The Cerulean (Untitled Duology, #1)(87)

“How do you know my name? How can you understand me?” she demanded.

“I don’t know.” He stumbled over the words and cleared his throat. “Agnes told me your name. She didn’t mean to, it just slipped out. And I . . . I thought maybe you would know, you know, how I can understand you now when I couldn’t before.”

It was deeply uncomfortable for Leo to realize she might have understood him this whole time. What other awful things had he said? He vaguely remembered bragging about her at the inn they’d stopped at in the Knottle Plains.

“And why would I tell you?” she snarled. “I am a Cerulean and my blood is—oh.” Her lips parted and a light shone in her eyes. “My blood is magic,” she whispered, running her hand over the crook of her elbow where Kiernan had stuck her.

“I beg your pardon?” Leo supposed he shouldn’t be surprised by this revelation, and yet somehow he was.

“My blood mixed with yours,” she murmured, almost like she was talking to herself. “You have my magic inside you now, like Agnes does. Except I chose to give it to her. I would guess that’s why you can understand me.”

“You would guess?” He rubbed his palm where his father had cut it.

She glared at him. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“I just wanted to tell you that . . . I’m sorry.” The words came out on their own with no warning. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done.”

“Is that all?”

Leo bristled. “What else can I do?”

“You can let me out of here.”

“I don’t have the key,” he insisted.

“You got me into this place and you have no power to get me out?” she said. “Why should I believe that? Humans lie.”

“I’m telling the truth,” Leo said desperately. “I mean, can’t your magic sense if I’m lying or something?”

“Cerulean magic is not a parlor trick. It is not a catchall.”

“Isn’t there something it can do? It’s magic, for god’s sake.” He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to prove to her that he was being sincere.

Sera folded her arms across her chest. “You are not very good at apologizing. Is this how you always go about it?”

“I—” He opened his mouth, then closed it. He felt his face go red. “Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I apologized,” he admitted. “For anything.”

“This does not surprise me.”

“I heard what you said to Agnes, about those ruins, about a tether.” She froze, and Leo knew he had touched a nerve, that whatever this tether was, it was significant. “It sounded like it was important, and I was hoping . . .” He trailed off.

“Hoping what?” Sera asked vehemently. “That I would reveal to you the secrets of my people? You let them hit me. You are the reason I am in this crate. You are helping them steal my blood!”

“I didn’t want to,” he protested. “I didn’t know my father would do that, I swear.”

“And yet you stood by and did nothing when it was taken from me,” she said.

The lump of shame in Leo’s throat was swelling with every word she spoke.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “My father . . . he’s a powerful man. I can’t speak against him. I just can’t.”

Sera was sitting up, her face pressed against the slats, and the ferocity in her gaze took Leo’s breath away. “Your father did not take me from that pit,” she hissed. “You stole me. I was scared and alone and you took me against my will and declared I was yours. I am no one’s! I am Sera Lighthaven and my blood is magic, and you will not take another drop of it from me!”

Her eyes glowed like blue flames and a sudden crackle of light ran over her skin, across her cheeks, down her neck, over her arms . . . it was a light that Leo felt in his own veins, a sizzling, spitting heat that snaked its way through his body and exploded in his heart like fireworks. In the span of one pulse, he gasped and fell to his knees as the theater vanished and memories swarmed around him.

It was his fourteenth birthday, and his grandmother had bought him his first shaving kit. All the other boys his age were beginning to grow their beards, but no matter what Leo did, his face remained stubbornly smooth. “Too much of the whore in him,” his grandmother said to his father. Xavier didn’t look at him or speak to him for the rest of the day.

He was sitting in an utterly fantastic garden, watching three girls playing some sort of game. They all looked like Sera and they had flowers in their hair. One girl kissed another. Leo knew he would never have what they had, and the loneliness was a secret agony.

He was a little boy. It was winter, and Robert’s mother was teaching them how to make snow angels in Robert’s back garden. Leo burned with jealousy when she clapped and hugged Robert, telling him what a beautiful angel he’d made.

He was standing in a bedroom in front of a mirror, three women with different-colored ribbons around their necks beside him. They looked at him with such love in their eyes, he thought his heart would burst. There was a girl his age there as well, and she said, “I have a gift for you too. But I . . . I would like to give it to you privately.” When the three women left, the girl handed Leo the necklace with the star pendant.