NOW IT WAS NEARLY TIME, SO CLOSE TO TIME.
Vera had already reaped five more soldiers to add to his ranks, while the embodied Lightless from Čegar Hill made their way toward Mara in the mountains.
But that maddening feeling of being shackled by ice had still not left him, and more galling yet, he could sense traces of the gleam still lingering in this city. Like the ripe, sweet smell of mead when there wasn’t a pitcher within reach. It wasn’t any of her daughters; he knew all of them were with her. If he cast his mind out far enough, he could nearly see them clustered in the distance, like a swarm of fireflies iridescing past the thicket of miles that grew between them.
Lovely Mara all alight, surrounded by the constellation of her own living stars.
No, this particular glowing linger betokened something else—traces of the gleam still wound around mortals that someone of Mara’s blood had loved. He recognized it as an echo of the protection she’d cast over her clan, like a fluid sheath of light. Her people had all bathed in its reflected glow, the way the moon basked in borrowed sun.
As far as he could tell, there were only two of them, and not so far away. Somewhere close to his grasp, sheltered by Cattaro’s blackened walls.
And he wanted them both, for his own. It was only fair that she see familiar faces turned against her, as he had. The treacherous eyes of someone that her blood had once trusted and loved.
He called Vera over to him, gripped her by the shoulders, and met her clotted gaze. “I have one last thing left for you to do, pet,” he told her. “Let me use your eyes again. I’ll show you the way to them, and you’ll show me what you find. And then after that, perhaps we’ll have our very first taste of something sweet.”
NEV STILL VISITED the café every other night, missing the cocoon of its kitchen. Maybe it was macabre of her, given the brutal way Jasmina had died here, but it somehow still felt like the safest place she knew. And the only place where she still felt close to them, even now when baking too many macarons barely made a dent in her pain. If that wasn’t the very fucking definition of rock bottom, Nev didn’t know what was.
It had been weeks, and Riss and Lina were still nowhere to be found. Then to make matters worse, Niko and Luka had up and vanished too. That they had gone without bothering to tell her where—or at least Jovan, for fuck’s sake, and he was practically the girls’ grandfather—had left her permanently stranded between helpless fury and devastation. She couldn’t even imagine how their father felt.
How dare they, she fumed to herself, whipping batter into a lacy froth. How dare they pretend that Riss and Lina had been theirs to save alone? As if Nev hadn’t spent years with them and Jasmina, laughing and arguing and fighting over scraps of sweetened dough.
They had been hers, too, damn it. They had been like family, and she missed all three of them so much.
Not even tugging her father’s network of strings had yielded a single useful lead. Every morning, she visited Jovan for news, but there was none. Watching him flounder so badly, lose himself to grief, broke her heart over and over. He had been so stalwart before he lost his girls, craggy as a mountain. And now more of him crumbled away each day.
Damn it, why couldn’t they just fucking call?
Cursing, she flung the wooden spoon against the counter so hard the handle snapped in two. Immediately chagrined to have marred Jasmina’s perfect kitchen, she bent to pick up the chips that had splintered off.
And all the hairs on her neck stood up in unison.
Someone was behind her, she was sure. Someone standing very still.
She straightened slowly, heart leaping to her throat. Her mind flashed to the image of Jasmina left bloodless on the floor, the tiles around her violently scarlet. What kind of reckless idiot was she, to keep coming back here alone? What had possessed her to come here at all?
But that wasn’t how she was going out, she decided in the next instant. Absolutely fuck that noise.
Instead she lunged for the stand of butcher knives, sliding one out and brandishing it as she whirled around.
It was just a girl, and the pounding fear left her like a receding flood. Just a girl about her age, looking more than a little ragged around the edges. Her eyes were cast down, her hair lank and loose, and her yellow spaghetti-strap top was torn and smeared with dirt. Concern crept in to replace the fear. Maybe something bad had happened to her. Maybe someone had hurt this girl. It wouldn’t have surprised Nev a bit.
It was so hard to be safe in this world.
“Hey,” Nev said, lowering the knife and tucking the hand that held it behind her. “Sorry about—this—you just startled me. How did you get in here? Are you okay? I can call—”
The girl lifted her head and looked at her with eyes that swam with oil. And as she lashed out at Nev, the knife clattered behind her to the floor.
JOVAN HAD FAILED all three of his girls. And each night he plumbed the depths of the failure, until it ate away at him like an acid no amount of fine brandy could dilute.
Perhaps if he hadn’t spent so many years chasing Jasmina’s love, it might have turned out differently. He could have kept the three of them close, sheltered them from all their daily storms. But she had been so singular, such an artwork of a woman. Irresistible to even the untrained eye. And he had been a man long unaccustomed to accepting no.
Even once they had settled into being friends—to the extent that a man could be true friends with a woman he had never learned how not to love—he could feel that she held back. Some days he could barely stand to see the toll that life took on her, and the one she exacted in turn on both her daughters. Especially his deft and darling Iris, so much more like her mother than she knew.
And now one of them was dead, and the other two—who knew? He couldn’t imagine that they would abandon him like this, without even a farewell word. Not his devoted Iris, not Malina in all her sweetness. If they hadn’t reached out by now, he didn’t think they ever would.
Another slug of brandy, more liquid fire down the gullet. On the better nights, it did burn away the roughest of the edges, and fill his mind with too much smoke to think.
If only he could see them just one more time. He had thought he’d have what was left of his life to teach Iris, to pass on both the gallery and the studio to her if she wanted them. That much would have been enough.
And instead he hadn’t even had the chance to say good-bye.
His hand curled around the cut-glass tumbler, arthritis spearing through his knuckles. Please, Lord, he prayed, I know we don’t speak all that often, nor do these old feet carry me to your house as often as they should. But if you’d spare me just one more moment with them, I swear I’ll make it up to you. Some fine new glass, whatever needs repairs. Whichever of your monasteries that could use these old man’s hands can have me.
And when a hand landed on his shoulder, his last thought was of awestruck wonder that his prayer had been answered.