Chapter 2 Two Weeks Of Absolute Misery

Lirael's POV

If someone had told me two weeks ago that my life could get worse, I would have laughed at them.

I was powerless in a family of witches. I lived in the Under district of Ebonveil, in a house that leaked when it rained and creaked when it didn't. My sister was brilliant and half mad and shared every opinion she had about my intelligence without being asked. I hunted game for coin because I had no magic to sell, and most days I counted myself lucky if nothing went wrong before noon.

That was my life before. And I had the nerve to think it was bad.

Two weeks had passed since Chaos knocked on our door, looked between me and Seraphina like we were mildly interesting problems, and asked which one of us had run into his brother. Two weeks since he had pointed at Seraphina when she opened her mouth to answer and said, simply, "You. You'll do," and decided, apparently, to make her his personal entertainment.

He came every day. Sometimes twice. He never announced himself, never knocked again after that first time, just appeared in whatever room Seraphina happened to be in and started talking. He moved things without touching them. He unraveled her spells mid-cast just to watch her face. Once he switched every labeled jar in her workroom so she spent an entire afternoon trying to figure out why her clarity tincture smelled like river mud. She had screamed so loud the neighbor's dog didn't stop barking until morning.

Seraphina, who had always been the composed one, the sharp one, the one who had an answer for everything and delivered it like a blade, was unraveling at the edges. Her hair was always slightly wrong now, like she kept forgetting to finish whatever she'd started doing with it. She muttered under her breath constantly. She'd started sleeping with a ward stone under her pillow, which would have been more reassuring if Chaos hadn't started leaving them on her windowsill as a joke.

Part of me felt guilty that his attentions had landed on her and not me.

The much larger part of me was dealing with my own problem.

Something was following me.

I hadn't seen it. I hadn't heard it, not exactly. It was more like a pressure, a shift in the air around me that had no business being there, the same way that night with the Fallen Seraph had felt, that sense of a presence so large it displaced something. Except this followed me. Into the market. Into the forest when I went to hunt. Into my own room at night when I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and tried to convince myself I was imagining it.

I was not imagining it.

The proof was in the disasters that trailed behind it. Three days after Chaos's visit, I went hunting up in the hill country past the eastern gate. I had my rifle up, game in my sights, and then that feeling came, that pressure settling over the back of my neck like a cold hand, and when I looked down my rifle was pointed directly at my own face. I had adjusted it without realizing. My finger was already on the trigger.

I put the gun down and sat in the grass for a long time after that.

A week in, my room caught fire. Not the whole room, just a corner of it, the curtain going up fast while I was asleep, and I woke to the smell of smoke and the heat already close. I got it out. But my hands shook for the rest of the day and I kept checking the corners of every room I walked into like something might be smoldering there too.

I slipped on the hill path four days ago and rolled halfway down before a root caught me. My palms still had the scrapes to prove it. Two days ago, a merchant's cart lost a wheel in the street just as I was passing, and the crates it was carrying had come down close enough that one had clipped my shoulder.

I had stopped going out unless I had to. Then I had yelled at the empty air in my room one night, told whatever was there to leave me alone, felt immediately ridiculous, and then lay down and pulled my blanket over my head like that would help.

It had not helped.

So when Seraphina stormed into my room on the fourteenth night with her hair coming loose from its braid and her eyes doing that wide, too-bright thing they did when she had been thinking too hard for too long, I was already sitting up. I had heard her pacing the hall.

She stood in my doorway and said, "I have to kill him."

I looked at her. "Kill who."

"Chaos." She said it the way she said most things, like the word itself was proof the idea was obvious and I was slow for needing it explained. "I found a spell. I can make him disappear, unmake him, pull him apart at whatever passes for his seams. But I need enough spiritual energy to cast it and I can only get that at the manor."

I waited, because there was clearly more.

"You're going to get us inside."

My mouth opened. Then closed. "How exactly am I supposed to do that."

"You go to the manor and ask for work. Maid, scribe, kitchen help, anything that gets you through the door. You keep whoever receives you occupied, and while you do that I'll slip past the wards and find a place to cast." She crossed her arms. "The security isn't heavy. Xalric guards the estate himself, everyone knows that. We just need the door open."

"Why can't you cast it here when he shows up tomorrow?"

"Because I need the spiritual concentration that place holds. Two centuries of prayers and death rites and soul harvests have soaked into those walls. I can't replicate that from our living room, Lirael."

I almost said it was the most unhinged plan I had ever heard. Then I remembered she knew about my encounter with the Fallen Seraph, because I had made the mistake of telling her, and I watched her use it now without a flicker of hesitation.

"He already saw you and let you go," she said. "You told me yourself. He said you weren't worth taking."

"That's a generous summary of what happened."

"You're powerless. You're no threat to him. You walk in, you ask for work, and he'll either dismiss you or humor you, and either way I'll have enough time." She tilted her head. "Unless you want to keep living like this."

I thought about my rifle pointed at my own face. I thought about the curtain burning. I thought about the way that pressure followed me everywhere now, patient and invisible and completely unbothered by my yelling at it.

"Fine," I said.

The manor was easier to get into than it had any right to be.

A guard received me at the outer gate, looked me over, and led me inside without much ceremony. I kept waiting for something to go wrong, some alarm or ward that would flare the moment I crossed the threshold, but nothing happened. The halls were quiet and vast and lit by orbs of pale light that drifted at ceiling height like they had somewhere to be but weren't in a hurry. Seraphina had peeled off the moment the guard's back was turned. I hadn't looked to see where she went.

The waiting room they put me in had one chair and no windows. I sat and folded my hands in my lap and rehearsed what I was going to say.

Then the door opened.

I had seen part of his face in the dark, in the fog, for about thirty seconds while I was busy panicking. I had not been prepared for the rest of him. He was tall in a way that made the doorframe seem like an afterthought, and his hair fell loose past his jaw, dark and straight. Tattoos ran up his neck and over his knuckles, patterns I couldn't read from here but that seemed to move slightly when the light hit them. His eyes were silver. Not grey, not pale, but genuinely silver, lit from somewhere behind them, and they landed on me with the calm focus of someone who had already decided what they thought and was waiting to be proven right.

That pull came immediately. Like something in my chest recognizing something in him, reaching toward him without my permission. I pressed my feet flat to the floor and told myself it was nerves.

"You're here for the job?" he asked.

His voice was exactly as I remembered it. Quiet and everywhere at once.

I opened my mouth to give him the answer I had rehearsed in that chair for the last ten minutes.

Nothing came out.