Page 30 of Eternal Ruin
“What about Susenyos?” Yusef asked. “Can’t he help?”
Kidan stared at the ground, too angry. “He stopped me from killing you-know-who.”
Slen’s brows drew together. “Why?”
Because of a fucking artifact.
“I don’t know.”
A part of Kidan also worried Susenyos didn’t care about GK. Not in his list of major priorities.
Slen hesitated, a question in her eyes. “By the way, it’s not true, is it?”
“What’s not true?”
“What you told Samson last semester. That he could have access to your house and theartifact.” Her features were still, utterly focused. “Adane House doesn’t have the artifact. That was only a rumor that got your parents killed, right?”
Yusef had stopped to listen too.
Though her heart rate picked up, Kidan calmed herself. If a rumor of the artifact got around Uxlay again, Kidan and June might not survive it.
Stop worrying about June.
She didn’t know exactly why she lied and said, “It’s not true.”
Neither of them said anything for a while. But Slen’s keen eyes lingered on hers, sharp enough to pick out any flaw. Any lie. Kidan’s tongue dried up but she didn’t look away. In the silence, Slen’s expression remained guarded, shielding her true thoughts. One day, Kidan hoped to tear away Slen’s iron mask and stare directly into her soul.
There were glimpses of it here and there, in their late-night meet-ups in the Philosophy Tower when they practiced Kidan’s Amharic lessons. Slen would smile a little when Kidan butchered the words and encourage her to try again. The language still felt like cliff rocks, earthy, sharp, with no hidden soft waves in between. But Kidan was beginning to like the construction of it. Like with a puzzle, familiarize yourself with enough of the pieces and you can manifest a new word easily enough.
Kidan’s new favorite word was “dem.” Susenyos said it often when he thought she wasn’t listening.
Blood.
It felt good to do it with Slen, reclaim the hobbies that had been poisoned by their parents. And for a moment in their room up in an eerie tower, Slen would look… less intense about everything, which for her meant she was at peace.
And by lying now, Kidan hoped to keep Slen and Yusef from any more dem.
But deep down, an ugly thought had bloomed from the ashes of June’s betrayal. That was why she didn’t tell her friends the truth, and she hated her sister all the more for it. If her own sister could betray her for safety, for power, who wouldn’t?
13.
KIDAN
Kidan stared at her reflection in the rain-speckled window of her Philosophy class.
Her scarf covered her chin but there was an arch to her dry lips, a streak of life to her dark eyes. Like a film capturing a slow rebirth. She had the urge to lean into the sepia glass, ask:Who are you now?
Because there had been no trace of this girl months ago. Vampires might be a collection of a hundred faces, a hundred shifting emotions, but so were girls. Not because they were immortal but because they transformed at the faintest of changes. Butterflies, Mama Anoet had called them.
Kidan touched her wrist, unbearably bare. Filled with nothing but her long, unending life.
I want to live, she’d said on that tower to Susenyos.It’s my life to do as I please.
She had always suspected that when a girl died, she took more than one life with her, but now she was sure of it. Her body didn’t seem elastic enough to host all that she could be.
But living is so dangerous, she thought.I don’t know what I’ll become.
She shook her head and focused back on her screen. Their new graduate IDs gave them more access to Uxlay’s history. They were waiting for Professor Andreyas. Kidan entered her log-in, and a black page opened up by itself, with the golden lions of Uxlay anchoring each end of the search bar.
