Page 64 of The Vanishing Throne

This time when he leaves, I let him go.

Gavin doesn’t know about the mirrored room. He doesn’t know that it carved the insatiable need to kill right out of me, the need that made me go out every night with a constant whispering voice that saidhunt kill maim.

He doesn’t know that I saw that part of me in a mirror, and it scared the hell out of me, too.

I sense Catherine come up behind me. ‘What did he say to you?’ I hear the anger in her voice, the protectiveness, even now that she knows what I am.

‘Nothing I didn’t deserve.’

Chapter 22

Catherine suggests we wait in my room in case I need to grab my weapons and ride out quickly. She has Tavish sit on the settee while he watches Gavin and the others in his vision. He remains quiet, his marble eyes wide and glassy.

Catherine and I lean against the pillows on the window seat, watching the storm outside in the fake Edinburgh. Swirling rain and icesmack against the window with tremendous force. The street lamps are all lit along the pavement, though it’s barely dusk.

I want to open the window, but I’m afraid the illusion might shatter. I’m afraid the Edinburgh of my imagination might disappear to reveal the glittering rock that makes up the vast underground city.

And yet … I’m tempted to test that. Could I explore the Edinburgh built entirely from my imagination? Just me alone in the place I helped destroy.

‘You could make the sun shine,’ Catherine says, resting back against the wall and watching the rain with me. ‘Or make rainbows. Two or even three if you wanted.’

I know she’s only asking me this so I can help take her mind off what might be happening to Daniel, Gavin, and Lorne. As if by shifting the weather’s illusion into something serene, it would be a comfort, however small. I want to try – just for her. But I’m held back by the longing to keep Edinburgh exactly as I recall it, downpour and wind and all.

‘What if I don’t want rainbows?’I ask her, feeling the cold draught every time the wind pounds the rain against the window. It’s so real I find it hard to believe that we aren’t really there. ‘What if I want to remember Edinburgh storms the way they were? They used to last for days, remember? Weeks, sometimes.’

I look past her to Tavish, rigidly seated on the settee, his alabaster eyes unblinking. He’s still in the vision, entirely focused on the place where he’s trained his Sight. I could wave a hand in front of his face or shout at him and he would never even wake. It takes touch to draw him out again.

Tavish is framed by the open doorway that leads to the pixie city, the light of a thousand other doors rising to the very top of the hive structure. They each create a thousand worlds, some pockets of our old lives. I wonder at which point the magic that formed those worlds cracks and bends and eventually reveals the truth: that none of it is real.

‘Yes,’ Catherine says drily. ‘I never could go outside in the wind without breaking an umbrella.’

‘What did you create behind your door?’ I ask her, not wanting chatter about umbrellas or rainbows any more. It only serves to draw our attention away from this world we live in now, where the people we love are always in danger. ‘Your bedroom, too?’

Gavin says I can’t bring back the dead, that I can’t live in an imagined worldwhere my mother is still alive, but what if I opened my window and the fake Edinburgh didn’t disappear back into the cave? Could I go in and decide never to come back out?

‘Sometimes,’ Catherine says softly. ‘Or it’s the garden at ourestate in Ayr during springtime, when bluebells cover the ground there.’ She pauses. ‘Right now it’s a boat in the middle of the Mediterranean, warm and calm, the waves lapping around me. It’s always sunset there. I make the sky burn red.’

I smile at her description. ‘You’ve never been to the Mediterranean.’

‘No.’ Her own smile is sad. ‘I used to read Father’s journals and imagine I was there. He wrote once about how it was always warm and it hardly ever rained. I wanted to travel there someday.’ She traces the carvings on the windowsill that Derrick had scraped into the wood when he thought I wouldn’t notice – back in that other room, my real room. ‘Now I wonder if there’s even a Cyprus left. If the fae killed everyone there, too.’

‘Perhaps there is,’ I say, suddenly guilty that I brought all this up for her.

Catherine asked me to summon rainbows, but I reminded her of all the things she lost. I sometimes wonder if Lonnrach stole me away to that mirrored room to steal the hope from me – however small it was to begin with –at the same time he stole my memories.

I try to hold on, just for Catherine. ‘Maybe the fae wouldn’t care enough for such a small island.’

‘Maybe.’ She says it with a flash of a forced smile for my benefit. As if she understood exactly what I was trying to do. We both know Cyprus is likely gone, just like everywhere else.

‘Do you ever wish you could stay on the boat without coming out?’ I can’t help but ask. ‘In your imagined Cyprus?’

‘Humans can’t survive in the worlds they build for long,’ she says. ‘We’re able to create landscapes with our minds, but only the fae have the power to make whatever they want behind their doors. They use it to supply us with food and materials.

‘For us, water turns to ash in our mouths. Food turns to rock. Even things we bring inside must be eaten quickly before they rot. Some people go into the places they create just to die there. They find it easier than—’ She turns sharply to Tavish, a flush creeping along her cheeks. But he is still deep in the vision, blind eyes wide.

‘What is it?’

‘Tavish’s wife,’ she says in a low voice, barely above a whisper. ‘They lost their son when the purge took Aberdeen. When she came here, she swore she could bring back the wee lad, and created a place beyond the door where they could all live. Tavish went in to pull her out, but he couldn’t find her. She had created a countryside that spanned for miles.’

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