Page 16 of Each Their Own Devil

“I thought you would be kind enough to tell me,” Nicolas replied with a bored wave of his hand. “If what they call the Avaddon is coming, then perhaps I should spend my last few weeks drinking wine and laughing with my wife.”

I WARN YOU AGAINST ALLOWING THIS RUMOR TO SPREAD ACROSS THE HIDING PLACE. THE ASTRAELIS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN HOW TO WEAPONIZE LIES.

The words caught Nicolas off guard, and he opened his mouth slightly to speak before clamping it shut again. “Are you asking me to suppress knowledge?”

I AM TELLING YOU NOT TO WASTE THE MIGHT OF MY MAGIC ON A DECEIT AND A DISTRACTION. ENSURE YOUR WIFE FULFILLS HER BARGAIN.

“My wife will fulfill her bargain either way.”

SHE IS STILL ONE OF THE SECOND’S SOLDIERS. IF SHE FAILS TO ACT IN THE INTEREST OF THE HIDING PLACE, I TRUST YOU WILL RESPOND ACCORDINGLY.

It was useless, really, to indulge in a show of strength in front of the Second—there was no world in which Nicolas could hope to escape if the creator of the Hiding Place decided to quash his current Knowing One and appoint one that would be less of a pain in the ass. But Nicolas still couldn’t help the darkness that swarmed around him. “Aleja is as loyal to the Hiding Place as any of us. Do you have anything else to say, or can I get back to commanding my armies?”

GO, KNOWING ONE. AND IF YOU ARE WISE, TAKE MY ADVICE. TREAT THE AVADDON AS A DISTRACTION MEANT TO WEAKEN OUR RESOLVE.For a moment, there was only silence, save for the endless dripping of water. Then the Second’s voice rolled through the chamber again.DO NOT LET THEIR LIES POISON YOU.

Nicolas stared into the glowing pool; the tension in his shoulders must have betrayed him. “Their lies,” he muttered. “Or yours?”

DO YOU TRUST YOUR ENEMY’S COMMAND MORE THAN YOUR OWN?

Nicolas was already uneasy. In fact, that was an understatement—standing in front of the Second often felt like lying before a guillotine held by a masked executioner, who claimed that he would be spared or killed based on a complex set of rules spoken in a language Nicolas did not understand. The shadows trembling around him were meant to appear flippant, but they betrayed the fluttering in his stomach. Never in all his centuries in the Hiding Place had the Second tried to silence Otherlanders. While capricious and cruel at times, the Second had been the being to teach humans magic—he had been the one to give them weapons they could eventually turn on the Astraelis and Otherlanders alike. Knowledge and free will were the two founding principles of the Hiding Place.

“I will take your advice into consideration,” Nicolas said.

IT WOULD BE IN YOUR BEST INTEREST.

“Is that a threat?”

THE THREAT IS HANDING THE ASTRAELIS A VICTORY. GO, KNOWING ONE. WE HAVE TOLERATED EACH OTHER ENOUGH.

In Nicolas’s mind, the masked executioner’s fingers twitched around the rope holding the blade above his head. Pressing further would only anger the Second. Besides, a new thought made the flutter in his stomach beat double-time. The only ones outside of Val and the circle of Saints who knew about the Avaddon were the librarians, who spoke and read languages no one but the Second understood. Had they already come to see him?

When Nicolas walked back into the dawn—unusually golden for the Hiding Place at this hour—the distant tree line was shriveled and black from where Aleja had once set loose her magic.

In all hertime in the Hiding Place, Aleja did not think she had ever seen Nicolas fall asleep before her—not until tonight, after he had ordered the librarians away from their quarters. The weight of the Second’s denial of the Avaddon, combined with Nicolas’s suspicion that the Second had been communicating with the librarians without their knowledge, gnawed at her.

She closed her eyes and tried to picture the details of a painting, as she used to do when she couldn’t sleep back in college. But it was as if someone else was in the room, tugging at Aleja’s ankle like a monster under the bed that had grown bold while the Knowing One slept.

As she slipped from under the covers, Nicolas turned toward the empty space she had left behind but did not wake. In the darkness, Aleja had to root around for the bone wrapped in a scrap of linen cloth. The magic inside of it buzzed in her ears, as if she had disturbed a flower bed full of bees. She turned back to Nicolas, but one of his wings draped over his upper body, hiding his face. It was oddly humanizing to see one of the Knowing One’s bare feet sticking out from the bottom of the sheets.

Aleja palmed the bone and padded quietly down to the throne room, where two chairs composed of sharp angles and bat wing-like silhouettes dominated the circular space. Alejalistened for Garm, but he’d gone to help Bonnie earlier and hadn’t returned.

She plopped onto the throne on the left and turned the bone in her hands. It again vibrated like a cell phone on silent mode. “Violet?” Aleja whispered, feeling foolish before the word even left her mouth. Instead, she closed her eyes and, like every other time she had channeled with an Unholy Relic, dipped into a memory that was not her own.

The room she found herself in was more of a surprise than if she’d been thrown into the Astraelis realm. A large poster for whatever punk band Violet was into that week hung over a dorm room bed. A tattooed girl with a lavender mohawk screamed into the microphone, surrounded by the bed’s pastel baroque opulence—a gilded pink plastic monstrosity that Aleja had helped her drag across campus from a yard sale two neighborhoods away.

A camera flashed as the Violet of the memory took Aleja’s picture. She was one of the only people Aleja had ever met who preferred a bulky camera to her phone.

“Please, don’t,” Aleja said, burying her face in her hands. Three months ago, she’d cut her bangs after an ill-advised two hours of Pinterest browsing, and the dark red strands trapped beneath her fingers poked into her eyes.

“How will we learn from our mistakes if we don’t document them? Fine. The camera is gone and can’t hurt you anymore. Did you submit your scholarship application, by the way?”

This had been routine for them in the first year of their friendship. Aleja had grown up in a family that believed she was destined to die young, and no one had ever taught her how to be an adult. Violet, on the other hand, had been thrown out of her family home at seventeen for coming out as gay and had been forced to grow up far too quickly.

“Yes, Mother, thank you.”

“Well, that’s great, because we have plans.”

“What? We do?” Aleja asked. Aside from a brief stint in the fencing club, her social circle was limited to Violet and her cousin, Paola, who was almost always busy with her new caretaking company.

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