Page 58 of The Dagger and the Flame
‘People,’ said Lark. ‘They’re just people.’
‘But how does it happen?’ she whispered. ‘How did Kipp turn into a monster in the first place?’
‘It has to be Shade,’ said Ransom, slumping onto the windowsill. ‘All that darkness. The reek of it. I had no power over it.’
‘Shade doesn’t dothat,’ said Nadia, all three of them silently staring at the marks on their hands. Perhaps wondering if one day they might become monsters on the outside too.
Lark leaned back, touching his head against the window. ‘The puzzle is before us,’ he murmured. ‘But half the pieces are missing.’
Nadia sighed. ‘This is a brand-new coat. And now it reeks of smoke.’
Lark snorted. ‘At least we’re keeping things in perspective.’
‘Here’s a perspective,’ said Ransom. ‘We need to find out how ordinary people are being turned into monsters. And fast.’
Lark looked up at him. ‘So, we can help them?’
‘No.’ It was Nadia who answered. ‘So, we can destroy them.’ She frowned as she looked to the flaming boardwalk. ‘Because one thing’s sure as shit. If we don’t start killing them, they’ll keep killing us.’
Chapter 20Seraphine
As part of her nightly routine, Sera sat cross-legged on her bed, staring at the golden teardrop. Pippin sat beside her, wearing the same look of fierce concentration.What are you made of? And what am I to do with you?
The bead was dim tonight, hiding its power. Biding its time. Sera prodded it. Clamped it in her fist. Pressed it to her lips. Prayed to it. Threatened it. Threw it at the wall.
Still nothing.
‘Wake up,’ she hissed. ‘Do something.’
She chewed on her frustration. She wished –saints, how she wished – she knew what this tiny bead was and why Mama had made it. What had she been working on all those late nights at her workbench when Sera was asleep, dreaming of far-flung adventures…?
A part of Sera was afraid to dwell on it. Afraid to think of Fig’s distorted body and compare it to the monsters she had seen in the Hollows. She was afraid of her mother’s secrets, the good and the bad…
Next time, we’re going to talk about that antidote.
She turned the Dagger’s words over in her mind for the hundredth time. What did he mean by that? What did heknow? And what the hell had possessed him to kill her mother but go to all that trouble to save her dog?
The bead warmed up, echoing the flicker of her frustration. She closed her eyes and held it against her heart. Sera knew Shade. She had known it all her life. The cold lick of that black dust beneath her fingers, the yawning hollow in every vial she used to bottle, as if the magic inside wanted to reach up through the stopper and take something vital from her.
But this teardrop was different. The magic inside it didn’t feel cold or foreboding. It felt like a promise of hope, like a kiss from the saints. A shield against the rising dark.
It was a gift.
Sera wished she could go back to the day she had received it. She ached to return to the plains, to her mother and their quiet little life that had never seemed quite enough for either of them. Now it was all Sera wanted.
To return to the first snowfall of winter when they used to race their horses to the low forest and back, a cream bun for the winner. Always halved. To the spring when the daffodils bloomed in the garden, and they feasted on grapes and cheese until their bellies ached. To lazy summer evenings in Ploughman’s Lake when they swam out on their backs to gazeat the stars, divining their futures in imaginary constellations. To autumn when the first leaves fell, amber and green and gold, and they made great piles of them to jump in.
All their wild and joyful living, Sera knew now, had unfurled under the dark shadow of Dufort’s gaze. Yet she never felt it. And if Mama did, she never showed it. But this necklace… It said Mama knew something bad was coming. It said she was trying to prepare for it. Trying to protect Sera from it.
Maybe all that time Dufort was watching Mama, Mama was looking back at him.
Sera’s cheeks prickled. ‘I could go back,’ she whispered. ‘I should go back.’
Her farmhouse had been burned to cinders but she might find something in the ashes. A clue to this strange magic. A whisper of what she could do with it. The bead tingled against her fingers, a faint glow pulsing as if to say,Yes, there is more to know. More to do.
Sera returned it to her neck and went to extinguish the oil lamp on the wall. Something made her pause at the window. She turned, peering into the mouth of the Hollows.
She spotted him almost at once, that familiar pair of quicksilver eyes shining in the dark.
