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Alek spun and stared at me as if he hadn’t realized I was following him at all. His eyes were wide with shock, his breath shallow.
This wasn’t him. This wasn’t the calm, arrogant Alek I knew.
“What’s going on with you?” I asked with a frown. “Are you nervous to close the veil?”
He let his eyes flutter closed while he took a long breath. “Narcissa’s right. This is risky.” He opened his eyes again, letting them dart around the forest behind me, searching the trees and the forest floor and anything but me.
“It’s not as risky as letting whatever dark spirits that live on the other side seep through and ruin our lives. This will fix everything, Alek.”
“What if the world doesn’t need fixing?” He stepped forward, lowering his voice as he continued, “What if this is exactly how everything is supposed to be?”
I stared at him for a moment. He had to be joking, right? He couldn’t possibly think that this chaos was normal, was better than life with the veil closed.
“Why are you saying this?” I asked. “What’s gotten into you, Alek? You were just as eager to close the veil as I was.”
“Yeah, well, that was before.”
“Before what?” I pressed.
He hesitated, his mouth opening and closing as the war in his mind raged on. I would have paid anything to know what he was thinking.
Alek was devastated when he discovered the veil had remained open.
What changed?
The conversation I had with my father replayed in my head. Alek might have known what Marcus really had planned with the veil, but it didn’t matter. He hated his father more than anyone.
“Over here!” Wrath called from the other side of the clearing. “Help me carry these logs!”
Alek brushed past me, bumping my shoulder as he left our conversation and hustled to help his brother.
My stomach tightened.
Once the veil is closed, this will all be over. Alek will start behaving normally again.
Once this is done, everything will be okay.
I closed my own eyes and took a deep breath, shoving away the nerves and the doubts that told me to get the hell out of there, to run, to stop this madness.
But Theia was right. This responsibility fell on me.
My blood opened the veil.
My blood would close it, too.
“Come here, girl,” Narcissa ordered. The boys were busy picking up the logs from the other side of the clearing.
I walked over to Narcissa, wringing my hands together in front of me.
“There is a balance,” she said, quietly enough for only me to hear. “You disrupted the balance when your blood opened that veil.”
I replied flatly, “I know. Everyone has been kind enough to remind me of that every waking second.”
“No,” she hissed. “This is much more than some spoken prophecy, Lyra. Your mother—” She glanced around the forest before continuing, “Your mother ensured that if someone was stupid enough to lower the veil, they would pay the consequences.”
I stiffened. “What are you talking about?”
She glanced over her shoulder again. She was paranoid, yes, but if it was my mother she feared, maybe we should all be paranoid.
