Imogen reaches out and takes my hand, squeezing it. “But you didn’t. Your sister did, though. Or at least tried to. She cut Ruth’s throat, Nina, and she left you for dead too.”
“When are we going after her?” Rhys asks. He’s standing in the doorway. His face is grim and cold, the bandage on his arm evidence of what he was willing to sacrifice to keep his grandma alive.
“I don’t know.”
“Not good enough,” he snaps. “You knew, didn’t you? You knew she was working with these maniacs. And you didn’t tell us.”
“I knew,” I whisper.
“And now my grandma is—” He chokes on the words. When he can speak again, his voice is cold. “You protected Artemis, and we all paid the price. No more. We need a plan.”
Imogen laces her fingers through mine. “We’re going to get Leo back, which means we’re going to face her again. And we need to know that you understand.”
“Understand what?” I don’t understand anything.
“She chose a side, and it wasn’t ours. She’s our enemy. We can’t afford to think of her as anything else now. I’m worried—hell, I’m terrified—that next time you go against her, she won’t be satisfied with burying you under a tower wall. We almost lost Ruth. We still might. We can’t afford to lose you.”
I want to cover my face again, hide from this, but Imogen has my hand. “She’s my sister.”
Rhys snorts an ugly sound. “Didn’t stop her from leaving you buried under half the castle. She doesn’t care about you. She doesn’t care about any of us.”
Imogen’s voice is softer. “I know she’s your sister. Which is why it has to be you who stops her. Promise me that if it comes down to you and Artemis, you’ll make the right choice.”
“We owe it to my grandma,” Rhys says. “You know she would have died to protect any of us. Even to protect Artemis.” He spits her name.
“Promise you’ll make the right choice,” Imogen repeats.
Artemis once made me promise the same thing. That I’d choose myself over her. I didn’t, and we nearly got a new hellmouth. I thought we’d averted the end of the world, but it feels like it quietly ended in the last few days and I didn’t notice until it was too late.
Artemis chose Honora and Sean over us. Artemis tried to kill Ruth. Artemis could have killed me. And Artemis took Leo. I can’t meet the pain and fury in Rhys’s eyes, or the weight in Imogen’s.
“I promise,” I whisper to the floor.
ARTEMIS
THEY HAD A CAGE ALL ready to go for him, but Leo is in no shape to run or fight. He can barely even stand. It hurts Artemis to look at him slumped in there. She always liked him. Admired him. Envied him, even.
But he should never have passed his Watcher test. He proved he would choose his mother over the world, or at
least over the Watchers. He knew what she was and he let her continue. Did he know what he was, even back in the days they trained together? He must have. He was always the most careful, the most precise. The most controlled. Because unlike the rest of them, his inner demons were literal. Does that make them easier to fight, though? When they have a name, a species, a neat little Latin classification?
Artemis’s own demons aren’t so easily defined. She can’t forget the look on Nina’s face as she pushed Artemis toward safety. Yes, Nina brought down the wall by trying to hit Artemis so hard even Artemis doesn’t know if she would have recovered, but Nina also shoved her out of harm’s way. And then Artemis left her there. Buried.
It’s gnawing at her, wriggling inside like an infection. Maybe she’s doing the wrong thing. Maybe she betrayed her sister and stole a friend and manipulated the only girl she’s ever loved and none of it will work out. She wasn’t chosen, after all. She never wins. Not really.
She looks away from Leo in the cage, focusing on her girlfriend, who’s checking the other cages in these caverns and marking down demonic inventory. “How’d you get him to go with you?” Artemis asks Honora.
Honora looks up from her pad. “Same way someone could make me willingly walk to my doom.” She looks back down, swallowing but keeping her expression light and disinterested. “Threaten the person I love most in the whole world.”
It’s the closest Honora has come to saying I love you. Neither of them has. Maybe neither of them is capable of it, after the ways they were raised. Maybe Artemis doesn’t deserve it and never will. Artemis’s throat aches, her eyes burn.
Her voice comes out a whisper so she won’t cry. “What if it’s the person you love most in the world who’s leading you to doom?”
“Then I would die like I wanted to live. Believing in her. Fighting at her side.”
Artemis wipes under her eyes. She will win. She has to. For Honora. For Nina. But most of all for herself, so she can be the person she needs to be to deserve any of this. To be strong enough to keep it. “For the record, I love you too.”
Honora closes her eyes. The look on her face is so raw and private that Artemis knows to turn away. To give Honora time alone to feel everything she needs to. Artemis just hopes they have enough time left.