“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry you’ll never know the joy of cake. But more for me, I suppose.”
“Indeed.”
I polished off the rest of my slice. Comfortably full, I lay back on the rug to stargaze, watching my breath rise like steam from a kettle.
It felt like eons since my nineteenth birthday. A year ago, Nick had baked me a strawberry cake and served it for breakfast, and Jaxon had afforded me nineteen minutes off to eat it (“What could be a better gift than a day of hard work for your mime-lord, darling?”). Later, Nick had given me an exquisite chatelaine he had wrangled at the black market and a stack of records for my collection, and we had gone out with Eliza for a slap-up supper.
We had been happy then, in the corner of the world we had scratched out for ourselves. I had been able to close my eyes to the real Scion and pick a living from the bones it tossed me.
Warden lay on the rug beside me and folded his arms under his head. It was such a relaxed, human posture, I had to look again.
“Thank you for this,” I said to him. “And for everything you’ve done since we arrived. I know I haven’t been much company.”
“You are not here to entertain me.”
One had to wonder what he really thought about birthdays. To an immortal, it must seem masochistic, to celebrate each step of my journey to the grave. Still, it was sweet of him to play along.
A row of three stars flickered right above the safe house. “Rephaim are named after stars. Their old names, I mean,” I murmured. “Why is that?”
“Most humans cannot speak our true names. Since your kind have long associated stars with the divine, Nashira decreed that we would use their names here.”
“Did you all choose your own?”
“After consulting the æther,” Warden said. “On the subject of my name, I never did invite you to call me by it.”
“Arcturus?”
“Yes. Warden is a title—a title that was stripped from me, at that,” he said. “We have known each other for almost a year. If you wish, you are welcome to call me Arcturus.”
He had a point. I should have stopped calling him Warden months ago, but to me, it had become a name. Or perhaps I had used it to draw a line between us—a tissue of formality that kept me from growing too close to him. Whatever the reason, it was long past time.
“I’d like that,” I said. “Arcturus.”
Another siren in the distance. Somewhere in the night, Nashira Sargas was considering her next move.
I had always had a healthy fear of her power and her reach. I had always known that, in the end, she was the one we would have to defeat to win this war. Yet before my imprisonment, Nashira had never kept me up at night. There had always been a reassuring sense of distance.
No longer. I had seen the fire in her eyes when I escaped her clutches for the second time. After everything I had done to defy her, I had also refused to break. I had refused to be silent. I had refused to die. She would never give up her pursuit.
A tiny sound drew me back to the present. Warden—Arcturus (it would take a while to get used to that)—had placed a small object beside me.
“A gift.”
It was an oblong parcel, neatly wrapped in newspaper. “Arcturus—” I sat up. “You didn’t have to get me anything.”
“I was under the impression that a gift was traditional on the anniversary of a womb birth.”
“Womb birth. Great.”
The parcel was heavier than I had expected. I opened it with care to reveal an ornate box. A moth gleamed on its oval lid, fashioned from smoked glass, perched on a bell-shaped oat blossom. I remembered telling him once that it was my favorite. In the language of flowers, it meant the witching soul of music.
I turned a gold key on the side of the box. The lid opened, and a figurine of a bird—a ring ouzel, black with a pale breast—emerged from inside. It beat its tiny mechanical wings and whistled like a living thing.
“Arcturus,” I said softly. The artistry of it was exquisite. “Where on earth did you get this?”
“Originally, it was one of my snuffboxes. Now it is a boîte à oiseau chanteur.”
A songbird box. “It’s beautiful.” I looked at him. “Wait, you made it by hand?”
“A modest conversion.”
Even the underside of the lid was stunning, painted to resemble a poppy field. He moved to sit beside me and turned the key the other way. The bird stopped moving, and instead, the box played music. As I listened, I had a muted recollection of my grandfather restoring a harp in his workshop, singing in his pebbly voice. An air about a long-lost soulmate.
A hollow ache stretched out within me. It started in the chambers of my heart, in a place that reached eternally for Ireland. I imagined Arcturus working on the music box while the Ranthen watched over his shoulder, wondering why he was squandering time on a trifle.
He had made me a memory I could hold. I leaned up and placed a soft kiss on his cheek.
“Thank you.”
“Hm.” He lifted his wine in a toast. “To you, Paige. And the next twenty years.”
“Sláinte.” I touched my cup to his glass. “May they be significantly less horrific than the first.”
We drank. I rested my head against his shoulder, and we watched the stars until dawn painted the horizon.
****
The days of waiting for contact from Domino wore on. So did the long crawl of my recovery. After two weeks, my bruises had gained more earthen tones, but I was still weak as a haystalk.
My mind was just as slow to mend. Time refused to blunt the edges of the memories. I could no longer sleep through the night. Sometimes I relived my father’s death, saw the open bottle of his body. Sometimes I would get so cold that my fingernails turned gray. More than once, Arcturus checked on me in the night and found me next to the radiator, enveloped in a blanket.
It was the dark that got to me the most. I had never been able to sleep well with a light on—yet without one, I couldn’t convince myself that I had ever left the pitch-black cell. I had meant to die there, and a part of me had.
The sedative, at least, was out of my system. Now it was a rattling cough that kept me up at night. That and a sharp pain in my chest, on the right side, when I took too deep a breath.
At first, I had watched the news every night—to make sure Scarlett Burnish was still alive, to keep one eye on London—but it made me itch to get back to the streets. Never more so than when the news offered glimpses of Georges Benoît Ménard, the Grand Inquisitor of France.
He was said to be a fanatic, his bloodthirst unrivaled among the leaders of Scion. Certainly he sent hundreds of people to the guillotine each year. His spouse, Luce Ménard Frère, had come to London as his representative in December. Other than that, I knew very little about him.
Arcturus did his best to distract me. He taught me chess, which I enjoyed even though he always won. I could still wipe the floor with him at cards, having spent years in and out of the gambling houses of Soho. I taught him the finer points of cheating as well as fair play.
“There is little honor in duplicity,” he pointed out one night.
“None,” I agreed, “but if everyone is duplicitous, honor is a disadvantage.” I threw down another card. “And whoever said there’s honor among thieves was talking absolute shite.”