Chapter 19 the cage

Odessa

I woke because Evan's heartbeat changed.

One second it was slow and sleepy under my cheek. The next, both of them were hammering, and his whole body had gone rigid beneath me.

"Don't move," he whispered.

"What..."

"The door. She locked us in."

I was out of the quilt and across the room before he finished. The knob turned freely in my hand, which should have been a relief. The door swung open on an empty landing, an empty stairwell, a farmhouse that smelled of lavender and dust and something faintly sweet underneath.

Something I knew. The smell of the car. The smell of the night I was taken.

"Evan." My voice came out thin. "The walls."

He was at my shoulder. I watched him see it. Threads, hair-fine, silver-dark, running along every beam and board, woven into the plaster, tacked around the window frames like cobweb. The whole house was wrapped in them, humming faintly. Waiting.

"She spun it while we slept," he said quietly. "While I lay there thinking about you."

"Don't."

"I should have..."

"Evan Sorrel." I turned and took his face in my hands. "I will say this once. You were exhausted, we both were, and she planned this for weeks. You don't get to carry this one."

His jaw worked. Then, slowly, he nodded.

Good, said the thing inside me. Not the silver. Something warmer. I'd started to feel it since the quarry, a presence beside the Lunara, quieter, patient. Now breathe, daughter. Listen.

I closed my eyes.

Through the floor I heard boots on gravel. A truck door slamming. Two voices, one furious, one calm.

Mia

The first thing I did when I came to was spit out a mouthful of dirt.

The second was try to move my hands, which were tied behind me with silver wire thin enough to cut. I was lying in the farmyard on my side, my cheek against frozen gravel, and about ten feet away, Josh was on his knees with a puppet standing behind him, a flat white mask where a face should have been, one hand clamped on his shoulder.

"Don't," Kessa said.

She was standing between us in her long grey coat, her scarred face lit by the first sun on the ridge. She held my sword in one hand. She wasn't pointing it at anyone. That was almost worse.

"The wire's cursed, Miss Aldous. The harder you pull, the deeper it bites. I'd hate for you to bleed on my account."

"Kessa." Josh's voice was raw. "Whatever he's promised you, we can help. Whatever he's holding over you, we can help. Please."

For a second her expression flickered.

"That," she said, "is the most generous thing anyone's said to me in forty years."

I stopped pulling at the wire.

"Forty years," I said slowly. "You're thirty."

"I'm fifty-eight." She smiled, and it was a tired, awful thing. "Silas's thread is very good at keeping people young. Ask the women in the puppets how long they've been waiting."

"Who are you?"

She looked at me for a long moment. Then she lowered the sword and knelt in front of me, close enough that I could see the thin silver ring around her pupils, the same ring Silas had.

"My name is not Kessa Thorne," she said quietly. "My name is Aurelia Sorrel. Silas is my father."

The wind went out of me.

"He had a daughter," Josh said hoarsely. "Grayson never mentioned..."

"Because Grayson was told I died." She stood. "My mother was a Lunara. The last one before Odessa. Silas kept her alive for eleven years in a stone room, until she gave him a child with the moon in her blood. Then he put the thread through her heart and wove her into the first puppet. I was four."

I felt sick. "Why would he..."

"Because one Lunara isn't enough to open the door. It takes two. A mother-line and a daughter-line, wound together at the seal." Her voice cracked. "I was the daughter-line. I've been the daughter-line my whole life. I'm the lock's counterweight, Mia. And Odessa is my sister in the thread."

Evan

The house had no doors anymore.

I saw it when I reached the stairs. Where the front hall had been, there was now a smooth wall of woven silver. The windows were gone, replaced by sheets of gleaming thread. Even the hearth was sealed. We were inside a cocoon.

"Evan," Odessa said behind me. "Look at the floor."

I looked.

In the center of the kitchen, laid out in chalk and salt and a spiral of braided silver, was a circle. Seven feet across. Covered in symbols I didn't recognize but that made the old wolf in my head go very, very still.

That, he said, in a voice I'd never heard from him, is the seal's other half.

Meaning?

Meaning she didn't bring us here to kill us, pup. She brought us here to open it.

We just got married. We haven't done anything...

You sealed the bond. You woke the thread. You are exactly what he needs. A long, low breath. And so is she.

Odessa had gone pale. She was staring at the circle with her hand over her mouth.

"Evan," she whispered. "I know this. I've seen this. In the vision at the quarry. The stone room, the woman on the bed."

"The old woman?"

"It wasn't a real room." Her voice shook. "It was a memory. Something the thread showed me, to make me follow the map." She turned. Her eyes were silver. "The woman in that vision wasn't Draven's mother."

"Then who..."

"It was me."

The air went cold.

"Not me now." She struggled for words. "Me, later. Older. Lying on that bed, in a cold stone room, with a braid down my back and nothing left in my eyes. It's what happens if I let him do this. It's what he's building."

I pulled her against me, hard. She was shaking.

"That's not going to happen."

"Evan..."

"It's not going to happen." I put my forehead against hers. "I'll pull this house down with my teeth first."

A voice spoke from the walls. Not Kessa's. Deeper, slower, so close it might have been inside my skull.

"Teeth," said Silas Sorrel, "won't be necessary."

The silver on the walls began to move. Slowly, one thread at a time, it pulled itself toward the center of the room, toward the circle, drawing the cocoon tighter and tighter around the two of us.

"I'm so sorry about the theatrics, my dear," Silas said, and I could hear him smiling. "But my daughter and my niece are on their way to your door. And I do so want to be there when the sisters finally meet."

Outside, very faintly, I heard Josh scream Odessa's name.

Then the circle on the floor began to glow.