Leo bristled. “What else can I do?”
“You can let me out of here.”
“I don’t have the key,” he insisted.
“You got me into this place and you have no power to get me out?” she said. “Why should I believe that? Humans lie.”
“I’m telling the truth,” Leo said desperately. “I mean, can’t your magic sense if I’m lying or something?”
“Cerulean magic is not a parlor trick. It is not a catchall.”
“Isn’t there something it can do? It’s magic, for god’s sake.” He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to prove to her that he was being sincere.
Sera folded her arms across her chest. “You are not very good at apologizing. Is this how you always go about it?”
“I—” He opened his mouth, then closed it. He felt his face go red. “Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I apologized,” he admitted. “For anything.”
“This does not surprise me.”
“I heard what you said to Agnes, about those ruins, about a tether.” She froze, and Leo knew he had touched a nerve, that whatever this tether was, it was significant. “It sounded like it was important, and I was hoping . . .” He trailed off.
“Hoping what?” Sera asked vehemently. “That I would reveal to you the secrets of my people? You let them hit me. You are the reason I am in this crate. You are helping them steal my blood!”
“I didn’t want to,” he protested. “I didn’t know my father would do that, I swear.”
“And yet you stood by and did nothing when it was taken from me,” she said.
The lump of shame in Leo’s throat was swelling with every word she spoke.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “My father . . . he’s a powerful man. I can’t speak against him. I just can’t.”
Sera was sitting up, her face pressed against the slats, and the ferocity in her gaze took Leo’s breath away. “Your father did not take me from that pit,” she hissed. “You stole me. I was scared and alone and you took me against my will and declared I was yours. I am no one’s! I am Sera Lighthaven and my blood is magic, and you will not take another drop of it from me!”
Her eyes glowed like blue flames and a sudden crackle of light ran over her skin, across her cheeks, down her neck, over her arms . . . it was a light that Leo felt in his own veins, a sizzling, spitting heat that snaked its way through his body and exploded in his heart like fireworks. In the span of one pulse, he gasped and fell to his knees as the theater vanished and memories swarmed around him.
It was his fourteenth birthday, and his grandmother had bought him his first shaving kit. All the other boys his age were beginning to grow their beards, but no matter what Leo did, his face remained stubbornly smooth. “Too much of the whore in him,” his grandmother said to his father. Xavier didn’t look at him or speak to him for the rest of the day.
He was sitting in an utterly fantastic garden, watching three girls playing some sort of game. They all looked like Sera and they had flowers in their hair. One girl kissed another. Leo knew he would never have what they had, and the loneliness was a secret agony.
He was a little boy. It was winter, and Robert’s mother was teaching them how to make snow angels in Robert’s back garden. Leo burned with jealousy when she clapped and hugged Robert, telling him what a beautiful angel he’d made.
He was standing in a bedroom in front of a mirror, three women with different-colored ribbons around their necks beside him. They looked at him with such love in their eyes, he thought his heart would burst. There was a girl his age there as well, and she said, “I have a gift for you too. But I . . . I would like to give it to you privately.” When the three women left, the girl handed Leo the necklace with the star pendant.
He was in the dining room at home, sitting next to Agnes, declaring that he would accompany his father’s men to the Knottle Plains. Xavier McLellan smirked at him. “Perhaps you’ve got more of me than your mother in you after all,” he said.
He was standing on a glass dais, staring out at the vast and endless stars dotting the impossibly black space before him. He raised his arms, blood streaming from two cuts on his elbows, and fell.
Leo screamed, his body jerking, and he came back to the present, startled to find himself kneeling on the floor of the stage. Sera had her head in her hands, and her palms were glowing blue. “What . . . was . . . that?” he panted.
He could still feel the sensation of falling, and the mix of emotions from all those memories, both old and unfamiliar. His grandmother’s gravelly voice, the envy of Robert’s mother, the yearning to be what his father wanted . . . they were all mixed up in a longing he didn’t understand, and a friendship he missed but had never had, and a fear that had shaken him to his very core, along with a courage he’d never known he possessed.
“We couldn’t have blood bonded,” Sera was murmuring to herself. “We couldn’t have. I didn’t touch him, I didn’t . . .”
“Did you . . . did you see everything I saw?” Leo asked, mortified.
“Of course,” she said, rubbing her temples like she could erase the memories.
He sat back hard. “Those were private.”
“I know,” she snapped, looking up. “You saw my memories, too. You think I wanted to share those with you? To share anything with you?”
He deflated. “No,” he admitted. He was still trying to catch his breath. “Who was that girl, the one who gave you the necklace?”
Sera pursed her lips, and Leo knew he would have to offer more.
“It’s just that . . . I have it. The necklace, I mean. It fell out of Kiernan’s bag when you tried to run, and I picked it up and kept it. It didn’t feel right, giving it to my father. It’s yours, isn’t it? It’s yours.” Leo felt like he was talking in a dream.
“You have Leela’s necklace?” she gasped.
He nodded. “I should have brought it. I’m sorry. I wasn’t . . . thinking.” He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. The images from those memories were so sharp, so vivid. “I haven’t thought about my grandmother in a long time. She died the year after she gave me that kit. I forgot how much she hated me.”
There was a long pause.
“Why did she hate you?” Sera asked.
Leo sighed. “Because I look like my mother, and she hated my mother.”
She pursed her lips, considering. “What is a grandmother?”
The question caught him off guard. “A grandmother is, well, she was my father’s mother.”
“Oh.”
“You don’t have grandparents?”
“No.”
“What about those three women I saw?” he asked.
“Those are my mothers,” Sera said.
“You have three of them?”
“Yes.”
He didn’t get a chance to ask exactly how three women could make a child together because Sera was turning the topic back to him.
“Your father is cold,” she said. “Compassionless. But I did not see your mother. Where is she?”
“She died,” Leo said, and for the first time, it seemed to him a sad thing. Sera’s face softened.