Page 60 of What Is Dark Within Me

Let yourself weep and weep and weep.

A note beside the entry,nearly illegible:

Agnes keeps calling, but the thing from the well won’t let me pick up the phone.

When my friends text, I feel it in my fingers, answering in my voice, saying everything is okay, while inside, I’m screaming.

Sometimes, I think I’m not really awake. I’m dreaming, but it’s not my dream.

7

A SPELL OF DESIRE

“I have something for you,”Nicolas said, half an hour after they had driven the car into a secluded woodland and returned to his office in the Hiding Place.

Aleja was too nauseous to protest as he led her back to the room with the stained-glass door that functioned as an office. She hadn’t expected him to be holding out the sickle from James’s locked display case; the one he’d pressed against her throat when she…

“I don’t want that,” she hissed when Nicolas held the hilt toward her. Another wave of unease moved through Aleja, and she thought of the doctor’s stiff hand—how the skin of his knuckles had peeled back in the heat.

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. This is an Otherlander blade. You defeated the person who wielded it against you, which makes it yours. There’s a reason this is the weapon he went for,” Nicolas went on, when she didn’t reach for it. “This blade is sharp enough to damage even a Dark Saint. Keep it on you.Please.”

Hearing the sincerity in his voice, Aleja met his eyes. “What if I try to use it to kill you?” she asked without animosity. Hating Nicolas had been a habit. Something familiar, something easier than trying to reckon with the fact that everything she had been told about the Knowing One was a lie.

“Areyou going to use it to kill me?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then, that’s settled. Take it.”

He seemed relieved when she wrapped her hand around the hilt and held the blade awkwardly at her side. “I’ll have someone bring you a sheath from the armory. In the meantime, I want to show you this.”

How many pockets does this man have? Aleja thought, when Nicolas’s hand disappeared into his suit again.

“This was with the vial of water,” he said, as he brought out a paper folio, rolled and wrapped in red twine.

“What is it?”

“Let’s find out.”

He picked at the knot and the papers unraveled. What first caught her eye was a rectangular piece of yellowing cardstock, printed with an illustration of a steamship and the words CONTRAT DE PASSAGE, La Havre—New York, 1842.

Next to it was another ticket. Aleja worried it would disintegrate as she held it closer to read the small text. “New York to Independence, Missouri,” she read out loud. “There’s a luggage tag too. Why would he have all of this?”

“Maybe he was sentimental. Look.” He passed her another document. Unlike the others, it was handwritten.

“A letter?” she asked, squinting to read the small cursive.

“A note from a doctor to his brother, dated 1848.”

“But that’s impossible. James couldn’t have been more than fifty,” she said, tracing the looping signature at the bottom. James Thomson. She hadn’t known his full name when she’d killed him. “Unless the well water…”

“Exactly what I was thinking. In the fog of war, it would have been easy for a Dark Saint to hide a Remnant with a hint of life left in it.”

“And if you had a brother you loved, a brother who was mortal and you knew you would have to watch die,” she finished, “all you had to do was tell him where to find it. Why couldn’t he have brought his brother to the Hiding Place? Seems easier.”

“The Dark Saints are supposed to detach from their human lives. That’s not to say others haven’t found loopholes,” he told her, his expression distant. “Perhaps this Saint appealed to the Second and was denied. Perhaps the brother himself refused. James wore an Astraelis pendant, and he wasn’t traveling alone. Read the letter.”

The note was brief:Anearly winter storm has trapped us in the pass. I cannot transport our friend as expected. Supplies dwindle and a fever has swept through the caravan. If we are to survive, we must ask our friend for help.

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