“Dad!”
“Wait,” I said, but Ethan didn’t wait.
He was already running down the corridor toward the bedrooms and I was running after him, fast enough that I seemed to outrun all the assurances I was giving myself. All possibilities of comfort seemed left behind, trailing me uselessly like ghosts.
We burst in through the door of Charles Stryker’s bedroom. It had a vaulted white ceiling, skylights set like a cupola in the center. The wall on one side was all mirrors, and the wall on the other was all windows, and in the wall facing us was an entrance I had never seen before: a hole that led to a shadowy passage.
Aside from that no-longer-hidden doorway, the whole room was bright. The sheets around Charles Stryker were brilliant white, and the blood on the sheets and on his white shirt was a vivid spreading stain.
Ethan shrank from the sight of his murdered father, back against the mirrored wall. I glanced at him over my shoulder as I advanced toward the bed, and it was as if there were two of him watching me with haunted eyes.
Charles Stryker’s face had always seemed to exist in relation to the stronger personalities about him, and that had not changed even now. He looked like a stone likeness, a death mask that could be lying under dust in a family tomb. I could see Mark Stryker’s death in this face, I could see Carwyn’s, and I could see my Ethan’s.
A knife had been driven into his heart. It had pinioned him as if he were a butterfly transfixed against a corkboard. The hilt was decorated with writhing shadows, Dark magic making the markings twist and turn. Around that shadowy hilt was a crumpled strip of pale paper, fluttering like the frill of a petticoat.
Ethan made a thin, terrible sound as I reached for the paper. “Lucie,” he whispered. “Don’t—” But I straightened it in my shaking hands and read the words written there in ink made of shadows that curled darkly and obscenely across the page:
Put him down into the dark. —The sans-merci.
Bury him, the buried said.
As soon as I had read the note, the shadows swallowed the paper at a gulp. Dark magic turned the paper into black ashes slipping between my fingers.
“We should . . .” Ethan said, and swallowed. “We should call the guards, but we can’t, can we?”
I was not surprised Ethan wanted to call the guards. I was surprised that he realized we could not: I’d thought I would have to fight to make him understand that he was suspected of treason already and he could not be found at a murder scene.
Charles Stryker’s death meant the Strykers’ power was more than halved: one less member on the Light Council, a blow to the perception that the Strykers were invulnerable. I did not know if Ethan realized that we were all in danger.
I looked at his lost, hurt face—the face of an orphan child, which is what he suddenly was. I remembered that moment, when the whole world felt like it had turned on me like a wild animal and gone for my throat, when I understood that the world had always been a cruel, hungry thing.
“Call your uncle,” I said as gently as I could.
Ethan took out his phone and called his uncle. His hands were shaking as he did so, as mine had shook unwrapping the message around the knife.
“Uncle Mark,” Ethan said, and his voice trembled as he burst into tears. “They murdered Father.”
I leaned in, my forehead touching his, so we could both hear the voice of our salvation. The voice of the man who had hit Ethan less than an hour ago, the voice of the man we were nevertheless going to obey.
“Where are you?”
Ethan swallowed. “I’m at home. Somebody used the plans of our home to get to him. They came through the secret entrance to his bedroom, the one we were meant to use if we ever needed to get away. They invaded our home and killed him, Uncle Mark, and I—”
“Get out of there. You are not the one who should make this discovery. I’ll handle it. Get out now!”
Ethan had barely been able to look at his father, but now that it was time to leave the room, he hesitated. It must be hard to leave someone knowing it is for the last time: it must be so hard to say goodbye. I had never had the opportunity.
I could not let him linger. I took his hand and laced his fingers with mine. His hand was shaking.
“We have to go.”
“Will you stay with me, Lucie?” Ethan asked quietly. He sounded humble, as if he was beseeching a queen for a favor he knew should not be granted. “I know it’s asking a lot. I know this is bound to bring back bad memories for you and this is all my fault, but I don’t know how to bear it without you.”
“Stay with you?” I said. “Let someone try to part us, now or ever.”