Trial by Fire (7 page)

“Juliet. I know this is a shock for you,” Lillian said slowly. “But I brought her here for a reason. And when she gets past her fear, she’ll realize that she wants to stay.” Lillian’s tone was icy and final.

“But I don’t!” Lily exclaimed. She felt like she was choking. “I want to go home!”

“To what?” Lillian asked derisively, her sweaty cheeks flushing red with anger. “A world that makes you sick? Armies of reckless doctors and scientist who don’t have a clue what to do with you because they only know how to cut and destroy?” Lillian said the words “doctors” and “scientists” with sneering hatred, but her brief, passionate tirade was curtailed by bone-rattling coughs.

Juliet tried to soothe her sister, but Lillian pushed her hands away. Lily watched, silent and still, as Lillian fought the paroxysm, and after several painful moments of gasping, she could speak again.

“Or maybe you want to go back to your Tristan? That fickle prettyboy who doesn’t want you? Or back to the family that would be better off without you?”

“My mother,” Lily said, her voice catching. “She’ll—”

“She’ll suffer more with a sickly daughter like you in her life than out of it. Believe me.” Lillian’s eyes drilled into Lily’s, cold and unrelenting. “You’re useless in your world. Worse. You’re a burden. But here, where you belong, you could be the most powerful woman in the world.”

Lily didn’t have much experience with hate. She didn’t even hate her dad for abandoning her, even though no one would have blamed her if she did. But as she watched Lillian finish her bitter speech and fall back against the pillows, she realized that she hated her. Lillian looked so pathetic, but Lily couldn’t help hating her. In fact, she’d never hated anyone or anything as much as she hated this evil other self in the big white bed.

“And what are you going to do to keep me here? Tie me up? Put me in a dungeon?” Lily asked, trying her hardest not to think how similar her vicious tone, even the cadence of her sentences, was to Lillian’s. A thought dawned on her. “You said you brought me here for a reason. You need me, don’t you? You need me so much, you can’t even stop me from leaving.”

“By all means, go,” Lillian said with calculating smile. “Run along.”

Lily turned and walked away from the bed, marveling at her own audacity. She had no idea where to go. She felt light and strange, like her blood had filled with cold bubbles and her belly with slippery rope. Her vision shrank in from the sides, collapsing until all she could see was the door. Lily lunged for it, praying that she didn’t faint first.

“Lillian!” Juliet cried.

“Let her go,” Lillian said. “She
needs
to go.”

“She could get hurt out there. It’s too dangerous,” Juliet said, incredulous.

“She’ll be back.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you can’t run from yourself forever.”

Half blind and numb with shock, Lily stumbled past the guards, through the gate, and down the steep hill of the Citadel toward the strange city. She heard people calling out to her, telling her to stop, pleading with her to come back to the safety of the keep, but she was too overwhelmed to respond. All she wanted to do was get away—to get as far away from this waking nightmare as possible.

As she walked, she told herself that what she was experiencing had to be some kind of hallucination. Something had happened to her when she’d had that seizure, she decided. Maybe she’d never even woken up this morning.

The more Lily thought about it, the more convinced she was that none of this was really happening. Tristan hadn’t cheated on her. They’d never had a fight or ended their friendship. She’d never gone down to the water or agreed to come to this strange place. None of this was real.

Lily paced down a cobbled street and headed into the heart of the strange city. She wasn’t really paying attention to which way she went; she was just following a vague sense inside her that told her when to turn or continue straight ahead. She talked to herself sternly the whole way, convinced that this was all some fever dream she couldn’t wake up from, probably because the doctors had drugged her.

“That’s it,” Lily said loudly, making several pedestrians stop and stare. She lowered her voice but continued to mumble to herself, trying to keep panic at bay. “When I heard that voice inside my head, the one that said it would be frightening, it was just the doctor warning me before she gave me a shot. She was telling me that the drugs were going to do this to me. That’s all.”

No matter how real it felt, she knew that she would wake up eventually and the meandering streets that she now wandered through, with their tall, latticed towers of vegetation, and their tinkling sounds of running water, would all disappear.

Lily’s wild eyes bounced from one strange sight to another. Colonial style carriage houses and brick townhouses, right out of her version of Salem, were interspersed with modern wood-beam and glass buildings that had a tent-like feel. A few steps down, she saw spiral-shaped domes that had gardens growing on side tiers, interspersed with glass windows. They looked like hives that housed plants instead of honey in their combs. Lily glanced into the glass windows of these hive houses and saw only more greenery inside. They were multifaceted greenhouses that were growing things both inside and out.

Rotating around, she realized that there was one on every block, and where there wasn’t, there was one of the tall, latticed green towers that went up to find the sun rather than wait for it to hit the ground. Lily wandered closer to one of the towers, trying to look inside the soaring double helix of greenery.

Something growled. Lily looked down slowly. At her feet, chained to the base of the tower, were three monstrous dogs. Or were they bears? One of them hissed, showing fangs like a tiger’s.

Lily screamed and threw her body back, away from the unnatural creatures, and didn’t stop until she slammed into something hard. She spun around frantically and saw that she had backed up against a large glass window. It was the front of a café.

Peering inside at the startled patrons, Lily’s eyes locked with a young man’s. They were dark eyes, such a deep brown they were nearly black. His eyes widened, momentarily, stunning Lily both with their intensity and with the recognition she saw inside of them. She’d never seen him before, but he knew her. The young man stood up from his table abruptly, tipping his heavy chair to the ground behind him. His lean body was tense and his angular face was immobile with fury. She saw his fists clench and his lips mouth a single, unmistakable word.
“Lillian.”

The malice she saw in him was breathtaking. He hated her—really hated her—and he looked like he wanted to hurt her. The dark-eyed boy took one stiff step toward her. Lily turned and ran.

The monsters chained to the bottom of the green towers roared at Lily as she streaked past. She shied away from them with horror even though they were chained and couldn’t get at her as long as she stayed on the sidewalk.

Lily could hear the footsteps of the boy with the dark eyes behind her. He was gaining on her easily. Any vestiges of the adrenaline rush she’d experienced when she had found herself surrounded by men with crossbows was long gone. She was still dangerously drained from the seizure and from the fact that she hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. After running only a few blocks, Lily’s legs were turning to jelly, her inner ears were burning, and all she could hear was the ragged wheeze of her own breathing. A cold sweat broke out across her upper lip and down her back, but her head still felt unbearably hot. Lily knew this feeling. It meant she was going to faint.

In a desperate effort to shake off her enraged pursuer before she passed out, Lily darted down a narrow alley, hoping to hide until the dark-eyed boy ran past. She took several sharp turns, ducked into a low niche in the solid wall of stone and crouched down, trying to hide herself in the shadows before he rounded the last corner.

Her legs shook and she half sat, half fell into what she belatedly realized was a garbage-filled drainage grate. She heard his footsteps pounding past her, then held her breath when she heard the footsteps stop and turn. A pair of black boots pointed into her disgusting niche, blocking most of the light. She heard him sigh.

“You know you can’t hide from me, Lillian,” said a deep, rich voice. The ringing in Lily’s head turned to clanging, and her ears popped. Two hands reached in and scooped up her spent body. The young man placed her on her feet and examined her sweaty face carefully. Lily’s vision was wobbling in and out of focus, but she could have sworn the dark-eyed boy actually looked worried for a moment.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“You know damn well it’s me,” he said angrily. He searched her eyes, and realized that she truly didn’t recognize him. “Rowan,” he said slowly. Lily shook her head, the action making her wobble unsteadily. His expression changed. “What did you take, Lillian? Belladonna?”

Rowan ran a hand over her face in a clinical way, checking her for fever like he had been her doctor for years. His hands were warm, but they still made Lily shiver. He trailed sensitive fingertips down the sides of her throat, feeling lightly over her glands. Confusion darkened his face.

“Where’s your willstone?” The anger and impatience she’d sensed in him earlier were completely gone. He looked afraid now, as afraid and lost as Lily felt.

“Help me, Rowan? Please,” Lily begged, figuring she had nothing left to lose.

She saw his dark eyes narrow with suspicion. He hooked a finger into the divot at the bottom of her throat, pressing hard on a sensitive point buried deep inside that U-shaped hollow. A chill swept up Lily’s already exhausted body, and she blacked out.

Gideon pushed his way into Lillian’s chamber. It should have been sealed, impossible for him to enter, but the heavy door swung open with the slightest nudge from his willstone. Lillian must be very ill, he thought. Or dead.

“What are you doing here?” Juliet asked.

She stepped in between him and the bed. Her eyes darted behind Gideon to the door as he closed it, her nervousness apparent. The willstone on her neck pulsed, but no power followed it. Juliet was a latent crucible. She carried the gene but not much talent, as if being the sister of Lillian had sapped most of her potential gifts. Gideon brushed past Juliet’s weak intervention and went straight to the bed.

Fiery red curls snaked up from under the covers and coiled over the white pillow, but the rest of Lillian’s fragile frame was buried in blankets. She was so thin now that her body looked to be no more than a wrinkle in the plush duvet.

“So she is here,” Gideon said. “The guards said she’d run away. They also said that before she left, they saw her on the beach, wandering around aimlessly. Like she didn’t know where she was.”

Gideon watched Juliet’s face. It was a pretty face, although she frowned too much. He’d break her of that when they were married. His father had arranged the match, and the Witch didn’t oppose it. It made sense for them to wed, even if Juliet wasn’t to Gideon’s taste.

“The Witch is sleeping,” Juliet replied in a lowered voice. “Please get to your point
quietly
.”

“Fine. Is she going crazy like your mother did?” he asked bluntly.

“No,” Juliet replied, offended even though she shouldn’t be. It happened every now and again in families that had true power. The dark side of great talent was often madness. It went hand in hand with genius, and it was nothing to be ashamed of. It meant the Proctor family had true power in its bloodline. Power that Gideon wanted for his own offspring, even if it meant he had to get them from Juliet.

“Then why was she wandering around on the beach—dressed very strangely, the guards said—and without her willstone? How’d she even tolerate being separated from it?” Gideon leaned close to Juliet. He saw her lips pinch together with distaste and considered slapping her, but the Witch would punish him for that.
Soon
, Gideon promised himself. She’d learn her lesson soon. “We all know the Witch has been struggling with a sickness of some kind for the past few months,” he continued. “If she would let me—or any another competent mechanic of her choice look her over—we might be able to help.”

“I know her behavior must have seemed strange to the guards,” Juliet said, ignoring his request to lay hands on Lillian for what seemed to Gideon the thousandth time. “But Lillian has her reasons.”

She was hiding something for her sister, something other than the cause of Lillian’s mysterious illness. Gideon was sure of it now. “Well, when she wakes, let her know that both me and my father would love to know what those reasons are.”

Juliet’s colorless face blanched an even paler shade at the mention of Thomas, and Gideon repressed a pleased smile as he turned and left. The Witch might rule, but she still had to deal with the Council and its leader. His momentary triumph was marred by the nagging feeling that something important had just happened. Something
huge
. And it was being kept from him.

Gideon was tired of being pushed aside. He was the Witch’s head mechanic in name only, and that fact was not lost on the rest of the Coven. If Lillian wouldn’t give him responsibility, then he’d just have to take it.

Lily woke, but not to the sterile bleakness of a hospital or to the familiar four walls of her bedroom. It was dark out—dark and cold. She could smell loamy earth under her and wood smoke on the air. Flickering firelight revealed crisscrossed wooden bars all around her. She tried to move her arms, only to discover that they were tied in front of her. She was a prisoner. Leather creaked as she tried to twist her wrists out of their bonds. There was writing on the leather straps. Lily squinted in the low light and tried to make out the unfamiliar shapes. They looked like something carved on the side of a standing stone, or engraved on the cover of a leather book.
Runes
, Lily thought, recalling the description from an old movie she’d seen once.