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“Do you think an axe is inside?” she whispered.
I glanced at her. Val’s eyes were pools of tears, but she wouldn’t shed them. She never did. Not once since that day had I ever seen her cry. “I don’t know if you want me to say yes, or if you want me to say no.”
“I want the truth.”
“I think it’s possible,” I said, thinking back to that day. I remembered the look on my father’s face when the fae cornered the humans hiding out in the pub. His insistence I stay away. For a long time, I’d ignored that memory. Father had made me feel so uneasy, but I didn’t want to remember him that way, so I’d pushed it out of my mind, replacing his scowls with the image of his smiling eyes.
But Nellie’s words had scraped away the mask I’d placed on him in my head. They were like a chisel, carving away the lie. I remembered him more clearly now, even if it made my soul ache. There had been something going on that day. He hadn’t been all right. For a very long time.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I don’t want to upset you.”
Val curled her fingers into fists. “I hope we find an axe.”
Together, we pulled the barrels of ale off the hidden door, careful not to wake the others or capture the attention of the shadowfiends lurking outside. When we finally pulled the door away from the floor, dust swirled up from a shadowy compartment only deep enough to hold a handful of items.
“Oh.” Val’s shoulders slumped. “That’s not an axe.”
I knelt. Kalen’s cloak pooled around me as I gathered three leather-bound books and a pocket-sized journal into my arms. Val lowered the door as I stood. She didn’t look at me, and I didn’t press. If I were her, I’d have wanted to find an axe, too.
I spread the books out on the bar and began flipping through one that had no title or author labeled anywhere. The parchment was old and faded, but the ink smelled fresh, and the rough paper seemed to hum beneath my fingertips.
“My father put these books there,” I said with a strange certainty. Something about this felt like him, and I remembered that day he’d brought me here, right before he’d run off into the mists, never to be seen or heard from again. His friend had been rummaging around behind the bar before he’d tossed my father’s pack across the room. This book was his.
Val frowned. “Why would he hide some books under the pub’s floorboards?”
“There’s something in them. Something dangerous.” My eyes slid to the journal, and my heart pounded. “Something he didn’t want any of us to know.”
“Then let’s see it.” Val snatched up the journal before I could stop her, so quickly I didn’t even realize she’d done it until the pages fanned open before her eyes.
“Val,” I said.
Her brows pinched together as she read. “This is weird.”
“Val.”
“What…?” Her eyes flicked up to me, and then back to the page. Something in me fractured. I didn’t like this. I didn’t like it at all.
“Books won’t help us,” I found myself saying. “We should put them away and then go back to searching for weapons.”
“Tessa, you need to read this.” Her voice held a strange softness that didn’t sound like Val at all.
“I don’t think I want to.”
Her eyes speared me. “It’s important.” She flipped the notebook around and placed it on the table before me. I didn’t glance down. I couldn’t. “You should look at it, but…it’s going to be hard.”
My mouth felt dry. “That’s really not convincing me to look.”
“Don’t you want to know what your father was doing?”
I sucked in a rattling breath. Muscles tensing, I glanced down at the page and instantly started. This wasn’t what I’d expected at all. There, on the first page, was a name, nestled inside an ornamental square with a line branching off to another just like it.
Andromeda, it read,the God of Death.
And the box it connected to read,King Ovalis Hinde of the mortal kingdom of Talaven.
I jerked up my head, furrowing my brow. “What the fuck is this?”
“It’s a family tree.”
