He gawked at me for another beat. But even as his gaze was trailing my body, he was nodding. “Focus. Right. I can focus.”
“You said we only have a few minutes.”
“Less, I think,” the phantom said. Her voice was at once sad and melodious, like a haunting song that plucked the listener’s heartstrings. “I feel my hold on myself slipping.”
Her accent was thicker than Rafaela’s, who’d erased any signs that might suggest she hadn’t always been intended to be Zaraga’s queen. The ghost clipped her final consonants, and set her words as if to a lilting score.
She met Baz’s eyes, then mine. “I want to let go.”
“You’ve earned the right to let go,” Baz said, sounding more compassionate than I would have ever guessed a commanding general with a reputation for marauding could.
“Ask your questions quickly,” she told me. “I will hold on as long as I can.”
I didn’t want her to remain for me when she’d already suffered as she had. Even so, I accepted.
“Why do you look so much like my rebirth mother, Rafaela?”
Her eyes brimmed with heartbreak. Before she answered, I already knew who she had to be. I must have realized it even before then, when I first saw her.
“She was my twin sister.”
My skin prickled at the confirmation. “She never said she had a twin, and my brother and I—she made us sänglures and claimed us—we’re twins.”
“No, she would not tell you about me.”
“She has mentioned an older sister, a sister who…”
“Who what?”
Where should my loyalties lie? With Rafaela, who’d concealed a sister, and a twin no less, or with a stranger who, despite everything, was light enough to be welcomed into the Etherlands?
“Rafaela’s older sister—yours too, then—betrayed her.”
“Hm, is that so?”
“That’s the story. Will you tell me your version, please, while we still have the chance?”
Slowly, she nodded, and I clamped down on the urge to hurry her more. At least Baz’s attention was now on her and not on my nudity.
“Our eldest sister, Andra, have you met her?”
“No.”
“And our parents?”
“Not them either.”
Her jaw stiffened, jutting out. “Because they are dead?”
“Yes, because they’re dead.”
She shuddered. “I feared as much when they never found me. But the demigod either did not know or would not tell me.”
“What demigod?”
“The one trapped inside this castle with me.”
I whirled to exchange a look with Baz. He was wearing the same what the holy fuck? look that I was.
