Page 31 of A Dagger of Twisted Starlight

“I think that sounds great,” I said. He lifted an arm, and without much thought, I lay down, resting my head on his chest. The gentle, slow beats of his heart were a nice backing track to the movie we settled down to watch. Today might have been terrible, but tonight proved to be the complete opposite.I’d discovered a lot about Xavier, much more than maybe I should be discovering, and I found myself wanting to unearth even more. I wanted to keep talking to him until the sun came up. I also wanted to help him heal from his pain, still clearly raw.

Ten minutes into the movie and we had somehow maneuvered ourselves into a little-spoon, big-spoon position on the spacious couch. Sleep came quickly, knocking me out before my favorite part of the movie.

Didn’t matter, though. The dreams I had, all starring Xavier, beat out any film ever made for Best Picture.

Chapter 13

Back Home

Xavier

Bambi,the family saber cat, purred herself to sleep on my lap. Her head was tilted to the side, so her long teeth weren’t at risk of poking my leg. I divided my attention between scratching her back and scrolling down the web page I’d been reading for the last hour. I sat outside under the shade of a bushy palm tree. Cassius sat across from me, flipping through a leather-bound tome he had pulled out of Damien’s horde. The pages crinkled loudly as he flipped them.

We’d been back at the Malibu castle for a week. There hadn’t been any new attacks, although the nation still reeled from what they dubbed the Kind Day Massacre. The president was still in critical condition, which made everyone hold their breath. I wondered what Blake must have been thinking about it.

He’d been a little distant from me since that morning he’d woken up in my arms on the living room couch. We’d woken up before anyone else in the house had, so after a moment ofwondering if it was real or not, we untangled from each other and went to our separate bedrooms.

I lay there giddy like a kid on Christmas morning.

But had Blake? He wasn’t exactly the smoothest with his emotions or how he delivered them to others, but I couldn’t get a read on why he was acting icy. He sat far from me during our family dinners, didn’t chat with me as often, and declined a couple of my invites to go spend some time around Malibu. I knew he didn’t like to feel contained anywhere. I didn’t want this castle taking on the appearance of a prison.

But he had said no. Said he wanted to continue researching the starlight dagger. Which, in all fairness, was the more helpful thing to do in our situation.

It still bugged me. I twirled the silver bracelet around my wrist, starting to get distracted. The research wasn’t wielding much useful information, at least none that Cassius hadn’t already told us.

“Find anything?” I asked Cassius. He lifted his sunglasses onto his head, pushing back his long blond hair. He had a birthmark on his left eyebrow, turning the hair bleach white. He was an easy guy to trust. I could see why Blake considered him his best friend.

“Nothing new, no. It talks about how Gael the Blessed Marvel created the dagger and how he tried to use it to go back in time to save his son. It says how he failed, and it was lost in the Iron War, before the treaty was formed.”

I sighed. This was why I had been hesitant about taking this job on. Not having answers frustrated me. It had been an issue all throughout my schooling. I’d miss one test questionand immediately bungle all the rest because of how frustrated I got with myself. I rubbed at the bridge of my nose.

An idea slowly started to form. “Maybe we’re focusing on the wrong thing.”

“What do you mean?” Cassius closed the tome.

“We’re trying to learn more about the dagger, but I think we need to start learning about who has the dagger first.”

It was time to go down a new route.

I clicked out of the scientific journal and opened a new page. “That red-eyed shifter at the Kind Gala wore the same patch that was on the shifters who attacked Blake in the desert. Those two were linked. That patch has to symbolize something.”

I didn’t have any photos of the symbol, so all I could do was type in a description. Cassius brought his chair over to my side, the legs scraping against the warm stone. I hit Search and was immediately rewarded with images of the symbol. He leaned in and cocked his head. “Hmm.”

“What? You recognize it?”

Cassius paused for a moment before he shook his head. “I thought I might have. Might have recognized that shifter, but his face… it was so twisted between wolf and human. I’m not sure, though. It’s like right there at the back of my mind. I can’t pinpoint it, though.”

The fresh Malibu breeze rustled the palm tree above us. I heard the clinking of ice against glass before I turned around. Blake walked toward us, a condensation-covered pitcher in his hand. “Thought you guys might be thirsty.”

I smiled up at him. I was. He filled upthe two empty glasses.

“Thank you,” I said. He spent all morning with Warrick and Dawn while I spent it training my archery skills. I’d barely seen him all day. It wasn’t until he was pulling up a chair and asking to join that I realized how I had missed seeing him this morning.

“What are you guys up to?”

“I figured searching for the symbol might lead us somewhere.” I scrolled through the images. They were all mostly hand drawn, but some photos did come back with people proudly brandishing the symbol on their clothes. I opened the first link, which took me to a video. I hit Play and watched as someone recorded themselves stitching it onto their jacket. The woman had thinning hair and sat outside in an overflowing junkyard.

“I’ve found my people. I’ve found my purpose,” the woman would repeat in an off-putting rhythm, like she was chanting it. And then her voice would rise as she’d shout, “Time shall not control us. Time shall not bend us. We shall bend it.”

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