Page 44 of In the Ravenous Dark
He doesn’t reappear to ask what I’m up to. Maybe he’s uninterested in my rifling, or he has no understanding of sigils as a shade, only an ability to sense oncoming blood magic of the potentially destructive sort. But that doesn’t mean he’s not watching. I pick up a book and pretend to leaf through it while my thoughts spin. At least the pages have pictures.
Follow your eye.
Perhaps I’m right about the map being on my body. And yet I can’t guess the path from my hand, so maybe he meant to help me out with clues in the room. I lean against the wall in front of thetacked-up paper, facing the office from behind his desk. It’s not too hard to bend my head toward the book while surreptitiously shooting glances up through my lashes.
There, indented in the back of his wooden desk chair, I find it. My father must have used his magic to put a sigil so lightly and perfectly there, so the dead man wouldn’t notice or grow suspicious. This one has more sinuous lines like waves. I’mfairlycertain I’ve seen it above the sigil in the center of my palm, but I don’t yet want to check to make sure. If the pattern holds, I imagine I might find another one from the perspective of the chair. Shifting as if uncomfortable, I sidle over to the desk to sit down and scoot over a sheaf of papers before setting the open book in front of me.
Underneath the stack of papers is another sigil, sunken into the wood of the desk, this one like an angular hourglass. To get a view from the desktop, I’ll have to look up. I wait a few moments, flip through a few more pages of the book, and then sigh as if I’m frustrated, stretching my arms overhead and tilting my face toward the ceiling.
This sigil has been pressed into the carved wooden clouds. It’s directly over the one on the desk, so there isn’t anywhere else I can look from there. I drop my hands into my lap and pick at my nails as if bored, studying my palm.
Those same four sigils in the room weave a diagonal line from the center of my palm onto the inside of my pointer finger, where a few more sigils continue until ending at my last knuckle, like they do on all my fingers.
Perhaps here is my path. Before I can try to trace it, either in the air or only in my mind, the dead man appears, making me jump and sit up straight in the chair like a child caught breaking the rules.
“Sorry to intrude, but I must,” he says, before I can try to come up with an excuse for what I’m doing in here.
My guardian doesn’t seem to want one. He merely waits, dark, silent, and strange.
“Were you going to say something, or just skulk around like a ghost?”
“Are you all right?” His voice is curiously soft.
And that makes me furious. “Don’t act like you care.”
“I do care,” he says, as if somewhat surprised himself. As I hold his gaze, something in his guard seems to drop. To leave a tentative opening.
I remember the odd ways he’s helped me, even as he’s held me back. The moments of wonder when I truly seem to see him.Thisis one of those moments. I should use it. “Whydo you care?”
“Because it’s my duty.” He hesitates. “And despite your rough demeanor, you’re kind to thoseyoucare about, and right now you have no one else looking out for you but me. Maybe Japha, but they can’t do much. Also…” He purses his lips. “You hate this place as much as I do, so it makes me more inclined to empathy.”
The words almost sound like an accident.
I gape at him over the desk. “You hate this place?”
He folds his arms and looks away. “I didn’t say that.”
“You did, too. What the hell, Ivrilos?”
He blinks down at me. “You called me by name.”
“Because maybe for once you sounded like a person and not like a corpse,” I say quickly, trying to mask my embarrassment. “But anabsurdperson,” I add. “How can you hate it here when you do all you do to uphold it? After what youjustdid to my father?”
“I have to.”
“What’s making you? I mean, I haveyoukeeping me in line. What’s keeping you here?”
Who doyouanswer to?I almost add, though I don’t want to press my luck.
He doesn’t respond, but his expression cracks open even more,revealing something raw and weary. Hope flares in me. Perhaps I’m not wrong to try to reach out to him—truly, and not just as a ruse. To treat him as more than a dead man. Maybe I can convince him to break his shadowy hold over me, no scheming required.
“You could just… let me go?” I suggest softly. “Please, Ivrilos?”
His face doesn’t so much harden as go deathly still—the openness shuttered—and I know I’ve made a mistake.
“I can’t,” he says firmly. “I told you, I need you.”
“Why?” I nearly cry. “For what?”
