Page 92 of The Mirror of Beasts

“There it is again, that note of hope in your voice,” she said.

“A little mawkishness is good for the worms that live in my rotting heart,” I told her. “Gives ’em a reason to squirm.”

I managed to get a small smile out of her. “And you think I’m the weird one in this friendship?”

“Just trying to get on your level,” I told her.

She looked down at Emrys, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. Checking for fever. She drew the blanket down over him, inspecting the loose bandages we’d wrapped around his chest.

“Caitriona told me what happened,” she said. “That was very, very brave of Emrys to push you out of harm’s way.”

I grunted in acknowledgment, resting my chin on my palm.

“Just checking in on if we still hate him,” she said casually. “And if we’re angry because we still can’t trust him, or because he broke your heart.”

Heat rushed to my face. “He didn’t break my heart—”

“Tamsin,” she said. “He did.”

I swallowed, fighting the burn in my eyes. “He didn’t.”

“He did,” she repeated. “You asked me before if I thought he was acting differently, and now I see it too. Something’s going on with him, and if it’s confusing me, it has to be confusing you.”

“No,” I said, feeling the sting of his endless rejections yet again. “This is who he truly is.”

She looked doubtful.

“He did it to ease his conscience,” I said. “That was his whole purpose in coming back. To make himself feel better about what he did.”

“I doubted his motivations in Avalon,” Neve said. “But I never doubted his feelings for you—”

“Please,” I interrupted before I threw myself down the stairs to escape this conversation. “Can we talk about anything else. Fungi. Your creepy bone collection. Anything.”

Neve looked disappointed by the dodge, but she didn’t push. “How about Nash? Did you have a chance to talk to him?”

“Yeah, a bit,” I said. “He’s still being cagey. But you’re going to love his explanation for how he beat death.”

And she did, hanging on every word of the story.

“What about your parents?” she asked. “Did you push him on that?”

“I tried,” I said.

Neve nodded, one hand drumming her fingers against her crossed legs, the other absently slipping beneath the collar of her T-shirt to grip her pendant. “Do you ever try to imagine what your parents looked like?”

“All the time,” I said. Sometimes I genuinely envied the ease with which people could point to their eyes and say, I inherited them from my father, or brush their hair and know it had been a genetic gift from a grandparent.

“Come on,” I said, hauling us both up from the floor. “Let’s get washed up and try to steal a few hours of sleep.”

I led her downstairs to the bathroom, and the single shower stall that had been preserved after the town house had been converted to the library. Listening to Neve sing a low, soft song, I let the hot water and thick steam welcome me into their comforting grasp.

The clock in the foyer said it was half past two by the time we emerged, clean and settled. For a moment, I was tempted to check in with Librarian, to see if he’d found anything about the Mirror of Beasts in his research, but Neve drew me back toward the stairs.

“No,” she said. “Sleep.”

It was a relief to return to the scratchy wool of my rumpled blanket, to lie out across even a hard floor and know I was safe.

Neve tapped my shoulder from beside me, offering me one of her earphones. I scooted closer to her so I could press it to my ear and she could keep the other pressed to hers. The disc player whirred softly to life, and the ethereal synthesizers of Cocteau Twins drifted through us, making my whole body feel like it was floating.

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