The Glass Magician (The Paper Magician Trilogy #2)(29)
Delilah shivered. “They don’t say everything, but they say enough. Whole families murdered, strange runes drawn in blood, and . . .” She paled. “Saraj has killed babies, Ceony. He attacked an orphanage and killed twenty-three kids, but he only”—she swallowed—“harvested five of them. He just killed the others for sport. He’s like a rabid animal. Grath takes credit for a lot—and yes, I think he’s sort of in charge—but he’s not even an Excisioner. I think . . . I think that’s why they’re going after Saraj. Whoever Magician Aviosky talked to this morning thinks he’s the one who’s responsible for the mill and what happened to your buggy. He’s too much of a public threat to leave alone. He said Grath is ‘containable.’?”
Ceony’s pulse pounded in her ears, and for a moment she heard nothing else. So much death, so much horror. She thought of the buggy driver, an innocent stranger. How easily the man in the night—this Saraj Prendi—had killed him. Saraj probably followed all the buggy drivers, touching each one, to make sure his spell would work the night of the accident.
She sat back in her chair, cold. How long had he watched the cottage to ensure he was there when Ceony and Emery left? How many more people could be hurt—killed—because of her involvement with Lira?
The list of casualties from the paper mill surfaced in her mind, and she reminded herself of each and every name. Had she not gotten involved with Lira—had she not frozen her—Grath and Saraj wouldn’t have come to London, to Dartford. All those people would still be alive. Though Ceony hadn’t set off the bomb or killed the driver of her buggy, all the violent deaths weighed on her shoulders. She was the reason these two murderers had infiltrated England.
Her glance passed to the closed doors. Emery could have been killed in that accident. He could have been hurt at the mill, had he come, or at the flat, had Grath’s timing been different. It was a miracle either of them still breathed.
It was her fault. And she hated it.
The two apprentices sat in silence for a long moment, Delilah staring out the window, Ceony drumming her fingers on the velvet armrests of her chair. She mulled over her conversations with Grath and everything that had happened with Lira, from when the Excisioner nearly broke her back in Emery’s kitchen to the end, when Ceony read those fateful words from the bloodied paper in her hands: “Lira froze.”
Now Lira had as little life in her as the statue of the politician that stood staring at Ceony from across the room. Ceony had done that. By chance, but she had done it. Because Emery had been in trouble. Because Emery hadn’t deserved to die. Because, maybe, some tiny part of her had loved him from the first moment they met. But she had done it, and she had done it alone.
A chill coursed up Ceony’s arms. “It’s my responsibility to fix this,” she whispered.
Delilah turned from the window. “What?”
“My fault, my responsibility,” Ceony mumbled, withdrawing her arms from the armrests and folding her hands in her lap. “I defeated Lira; I should be the one to handle Saraj and Grath, too.”
She’d faced an Excisioner before and won, hadn’t she? Couldn’t she do it again?
Delilah yelped, a sort of strange hiccup. She clapped one hand over her mouth, wide-eyed, then dropped it back into her lap. “No, Ceony. You can’t be serious.”
“I’m not much of a comedian, I’m afraid,” she replied. Her fingers trembled, but she curled them into fists and took a deep breath. “I don’t know about Saraj, but I think I could contact Grath. Lure him out. He’s only a Gaffer, after all. I’ll need your help, Delilah. Can you trace the mirror he used to contact me?”
Delilah’s expression turned wan and colorless. “I . . . I wouldn’t even know where to start! And I’m only an apprentice—”
“The mirror from my vanity room,” Ceony said in a hushed voice. “The pieces are all still there. Could you trace him through that?”
Delilah opened her mouth to respond, then closed it. She glanced at the closed doors that concealed the Criminal Affairs department.
Voice like a frog’s, she said, “I think so, but we’d have to get a ride there—”
“Not if we transport,” Ceony said, courage beginning to form in her chest. She couldn’t afford to sit and wait for something else to happen. She had to fight. She had to stop Grath before any more tombstones went up on her behalf. “Surely Parliament wouldn’t install flawed mirrors. There’s one in the ladies’ room. We could use that to transport to the lobby of my apartment.”
“But Magician Aviosky—”
“If anything goes amiss, we can form a new plan,” Ceony said. She scooted forward and grasped Delilah’s hands. “You can stand out of the way, so Grath will never see you, only me. I just need to talk to him. He wanted to negotiate with Lira, remember? Well, I’ll make him think I’m ready to negotiate. And if we contact him through one of the shards of the mirror I broke at the apartment, he won’t be able to transport through it.
“Don’t you see, Delilah?” she asked. “I need to wrap up this mess before anyone else gets hurt. I can do it. I know I can. But we have to leave now, while there’s still time.”
“What do you plan to say to him?”
“I guess that depends on what he says to me,” she confessed. “I want to know his plans. I’ll say all the right things, and hopefully he’ll reveal a weak spot, a way for us to thwart him.”