The Midnight Star (The Young Elites #3)(16)

“It’s uncommon,” Lucent tells Raffaele as they pick their way over the rocks toward the sand. “But not unheard of. Beldain has seen mass beachings before. It can be caused by anything—a warming or cooling of the water, a sparse year for migrating fish, a storm. Perhaps it’s the same here. Just a temporary shift of the tides.”

Raffaele folds his arms into his sleeves and looks on as the children run around the bodies. A simple storm or tide shift couldn’t explain the energy he’d felt in the ocean last night, that had drawn Violetta out of bed and made him gasp. No, this was not caused by any natural phenomenon. There is poison seeping into the world. Somewhere, there is a crack, a break in the order of things.

The eerie energy lingers, but Raffaele has no way of explaining it to those who cannot sense it. His eyes stay fixed on the water. He hasn’t slept, having spent the night at his writing desk, poring through what papers he still kept from his recordings, trying to solve the puzzle.

Lucent looks like she is trying hard not to show the ache in her bones. “Well, some of the villagers are saying there are reports of a similar event along the Domaccan shoreline.” She finds a comfortable spot amongst the rocks and sits down. “Sounds like it’s not just concentrated here.”

Raffaele leaves Lucent’s side and heads down to the edge of the water. He pushes back his sleeve and dips a canteen into the surf, letting it fill. The touch of the ocean makes his stomach churn just as much as it had the night of the storm. When the canteen is full, Raffaele hurries out of the water to shake off its poisonous touch.

“You’re pale as a Beldish boy,” Michel exclaims as Raffaele passes him.

Raffaele holds the canteen with both hands and starts making his way back toward the palace. “I’ll be in my chambers,” he replies.

When he returns to his quarters, he pours the contents of the canteen into a clear glass, then sets it on his desk so that it is drenched in light from the window. He opens the desk’s drawers and removes a series of gemstones. These are the same gemstones he once used to test the other Daggers, that he had used on Enzo and Lucent, Michel and Gemma. On Violetta. On Adelina.

Raffaele lays the gems in a careful circle around the glass of ocean water. Then he steps back and observes the scene. He reaches out with threads of his energy, searching for a clue, coaxing the stones.

At first, nothing happens.

Then, slowly, very slowly, several of the gems begin to glow from within, lit by something other than the sunlight. Raffaele pulls on the energy strings as he would when testing a new Elite, his brow furrowed in concentration. Colors blink in and out of existence. The air shimmers.

Nightstone. Amber. Moonstone.

Raffaele stares at the three glowing stones. Nightstone, for the angel of Fear. Amber, for the angel of Fury. Moonstone, for Holy Moritas herself.

Whatever presence Raffaele felt in the ocean, it is this. The touch of the Underworld, the immortal energy of the goddess of Death and her daughters. Raffaele’s frown deepens as he walks over to the desk and peers at the water in the glass. It is clear, shining with light, but behind that is the ghost of Death herself. It is no wonder that the energy feels so wrong, so out of place.

The Underworld is seeping into the living world.

Raffaele shakes his head. How can that be? The gods’ realm does not touch the world of mankind—immortality has no place in the mortal realm. The only connection the gods’ magic has to the living world is through gemstones, the sole, lingering remnants of where the gods’ hands had touched the world as they created it.

And the Young Elites, Raffaele adds to himself, his heartbeat quickening. And our own godlike powers.

Even as he stands there, turning the mystery over and over in his mind, he finds himself looking in the direction of Enzo’s chambers, where the ghost of his prince still lingers after having been pulled up from the Underworld. After having been torn from the Underworld.

A Young Elite, ripped from the immortal realm and dragged to the mortal.

Raffaele’s eyes widen. Queen Maeve’s gift, Tristan’s resurrection, Enzo’s . . . could it have caused all this?

He goes to his trunks and pulls out several books, stacking them in a precarious pile on his desk. His breathing has turned shallow. In his mind, the resurrection plays over and over again—the stormy night at the Estenzian arena, the appearance of Adelina disguised as Maeve, shrouded behind a hooded robe, the explosion of dark energy he’d felt in the arena’s waters that came from somewhere beyond. He thinks of the lack of light in Enzo’s eyes.

The goddess of Death had punished armies before, had taken revenge on princes and kings who became too arrogant in the face of certain death. But what would happen if a Young Elite, a mortal body doomed to wield immortal powers, one of the most powerful Elites Raffaele had ever encountered, was taken from her domain? Would that tear the fabric separating the living and the dead?

Raffaele reads late into the night. He has ignored the others’ knocks on his door all day, but now it is silent. Books strewn around him, volumes and volumes of myths and history, mathematics and science. Every time he flips a page, the candle on his desk flickers like it might go out. He is searching for a specific myth—the only reference to a time when the immortal realm touched the mortal that he’s heard.

Finally, he finds it. Laetes. The angel of Joy. Raffaele slows down and reads it aloud, whispering the words as he goes.