The Twin

Chapter 24: The Twin

Evan

I read it four times before I let myself breathe.

The door has a twin.

"Silas is dead," my father said. "I felt his thread go out of the world with my own eyes."

"Then somebody wants us to think he isn't." I turned the black paper over. The wax seal was broken clean down the middle, the moon cut in half like it had been split with a blade. "Or somebody has been practicing his handwriting."

"Who would know about the child?" Josh had come up behind me with Mia, both of them half asleep and fully armed. "You only found out four hours ago. Who else was on that balcony?"

Nobody.

That was the answer, and it made the back of my neck go cold.

Pup. The old wolf was awake, and he wasn't amused. Take that paper to the one who ran from her father. Now.

Aurelia didn't need to read it. She took one look at the broken seal and sat down on the kitchen floor like her legs had been cut off.

"He kept a ledger," she said. "Forty years of it. I used to read it while he slept, because it was the only way to learn what he planned." Her voice was thin. "There was a page I could never open. It was sealed with his own blood. He used to touch it when he thought I wasn't looking."

"What was on it?"

"A name. I only ever saw the first letter." She looked up. "An M."

"Marian," I said.

"No. I thought so too. But Marian was the first thread he cut. Everything after that was practice." She swallowed. "The second M was the one he saved for last."

My father said something under his breath that I will not repeat.

"The Priestess blessed two births," Aurelia whispered. "Odessa's, and one before it. Four hundred years ago, the first Lunara had a twin sister. The Goddess made them a pair, the way she made the wolf and the woman. One stood at the first door." She pressed her hands against her eyes. "The other was meant for the second."

"There's a second Hollow," Mia said flatly.

"There's a second door. And it was never sealed, because the woman who was supposed to guard it was killed before she was old enough to walk." Aurelia let her hands fall. "It's been standing open for four hundred years, Evan. We thought the Hollow was a prisoner at one gate. It's been getting out through the other this entire time."

Odessa

The moment the sun touched the lawn and the hinge closed behind me, I knew something was wrong.

The loom had gone quiet.

Not peaceful quiet. The kind of quiet a house gets when everyone inside is holding still. My sisters sat in their circle with their faces turned toward the empty edge of the silver grass, and nobody was talking, and nobody had touched the soup.

"Marian?"

The small grey-haired woman took my hand without looking at me. Her fingers were ice.

"Child," she said. "How long since the baby moved?"

My heart stopped. "This morning. Evan felt it. Why?"

"Because she's not moving now."

I pressed both hands to my stomach, and for one terrible second there was nothing. No flutter. No third heartbeat. Nothing at all.

Then, softly, almost too faint to feel, something turned over inside me like a sleeper rolling toward a voice.

"She's listening," Marian whispered.

"To what?"

"To that."

I followed her gaze across the grass.

There was a door at the far edge of the loom. I had never seen it before, and I knew with total certainty that it had not been there yesterday. It was plain and low and made of something dark and wet-looking, like wood that had been underwater for centuries. It was slightly ajar.

And from the gap, very sweet and very patient, a voice was singing a lullaby.

I knew that voice. It had a hundred women in it, and a thousand more, and under all of them one that sounded exactly like mine.

Hush, little one, it sang. Hush, little moon. Come out and play.

My daughter kicked, hard, toward the door.

Evan

I felt her terror before she said a word.

Evan. Odessa's voice hit the back of my skull like a dropped plate. Evan, something is calling her.

I was on my feet in the study with the whole room staring at me. Calling who?

The baby. She keeps turning toward it. I can feel her trying to go. A broken breath. Marian says the child isn't just ours. Her thread is wound through the hinge. She's tied to both doors now, and one of them is open.

Come back.

I can't. It's not the full moon.

Odessa. Come home.

I can't, Evan. Her voice went small and fierce. But I can do something else. I can hold her still. If I stay very quiet and very close, I can keep her from answering. For a while.

How long?

Silence. Then:

Until the next full moon. Maybe.

Twenty-seven nights.

The old wolf rose inside me like a wave. Then we have twenty-seven nights to find the other door, pup. And I know where to start.

Where?

Where else would a man hide something he wanted to keep forever? The gold in my eyes flared hot. In the one place nobody would ever look. Under the house of the people he was supposed to be protecting.

I thought of the Kade estate. Of my father-in-law's study. Of a man pacing a hallway in his pajamas, ashen, saying I thought I was saving you.

"Dad," I said. "Where does John Kade keep the old pack records?"

My father went white.

"The vault," he said. "Under the east wing. The one Silas insisted on building for us thirty years ago. A gift." His voice cracked. "He called it a gift."

Josh

We were in the trucks inside four minutes.

I drove. Nobody argued. Mia sat in the passenger seat with her sword across her knees, and Evan and Aurelia were in the back, quiet in the specific way people go when they're listening to something nobody else can hear.

My father met us on the front steps of the house I grew up in. He took one look at Evan's face and didn't say a word. He just turned and led us through the kitchen, down the cellar stairs, past the shelves of jam jars Mom pretended she didn't hoard, and stopped in front of a wall that had been plain brick my entire life.

"Thirty years," he said. "I've paid the taxes on this house for thirty years. And I never once asked what was behind this wall."

"Dad," I said.

"I should have asked."

Evan laid his palm against the bricks.

They went warm. Then hot. Then, slowly, the way a dream dissolves, they thinned to nothing, and a narrow stair spiraled down into the dark.

The smell hit me first. Old stone. Iron. And something sweet underneath, rotten-sweet, like fruit left in a locked room.

"Stay behind me," Evan said.

"No," I said.

He looked at me. I looked at him. After a moment, he nodded.

We went down together.

Odessa

Hold on, I told my daughter, over and over, with both hands pressed against my stomach. Hold on. Please, baby, hold on.

The door at the edge of the grass had opened another inch.

Behind me, a hundred women had formed a ring around me, shoulder to shoulder, translucent and fierce, with Marian at the front. None of them was singing now. They were humming, low and steady, a sound like a wall going up.

Odessa.

Not the voice behind the door.

Evan. Far away, close. Winded, like he was running.

We found the vault. There's a door down here. It's... His thoughts snagged. It's the same door. Exactly the same.

Don't touch it.

I won't.

Evan. Don't open it. Whatever you see.

I won't. I promise. A pause. Then, very softly: There's someone down here.

My blood froze. Who?

I can't tell. They're standing in the dark with their back to us. A man. Silver hair.

Draven's dead.

Is he?

On the far side of the loom, the dark door swung wide.

And a figure stepped out, small and old and perfectly calm, with a long grey braid over one shoulder and a thread of silver running through her heart. She was smiling at me the way a grandmother smiles at a child she hasn't seen in years.

"Hello, Odessa," said Draven Hale's mother. "I've been waiting such a long time to meet my great-granddaughter."

My daughter went completely still inside me.

And in the vault, on the other side of the veil, I heard Evan's voice crack over the bond.

Odessa. The man down here just turned around.

Who is it?

A long, awful silence.

It's Silas.