Page 90 of By the Orchid and the Owl
Lowering myself to her still-quivering nose, I pushed it out in the faintest breath I could manage—everything I had just read. When I was done, she did a lap around the desk and settled herself in the crook of my neck, panting heavily.
“I thoughtyoutold me Lord Arad was the last descendants of the vampires?”
Indeed, I’d told Willa everything that had happened in that abandoned classroom, but I wasn’t sure…
“No,” I said, straining to remember, “he said he and his children were the last of the tomb bats from the ancient Asmodeus Colony. Whatever that means. Maybe there was a colony here on the island before Dyonisia took over?”
“Or maybe he was just batshit,” Willa quipped. “Literally.Listen, Rayna, you know what this means, right?” She put a paw on the landmass of Sorronia, situated right beneath Eshol’s bottom right curve where the Institute sat.
Vaguely. I vaguely knew what it meant, but my brain was having trouble taking a step back to view the picture as a whole. Again, it was like I could only take in meaningless syllables and splatters and sounds.
“Magics aren’t fully developed until the faerie reaches maturity,”Willa repeated. “Your power—the innate one, the one the Good Council didn’t give you—isn’t developed yet because you haven’t reached maturity. The pirates, your mother, half of your blood is—”
“I know,” I whispered, nearly against my will.
Her little voice repeating it back to me did the trick. The syllables and sounds coagulated into pictures in my mind: faeries brimming with hazardous, shapeless powers until they reached a certain age and learned how to shape it. Hone it. Use it.
Perhaps everyone else on the island was fully human, butwe—Coen, Garvis, Terrin, the twins, and I—must have come from Sorronia. Or at least our parents had. The faerie lands.
If Ms. Pincette’s sources were right, if her descriptions were true, then that monster brimming in my veins… it wasn’t a monster at all. It just had yet to take form.
Because I was half-faerie.
CHAPTER
33
Isnapped the tome shut and hugged it against my chest.
“Willa, do you know of any place in the house I could store this where no one will find it? Someplace it’ll be safe until I’m ready to read it again?”
Because if I let myself continue studying this and obsessing over it, I would not sleep tonight. And with the second quarterly practice test tomorrow, with the weight of my future resting on how well I could perform during these damned things, I couldn’t risk heading to that Testing Center with bags under my eyes.
Anything, after all, could trigger my power—my… my faerie power, apparently. Not just bascale, but stress and fatigue as well. And while I was sure Ms. Pincette wouldn’t report it if I exploded again, Iwasn’tsure about Mr. Conine or Mrs. Wildenberg or Mr. Fenway.
“Give me a minute,” Willa said.“I’ll be right back.”
I waited. My fingers twitched, itching to open it again, to just take another peek and try to figure out which of those dotted towns or cities my mother might have come from. But… tomorrow, I could. After the second test.
I just had to get through tomorrow, and then I’d bury my nose in this thing until it went numb.
Willa returned mere minutes later, her fur disheveled.
“Okay, it’s ready for you. It was my cousin Barty’s favorite place to shit, so we had to clean it of all his droppings, but it should be a perfect place.”
Bemused, I followed her skittering shadow back to the foyer, where she put her paws up on the piece of wall right beneath that giant cuckoo clock between the staircases in the back.
“It swings forward, but only when it goes off. Which should be any….”
Right on cue, the clock let out a mechanical chirp, and I pried the rounded edges of it from the wall. It swung outward, revealing a hole the size of my head.
I coughed at the dust and the cloying smell of old piss soaked in wood.
“This is perfect.”
I gently placed the tome inside, patted its surface, and closed the cuckoo clock over it again. A smallclicktold me it had latched back into place.
I didn’t have the energy to ask Willa if she knew who’d designed this hiding space, or why it was there.
