“Sounds nice.” He reached out, and as soon as Cami got in range, his hand polished her bare wet shoulder. “You okay?”
For a moment Ruby thought he was asking her, and a laugh threatened to spray all over the pool. Water lapped; she swallowed the sound and realized he meant Cami.
“F-fine. What exactly happened?”
He shrugged, nice and easy, but his gaze came up over Cami’s shoulder. The warning was clear.
Don’t talk in front of strangers. “Tell you later,” he said. “I’ll get you some coolers, then, if de Varre over there won’t snitch to her grandmother.”
“She would never—” Cami began, hotly, but he laughed and tugged gently at a lock of her long black hair before vanishing down the path leading to the house.
“He likes pulling your chain,” Ruby observed. “So, the Canisari? They’re pretty reckless. At least the younger ones.” For a little while she’d had a crush on one of them, but that embarrassment was something she’d take to the grave.
Family and kin didn’t mix. Except Cami, and her. They were exceptions all over, weren’t they.
“Oh, yeah. So’s Nico. He’s getting better, though.” Cami turned, standing in the shade of the poolhouse, and her eyes were a blue glimmer. “Ruby, can I ask you something?”
“Ask away.” A long, luxurious stretch. Maybe she’d avoided the rocks. If Nico came out, Cami wouldn’t question her about Gran or Conrad or anything else. They could do the old familiar dance, Nico trying to get a reaction, Ruby giving him one, Cami keeping the peace.
Just like always.
“Do you really like this Conrad guy, or is it just what you have to do?”
Nope. Not past the rocks yet. “Talking about it is boring, darling. Leave it alone.”
“Okay.” Cami came back, picking her steps with care on hot concrete, and Ruby suppressed a sigh.
The pressure mounted until she had to speak again. “It’s just a betrothal. It’s not the worst that could happen,” she added. “Really. Trust me on that.”
Cami paused, looking down at her. In the sunshine, she glowed, an alabaster statue. Her swimsuit—white, one-piece, she’d stopped wearing cover-ups all the time—was rapidly drying. “You d-deserve more than that.”
It’s sweet of you to think so. Another smile. “Thanks, Cam. It’s getting hot. Race you to the pool.” She was off the chair and halfway to the water before Cami laughed and bolted after her.
ELEVEN
“I’M HOOOOOME!” SHE CALLED INTO THE COTTAGE’S cool, dark interior. “Did you miss me?”
No answer, but the house didn’t smell empty. Gran was inside.
Great. Had she been supposed to sit here and babysit Conrad? Had he decided to go back to New Avalon? That would be just grand, wouldn’t it.
The lights were on in the kitchen, and Gran was at the table, bolt-upright. Her hands were folded, and Conrad was there too, leaning against the counter near the sink. His expression was indecipherable, sun-eyes gleaming under the electric glow. They hadn’t had dinner yet.
It’s not my day to cook. What’s going on? “Gran?”
“Ruby. Sit down.” The lines on Gran’s face were graven a little deeper today. Instead of one of her housedresses, she was in her office wear, a black silk shell and tailored pants, a summer-weight wool blazer draped crookedly over the back of her chair.
It wasn’t like Gran to hang something up that way. Especially her work clothes.
“What’s going on? What happened?” She glanced at Conrad, but he was no help. He just stood there, staring at her. Was that a smirk? It couldn’t be.
“Sit down.”
“I want to know what’s happening.” She folded her arms, her stomach turning into pure acid. “You said I could go to Cami’s today.”
Did Gran’s mouth pull itself even tighter? “And if I call her, no doubt she will confirm you were there.”
Hot injustice, then, but she supposed Gran had a reason. She’d caught Ruby sneaking out a few times, including the last and most memorable when Rube had been trying to get out on a fullmoon night, desperate to hunt down missing Ellie and thinking that maybe with the shift burning in her she could find what nobody else could.
Or maybe it was something else. Gran hadn’t mentioned collaring again.
Was it that? But she’d been so good lately. “You can even ask Nico. But I suppose you think he’d lie for me, for Cami’s sake. I’d go to those lengths to cover my tracks, right?” She shrugged. “Okay, fine. What is this?”
“Ruby . . .” Gran took a deep breath. “When did you last see Hunter?”
For a moment the words made no sense. Why is everyone asking that? “At the train station, when we picked up Conrad.” She looked at him, but the Grimtree was no help at all. He just watched. The world gave a little jiggle underneath her, but she didn’t have any attention to spare to figure it out. “Why?”
“Sit down.”
The floor was acting funny, and there was a buzzing in her ears. It was her body again, knowing before the rest of her.
She pulled out her usual chair and lowered herself into it, slowly. “Gran, what’s happened?”
“We found Hunter.” Gran’s hands tightened against each other.
Then why are you asking me . . . She couldn’t even finish the thought. Sweat prickled all over her. “Found him?”
“In Woodsdowne Park, in the heart of the green. Ruby, he . . . he has gone to greet the Moon.”
What? The roaring in her ears made it difficult to think. “That’s impossible,” she said, with perfect logic. “He’s a cousin.” He’s young, and we don’t get sick often. When we do, we fight hard. Like Tante Rosa.
Gran was very pale. She’d only looked this way once or twice before. “He was attacked.”
What? Her mouth was numb all through, as if she was buzzed on something stronger than honeywine. “Attacked? You mean . . .”
“Yes. He . . . Hunter is dead, Ruby. He . . . he fought, but something—someone . . . I am sorry.”
What? Numb, she stared at Gran’s familiar face, turned alien now. She kept talking, but all Ruby could hear was the roaring. Maybe it was the honeywine coolers, though kin didn’t get drunk really, just pleasantly slow for a little bit. The simple sugars burned off with the poison of alcohol, a little lassitude and then you were done.
She could still smell the chlorine from the pool in her hair. Her bikini was still in the car, too. She had to go get it out. Plus there were chores, right? Chores to do. There had to be. This was all a mistake, and if she just did her chores . . .
“Do you understand?” Gran, quietly and firmly. “Please, Ruby. I am so sorry.”
There was a hand on her shoulder. It was Conrad, and he squeezed. He didn’t know his own strength, because it hurt, badly. A crunching, grinding pain.
She didn’t wince. She just stared at Gran’s familiar-strange face across the table.
“In the Park.” A good schoolgirl, repeating her lesson. “Hunter . . . in the Park. He’s . . . dead. Who . . . Gran, who would hurt him?”
“We do not know.” Gran’s irises were the color of steel, now. “But when we do, there will be justice.”
TWELVE
NEW HAVEN SWELTERED UNDER A LID OF GRAY, HEAVY cloud. Wet flannel, pressing down on everything below, steaming its way into every pore. The trees drooped, even though their green turned deep and vibrant like a jungle; the ones that had begun to turn stood halfway painted, splashes of color on their branch-fingers as they shivered feverishly.
In the old days, the kin would have been deep in the woods, and a platform would have been built in the treetops. The body would be arranged carefully among the sap and leaves and sawdust, and birds would clean the bones. After they were naked, white bone would be stained with ochre and wrapped securely, then returned to the earth.
; The Age of Iron left great scars in the old forests, and the Reeve had made them Waste. You couldn’t have bodies hanging in the treetops in Woodsdowne Park—although, right after the Reeve, sometimes they did.
For those reasons, and others.
Her charmhose stuck to her legs. White-sleeved long dresses on the women, Gran’s patterned with subtle dragons in ecru thread, Ruby’s linen plain of any ornamentation. You couldn’t wear an underwire or jewelry, no metal allowed. Even silver, that holy Moon-glow ore.
No metal, and no words. The kin buried in silence. This graveyard was within New Haven, but no inspectors or city groundskeepers came within its peaked iron fence. Gran had once remarked that negotiating the passel of restrictions and leases with City Hall had been delicate and patience-consuming, but worth it.
Those leases had been negotiated just a little after the Reeve, in the vast deep darkness of the Deprescence; Ruby never quite figured out if Gran meant she’d been there to witness it herself.
Absolute silence as Woodsdowne men related to Hunter and past their tenth fullmoon run carried the wrapped body, thin sapling-sticks sewn into the wrappings to provide support for the cloth and the antistain charms.
Her lips moved a little. It was probably blasphemous, but all she could think of were the chapel songs at St. Juno’s. Mithrus Christ, watch over us all; we are the lambs and you the shepherd. . . .
Gran never said anything about Juno being run by the Mithraic Order, though the kin remembered darker times when anything remotely churchlike was dangerous. Even now cathedral-kin was a dirty, serious insult.
It meant betrayal. It meant you’d given one of your own to the mere-humans who once hunted kin for Church and sadistic pleasure alike. A tremor went through Ruby; she braced herself against the nightmare.
It was no use. There was no waking up from this.
Even though they had wrapped . . . him . . . carefully, it was still pretty obvious that things were, well . . . The shape was wrong, bulging oddly near the head and the legs too thin.
Things were missing.
What had happened? Gran just said, “He was attacked.” Conrad said nothing. Nobody else would tell her, and Thorne . . . well, he didn’t talk, or visit.
At all.
Something moved next to her. She couldn’t stop thinking about chapel at Juno, the girls massed together, Cami with her sweet throaty alto and Ellie, when she bothered to sing, quietly but clearly hitting every note. They made it sound easy.
When Hunter was eight he had announced she was pretty okay, for a girl. The smoky char-smell of barbeque and the tang of lemonade on her tongue, she’d let him kiss her cheek and the adults had laughed. Of all the cousins, he was the sweetest. The calmest, too—he’d only gotten into a domfight a handful of times, and all of those with Thorne.
It was Thorne next to her, dry-eyed and tense. The movement was his hand on her shoulder, warm and familiar. Her knees almost gave.
Hunter’s mother, dun-haired Tante Alissa who had married out to a branch from the Cherweil clan down in Pocario to the south, swayed. Her husband Barth propped her up. Hunter’s brothers, all older, were either carrying the . . . carrying him, or standing on their mother’s other side. Gran, apart and alone as Clanmother, held the silence as the slow steps of the bearers drummed on sweating earth, crushing green grass.
They lowered him slowly with charmed straps of seven-braided linen, and the soft thump of him resting against the bottom jolted all through Ruby. She bent forward, suddenly breathless, Thorne’s arm around her shoulders. He held her on her feet as the charmed shovels lifted soft steaming earth.
Gran reached the graveside and looked down. Her old, strong hands lifted, their nails unpolished and a little long, gleaming slightly. Potential buzzed between her palms, a shower of colorless sparks fountaining into the hole in the earth. You could see layers in the sides of the hole, stripes of different-colored dirt like pages of a book.
Ellie would know what each stripe was called.
The gravecharm settled in fine gossamer layers. Hunter’s mother sobbed, but silently. Until he was sealed, there was no speaking, no sound if you could help it.
He had to be free to go on, and speaking would call him back. Words crowded her throat. This is a mistake. Hunter, it’s a mistake, one of your pranks, stop playing around!
He loved water. Always the first in the pool, and sleek-graceful as a seal.
Stop it, Hunter. Stop it.
Gran stepped back and nodded. The first shovelful was tossed in by Hunter’s eldest brother, lean, dark-eyed Robert. His wife wasn’t here—she wasn’t kin. If they had any children it would be a miracle, since kin and mere-human were often sterile pairings. Just one more unraveling of the bloodline, but at least there was a chance she’d give birth to kin.
Maybe even a girl.
Crunch of shovel-edge against the pile, the soft sound of it pattering like rain into the hole. Ruby straightened slowly, but Thorne didn’t let go of her. His arm around her, tight and tense, but not digging in. Her hand quested a little, blindly reaching for the grave, but Thorne reached across, grabbed her wrist with his free hand. Was she trying to pull away?
He held on as if she was. The world whirled, hot and muggy, her breath coming in short little sips. A green carousel, going too fast.
Thorne’s arm tightened again, just on the edge of pain. He leaned into her, and for once she didn’t step away. If she pressed her side against his, the whirling slowed a little. It didn’t stop; nothing would stop it. It just got easier to handle.
The bearers worked, mechanically. Her cheeks were wet.
Hey Rube, want to go to the Park? Hunter’s dark, sleek head, and the way he ducked and smiled, shyly, each time she saw him. Wrestling with Thorne in the Vultusino’s pool, cocking his arm to skip a rock across the pond they’d hung out by the summer of her seventh-grade year. The time he gave her bluecharm candy for Fish Day and laughed when she found out it was sour. She’d once fallen asleep against his shoulder as they sat in an arcade on Southking, watching the crowd pass through the window. He hadn’t moved the whole time, barely even breathed.
The mound of earth shrank, shovelful by shovelful. Each load of dirt crackled with Potential. Bindcharms, sealcharms, some already worked into the dirt by Gran, others bound into the hafts of the shovels and escaping in controlled bursts. When a shovel’s charms were emptied it was laid aside and a fresh one handed to the bearer; each family of each branch had at least one they added charms to at every fullmoon.
If the bones must be laid in earth without being cleansed, at least they would be laid securely.
When the final load had been tamped down, the still-charmed shovels were laid aside as well. They’d be drained as dusk fell, and next fullmoon the charms would begin accreting again. Back during the Reeve the shovels were consecrated daily instead of monthly, the Moon taking pity on her children and providing them a little grace as the Age of Iron shuddered to a halt.
A glass bowl of silence, laid over the hilltop. The last funeral she remembered was old Maxim Corris, not the head of his branch but still the one everyone went to with problems because the head, Gregor Corris, was, well, a little harsh.
The Corrises had always been strange; they were full of fierce silence, the Moon’s daggered hand instead of Her giving palm. But Oncle Maxim’s interment had not felt like this.
Gran half-turned. Her steely gaze met Ruby’s. She tilted her head, very slightly.
Dry throat. Shaking, as if she had a fever. Ruby stared back, willing her knees to stay steady. Gran would be seeing Thorne’s arm around her, their fingers knotted together.
Would she smell the grief spreading from him like a bruise, red-violet pain digging into her ears and nose? Over his living scent, musk and male and fresh-cut grass, would she catch that fringed screen?
Gran didn’t understand.
> Well, really, nobody understood Thorne, mostly because they didn’t care to. If he’d had at least one sibling, it might have been different. Maybe. Or maybe he would be just as spiky and difficult. They called him Thorne instead of his given name, even his parents—Hunter had started it, sure, just to be funny about his real name, but some things had a habit of sticking. His mother, willowy blue-eyed Tante Carina, had a hard labor with him and was rumored to now be barren, but his father made no move to take another mate. Nobody mentioned doing so to him either, not since he almost broke Oncle Radin’s jaw for even suggesting it during a clan meeting.
That was probably where Thorne got his temper. Under that temper, though, he cared, probably—like Cami—too much. Nobody saw that under the anger he wore.
Gran’s gaze moved on. She nodded to Hunter’s mother.
Alissa tilted her shorn head back, her eyes closed, and the sound that rose from her thrilled into the ultrasonic. A glass cry, a moon-cry, even under the daylight it twitched the silver thread inside Ruby’s bones.
The rest of them flung their heads back and howled.
It was a different hymn than one of the music-teacher Sisters picking at the organ, and different than the thudding of Tommy Triton’s backup drums too. High, hard, and silvery-haunting, it rose and fell in cascades as the breath did, each voice unique but their similarity overpowering.
Ruby’s mouth was open, but no sound came out. Thorne’s hands were strangely gentle. His throat swelled, the shine on his cheeks wasn’t sweat. Hot salt smell, and finally, finally, the shame in her own throat eased aside long enough for her own cry to join the rest. It went on and on, echoing against the uncaring daytime sky.
Underneath, the same dreadful knowledge beating against her cathedral-arch ribs, under her heart. Over and over, the same two words.
My fault. My fault. My fault.
Because maybe he’d been waiting in the Park for her, like he often did. All her sneaking out at night had a price, too.