What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(78)
Those eyes were fixated on Caelum, returning the intensity he gave her. My attention shifted between them, feeling something pass that I didn’t understand.
My suspicions rose, my stomach dropping like lead. They knew each other, I realized with another twist of my gut.
Caelum turned to me, wrapping an arm around my back, soothing parts of me that he shouldn’t have been able to touch; the wounded girl who didn’t want to admit I wouldn’t stand a chance of holding onto him.
It was why I never should have let him under my skin in the first place.
He buried his face into the curtain of my tangled hair, his lips brushing against the shell of my ear. “She’s a witch,” he murmured, his voice low enough that I knew he didn’t want the others to hear.
The glowing mark, the fingers that had been dipped into the shadows of the night itself, the eerie mismatched eyes: all of it made sense with her being Other. Her eyes fell to me, studying me intently as she pursed her lips briefly before smiling.
As quickly as she’d studied us, she turned her attention back to the maps on the table, closing us off as if she hadn’t examined us from the inside out. “That’s Imelda,” a woman said, stepping up in front of me. I forced my eyes off the witch to meet the kind, gray-eyed gaze of a human woman. “And I’m Amalie. She’s taught some of us to see through Fae glamour, but no one is better at it than a witch.”
“A witch?” I asked, pretending Caelum hadn’t recognized her for what she was. I couldn’t be certain that his knowledge wouldn’t be used against us or make us look suspicious, having questioned it myself when we first met, as well.
Brann had been cautious in the face of Caelum’s knowledge, leading us straight to his death out of that fear. My heart faltered in my chest; with the promise of a safe place to rest my head that night, the pain of the loss of him seemed more blinding. I didn’t have to focus on keeping my feet moving, or on where my next meal would come from. I didn’t have the same kind of life-changing distractions.
“Yes. She is how we keep the tunnels warded,” the woman said, the explanation bringing that multicolored stare back to us. “They draw their power from the nature around them, and their magic isn’t tied so directly to Alfheimr, like the Fae.”
“I thought they were all dead?” I asked, thinking of the stories that told of how the last of the ancient witches had given their lives to create the Veil, to protect humans from the wrath of the Fae.
“Most of them are,” Imelda said, raising her chin to meet my inquisitive stare. She stepped around the edge of the table, coming to stand next to the woman who had greeted us. “But there are some of us here, some of us alive in Alfheimr, as well, I suspect. The Crown tried to kill off the rest of us who survived the Veil to fit their narrative of events, but we’re still here.”
She leaned into me, her face stopping only a breath from mine as she looked down my body. She drew air into her lungs, smelling me as her brow furrowed and she tilted her head to the side. “Death is calling to you,” she said, her words echoing what had been foretold in the woods on Samhain.
I swallowed when Caelum’s hand tightened around my waist, his arm twitching against my spine. “Is that a threat?” he asked, his voice dropping low in warning. Only he would be foolish enough to think he could stand against a witch.
The mark on her forehead pulsed with light, answering the quiet violence hidden in his words. “I don’t mean either of you any harm. Death stalks her, as if she is halfway to the grave already. From the look in her eye, this is not the first time she has heard such a thing,” Imelda answered, turning her back on us and vacating the common space.
Caelum’s stare burned into the side of my face as I ignored him, smiling gently at the woman who’d been kind enough to greet us. I didn’t want to speak of the night in the woods or the death that I felt pacing at the edges of my life, waiting for me to make one fatal mistake.
Waiting for the knife to press against my throat once more, to take the life the Fae had denied it when they broke through the Veil.
“Sorry,” the woman said with a little laugh, shaking out her chestnut hair. “She can be a little intense.”
“So can he,” I said, nodding my head toward where Caelum refused to release me.
A child raced up to the woman, grabbing her around the legs and gazing up at her with all the affection I’d given to my own parents as a girl. She knelt down to tend to the child while we watched, smiling apologetically when the young girl refused to release her. The fact that there were children living in their community brought a smile to my face, the bittersweet reality of their survival and relative freedom from the harsh life above the surface tempered by the fact that they probably rarely got to feel the sun on their skin.
Jensen crossed the distance, emerging from behind the table and coming to stand in front of us. “We got off on the wrong foot, but you must be hungry. Let me take you to get something to eat.”
He gestured for us to follow him, and Caelum and I did so silently. The pessimistic part of me wondered if we should trust food provided by people we didn’t know at all, but my stomach grumbled with hunger as if to protest my thoughts of turning down an opportunity for a meal.
There’d been nothing but wild hare and fish in the days since Caelum and I had started traveling, because while I didn’t doubt his ability to hunt or snare something larger, the time it would take to butcher it wasn’t worth the risk.