Page 139 of Ulune's Daughter

She strokes my chest silently. Can she tell I’m lying? Do I want to lie to her?

I turn on my side, not-quite-intentionally booting the cat dozing between our feet, and slide my arms around her. “That’s a lie,” I whisper. “That’s not what happened.”

She cups my face in her hands. “If you want to tell me what really happened, you can. I would never judge you, Rho.”

“I killed him.” I choke out the words, which I’ve never said to anyone. “I’d worked my right hand free. I reached up. I was trying to push him away. Make him stop. My palm hit his forehead and I could feel his blood pounding. Everything I’d learned about healing turned itself inside-out. I could feel this knot, this old weakness, in his brain. Instead of smoothing it with my magic, I tugged on it. Blood ran out of his nose. He looked at me, really looked at me. And I could see fear in his eyes for the first time. But he didn’t pull back. He wasn’t going to stop ... I tore out the knot and he fell on the floor. Like a puppet. He just collapsed. His wards fell and Dad and Uncle Bert rushed in and got me free. They carried me out. I didn’t know until a few days later that he’d died. They wouldn’t talk to me about him. How do you tell a kid they’ve murdered their own grand-uncle?”

“The same way you tell a survivor that the person who tortured them is dead and they’re safe,” Kellan replies, stroking my cheek. “I’ve looked into those eyes, Rho. I know that look, the one that says they won’t stop. The one that says only one of you is going to walk away. You made the right choice.”

“No, I should have just gotten away from him.” I wipe my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose until my magic washes away the congestion growing there.

“So he could wait for the next opportunity?” Kellan asks. “You did therightthing. You made therightchoice. People who haven’t been in life-or-death situations might not understand but I have and I do. In that moment, looking into those eyes, you have one chance. One choice.” She kisses me gently. “You’re wondering if he chose you because he thought you were weak. You weren’t, Rho. You were a kid in the first flush of his magic, against a man two generations older and more experienced than you. You weren’t weak. You were strong. You made the hard choice and it’s what kept you alive. I know you must carry a huge amount of guilt over killing a member of your family. You shouldn’t. It was him or you in that room and you did what you needed to do to be the one who walked out alive.”

The congestion’s back, in my head, in my throat, but not in my heart. Not this time. Kellan’s acceptance of the worst part of me, her glow flooding the darkest corners, washes away the guilt.

I kiss her gently, giving Law another boot where he’s crept back between our feet, before sliding my hands under her pajama top to worship her the way she deserves to be worshipped.

Chapter43

Laying Souls

KELLAN

Ilove my mother, but she can ruin my day with a single text.

I’m sitting with Luca in our “War Room”: a storage room in the Bevvy museum that Freya let me clear out and fill with our translation materials when they overflowed my office. There aren’t any windows. One corner of the room has been warded off due to a Nox spider nest that the curator, Freya, tells me is over a hundred years old. Evidently, the original spider eggs piggybacked into the museum on Pocomtuc funeral pottery. But as long as you don’t mind witchlight and potentially soul-stealing spiders in the corner, it’s ideal. Plenty of space for the four desks I’ve arranged in the middle of the room, worktables along each wall, and two, six-foot bookcases for our research sources and Arcana.

Mom: Are we seeing you for Yule? I’m menu-planning.

I’m not sure what’s worse: the idea of Yule with my sister and Mitch or Mom’s Yule Log, which is so dense that some year it’s going to create a singularity on the dinner table.

Luca, who is manspreading onto my desk despite having his own and is about to get an elbow in the ribs, blatantly reads over my shoulder.

“If you ditch Yule at Cait House, you won’t just break Mom’s heart. You’ll break Aine’s. Seriously, it’s not worth it.”

I shoot him a side-eye. “Nosy.”

His brother’s retort would be “Cait,” but Luca just chuckles.

“My dad loves you,” I recall. “Want to come to dinner and help me weasel out of Yule? I wouldn’t want to disappoint Allie or Aine.”

“Sucker,” Luca sniggers. “Aine really has you wrapped around her finger. But, yeah, I’ll come to dinner.”

“Thank you.” I shoot off a text to my mother declining for Yule but asking if we can do dinner later this week instead.

She responds with a row of crying emojis.

And, the guilt trip begins.

I sigh.

“That didn’t make her happy, did it?” Luca asks.

I put my phone screen-down on my desk and refocus on the inscription hanging in the space at the center of the four desks, slowly revolving so we can inspect it from every angle. It was Luca’s idea to project the inscriptions into a central space so we could get multiple pairs of eyes on them. Yet another brilliant idea, since it’s brought to light that some of the glyphs are three-dimensional.

“Have I said thank you for your contributions today?” I ask him.

He rubs his chin. “I don’t think so.”

---