The Veil (21 page)

“For what?” Mr. Stratton asked testily, crossing the living room and turning his back to Gran. He stepped up to what looked like
a bar, poured himself a glass of something dark and amber colored, and turned back to face the room.

Gran stayed in the center of the room, her boys fanned out around her. She uncrossed her arms; she was so angry her fists shook.

“You know very well ‘for what.’ Eleven years, Renard.
Eleven years!
Then you come along, and now we have the Others
and
the Council breathing down our necks! I want an explanation.”

Mr. Stratton sighed and sipped his drink, leaning against the bar with a casualness I could not possibly have faked, had I been the one staring down a livid Gran and her ten glaring warriors.

“They were always going to find her, Edith,” he said calmly. “It was just a question of when. You were lucky to have eluded them for so long.”

“Luck had nothing to do with it!” Gran snapped.

“You can’t honestly think I had anything to do with them finding out. You’ve spent the last eleven years hiding.
I’ve
spent them searching. Do you seriously think, after all of this time, I’d simply hand her over to them?”

“Just tell me that’s not what you plan to do now.”

Mr. Stratton finished his drink and set the empty glass back on the counter. “Not necessarily.”

Luc, who up until now had been a pace behind me, silently watching their exchange, took an angry step forward. “You can’t
possibly
be considering bringing her before the Council!” He sounded aghast, and he stared at his father in total disbelief.

“Of course I’m considering it,” Mr. Stratton informed him levelly. “It may well turn out to be the most sensible course of action, as long as we take certain precautions—”

“No,” Luc said simply.

Mr. Stratton raised an eyebrow at his son. “Now listen, Lucas, the only thing worse than letting her face the Council might be
not
letting her face them. Do you really want to be the one to prove that
the Council doesn’t actually have the power to summon her in the first place?”

“It’s better than putting her life in their hands,” Luc argued.

“Not in the long run. Not for her, not for any of us. You’re not thinking clearly.”

I stamped my foot; it was a childish thing to do, but I was so frustrated I didn’t care. “I am
right here
! Stop talking about me like I’m not!”

“Addy, I’m sorry,” Luc said immediately. “There’s just a lot you don’t know.”

“Only because you decided not to tell me!” I glared at him before turning to point accusingly at Gran. “And you too! I’m sick of being the only one in the room who doesn’t know what’s going on!”

No one seemed very inclined to respond to me just then, so I turned angrily and flung myself at the nearest door—which, it turned out, led to a balcony. I jerked aside the heavy curtain and yanked the door open, striding outside into the chilly air blowing straight off the bay.

——

I leaned against the balcony’s metal railing, shivering in the wind for a good five minutes before Luc came after me. Wordlessly, he slipped his coat over my shoulders and stepped up next to me, following my line of sight across the street to the ocean.

I wanted very much to take the coat off and fling it in his face, but I was
freezing
, and I was fairly certain chattering teeth would make me look more pathetic than righteously angry.

We stood there silently for a long moment before Luc finally spoke. “You know, you haven’t been entirely honest with me either,” he pointed out.

I glared over at him; he glared right back.

“You didn’t tell me about Oran Tighe,” he said.

“I told you I saw him on stage.”

“But not that you’d been seeing him around school.”

“I didn’t know he was a man until tonight.”

“I
told you
the Others were on the hunt for you,” Luc said testily. “Even if you didn’t know what was following you, it didn’t occur to you to let me know about it?” He stared at the balcony floor at his feet, but I could still see his eyes; they were angry, angrier than I’d ever seen them.

“You were the one who gave me those glasses!” I countered sharply. “I didn’t see him anymore after I started wearing them, so I forgot about him! And anyway, I never saw him close enough to get a creepy feeling from him—it wasn’t anything like the things I saw in the rally fire.”

“The what?” Luc’s head snapped up.

“The bodies in the fire,” I explained impatiently. “You saw them.”

“No I did not,” Luc said darkly. “I saw flames. Yellow-green flames. Then I saw you, and I could tell from the look on your face that you were seeing them too.”

“At first it was just the flames,” I told him. “Then there were people inside of them. People being burned. You didn’t see them?”

He shook his head. “If I’d known about this earlier—” he broke off, grasping the railing in front of him and staring off into the dark. For a moment, a very brief moment, my guardian angel appeared at a loss.

“I think Oran Tighe has been testing you,” he said finally. “Well, not you, specifically, but the people who go to our school. Trying to get to you. Oran Tighe must have tracked you to Marin County High School, just like I did. And also like I did, he must have discovered he couldn’t sense you the way he could sense a full-blood Annorasi. So he’s been making things from the Annorasi world appear and watching closely to see who reacts to them.” He shook his head. “I should’ve realized it sooner. I considered doing something similar when I was trying to decide between you and Emily.”

“What did you consider doing?” I asked, a little bit lost.

To my surprise, he grinned a little bit. “Actually, I thought
about trotting Sonya out in front of both of you to see if one of you noticed her. But I decided against it—I wasn’t sure you’d be able to see the Annorasi world yet. And if you
could
see it, I was afraid to tip off anyone else who might have been watching.”

“Did Oran Tighe send her into our class that day?” I asked, horrified. I was beginning to like Sonya.

“No,” Luc said. “I think it was just a fluke. Sonya does things like that sometimes. But the bonfire and what happened in the theater tonight . . . I think those were deliberate. Think about it—they were both very public displays, in places where large numbers of students would be gathered. They were both designed to make the person who could see them react in some way. They were designed to draw you out, Addy.”

“If they were designed to draw out an Annorasi, then why couldn’t you see them?”

“I
could
have seen them,” Luc answered, “if I hadn’t been . . . distracted. At the rally, I was trying to get you out of there before you made a scene, in case someone was watching. And tonight, like I said, I was watching you, not the stage.”

“But can’t you sense other Annorasi?” I pressed him. “Didn’t you know another Annorasi was there? Couldn’t you sense Oran Tighe tonight?”

He shook his head. “Tonight I
did
sense another Annorasi in the auditorium, but I assumed it was Chatsworth.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Do you think he could have—”

“No,” Luc answered quickly. “Alfred Chatsworth has been a loyal agent of my father’s for years. He had nothing to do with this.”

I frowned. Something about Luc’s explanation still wasn’t completely adding up. “If Oran Tighe was at the rally,” I began, “why didn’t he realize I was the person the Others have been looking for?”

Luc considered this for a moment. “I think I got you out of there before you called too much attention to yourself,” he said finally.

“But I
screamed
. A couple of times.”

“It was a rally,” Luc pointed out. “Everybody was screaming. Besides, the Others would want to be absolutely positive they’d found you before they went to the Council. Tonight’s stunt at the theater was their way of making sure.”

I shook my head. “They knew before tonight,” I told him, utterly positive this was the case. “Oran Tighe looked right at me when he loaded the flare gun. He
winked
at me.”

“You’ve probably been a prime suspect for some time,” Luc informed me. “Especially after I started spending so much time with you. They know me, and they know who my father is.”

“Then why bother with all the tests if they knew you were protecting me?”

“They know I’m a Guardian. And yes, I’ve been spending a lot of time with you so that is definitely a big clue you’re the one they’ve been looking for, but it’s hardly conclusive proof. Guardians are assigned to humans for any number of reasons, Addy. And, remember, they couldn’t sense the Annorasi side of you. They had no way of knowing for sure you were anything other than an ordinary human. Until tonight . . .” He trailed off, and I cringed.

“Until tonight, when I made it so painfully obvious,” I finished for him.

“You did what you had to do,” he told me seriously. “If you hadn’t stopped the play, Olivia could have been very badly hurt, maybe even killed. And poor Casey would be in a world of trouble. You did the right thing.”

We were both silent for a moment.

“You know,” I said finally. “I didn’t tell you about seeing Oran Tighe following me because I didn’t know he was important. But you’ve been holding out on me on
purpose
. You still haven’t explained everything to me. Why?”

“I haven’t left out as much as you think,” he said defensively, not looking at me. “I told you the Others were searching for you—that
they would stop at nothing until they found you. I just never told you why.”

“You said they wanted to kill me.”

“Yes, but it’s more than that. They don’t just want to kill you—they want to use you first.”

“Use me?”

“Yes. You know how I said the Others want to find you because you’re the evidence that our longest standing rule—the one against human and Annorasi relationships—has been broken? Well, that’s true. But that’s not the only reason they want you. I have no doubt there are certain Others who personally hate you, who’d love to kill you just because of who you are, of what you represent—the union of one of the Annorasi and a human. That is something so repugnant to the Others, I’m not even sure I can describe how much they must hate you.”

He gave me a sideways glance, likely to see how I was taking such news. I continued to stare straight ahead, determined not to have any kind of reaction that would make him decide not to tell me all of it.

When he was apparently convinced I was not about to fall apart at the seams, he continued. “The Others think the Annorasi who don’t think like them, the Annorasi who control the Council right now, are useless idealists—frauds who could never live up to the principles they expound. The Others want to bring you before the Council and demand they destroy you—if they can do that, they will put the Council in an unwinnable situation.”

“How so?” I had no idea where Luc was going with this.

“If you go before them, the Council will have two options. The first is to decide to let you live, to declare Law Thirty-Seven archaic and barbaric and no longer applicable. Which is true, actually—no one has been executed under that law in centuries.”

“So why can’t they just do that?”

“If the Council can declare this law to be null and void, what’s
to stop them from dismissing other laws? The Council
exists
because of these laws—their power comes from them. If they can simply choose when to apply them and when not to, the Others will be able to denounce them as hypocrites.”

“So what’s the second option? To execute me? Just to prove they follow their own laws?” I couldn’t believe the word
execute
had just come out of my mouth.

“Yes, but the Council will lose there too. The major difference between us and the Others is how we believe humans should be treated. If the Others can force the Council to execute a human—well, a half human in your case—who’s totally innocent, except that you happened to run afoul of our laws through no fault of your own, then how can the Council then turn around and denounce the Others for not treating humans as equals? And then there’s the small detail that you’re Rosabel Stirling’s granddaughter. How powerful will the Council look if they’re forced to execute a relative of one of their greatest heroes?”

“I thought the Council already
was
this all-powerful body.” I said. “Why are they so concerned with power and how they look? You said they controlled all of the Annorasi, including the Others.”

“That’s true,” Luc leaned against the railing, “but lately the Others have started to gain ground. They’ve been able to sway a lot of the Annorasi over to their way of thinking. Using you to discredit the Council, to force them to make a choice between something illegal and something unconscionable, is the perfect way for the Others to draw followers to their side. Maybe even enough followers to swing the balance in their favor and allow the Others to take over the Council entirely. It nearly happened before. It could happen again.”

“Before?”

“When the Council was unable to prevent your parents from getting married or to track them down after they did, they took a lot of heat,” Luc explained, still looking at me only out of the
corner of his eye. “The Others accused the Council of being lax, of playing favorites because it was your grandmother’s family. A lot of the Annorasi lost faith in the Council. They only barely survived the scandal, and they were much stronger back then. The Others are becoming very powerful—a scandal like the one all those years ago would almost certainly allow them to take control of the Council.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?” I asked him finally.

He hesitated. “It’s complicated.”

“You didn’t think I would understand?” I felt my now-familiar anger rise up again.

“No,” Luc gripped the balcony with white-knuckled fists. “I mean yes, sort of. I
did
worry about overwhelming you with too much information, Addy, but it’s not that I didn’t think you could handle it. I didn’t want you to
have
to handle it. It’s stupid, I know, but I wanted you to
like
our world. I didn’t want you to lose the look you had on your face when you lifted the veil for the first time—if you knew so many people behind it wanted you dead for one reason or another, how could you possibly continue to love it the way you did? I couldn’t bear to make you face that reality. I’m sorry. It was bad enough having to make you look at the island in the lake—I
hated
doing that to you.”