove my dedication to Safia and our cause. She must trust me. I need time and I need to be able to get close to her when I find a way to kill her.”

“Why not just stop giving her the blood of children?”

“If it were that simple, I would. But without that blood she would not die. She would merely age, and I know from previous experience that it will not stop her or slow her down; it will only enrage her.” His tone carried a hundred sad stories under it, and I got the sense that he’d learned that lesson the hard way.

“So what keeps her alive then—if not the blood?”

“I have read every book, studied every spell, tried every toxin, and I have not found a way to either kill her or break what spell holds her here.” He lowered his head. “I am ashamed to say I do not know. However, there may be a way to stop her. And—” He looked down at my hand and then reached out for it, his shoulders dropping when I refused. “I may not see you again after the battle at Loslilian.”

“Why?”

“I feel the time has come to sacrifice myself for the greater good of those I love.”