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Creon shrugged, and if I hadn't known better, if I hadn't seen him torture himself to insanity just to be anyone else than the male his father had been, I wouldn’t have looked for anything but proud amusement behind that shrug.
‘What?’ Agenor snapped.
‘When, according to you …’ I looked at Creon, waiting for a sign to stop me. He merely nodded, so I braced myself and blurted, ‘When would you say Kertayan died?’
Agenor’s eyes shot towards Creon. ‘Kertayan?’
Creon’s smile was just short of patronising.
‘Why in hell would that be—’
‘Agenor,when?’
‘Two months before Creon’s birth,’ Agenor said sharply, turning back to me, ‘at the hands of a group of vampire rebels, who were promptly executed in retaliation. Could you tell me what in hell this has to do with Korok, beyond the obvious?’
‘He lived until Creon was eight,’ I said.
For three, four heartbeats, nothing broke the silence except Naxi’s whispered, ‘Oooh.’
Lyn stared at me. Everyone else stared at Creon, who studied his nails with the bored look of an arrogant lord waiting for his subjects to stop nagging.
‘You never met him, did you?’ Agenor said, fear of the opposite oozing through every single word of that sentence.
Creon merely smiled at him.
‘But … How …’ I wasn’t sure what had shocked the Lord Protector of the Crimson Court more: his own ignorance of these new facts or the revelation that Creon had known his father after all, a father I suspected Agenor never mentioned for his own personal reasons. The bastard had been the one to take Korok’s place, after all. ‘Did he survive that meeting? Kertayan?’
Now the shield of the Silent Deathhadto waver, didn’t it? But Creon just shrugged, sighed, and slowly shook his head.
Isawthe pieces of the puzzle fall into all the wrong places in the eyes around me, saw every single one of them draw exactly the wrong conclusion: thatCreonhad been the one to kill his demon parent, had perhaps even been the one to initiate the confrontation. Only Naxi looked almost elated with sudden understanding.I don’t know what made him turn away from his kind so staunchly, she’d said months ago in Lyn’s library.
Now she knew.
‘Anyway,’ I said, dragging the conversation back to its starting point before anyone could start asking questions no one wanted to answer, ‘obviously the Mother knew about all of this. So if you didn’t’ – I shrugged apologetically at Agenor – ‘you may not have been as privy to her secrets as she made you think.’
He looked vaguely green in the face now. His gaze wandered to the black bargain gem at the inside of his wrist, that last mark my mother had left – enough to pull him from what may have been much, much more than an indifferent blind eye.
‘Well.’ Even his voice sounded nauseous. ‘I suppose I should get back home and look into my old notes to see if … if anything …’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said again.
‘Let us know if you find anything relevant,’ Lyn said, as usual better at finding the right words. I didn’t have any words left, staring at my father’s slumping wings. I just wanted to hug him, which was ridiculous, given that I’d never hugged him in my life and might give him a heart attack on top of everything else.
‘I’ll do that.’ His attempt at business-like determination was less than successful. ‘And I’ll have a word with the phoenix elders, if they’ll see me. I’ll …’ Again his sentence drifted off, the words sucked straight into that blackened crater next to us, straight into the pit of memories he couldn’t possibly reach anymore.
Not even Tared made any biting remarks this time.
‘I can fade you back to the Golden Court,’ Beyla said, stepping forward with a glance at Naxi. ‘Please don’t move that demon shield of yours anywhere until I’m back.’
Agenor grabbed her outstretched hand like a male dangling dangerously over the edge of a gaping ravine, and with a last flicker of light, the both of them were gone.
Chapter 7
Beylareturnedwithinminutes,fading safely into the shield of protection that Creon and Naxi kept up around us. The expression on her slender face was dark and hardly brightened as she shoved a handful of honey-glazed almonds into her mouth.
‘And?’ Tared said.
