Page 20 of Shadows of Perl

“So I took on my oldest persona to get to know more about the target Mother wanted me to bring in. Octos was a very close friend of mine. My only friend, really, for a long time. We met as kids. He’s dead now.” Yagrin swallows, and I don’t know if I should be disgusted or moved that he plays dress-up as his dead best friend. “Anyway, you were in the Order, an heiress from a high family, but not willing to cheat your way to success. It struck me with an odd sense of hope, and I’m not a person who’s very hopeful. Not much longer after that, you found me again. You saw me—well, Octos—a grimy Order reject, as someone worthy of trust. That’s when I decided I’d stop hunting you for Mother. The Order needs people like you, Quell.”

I shift on my feet.

“I returned to House Perl and visited your mom, who was still there, to tell her I wasn’t going to hunt you anymore. I visited her more than once and we talked a lot. Eventually, she opened up about how you both used to live. How she has no love for the Order either.” His eyes dart away. “I’m ashamed to admit that I worried it might have been a trap. That Mother convinced her to lure me into admitting how much I hated the Order so she can finally have me killed like I know she wants. So I didn’t go back for a long time. When I came to my senses, I went back to see your mother, and I promised to do all I could to protect your life.”

“She was there,” I mutter, more to myself than him. “For how long? Abby said she saw her in Chicago months ago. And my mother wrote me a letter.”

“That was me.” He sighs. “Watch. Please don’t be afraid.” He slides his hand down the bridge of his nose, and Yagrin’s face shifts with my mother’s dark eyes and warm brown skin.

“No!” Words stick in my throat. I steady myself on the furniture beside me as I stare at a lie of my mother’s face. It’s not her. I snatch at his face, my toushana ripping the mask away. “Never take her face again! Never.”

He throws up his hands. “I’m sorry. I just wanted you to see. That was me in Chicago wearing her persona. I delivered the letters to you, too.”

I can’t breathe. The world spins. When was the last time anyone saw my mom?

“Your mother gave me a bit of her blood. That’s how Anatomer magic works, for most of us, anyway.”

I clench my fists. “You could have killed her and took it.”

“Your mother agreed to let me impersonate her to help you. She thought the safest place for you was to keep you at Chateau Soleil. Look me in my eyes, Quell. You know I’m not lying.”

“You were wrong,” I say. “About me being safe at my grandmother’s.”

“I didn’t know all Darragh Marionne was doing. Your mother didn’t either.”

“Is my mother still at House Perl?”

“I went back the day before your Cotillion and she was gone. I was given no information. My House, the Draguns, my own family, they all keep me at arm’s length. Quell, I hate to say this, but she’s probably d—”

I shake my head. No. I try to picture Mom broken and battered, the life gone from her body, but the pieces don’t come together. She is a survivor. She’s the one who taught me how to stick to the shadows, how to fool those with their eyes wide open. How to not exist in order to exist. “Did you see her body with your own eyes?”

“No. But Beaulah discards everything that isn’t of use to her.”

“What facts do you know?”

“Quell.” He steps toward me. “I looked for her name on the Sphere, where all the members’ names who have bound are. It wasn’t there.”

My mother never bound to magic. Binding requires plunging a honed magical dagger into the heart, meshing blood and magic together forever. It absorbs the whole blade. But my mother gave me her dagger before we separated, which meant she never completed Third Rite.

“I also checked the Book of Names, where inductees’ names go once they’re anointed. Not there either.”

She may have never been anointed. I don’t know that she was ever inducted. I just know that she had a fancy dagger.

“You would say anything to keep me from killing you.”

Yagrin sighs. “You’re wasting your time hoping for any other outcome. Your mother is—”

I hold up a hand, thrashing with shadows.

Yagrin stiffens against the shelf at his back. “Quell, the Order is the enemy. Not me. Look how they’ve ostracized you. Look how they force the people who don’t fit their rules, like Knox and Willam, to live. If we work together and find the Sphere, we could destroy it all. Take their power from them. Then no one has to live this way anymore.”

The last few months suddenly make so much sense. “You’ve been…using me,” I snap, charging at him. He chokes on the darkness bleeding from my hands. The bruising on my fingers stretches across my skin, up my wrists, clawing its way up my arms. Rage burns through me, colder than my magic has ever felt.

“Easy, Quell,” he wheezes, and I can taste the fear on his breath. “Try to calm. Breathe.”

“Shut up. How do you expect me to believe a word you say?”

“I could have killed you in an instant these last months.” His eyes deaden, and I see someone in him that I’ve only seen in the boy I used to love. A killer. “I’ve lied to you, but I’ve never hurt you. The Order ruined my life.” His voice cracks. For a moment Yagrin is far, far away. Sadness sinks his shoulders. “I hate them all.” He looks away. “Except my brother,” he mutters under his breath. “I won’t apologize for any of it. This is what the Order deserves. And if you don’t agree with that, you haven’t seen how monstrous it is yet.” Yagrin slides to the floor, hugging his knees. “If I don’t find it, she died for nothing. Everything I’ve put up with was for nothing. You can track the Sphere better and faster than anyone. Please help me. Help us all.”

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