Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(31)

“Another one.” Lake slid slices of plantain into the pan. The thick, sickly sweet smell sizzled into the air. “Will I ever get a reprieve from all this blood and death?”

Chae Rin smirked. “Life was a lot easier back when you were still dodging the Sect’s calls, huh, Victoria?”

I was so used to the stage name that I usually wasn’t prepared to hear anyone use Lake’s real name. Chae Rin only did it to piss her off.

Lake shot her a dirty look, grabbing the handle of the frying pan menacingly. “You’re really asking for half a pint of hot oil in your face, aren’t you?”

“In any case,” I said loudly before this got ugly—as it often did, “now that we’re all here, there’s something I need to tell you. It’s about what happened in Morocco.”

Chae Rin sat at the table and crossed her legs. “So are you finally going to tell us what you saw in that dream of yours?”

My fingers gripped the sofa.

“You saw her, didn’t you?” Lake said over the sizzle of her pan.

“Yeah. I saw Natalya. And she . . . she wasn’t . . . right.”

Chae Rin and Lake stared at me. But it was the shuffling upstairs that caught my attention. I swiveled around and looked up to see Belle peering down at us from the iron railing on the second floor, her hair loose over her shoulders. She’d shut the door to her room so quietly I hadn’t even noticed she’d left it.

“What do you mean, she wasn’t right?” Belle asked, looking down at me.

“Wow, it’s like Bloody Mary,” Chae Rin said in a low voice. “Say Natalya’s name three times and Belle suddenly appears.”

Belle usually ignored her snide comments, but this one earned Chae Rin a look so cold even she looked a bit shaken. Quietly, Chae Rin took another sip of soda while Belle started down the stairs.

“Maia, what do you mean?” Belle repeated, her eyes on me.

I always had to choose my words carefully when it came to Natalya. “What I mean is that she wasn’t right. She was violent. Scary.” I shuddered, thinking about the sword in Rhys’s chest, but I didn’t dare utter that detail. I couldn’t. “She entered into my dreams.”

“But that has happened to you before, has it not?” Belle stopped by the couch. “The only way to see former Effigies is to scry. Peeling back the layers of your own mind to access their memories. You would have to be in a trance—or else, you would have to be dreaming. You have seen her memories in your dreams before.”

“But this time was different. Before, I’d just fall asleep and see her memories. This time, I was having a dream of my own and she appeared. In my dream, she ran around Marrakesh, telling me to catch her. That’s when she led me into a new memory.”

“Led you? Is she like your spirit guide now or something?” Chae Rin asked. “Telling you stuff, leading you places?”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, in the past, whenever I’d glimpse her memories, it’d be an involuntary thing. She’d only tried to directly communicate with me twice. Once when I took my oath at Ely Cathedral. And then in France, the first time I scried properly.”

And then she’d tried to take my body.

I went rigid, my blood pumping faster as I thought of it. “I used to just dream my own dreams. And then suddenly one night, I began to dream Natalya’s memories. But since France, I’d been hearing her more often in my head. And then this happened. I thought maybe it was because of the experiment messing around in there. But what if the true problem was that the barrier between my mind and hers was already deteriorating even before then?”

Then Natalya would have more freedom to play around in my head. It’d make taking my body all the easier. My throat tightened as I thought of the possibility. I rubbed the sweat beading off my flushed forehead.

“Well, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Maybe it was something she could do all along and she’s just decided to be more proactive,” Lake said from the stove, her spatula dripping oil onto the counter. “If that’s the case, then isn’t it a good thing? We know the Sect lied about Natalya’s death being a suicide. We know Vasily tried to kill you.” She listed them off with her fingers. “We know he and some agents from Research and Development helped free Saul from Sect custody. I still think she wants us to know the whole story regardless of anything. She led us to the box in Belle’s old foster home, but since then it’s been radio silence. We’ve been waiting for her to beam another message to Maia.”

But all I’d gotten from Natalya were taunts and hazy dreams of her death played on instant loop like a broken nightmare channel.

“Each time you’ve been in contact with Natalya’s consciousness, you’ve learned something about her death,” Belle said. “Her investigations of Saul, moving under the Sect’s radar. It was because of all her efforts to find out the truth that she was . . .” The next words caught in Belle’s throat, but she covered herself quickly, sweeping back her long hair. “If she’s leading you somewhere, it’s for a good reason.”

Or she was messing with me. That was the problem. It’s like Natalya herself couldn’t decide if she wanted me to know the whole story behind her death and the mystery that she’d died for—or if she simply wanted to use her memories to lure me into a trap to take my body.