The Hidden Goddess (32 page)

Emily stared at her. Mrs. Stanton blinked once, slowly.

“The Senator has gone through his share of difficult times over the past twenty years. There have been public scandals—allegations of bribery, graft, kickbacks. And there have been private disappointments. There will always be other women, Miss Edwards. To imagine otherwise is sheerest self-delusion.”

She drew in a deep breath. “However, when my husband looks in the mirror, his reflection shows him an unblemished servant of the people, a faithful spouse, and a wise father. There is no doubt in his mind. He is a clear, unruffled pond. He is perfect in his belief in his own perfection. I have built this in him. I have killed all remorse, all conscience, all compromise within him. Because the strength of our perfection, the strength of our right to rule, is only as strong as our faith in it. Do you understand?”

Emily stared into the older woman’s green eyes, lost in their ocean of implication.

“But what about the truth?” Emily whispered.

“The truth doesn’t matter,” Mrs. Stanton said.

A heavy silence filled the room. Emily moved to the other side of the room, wrapping her arms around herself. She felt dizzy and sick. Of course the truth mattered. It had to matter. What would life be if it didn’t? Bitter self-delusion in the service of power? Despair flooded her. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth, pressed it hard against her teeth to keep from screaming something foul.

“You have to rise above things like this, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said to Emily’s back. “My son has explained many things about this ‘credomancy’ he practices. It is a fascinating art, though I can hardly understand why he had to spend a half-decade of intensive study on what seems to me little more than common sense. One of credomancy’s foundational precepts has always struck me as extremely comforting: While false things can be made true with enough belief, true things can also be believed into becoming false.”

Emily heard Mrs. Stanton rise. The woman went over to a carved walnut sideboard. She took a key from the small ring
that hung at her waist and unlocked the cabinet. Inside, there was an arrangement of bottles and decanters. Mrs. Stanton selected an unopened bottle of brandy. She set it on a table, along with a cut-crystal tumbler.

“Personally, however, I prefer a more direct brand of comfort.” Was that an attempt at kindness in her voice? If so, it was very difficult to distinguish from contempt. Emily watched as the old woman tore the seal off the bottle, poured herself a brimful glass. She brought the glass to her mouth, drained it slowly and fondly. When she was finished, she set the tumbler down softly, touched a fingertip to each corner of her mouth. She recapped the bottle and left it on the table.

“I’m sure you’re very tired, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said. “You’ll want to remain in your room this evening. I’ll have something sent up. We all understand.”

Emily turned violently, glaring at the bottle of brandy, at the old woman who hovered over it. She wanted to kick the table over. But at the moment, Emily did feel tired. Very tired. And the thought of locking herself in a room with a bottle of brandy didn’t seem all that exceptionally bad.

Mrs. Stanton moved toward the door. Her hand was on the doorknob when she paused.

“It is a shame you must feel such heartache, Miss Edwards,” Mrs. Stanton said, not turning. “It is as disappointing to me as it is to you. I did not raise my son to fall in love. I raised him to be like his father.” She paused, and Emily heard her murmur as she closed the door behind her: “If only I knew where I went wrong.”

Emily snatched the bottle of brandy and sat on the edge of the bed. She uncorked the bottle and tipped it down her thoat, forgoing the niceties of the cut-crystal tumbler. She assumed it was good brandy, but even so, it burned like hell going down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

So. The truth didn’t matter. If there was truth in the red book, she was supposed to ignore it. Forget it. Polish Stanton into a gloss so fine that nothing real or honest could stick to him ever again.

She took another drink, the choking alcohol tickling her
nose. Warmth spread through her quickly, tingling and numbing. It would be easy. Drink a little more, go to sleep, smile pretty, and for God’s sake don’t move. Ignore the goblets of blood and sadistic ex-mistresses.

Swim with the current.

“To hell with that!” she growled to herself, dashing the bottle of brandy into the fire. It smashed with a satisfying sound, and blue flames leapt on the hearth. Swim with the current? Let Stanton stand by and get away with murder, if that’s what he’d done … She swallowed hard. Three years at the Erebus Academy. How could she never have thought about what that really meant? Did she think that he’d spent those three years discussing theoretical abstractions? She trembled, wishing suddenly for another mouthful of brandy, wishing Mrs. Stanton hadn’t taken the keys to the liquor cabinet with her.

Even if he hadn’t gone to the diabolical lengths described in the book, he would have killed for blood. He would have tortured his victims to empower the blood. It was what sangrimancers did.

… it’s in murdering the right people, and sparing your family the indignity of getting caught …

She put a hand over her mouth, trembling harder. These people really believed that! That life was worth nothing more than the power that could be bled from it.

And she’d told him it didn’t matter. That it was all in the past.

She leapt to her feet, pacing the room up and down its length. She’d told him it didn’t matter because she’d never really believed it of him. She’d never thought he could have done it. But he could have. She knew it now, with terrible certainty. He could have been that person. His mother’s coldness, his father’s reflective emptiness; the images drifted together, resolving into an image of Stanton, his face cold as marble, his soul uncluttered by doubt, driving needles into the flesh of a struggling victim …

Emily ground the heel of her hand into her eyes, trying to rub the image away.

And what if … what if he was
still
that person? The kind of
person who would send thugs to smash bookstores, beat an innocent man to a bloody crumpled pulp …

She couldn’t marry someone like that.

Using her mouth, she stripped the diamond ring from her finger, teeth raking her skin. She spat the thing into her hand, then slammed it down on a side table with a fierce cry. Then she stood looking down at it, watching it wink and glitter. As she watched it, her anger crumbled, tumbling into little shards of brandy-fueled misery. She thought of the afternoon up at the blockhouse, with Stanton’s warm hand on her sore ankle. That was the man she wanted to marry.

Emily shook her head hard, as if the action would drive the thoughts away. She wasn’t going to think about it anymore. There wasn’t anything left to think about, really. Misery transmuted into bitterness. “Mrs. Blackheart” and the leather bindings imputed to her were not Emily’s true rival. Her true rival was far more abstract and far more demanding. The Institute. The Institute would never relinquish him. It would always be the arms that held him fast, black glass hands tracing blood trails on his smooth flesh …

Emily shook her head. Stupid thoughts, all getting mixed up. She had to think of something else. She sat down and crossed her arms, squeezing her eyes shut tight, making herself small and hard.

Aleksei Morozovich
. The name the Faery Reader had found on the hair sticks came back to her, and she pounced on it, eager for the distraction. Aleksei Morozovich. She had heard the name before. But where?

She tried to concentrate on the name, tried to remember where she’d heard it, but all she could see in her mind were young men in plaid suits, tearing up red books. Drifts of paper, white as ash, tumbling down the muddy streets of Chatham Square, balling in gutters …

Stop it! Emily used her good hand to give her own cheeks a smart slap. It didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected it to. She slapped herself again, experimentally.

Aleksei Morozovich
.

She remembered the sun shining down through the ivy-covered roof of the blockhouse, Stanton’s warm hands. She
was about to slap herself again for letting her mind wander, when she remembered Stanton’s words, the words he’d spoken thoughtfully while his fingers played over her ankle, finding the sore places with perfect accuracy:

… They propose to implement a sort of toxin … a poison, deployed within the Mantic Anastomosis itself, that would make magic toxic to any practitioner channeling it. The idea was put forth by a scientist named Aleksei Morozovich …

Emily blinked.

Aleksei Morozovich. The scientist who’d been working on the poison.

Her father. A member of the Sini Mira. Mrs. Kendall had said he was working on an important project, one that had driven him from Russia. She had said that he’d had a mentor who’d been killed for his research. If his mentor was Morozovich …

She remembered being young and small and cold, her father standing before her with the gleaming sticks of engraved silver in his hands, the sticks she had thought were so pretty …

… There is a secret written on these hair sticks, Emilichka … A dangerous secret …

Emily could not move. Her head felt as if little explosions were going off in it. The poison. The secret of the poison that would make magic unworkable. Volos’ Anodyne, that’s what Zeno had called it. The poison hidden by the God of Oaths. That was what had to be written on her hair sticks, in hyper-tiny violet scale letters. That was what her father had been trying to protect.

She leaned forward, staring at the carpet beneath her feet. It couldn’t be. But it had to. That’s what the Sini Mira wanted from her. They wanted to reclaim Volos’ Anodyne. And now she knew where it was. At least, she thought she did.

She had to suppress the urge to leap to her feet and rush down to the Bowery that very moment. The Faery Reader’s report wouldn’t be ready until morning. She couldn’t make the man work any faster, but the trembling anxiousness inside her was killing her.

She rocked back and forth in her chair, staring at her trunk.
Inside, the blue bottle of memories lay half full. The rest of her past was in there. Her past, her father … and maybe the poison that everyone was looking for. Maybe there was an explanation in there, a confirmation, a confession. Maybe there was more he had to tell her.

Falling to her knees, she scrambled across the floor to her trunk, unbuckling it and throwing the heavy lid back with a thump. She dug through fabric until her ivory hand clinked against the glass. She lifted the bottle, looking at it.

Father
, she whispered in Russian.
Let me see
.

She uncapped the Lethe Draught and drank it down to the last dregs. The bitterness of it filled her mouth, tasting of blood and mold and mushrooms …

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Bitter and Dark

Her hair was on fire.

Her entire scalp burned and itched, and Emily kept throwing her head back and forth, trying to make it stop. Her father had plastered something on her hair, something thick and rust-brown that smelled like the strange powders he kept in his workshop. At first it had tingled, then it had itched, and now … now it burned. It burned like swarming stinging bees, like fire. They were in the barn, and Emily sat on a wooden chair, tilted back over a tub of foul-smelling water. Emily shrieked and squirmed in her chair, but her father held her shoulders hard against the wood. She kicked against him, screaming, crying.

“It burns, Da! Oh, Da … it burns!”

“Oh, Emilichka. Shush,
devuchka
. I’m so sorry.”

Emily screamed angrily, tears of pain and rage streaming from her eyes. Her father reached up to brush them away.

“It must stay on for a few minutes yet,” her father murmured, gentle but implacable. “Only a few minutes, Emilichka. Shush now, shush. And I will tell you a story. Do you want to hear a story?”

Emily gritted her teeth and stared at her father, hating him. She snuffled, and tears continued to streak down her cheeks. She began kicking her heel rhythmically against the leg of the chair, and the feeling of the back of her ankle connecting with the hard wood was comforting. It didn’t hurt as much as the burning, but it hurt enough.
Thump, thump, thump
.

“I will tell you a story about a Witch,” her father said, his
voice rich and slow. “You know Witches are distasteful creatures, ugly and hideous. But they can be very powerful.”

Thump, thump, thump
. Emily did not want to hear about Witches. She wanted this horrible stuff off of her head. She wanted to reach up and stomp out the fire with her hands. She whimpered as her father held her hands down tight against her sides.

“Now, listen. Listen. Once upon a time, long ago, the God of Oaths was being chased by demons who wished to steal the heart of his one true love. He kept her heart locked in a box made of gold and silver, and he kept it with him always—”