I froze, remembering the tea Gerard had given me.
“He even laced the candles in these women’s rooms with oil ofBrugmansia.” He glanced at me as if knowing I wouldn’t understand. “It’s a trumpetlike flower. Very poisonous.”
“Their candles,” I echoed. “He put poison in their candles?”
Julien nodded.
“And these flowers…what color are they?”
“They come in a variety of shades,” Julien said. “Yellows, whites, even oranges. But the most powerful of them are a deep pink—much like those candles over there.” With a grimace, he gestured to a series of unlit tapers gracing a sideboard. “Don’t even think about lighting those, Viktor.”
They were the same shade as the pink candles in that cursed nursery. The hallway outside my quarters. Resting beside my bed.
Who knows how long I’d been breathing in their poison.
Gerard had been drugging me, ever since I’d arrived. Lulling me into a state of complacency. Compliancy. Numbing me so I didn’t notice all of the strange things within the manor that weren’t right.
Viktor clicked his tongue thoughtfully, unaware of my discomfort. “Why would Father be giving babies hallucinogens?”
Julien pursed his lips, musing. “Perhaps to ensure they’d be born in a perpetual state of seeing…things.”
“Ghosts?” I whispered hopefully.
“Gods.”
A chill ran down my back.
Viktor sat on the edge of the desk, his second glass nearly empty. “The gods are everywhere. Why go to such complicated lengths to communicate with them?”
Julien set down the papers, musing. “There are many who don’t travel between the worlds anymore, the ones deep in the Sanctum. The forgotten ones.”
When I was a child, Annaleigh’s husband, Cassius, loved to terrify me with stories of those fallen deities, the Denizens, so long unremembered they’d grown shapeless and too large, morphed into hulking beasts of clay and hungry maws. “I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to speak to them.”
Viktor chewed on the inside of his cheek. “Maybe Father wants to hear whattheyhave to say.”
Julien glanced to Viktor. “Did you find anything about it in the diary?”
Remembering it had fallen under my chair, I reached down to pull it out.
“Ver, don’t!” Viktor warned, grabbing for it. His movements were slower than they should be, his accuracy impaired by the spirits.
But I had the journal open, already scanning the pages. Unlike the notes filed in the folders, this book was written in Arcannian. I understood it all.
“Oh.”
There, scrawled out in Gerard’s tiny handwriting and favored evergreen ink, was my name.
My name, written out across the page three times.
Partnered in three combinations.
Again, three.
Always, three.
A small part of me had held out the impossible hope that Julien’s theories were wrong, that it was all some terrible and unlucky coincidence that I found myself here, with this family, in this situation.
But there it was, the unmistakable proof.
