I turned my attention to Elspeth. She still hadn’t told me our destination. She kept her eyes directed ahead, toward the road, and her expression was blank. But I sensed a difference in her. The edge of anxiety that had clung to her for the past several months had lessened. I didn’t catch that hint of sadness that had weighted her every gesture. I’d never had trouble reading Elspeth—and I didn’t have trouble understanding now. I finally clued in.
“You’re taking me to see Iris.”
She flicked a glance toward me. “Don’t be mad. She just wants to talk to you.”
I couldn’t exactly scold her for harboring her own sister, when I’d spent the past three months hiding Gideon. But that didn’t mean I was happy about it, either. I crossed my arms, leaning back against the seat. “She couldn’t use the phone?”
“She said you’d hang up on her.”
Well, she was right about that. “We already talked. My answer was no.”
“Hear her out, please.”
“Do you know what she wants?” I asked.
Elspeth didn’t answer immediately. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Yes. She told me. Can we wait to talk about this until we get there?”
“She also said she wanted my mother dead. Did she tell you that?”
“I’m sure she didn’t mean it.”
I snorted, but I didn’t respond. We lapsed into silence. I watched the rain roll down the windshield. Beyond, the Minneapolis skyline was cloaked in gray. Headlights slashed through the thick haze of moisture that shrouded the highway. We crossed the river and passed downtown, and then Elspeth exited and turned onto a frontage road. She parked in the lot of a run-down motel and ducked out of the car.
I sat there a moment, surveying my surroundings dubiously. The sidewalk ahead was full of potted plants and cigarette butts. The huge sign that rose above the building was missing a letter, or at least a light, so that it declared BLUE LOON MOTE to all the passing vehicles. The blue loon itself was nowhere in sight. It was the sort of motel you see in horror films and crime shows, where the cops open up the ice bin and find a corpse stuffed inside. Or the sort of motel where fugitives hole up on their way out of the country, I thought.
“I guess Iris must feel right at home here,” I muttered, stepping out into the rain. Elspeth shot me a look. “How are you paying for this?” I asked as she led me toward room number five.
“Grandmother’s credit card.” She pushed open the door, peeking inside. “Iris?”
Iris was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, eating cheese pizza and watching television. The ragged gray sweater and frayed skirt were gone. She appeared to be dressed in Elspeth’s clothing—a pair of pajama shorts and a black T-shirt that were both big on her, since Elspeth was nearly seven inches taller, and six months Beneath had rendered Iris’s already thin frame scrawny. She looked healthier than the last time I saw her, I noted. And definitely cleaner. Her silver hair had been pulled away from her face, and the dirt was gone from under her fingernails. Though her face was still drawn and gaunt, her eyes were once again their normal brown-gold. That was something of a relief, even if I wasn’t exactly pleased to see her.
Elspeth flicked on a light, closing the door behind us. I walked across the room and seated myself at a chair near the window, while Elspeth pulled herself onto the bed beside Iris. I glanced around. There were a few pieces of luggage leaning against the wall, more of Elspeth’s clothing spilling out of them, and on the table were several items I recognized from Iris’s room in St. Paul. Elspeth must have brought her what remained of her belongings. I wondered if she really was planning to smuggle her out of the country—or at least out of the Circle.
Iris set her piece of pizza back in the box, closed the lid, and shoved it at Elspeth. “Here. Put on some weight.”
“It’s your fault she lost it,” I said.
“Audrey,” Elspeth sighed.
Iris twisted Patrick Tigue’s ring around her thumb for a moment before looking toward me. In the meager light from the hotel lamps, her eyes had a hard glitter. “You let Verrick get unsealed.”
“There was no let involved.”
“You were supposed to kill him.”
“No, you told me to kill him,” I said. The chair I sat on wasn’t upholstered, and the rim of the seat dug into my legs. I pushed the chair backward, against the window, where I could hear the rain slap against the glass. I met Iris’s look coolly. “I didn’t agree to it, if you remember.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I tell you the entire Kin is about to be annihilated and the only way to stop it is to kill Verrick, and you say no. What kind of stupid are you?”
“The kind that doesn’t believe you.”
“I spoke to Daniel,” Elspeth interjected. She’d set the pizza box aside and scooted across the bed so that her back touched the wall. A slender lock of black hair had come loose from her ponytail and curved around her jaw. “I asked him about Val’s visions, about the end of the Kin. He told me she didn’t just see one future. She saw two.” He’d apparently kept his belief that I was the one to determine it to himself, however, since Elspeth didn’t mention it. She just said, “It can be prevented, Audrey.”
I didn’t answer. The end of the Kin, I thought, remembering the night Drew had stood in my house and whispered the name of Valerie. He’d told us of Val’s vision, and for a moment everything had come to a standstill. I hadn’t just heard his words; I’d felt them. Physically. They’d frozen the air in my lungs. Images had played out before me: Harrowers clawing through city streets under a sky awash in crimson; shadows curling up from the earth; the Astral Circle bleeding into nothing. Everything dark.
But somehow, the words had lost their hold on me. “The end of the Kin,” I repeated. I clasped my elbows with my hands. Visions were often wrong, I reminded myself. Open to interpretation. And Val had seen a Harrowing; she hadn’t seen Gideon. Whatever future she’d witnessed, this wasn’t it. I hoped. “That isn’t going to happen,” I said.
“It is unless you stop Verrick,” Iris said.
I ignored her, turning an accusing glare on Elspeth. “You liked Gideon,” I said. “Remember? You danced with him at the Drought and Deluge.” If I closed my eyes, I could see it again—her blue dress, the smile she’d given him. “How can you just agree I should kill him?”
She looked away. “I didn’t know what he was.”
Iris gave one of her raspy laughs and smirked at her sister. “Guess it runs in the family.”
I ignored that, too. “What he is is my friend. My family. Would you kill Iris if Esther told you to?”
Elspeth raised her chin. “If the fate of the world depended on it.”
“First of all, no you wouldn’t,” I retorted. I knew Elspeth well enough to know that. “You wouldn’t be hiding Iris here and feeding her pizza if that were in any way true. And there is no fate. The future isn’t fixed.”
“Ugh. Don’t quote Grandmother,” Iris groaned. “Would you please use your brain, Audrey? You know what’s happening. You can feel it. The Beneath is gaining in power. Did you happen to notice the sky?”
“Yeah, it’s raining. Alert the media.”
“The stars. Red stars, Audrey.”
That got my attention. I remembered the crimson glow I’d seen in the night sky, the scattering of stars that had gleamed before my eyes and then abruptly vanished. I hadn’t imagined it, then. I hunched my shoulders. “I’ve seen them,” I said.
“The Beneath is leaking through. It’s getting closer and closer to breaching the Circle entirely. It’s been feeding off the Kin it kills. Gaining strength.”