CH193

CH193
Matteo's roast was way better than I expected. Impossibly and mouth-wateringly good and tender enough to melt in my mouth. I settled in with everyone to do homework, though Matteo had to leave for a few hours for rehearsal.
When he came back, it was past ten o'clock. Matteo and Ben drifted upstairs together. Isla followed soon after, promising to have the woman's name by tomorrow. Lukas and I followed and he walked me to my door.
“Get some sleep.”
“You too,” I said, though part of me knew he wouldn’t.
I watched him walk down the hallway to his room before going into my own room. I closed the door behind me and all of a sudden, the house was too quiet. I had this urge to go check on him again, but I didn't want to be weird about it. So I went back downstairs to double-check the front door, the windows, and stood for a while in the soft hush of the living room. The lamplight painted gold over the floorboards and caught the faint shimmer of frost on the windowpanes. Outside, the wind picked up, whispering against the glass like it wanted in.
I washed the mug in the sink, just to keep my hands busy. Matteo was one of those impossible cooks who cleaned as they cooked, so there wasn't anything else to do but go back upstairs and try to put some of this restlessness away. Lukas’s door was still closed. I paused outside it for half a heartbeat, tempted to knock, to make sure he was still there, but the light seeping through the bottom of the door and the soft rustling of papers told me he was awake, probably reading.
I went back to my room and forced myself to get ready for bed. Soon, I was brushing my teeth in the adjoining bathroom. My face looked tired. Dark smudges beneath my eyes made me look haunted. I looked older, weary, and oddly more dangerous, too. I realized I understood what Lukas meant when he didn't know what expression he was making.
I had no idea where the hardness in my eyes had come from. Probably wherever the blood lust had come from. I pulled on my oversized sweatshirt and crawled under the blankets, letting the warmth swallow me whole. My mind refused to quiet, replaying the day in loops, like it was trying to figure something out and just thought it would come with one more go-round. Eventually, exhaustion won. My eyes drifted shut.
Then, I wasn’t in my bed anymore.
The air was cold, laced with salt and smoke. I stood in the middle of a forest clearing ringed with ancient stones. The moon was huge and high above me in an unnaturally dark night, spilling silver light over the ground. Torches burned in four directions around the carved circle, and the shadows that danced along the trees seemed to swell.
There were four figures in the circle.
The first was Reese, or someone wearing his face, though older, sharper, and meaner, too. He was dressed in old ceremonial robes, the kind I’d only ever seen in illuminated manuscripts. His hands were smeared with ash and blood.
Beside him, Celeste knelt, her hair wild and tangled, lips moving in a low chant I couldn’t understand. She wasn’t the polished airhead I knew. She looked much older, almost feral, and her eyes reflected the firelight, making her look starving.
The woman who had taunted me through the bars stood across from them. Her gown shimmered black and gold, her hair unbound and gleaming like molten copper. She was the most polished of them. She raised a dagger carved with runes. The blade caught the moonlight, and she began to murmur in a language that sounded ancient in my ears, but like I should know it.
And then there was Jean-Baptiste. He was much older, wearing a heavy wolf-fur cloak, his expression cold and indifferent.
Reese lifted his hand, revealing something in his palm. I had never seen it, but I knew it was the token.
It wasn’t what I expected. Not a coin or medallion, but a small disc of gold, etched with interlocking runes that seemed to shift when the light hit them. At its center was a faint crystal inlay that pulsed with light like a heartbeat. If it had been split in half once, I guessed the crystal inlay came out.
Reese let it float over the circle, filtering the moonlight for the four of them. His mouth curled into a grin that made my skin crawl.
“Let us begin the reaping,” he said, his voice echoing as though the air itself carried it. “The mirror?"
The woman lifted the dagger higher.
The torches flared. The ground trembled under my feet. I tried to move, to speak, to scream, but the air was thick as honey. My lungs wouldn’t work.
Celeste’s chanting grew louder, faster. Reese dragged a circle in the dirt with some kind of black powder. The woman with the dagger sliced her palm open and let blood drip over the token. It hissed where it landed, glowing bright gold before fading into a deep, living red. The sound that followed made no sense. It was like wind ripping through a thousand voices at once.
Jean-Baptiste stepped forward. "I'll go first."
His accent was thick and rough. His eyes were full of hungry light.
"I did find it, after all…"
The woman smiled, but it was cold. “By all means…"
The flames surged higher, and I could see the outline of a mirror behind her. Its frame was carved in runes I almost recognized, each one pulsing faintly in time with the token's light.
But the other mirror drifted behind Celeste. Slowly, they spun around the circle. I took a step closer, drawn by something I couldn’t name. My pulse matched the glow of the crystal at the token’s heart. Every instinct in me screamed that I had to do something. That I had the ability to do something.
So I reached out.