Her mothers’ eyes flickered toward each other. “Can you tell us anything, Lore?” Mari asked softly.
She wanted to. She wanted to let all of it go—the bodies, the lies, the esoteric mysteries she knew had to fit in somewhere, and the specter of war hanging over it all—but knowledge could be a noose.
They could stop it. She and Bastian, and Gabe, if he’d still work with them after this. No need to make Val and Mari panic. No need to get them mixed up in this any more than she had to, at least until there was no other choice.
“No,” Lore murmured. “I’m sorry, but no.”
Beside her, Bastian’s hand tensed, rose the slightest bit into the air. Like he’d lay it on her arm. But he didn’t.
“That’s fine, mouse,” Val said. “We understand.”
Mari nodded, a determined bob of her chin. “I don’t know much,” she said. “But just the little bit that Phillip told me was enough to make him nearly wet his pants, so I need to know you’ll be careful. All of you.”
“Of course,” Bastian murmured. Gabe nodded. Lore did, too.
“All I know,” Mari said with a sigh, “is that whatever they’re moving, they’re taking it to the catacombs. Deep in the catacombs. All the way under the Citadel.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Every shape of affection can maim
but a triangle’s formed most like a blade.
—Bar song lyric
Tomorrow night.” Bastian affected no nonchalance, not anymore. He stood with his hands braced on the back of Lore and Gabe’s couch, his hair falling over his brow and shadowing his face. “It has to be tomorrow night. We can’t wait longer; it could mean another village if we did.”
“Won’t the guards get suspicious?” Lore stirred the embers in the fireplace with the gleaming silver poker, then blew a thin stream of air to make them ignite. Her skin was still goose-bumped from channeling Mortem, a cold worked bone-deep. “It’s one thing to sneak into the city; it’s entirely another to sneak into the Presque Mort’s supposedly secret garden with its supposedly secret catacombs entrance.”
Gabe’s hand, hanging close to her face as he leaned the opposite elbow against the mantel, twitched toward a fist. He’d been silent ever since Mari told them about the catacombs, for the entire walk back to the Citadel and into their apartments. She glanced up at him; his eye patch faced her, and the line of his mouth told her nothing.
“Not if we bring one of the Presque Mort.” The Sun Prince’s expression she could read just fine—anger, and the expectation of a fight. “And not if we’re careful. The real question is how we’ll find the bodies once we’re inside the catacombs. Under the Citadel doesn’t narrow it down much.”
Lore looked at him, chewing her cheek and willing him to read the answer to that in her eyes. She’d been so close to telling Gabe the truth of what she was in the alley, but that was before she turned Milo to stone, before Gabe started looking at her as if she were sin incarnate. She didn’t want to tell him the truth now. Didn’t ever want to tell him.
Bastian caught her eye. Understood. He dipped his chin in her direction. “We’ll find a way, though.”
“How do you suppose?” Gabe didn’t look at either of them, still facing the fire Lore had coaxed to life. His hand had given up the fight against a fist and curled inward, the points of his knuckles casting sharp shadows on the floor. “The catacombs are vast.”
“I’ll find a map,” Bastian said, as if it were the easiest thing in the world. “There has to be one somewhere.”
Lore expected Gabe to call him out on the asinine answer, but instead the Presque Mort clenched his teeth to match his fist.
“And once we find these bodies?” he asked the flames. “What then? What do we do with them?”
“Then,” Lore said softly, “I ask them how they died. Again.”
A frown pulled down Gabe’s mouth. He didn’t have to say what bothered him; they all remembered what happened to the first corpse she’d raised. The one that told her to find the others. The night killed me.
Lore shifted so she could pull her knees to her chest, a makeshift shield. “I know how to fix it now,” she murmured, a rebuttal to the thing Gabe didn’t say. “If I… accidentally make it last, again.”
Gabe flinched. She pretended not to notice. Icy silence blanketed the room, distrust crystallizing in the corners.