“Just them?” I asked. “What about Sam?”
“Oh…Sam has already seen fit to take care of himself. Don’t spend a moment’s worry on him.”
My mouth felt dry and sour. “What do you mean?”
“He’ll be fine, Ellerie. Just fine. But your sisters…”
“What…what would I have to do?”
She beamed and made a small gesture out to the trees. “Join us.”
A stream of figures emerged from the forest. A tall man, his skin dark and gleaming, took off his top hat, doffing it in my direction. He wore buckskin breeches, fringed and beaded.
Whitaker’s Burnish, I thought, before shoving the thought aside. That wasn’t his name. It had never been his name.
There was an older woman wearing a plain black dress, accented only by a wide white yoke and cuffs. Her graying hair was parted severely down the center, neatly covered by an outdated bonnet.
And a little girl—the so-called Abigail—a blur of motion, danced about the meadow, spinning in a dress of dazzling blue satin, trimmed with lace so intricate, she resembled more a child of days gone by, a fairy-tale princess or a bedecked infanta. Her wrists were so decorated with green marks, they nearly reached her elbows. She skipped gaily about, ignoring us all.
Whitaker was noticeably absent.
“Join you?” I repeated.
“Become like us. Become one of us. We’ve been wanting to add to our Kindred for years, but the right someone had eluded us.” She smiled again. “Until now.”
“Become like you—you mean you’re not…you’ve not always been…” My mouth dried, realizing what she implied.
“They were human once too,” the Queen said, putting words to my struggles of the idea. “Before.”
“Whitaker was human,” I said slowly, letting the idea sink in.
It shouldn’t have changed anything.
It didn’t, not truly.
But it felt like it could.
She nodded.
I glanced at the others dotting the meadow. “And you…you all chose this? You knew the destruction she causes, and you—”
“I saved my daughter,” said the woman in the plain dress. “My Sally. We were new to this land. Struggling every day just to get by. No food. Little water. Supplies raided. Children taken right out from their tents in the dead of night. Our colony was on the brink of madness. None of us would have made it out alive.” She paused. “And none of us did—except for her. Sally. I traded my life—as I’d known it—for hers.”
The man nodded, eyes flashing and beguiling. “My brother.”
It was said with such simple stoicism, I ached.
The little girl who wasn’t Abigail stopped dancing. “My maman and papa.” Her voice had a musical lilt, like the old fur trapper Jean Garreau’s. “The Great Sickness swept through our town. Our servants brought it to the manor, dying right and left, sweating and stinking.” Her nose crinkled as she remembered. “Papa caught it first, then me. Maman never left our side, looking after us even as she fell ill.” She paused, offering a grateful smile to her Queen. “They’re long dead now, but I have a new maman.”
“And Whitaker?” I turned back to the Queen, seeking her answer.
Her lips pressed into a thin line. “A sister. Such a sickly thing, if I remember right.” She raised her shoulders in a delicate shrug. “It’s been decades.”
I thought back to Sadie’s birthday and the flower crowns he and I had woven alongside the lake. He’d spoken of a sister then.
Amelia.
“Where is he now?” I asked, glancing around the meadow. “They’re all here. Where is he?”
“I didn’t need him interfering. Not while we have this little chat, you and I.”
I remembered his abrupt change once he’d spotted her among the trees, and understanding rippled through me. “You…you can control them?”
She glanced toward the other Dark Watchers. Without a flicker of effort from her, they began to walk backward, moving in perfectly eerie unison, their faces as blank as poppets, their silver eyes as flat as beaten nickels. Abigail’s legs had to stretch into impossibly long strides to keep pace with the two adults. They all stopped at the same moment and stood, frozen and waiting to be of use.
My mouth hung open, astonished. “How did you do that?”
“How does the moon hold sway over the waves? How do your queens rule their hives? It’s just our nature.”
“But Whitaker…I’ve never seen him look like…look like that.” My eyes darted to Burnish’s expressionless eyes, and then snapped away. It was uncomfortable to witness such complete servitude.
She frowned. “No. He’s proved to be less malleable than the others.”
“The luck,” I whispered, thinking of his endless supply of trinkets. “It holds back the darkness.”
“Holds back me,” she corrected me. She tilted her head as if it was inconsequential. “It’s not enough to truly override my desires, but it’s enough to grant him the illusion of control.”
“He chose…this…to save his sister,” I murmured, piecing everything together.
His reluctance to speak of his past.
Mentions of a debt to be paid.
She nodded. “To save her from certain death. Just as you can save yours. If…” She left the word hanging in midair, silvery and slippery with potential.
“If I join you.”
Her face remained placid, as if it didn’t matter to her which path I chose, but I noticed a burning edge in her eyes. She wanted me to say yes. Badly.
“But I don’t want to save only my sisters. I want to free the whole town.”
She raised one eyebrow with amusement. “That’s not what I offered.”
“You wouldn’t have to offer it—not if I know your name. Your true name,” I clarified, cutting off whatever pithy remark she’d undoubtedly planned to counter with.
Her smile was sly and biting. “You’re welcome to test your luck. We can even change the terms of the deal, if you like. I’ll give you three chances to guess my name.”
I felt myself begin to nod, lulled into complacency.
“If you don’t guess correctly,” she continued, raising that one horrifically malformed finger. “You join us.”