Page 172 of The Mask Falling

Chandeliers were suspended on chains, so delicate the candles seemed to float in midair. By their light, I could make out a figure at the other end of the chapel. Unbound. With a low sound of relief, I crossed the hall and all but threw myself onto him. My arms went straight around his waist.

“Arcturus.” I pressed my cheek to his chest. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I took so long.”

Relief had clouded my vision. That was why I missed the change in him. I had looked without truly seeing.

His stance was stiff, his arms at his sides. When I drew back and saw his face, his eyes gave me an unanticipated chill. Their light was that of a long-extinct sun, a dead and distant echo.

I took half a step away and found that he was dressed from head to toe in black. That was usual. The uniform, however, was not. Boots covered him to the knee, a silk-lined cloak swept to the floor, and leather gloves were pulled halfway up his forearms.

This was how he had dressed as blood-consort.

“Arcturus,” I said, unnerved.

He said nothing.

His appearance, and his silence, almost stole the words from my tongue. I recovered enough to say, “We need to go. Before the soldiers—”

“Neither of us is leaving, 40.”

The number stopped my blood. Dark memories woke in the back of my mind.

“What did you call me?” I whispered.

Red-hot brand. Nameless, numbered.

The Emite blood. It had to be. They had given him too much, and it had affected his mind. That hardly explained why he was dressed like this. Why he was standing free as a bird.

The night before last, his hands had discovered my body, and his eyes had seldom left my face. They were fixed on my face again now, but too intensely. As if he wanted to melt skin from bone.

“Arcturus,” I said, “what—”

“Do not presume to use that name.”

Through the encroaching fog, I racked my mind for an explanation. He was acting. This was some kind of tableau, like the one Hildred Vance had created for me in Edinburgh, designed to devastate my sanity. I glanced up at the ceiling and toward the rose window, searching for cameras, for snipers, anything to help me understand.

“There is no one watching us,” came his cold voice. “Were you so convinced I cared for you that you are unable to face the alternative?”

He sounded so unlike himself that I almost laughed, but the mask of his features locked my voice box.

“Jaxon Hall once gave you a warning. He told you that Terebell Sheratan ordered me to seduce you,” Arcturus said. “He was not so far from the truth. I was not ordered. I chose. And I did not do it for Terebell.”

A numbing agent was rushing through me, anaesthetising every limb. As if in preparation.

“No,” I said, after an excruciating silence. “You can’t have been acting. Not all this time. You would have—”

“Perhaps I should help you understand,” Arcturus said softly. “The blood-sovereign needed information about the clairvoyant syndicate. She wanted Jaxon Hall, who had eluded her for years. When I discovered that you were his heir, I saw an opportunity to retrieve all that she desired. Without her knowledge, I set out to do this.”

Every hair on my arms stood on end as I stared up at him.

“Through past actions, I was already a traitor. It was not such a fall, to become a flesh-traitor. To gain your trust,” he said. “In London, I found out all I could about Jaxon Hall. I stayed at your side while you investigated the gray market. After the scrimmage, once I knew exactly where he was and all that he had done to mock Rephaite rule, I paid Jaxon a visit. I forced him to return to the anchor. I also delivered three of the fugitives who escaped from the first colony.”

Their corpses on a scaffold, on a screen. Jaxon, gaunt and tired in his borrowed finery.

“No,” I said again, faintly.

“I decided to remain by your side. To learn every secret of every clairvoyant organization,” Arcturus said, “so that one day, we Rephaim could eradicate them all. You were thorough: London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Paris. You never questioned whether you should tell me all you knew.”

Through me, he knew our leaders, their organization, their hideouts. I had let him into every part of my life without a second thought.

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