Sauter (Ironside Academy, #3)(21)
Sophia winced again. “Yeah, I think it is.”
“Which god is that?” Isobel asked nervously.
Sophia pulled up from her chair, disappearing into the other room for a moment and returning with a huge tome. It had a thick spine and faded gold edges, but it was clearly very well used. She found the page she was looking for and set it onto the table in front of Isobel, tapping the image of an hourglass on the first page. It was half filled with twinkling, airy light and half filled with twisting, menacing shadow, the two mixing at the waist of the hourglass like coloured smoke.
“Stygian,” Sophia announced. “The Duskfall Warden. He maintains the balance between dark and light. He’s very powerful, and … terrifying. People who don’t understand how the Gifted religion works sometimes call him the God of Mysteries.”
Isobel scanned the paragraphs detailing Stygian’s power, skipping over to the next page, where it showed an illustration of a man with eyes like stars—a bright galaxy of light twinkling through his stare, though it wasn’t a peaceful expression. It was hard and fierce, most of his delicate face cast into heavy shadow, his skin a meld of deep ebony and shadowed dusk. He wore strings of stars around his neck and held an apple in each hand. One was rotten, with worms crawling through the brown flesh. The other sparkled with vibrant colour, its skin flawless, a fuzzy green leaf unfurling from its stem.
“Why would a god of mystery make my chain turn into some sort of … piercing?” Isobel sat back from the page, her stomach churning, her head feeling heavy.
“That’s exactly why I think it’s him,” Sophia emphasised. “Because there’s no plausible reason. If this has anything to do with Stygian, then all you can do is wait for him to reveal its purpose.”
“He’s scary,” Luis said to the table. His excitement over guessing the right answer dying off. “He fixes good luck.”
Isobel quickly took a few hasty gulps of the tea before taking the mug to the sink. “Maybe he’ll be nice to me.” She forced out a faint laugh. “I’ve had pretty shitty luck.”
“Maybe not,” Sophia said carefully, standing to walk Isobel back to the gate, her arm winding around the narrow shoulders of her brother. “Your mate is exceedingly strong. Stygian might think you’ve been given too much.”
Ten mates was definitely too much.
Damn.
Isobel’s hands shook when she opened the gate and stepped through, but she paused to look back at the siblings. “Thanks,” she said softly. “It’s nice to talk to people who aren’t … you know.”
“Fighting to the death for a spot of fame?” Sophia chuckled, an accent that Isobel hadn’t taken much note of the first time she had met the girl becoming more obvious the more at ease she became. There was the slightest lilt to her words, the s sound softer and the consonants crisper. They might have been from Mexico or another Spanish-speaking country.
“Yeah, I knew I was right about you,” Sophia seemed to decide out loud. “You’re exactly how you appear on screen. You should work on that. Be more like Kane. Be a better actor. Be a predator.”
Sophia saw it too.
The real Theodore.
For some reason, that made Isobel like her just a little bit more. Most people didn’t see through Theodore’s golden boy mask. She kept her mouth shut instead of commenting on Theodore, but her lips curled into a smile.
“You can come back,” Luis offered, answering her smile with a toothy grin. “You can finish your tea next time.”
“Maybe I will.” Isobel waved at them and then started off toward Dorm A.
4
The Cold Emoji
Isobel walked halfway to Dorm A before her nerves got the better of her and she redirected herself to Dorm O. She couldn’t turn up in sweaty exercise clothes spotted with blood and without birthday gifts. Niko never invited her to anything, and she hadn’t seen Kilian in weeks.
She agonised over what to wear, her stomach flip-flopping sickeningly. Her fingers itched to snatch one of Kilian’s shirts from the shelf, but they didn’t smell like him anymore. She considered wearing the dress he had bought her, but it reminded her of Eve … and the fact that nobody had attacked her since Eve was expelled.
The news about Aron had broken to the public the same night she told the guys, but none of the officials had reached out to her to hear what she had to say. Not even her father had asked her what had happened in Vermont. He had given her an exhaustive lecture about wasting her time on Omegas and then ignored her for two weeks for ruining his settlement tour, abandoning his apartment in the family centre until she was well enough to start playing the game again.
She had no idea what had happened to Eve.
Nobody would tell her, and the news was only focussing on Aron, keeping the details just vague enough that it almost seemed like they were blaming him for the attack … and him alone. None of it made sense, but that was Ironside. The officials didn’t have to explain themselves. They decided what narrative to play, and the rest of the world never questioned what they saw. The only thing that remained to be determined was why, exactly, they had chosen this narrative.
Isobel settled on a pale slip dress—one of the pieces her father had brought to their last dinner. He had one of his assistants analysing the latest fashion trends and purchasing designer pieces for Isobel to wear. A post had gone viral of Isobel recycling the same five oversized T-shirts, always tucked into black tights or shorts, and some of the comments had linked her apparently limited wardrobe to the less-than-stellar box office numbers for her father’s latest movie.