Chapter 169: The gold
MARGAUX
Étienne pulled Laurent back over the windowsill with a final, wrenching effort, and Laurent landed on the corridor floor beside him, breathing hard, glass scattered across the stone around them both.
Prim’s apparition had not moved.
She stood between the two of them and me, her form flickering between the pale, elongated wrongness she had become and the occasional flash of the woman I had met in this estate. The voice that kept coming from her was not built for ears. It scraped the air the way a fingernail scraped glass.
"Revenge. Revenge. The witch loves him. He has to die. He is part of the reason I am dead. He has to die."
She moved toward Étienne.
I stepped into her path.
"I can help you," I said.
She stopped.
For one moment she simply looked at me, and I looked back, and the corridor between us held the weight of everything that had happened to her in the last twenty-four hours compressed into a single charged space.
"You cannot help me." Her voice cracked on the last word, splitting into something more human than the scraping sound from before. "They are all dead. Everyone I loved. She made me do it. I killed them. I killed them all. Even the little ones. It was slow and agonizing. They suffered."
The temperature dropped further.
"I want someone to hurt," she said. "I want all of them to hurt."
"By killing more people?" I said.
She screeched.
The sound shattered one of the last intact bulbs in the corridor above us, sending glass raining down, and she moved at me with everything she had.
Something got between us.
Étienne.
He stepped in front of me and took the full impact of her attack across his stomach, her claws going in badly, and the sound he made was not a scream because he did not scream, but his body folded around the wound with the automatic honesty of something that had been genuinely hurt.
I reached for him.
He held up one hand to keep me back.
Laurent, beside me, had his weapon raised, and I realized as I looked at both of them that they could see her now. Properly, solidly, not flickering in and out but fully present in the corridor with us, her form visible to everyone and not just me.
Étienne straightened despite the wound.
He looked at her directly.
"I understand you," he said.
Prim’s light flared. The walls shook with it.
"How could you," she said. "How could you possibly—"
"Because I have wanted the same things." His voice was steady and raw in equal measure. "I have wanted everyone responsible for my family’s death to suffer. I still want that. But I channel it in the right directions." He held her gaze. "If you came after me for my own incompetence, for not recognizing that I was housing a dangerous witch who was using my protection to do what she did to you, I would stand here and let you. Right now. I would not move."
Prim’s form flickered.
"But you believe she loves me," he said. "That is your reason. How are you any better than what she did to you?"
"Do you?" Prim’s voice had changed again, some layer of the distortion dropping away. "Do you not love her?"
Her eyes moved to me just as I also felt Étienne look at me for a fraction of a second, something passing across his face too quickly to hold.
"No," he said. "I let her go because I believed she was stable enough to take it honestly. I was wrong about that."
Prim’s light pulsed, irregular.
"It does not matter," she said, and some of the humanity that had briefly surfaced receded back into the wrongness. "Whether you love her or not. She stole the people I loved. She stole my life. She took my hands and made me use them on my own family." Her voice splintered. "I want the people she loves dead the same way mine are dead. Her grandfather and you. Then her! That is all I want."
She went still.
And then she laughed, a short, strange sound, and one of the already-cracked bulbs overhead exploded in a burst of white light.
"Looks like I already succeeded with one," she said. "So now you go."
Her hands shifted.
The claws that appeared were not what she had been using before. These were something deeper and more final, darker at the edges, and the cold that came with them was a different quality of cold, the specific cold of something that intended to be permanent.
She moved toward Étienne.
Every memory I had of him arrived at once and without my permission.
Étienne at fifteen in the forget-me-not field with the sun at an angle that made everything look like something worth keeping. Étienne in the kitchen with his hands over mine on the knife, teaching me something I had no business needing to learn. His forehead against my shoulder in the corridor after I fell apart, his hand at the back of my head, his arms holding weight I had not asked him to carry but that he had taken anyway.
The thought of him on the trafficking house floor, alone, doing what he had done to himself so he could survive long enough to have reasons to keep surviving.
"No!" My voice tore itself raw.
Heat prickled beneath my skin.
Before I could understand what was happening, light erupted from my palms. Not flames, not sparks, but a torrent of molten gold so brilliant it forced my eyes shut. It spilled through my fingers with a force that didn’t feel summoned so much as unleashed.
I had never seen anything like it.
It slammed directly into Prim’s apparition.
She screeched, the sound tearing through the corridor in a register that bypassed the ears entirely, and her form destabilized completely, flickering in and out of existence in rapid succession, the claws dissolving before they reached Étienne.
The light hit every surface in the corridor simultaneously.
I heard both Laurent and Étienne make sounds of sudden blindness beside me, their hands going to their faces, and I squeezed my own eyes shut against the brightness even as I felt it continuing to pour from my palms with no sign of stopping.