Page 126 of Sonnets and Serpents
“The only rat I see here is you,” she snarled, clawing her nails into his arm. “How could you, Kerem? How could you be like a father to Silas and then kill your son?”
He flinched from her words, his fingers slackening.
After all she’d done to encourage Silas to trust Yvette, to trusther, to let go of the hurt caused by his father and not see betrayal around every corner ... Kerem had ruined it all.
She hated him. For what he’d done to Silas, she hated him more than she’d ever hated anyone.
“How could you?” she whispered again, wishing she had stronger words, piercing words, words she could plunge like daggers through his chest and into his cold-blooded heart to make him realize exactly what he’d done.
But, sometimes, words fell short.
For a moment, Kerem’s gaze held hers, his dark eyes unreadable.
Then he winced.
Looking down, he seemed to spot the little brown rat clamped around his ankle in the same moment Eliza did. The glow of the Artifact died, the box tumbling from his hand.
In a puff of brown mist, Kerem was a rat.
And Henry was a breathless, triumphant knight.
“Kneel,” he ordered, cowing the rat at his feet. It trembled against the ground.
Gill transformed back, and Eliza crouched to stare down a black-eyed rat. “My first day in your office, you said, ‘Magic is a powerful weapon, not a shield against all ills.’ You forgot your own lesson, Iyal.”
Snatching up the Artifact, she ran back to Silas.
Tulip hissed a warning at her approach, perking up to strike, but then the python settled.
Dropping to her knees, Eliza grabbed Silas’s hand and pressed the box between his palm and chest, willing it to return his magic, to give him healing or strength or whatever he needed.
What little color had been in his face was gone, leaving him pallid as death.
Please, she willed, and then she was whispering it aloud, “Please.Please.”
Please come back.I won’t ask for anything else. Just come back.
Warmth pierced the darkness. Just a pinhole of it, hardly enough to discern.
He’d almost lost all sense of self, but he felt the warmth. And with it, he heard a whisper.
Please come back.
It wasn’t clear how he heard it without ears. Even less clear how he grasped it without fingers, but he did, drawing in the warmth, holding to the whisper.
Until, slowly, Silas remembered himself, and his world faded back into focus.
A world that hung above him in the form of a familiar, reckless princess.
“Apta,” he whispered, reaching for her face. Tears spilled downEliza’s cheeks even as she burst into a smile, clutching his hand with her own.
When he tried to lift himself, he realized there was a weight on his chest, holding him down. A disgruntled python hissed out her opinion of his death scare.
“It’s not like I enjoyed it either,” he griped, his voice barely a croak. He ached all the way down to his soul, but that soul seemed to be more or less intact again.
Tulip hunched herself into a tight S shape, and in so doing, she displaced something else from his chest.
The bone-box Artifact.
