But today, I have to.
The auras are harder to locate today, but eventually, I find one. The golden table. It’s right where it’s always been in the tower. But when I keep searching, I realize I can’t sense the pheasant or the goblets or any of the other golden objects.
My mouth goes dry. My eyes snap open.
“No,” I whisper.
I grab the hem of my dress and dash toward the door. Someone shouts my name, but I don’t stop. I rush down the corridor and up a flight of stairs. My braid thumps against my back in time with my heart.
I skid to a stop at the bottom of the second staircase. Blood drips down the stairs, and I leap away from the puddle seeping into the carpet. Each drop that rolls off the steps seems to confirm my fear.
I stare at the ceiling as I gingerly step around what becomes a stream, keeping one hand against the wall as I inch forward.
A guard’s headless body limply hangs over the top step. I clutch my stomach and look away before I vomit, fighting to breathe as the metallic tang of blood creeps in around me. I struggle forward as much to get away from the sight as from the smell.
Ahead, the woven tapestry of several dancing ladies lays crumbled on the floor, exposing the pieces of the door and staircase it concealed. My feet slide into the grooves in the stone steps worn away by my father’s continual trek up to the gold. As I climb, I suddenly wish I had a weapon.
At the top, the other door has been kicked in. No lamps are lit in the room—there don’t need to be, at least not for me. An ever-pulsing glow ebbs and flows from inside, inviting me in as it did ten years ago.
My breathing quickens. I shouldn’t be this close to the gold, to the room where I nearly killed a man last time I was in it. No, where I did kill a man.
But my father can barely survive without sitting next to the gold. Every day his eerie connection to it saps more of his strength, consumes more of his mind, makes him need its presence in order to keep going. What would happen to him if the gold really isn’t in the tower?
Before I let my fears overtake me, I shove off the wall and into the round, windowless room.
The golden table rears up in front of me, and the glow overwhelms me, like I’ve stepped into the sunlight of the garden. I freeze. My breath catches in my throat. It’s been years since I’ve seen real, solid gold. Not since the incident.
I swallow down the bile crawling up my throat. I force myself to inhale. No matter how much the room smells like metal, you can’t inhale gold. I hope.
Still, my fingers itch inside my gloves. I clench them into fists and take one step farther into the room. Closer to the golden table. Its hulking legs look like columns of twisted gold, and its top could easily fit Hettie and me lying side by side.
It’s the only object too big to steal. The other eleven objects are gone. Round and square outlines of dust are all that remain of the three coins, two chalices, rose, platter, pheasant, knife, tapestry, and necklace that my father had turned to gold.
My father’s gold has been stolen.
CHAPTER 4
The wooden chair my father uses to sit near the gold lays in pieces on the floor. I pick up what used to be the seat of the chair and hold it like a shield across my chest.
Footsteps pound up the staircase toward the tower room.
Maybe it’s the ghost of the man I killed. Still lurking here, waiting for me to come back after all this time. Or maybe whoever decapitated that guard is still nearby. I shouldn’t have run off on my own. I shouldn’t have come here at all.
My eyes widen when a figure does appear. I stumble backward until I collide with the wall. I clutch the broken chair fragment closer to my chest.
It’s not a thief or the man I killed come back to haunt me. It’s Aris.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say. “It’s not safe.” I’m not safe is what I meant, but I can’t tell him that. I tighten my hold on the chair fragment, willing myself to look at him and not at the table. Oddly, that seems to help. My rising panic subsides the longer I look in his eyes.
Still, the ever-pulsing glow doesn’t let me forget that it’s there. Just one touch away.
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?” he asks breathlessly. His eyes are wide as he takes in the room.
“It’s gone,” I say, my voice strangely hoarse, as though being this close to the gold has strained that too.
“What’s gone?” The words echo hollowly around the room. He takes a hesitant step forward. He must’ve taken the same staircase I did. Bloody footprints trail behind him.
“My father’s gold.”
“We’ll alert the palace guard. The thieves can’t have gotten far. Come on.” He reaches out to me.
“No.” I answer as much to his statement as to his waiting hand. I’m afraid to step closer to him. Not with the table so close.
“Why not?”
I take a steadying breath. We’d never told anyone outside the family about my . . . ability. My curse. Most people have realized something was off about me, something more than just my gold skin. But we never confirmed it. Uncle Pheus always said it was better to let them wonder, to dream up their own ideas, than for us to confirm any weakness.
And yet, I feel that if anyone is going to understand my family’s curse, it will be Aris. There is nothing else to lose anyway.
“The gold my father . . . created was stored in this room.” The dingy space looks even dimmer with just one large gold table in the middle. Spider webs cling to the corners of the rafters. Oddly, none lace their way around the table legs, as if even the spiders are afraid to touch the gold.
“All of it?”
I nod. The whole reason my father had wanted The Touch in the first place was because the treasury was nearly empty, and he knew war was on the horizon. But he hadn’t turned many things to gold before turning me to gold, after which he’d refused to touch anything.
“Surely your father can survive without a few gold pieces.” Aris runs his fingers across the top of the table, leaving trails in the dust.
I shiver.
“That’s just it,” I force out, dragging my gaze away from the gold. “He can’t. Dionysus was very specific after my father begged to be released from the curse. The god told him to take everything that had been touched down to the spot where the river met the ocean to be washed before the sun set on that very day.”
I’d so often heard my father and uncle repeating the words Dionysus had said to them: “Make sure everything gets washed as I instructed, or there could be unhappy consequences. For my gifts take on a will of their own sometimes, and if it’s not fully cleansed, especially from humans, well, sometimes they find their own ways of surviving.”
“My father bathed in the water,” I recount to Aris, “and had me carted down as well. My skin turned back to normal, and after that, he forgot about the other objects.” I ignore the memory trying to surface of suddenly finding myself underwater and a halo of white light shining through the deep blue water as I sputtered back to life.
“My skin was gold again at sunset.” I shudder, remembering how I thought I was turning back into a statue. My skin never hardened—it just took on its awful hue. “And the next day, my father started showing his first signs of weakness,” I continue. “He’d lost the ability to turn things to gold, but everything he’d already turned was still enchanted, still contained a piece of him.”