Page 132 of A Dusk Of Stars

“It won’t be much longer now until I make you shift, and everything will fall into place.”

“Why are you doing this, Serra?”

“Why am I doing this?” she snaps as she gets in my face. “Youareabsolutely annoying, you know that? How many times have I had to play the poor weak old Serra and listen to your bullshit? You know nothing of the world, girl.”

I grit my teeth. “I thought I could trust you, I thought we shared the same values.”

She just looks at me for a second, obviously pissed. Then she lets out a laugh and goes to sit on the pedestal. “You think the two of us are the same?” she asks in an incredulous voice. “I know I told you things that day in the cafeteria, but you don’t reallyknowwhat my life was like. You don’t really know what’s it like to be the only weak one in a dynasty of mighty people,” she says.

She gets off the pedestal and starts approaching me with this unsettling spark in her eyes. “But then one day everything changed. Imagine a little girl working her way through her family’s library, and finding something more fascinating than anything she’d ever laid eyes on before. An image of Baldur.”

She keeps silent for a moment, still looking at me but seeming as if her mind is elsewhere.

“It spoke to me, Anna,” she says, her voice hushed and swelling with longing. “For some reason, I knew this man — this god among men — was my destiny. He will give me all the power I never had.”

Destiny… It makes me remember what she told me that day in the cafeteria — how it’syoumaking it, not the stars. She was talking about the prophecy, she wants to insert herself in it.

“Everything I did from that moment in time,” she says with a pensive laugh, “I did to get closer to Baldur. Eventually, while I was still studying at the Academy, I met this old fae who knew where the pieces were buried. It was the happiest day of my life.”

She pauses, seemingly snapping out of it andreallylooking at me again. “Until I found out I had no way of using the information to awaken him. Until I found out I needed someone called the Aurora.”

There’s bitterness in her voice and her eyes as she says this.

Slowly, she walks over to me. “It only took me ten years of working at the Academy to find out about the Order and make Lorcan initiate me into it. Then another twenty of sucking up to the man, waiting for you to show up.”

Despite knowing I won’t be able to do it, it makes me try to back off, when she slows to a stop in front of me. “Imagine my surprise,” she says, her eyes roaming all over my face, “when I learned that the famed Aurora was our little Scion Librarian.”

She’s not taking her eyes off me, but I can tell she’s done talking so I ask, “But how did you…” I don’t even know where to start.

She lets out a scoff. “How did I what? Manage to trick you into doing my bidding?”

I don’t say anything. I just keep looking at her, bile working its way up my throat.

She shrugs. “It wasn’t that hard,” she says, looking me up and down as she starts walking back to the pedestal. There, she takes a seat again, folding her hands on her thigh. “After all, Ihadspent three years working alongside you, Anna. I knew you were a smart girl with more than a healthy dose of distrust in others.Which is why I understood I had to make you think every step you took wasyouridea, no one else’s.”

I grit my teeth. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” she says with a smile. “The book, for example. I couldn’t just give it to you. Of course, it was supposed to beyouwho stumbled on it, not your little vampire friend. But it did find its way to you eventually.”

How could I have been this stupid? My nostrils flaring, I remain silent, but my silence only makes her laugh. “I also needed you to keep unlocking your powers,” she explains, “which is how Warsaw happened.”

My eyes round. “It wasyouwho killed those people,” I say in a voice that’s barely above a whisper, “not the third piece.”

“Exactly,” she replies with a nod. “You were becoming too enthralled with your little mate, so I had to give you a little nudge, to reshift your focus.”

“If I didn’t use the moon stone to reestablish my connection with my wolf…”

“The third piece would have remained dormant.”

I know it would be smarter for me to come up with another question, another little distraction, but the paralysis is starting to reach my neck and my head is ringing, images of streets full of dead people flashing before my eyes.

She killed them all just to get me to take another step in actualizing my powers? It makes me significantly more afraid of what else she’s capable of doing. Is her Divine Magicthatstrong?

And then the realization hits me. It was a lie, that time she came to return the book and tell me what the central symbol is about.

It’s not Baldur, it’s theAurora. It’s notBaldurtheBringerof Suffering, it’sAuroratheBearerof Suffering.

It’s my own Aurora powers she made me block.

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