The Midnight Star (The Young Elites #3)(17)

“Laetes,” he murmurs, “the angel of Joy, was the most precious and beloved child of the gods. So beloved was he that he became arrogant, thinking only himself worthy of praise. His brother Denarius, the angel of Greed, seethed with bitterness at this. One night, Denarius cast Laetes from the heavens, condemning him to walk the world as a man for one hundred years. The angel of Joy fell from the light of the heavens through the dark of night, into the mortal world. The shudder of his impact sent ripples throughout the land, but it would take more than a hundred years for the consequences of that to manifest. There is an imbalance in the world, the poison of the immortal touching the mortal.”

Raffaele’s voice trails off. He reads it again. There is an imbalance in the world. The poison of the immortal touching the mortal. His finger moves down the page, skimming the rest of the story.

“. . . until Laetes could look up at the heavens from the place where they touched the earth, and step through once more with the blessing of each of the gods.”

He thinks of the blood fever, the waves of plague that had birthed the Elites in the first place. The blood fever. Ripples throughout the land. Those plagues had been the consequence of immortality meeting mortality—they had been caused by Laetes’s fall. He thinks of the Elites’ powers. Then he thinks of Enzo, returning to the mortal world after having visited the immortal.

How had he not seen this before? How had he not made this connection until now? Until the poison in the ocean had given him this clue?

“Violetta,” Raffaele mutters, rising from his chair. She will understand—she felt the poison in the ocean first. He throws on his outer robe, then hurries to the door. As he goes, he thinks back to when he had first tested Adelina’s powers, how her alignments to the Underworld shattered the glass of his lantern and sent the papers on his desk flying.

This energy feels like Adelina’s, Violetta had said when her feet touched the ocean’s water.

If what he thinks is true, then they would not only have to face Adelina again . . . they would need her help.

When Raffaele turns the corner and enters the hall where Violetta’s room sits, he halts. Lucent and Michel are already standing outside her door. Raffaele slows in his steps. Even from a distance, he can sense a disturbance behind Violetta’s door.

“What is it?” Raffaele asks the others.

“We heard a wailing,” Lucent says. “It didn’t sound like a normal human cry . . . Raffaele, it was the most haunting sound I’ve ever heard.”

Raffaele turns his attention to Violetta’s door. He can hear it now too, a low moan that makes his heart clench. It does not sound like Violetta at all. He glances at Michel, who shakes his head. “I don’t want to see,” he mutters, his voice soft. Raffaele recognizes the fear in his eyes, the wish to avoid the image of what he is hearing.

“Stay here,” Raffaele says gently, putting a hand on Michel’s shoulder. Then he nods at Lucent and steps into the room.

Violetta is awake—or she seems to be, at first glance. Her dark waves of hair are soaked with sweat, strands plastered against her forehead, and her arms are bare and pale against her nightgown, her hands desperately clutching her sheets. Her eyes are open, Raffaele notes, yet she is unaware that he and Lucent now stand beside her in her room.

But what holds his attention the most are the markings covering her arms.

This girl, the Elite who was once unmarked, now has markings that stretch all across her skin. They look like bruises, black and blue and red, irregular maps that crisscross her arms and overlap one another. They stretch up to her neck and disappear down her nightgown. Raffaele suppresses the gasp in his throat.

“She doesn’t seem fully conscious,” Lucent says. “She was fine yesterday—she was walking around, talking, smiling.”

“She was tired,” he replies, running a hand in the air over her body, thinking back to how weary her smile had seemed. The threads of her energy tangle, weaving and unweaving. “I should have sensed it last night.”

But even he could never have guessed how drastically this could happen, how Violetta could go to bed an unmarked Elite and appear this morning as if she had been beaten. Was this triggered by her wading into the poisoned ocean? It is all coming to pass. The thought floods his mind even as he tries to ignore it. It is the same phenomenon that is hollowing out Lucent’s bones, that had killed Leo by turning his venomous power back on himself, and that will eventually happen to the rest of us. A side effect directly related to her power. For Violetta, whose ability had once protected her from markings like the others’, is now facing the opposite—her power has turned viciously on her.

Raffaele shakes his head as he studies her energy. She will die. And it will happen sooner than for any of us.

I have to tell Adelina. There is no other choice.

He straightens and takes a deep breath. When he speaks, his voice is calm and unwavering. “Bring me a quill and parchment. I need to send a dove.”





And they say she loathed everyone in the whole wide world,

except for the boy from the bell tower.

—Lady of Dark Days, by Dahntel





Adelina Amouteru




It is only early afternoon, but a cold drizzle has settled over the city, bringing with it a layer of mist that dampens the light. Sergio has retired to his chambers, complaining of dizziness and thirst, his lips parched. I step out into the city streets alone, clad in a white hooded cloak shielding my hair from the elements. I’m completely hidden behind an illusion of invisibility. The rain dots my face with tiny pinpricks of ice, and I close my eye, savoring the feeling.