Page 60 of Daughter of the Dark

It was a gentle tide. A soothing embrace. After a moment, the boy’s chest stopped rising, and then the tension melted from his body, life gone with one long, last exhale.

When Reyes turned to find her, she saw the guilt and grief in the press of his mouth and the tick of his jaw. A kind of understanding that she had never been given before.

He had used his gift to give that boy a merciful death. A blessed release.

Never had she felt more seen.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Solana reluctantly agreed to a meeting in the library, where Cora was the one pacing the floor. Nikolas sat in a high-backed chair with a leg slung over the arm and yawned several times in a row. Oskar, calm and patient, perched on the other arm, and Suri, abrasive as ever, leaned against a table with her arms crossed over her chest. Reyes stood in front of the door, blocking Solana’s only exit as if to say she wouldn’t need it.

“An explanation would be nice,” Suri said. “I left my bed way too early for this.”

“There’s something important we need to discuss. As a team,” Reyes said.

He glanced at Solana, and she sighed loudly. Might as well get it over with as fast as possible. “My father is Masimu Quispe, the traitor of Supay.” She expected gasps of outrage, but none came. Perhaps they hadn’t heard her properly. “The man who betrayed the king and ushered in the death of—”

“We know who he is,” Nikolas reassured her. “Just don’t understand what that”—he gestured to the whole of the room—“has to do with this.”

“You don’t care that I’m the daughter of the man who breached the underworld and let in hordes of demons that terrorize the cities to this day?”

“How old were you when that happened?” Everyone turned to Reyes, but his attention was fixed on her, implication heavy in the curve of his brow and the line of his mouth. When she didn’t respond, he said, “Answer the question, Solana.”

“I was seven,” she offered grudgingly. In her mind, she should have been the first to see it coming. Masimu was her father, after all. She spent all her time with him and worshipped the ground he walked on. She tried to read his books and asked all the questions and listened to every answer. She wanted to be just like him when she grew up.

“You were a child who barely knew her own mind,” Reyes said. “No one can expect you to have known the mind of your father and hold you accountable for his wrongs.”

“You have plenty of your own wrongs we can hold you accountable for,” Suri added.

Solana gave her a bland smile. “I thought you wanted nothing to do with me.”

Suri shrugged. “That’s because I didn’t trust you.”

“And now you do?”

“I distrust you less than I did before.”

Oskar’s hands began to move before Solana could respond. Nikolas was right. Why are we here? he asked.

All eyes were on her, waiting for an explanation. This thing she could do, the possibilities she held, they were no longer solely her own. They had never been. The thought was more of a comfort than she expected.

She pulled her dagger out of its sheath and gingerly placed it on the table. The cool metal gleamed in the low light. “Those stones were made with my blood,” she said, pointing at the crimson himaya. “And whenever I kill muki with this dagger, I can feel it being released from the curse. A true death. I need to figure out a way to do that but on a much larger scale, and without killing anyone. Ideally.”

“You can … feel the curse?” Suri’s brow pinched in thought. “Can you feel it in us, right now?”

Solana shook her head. “No,” she answered regretfully. “I can only feel it when I kill.”

Nikolas strolled closer and eyed the blade. “What would happen if you killed one of us with it?”

With a snort, Solana crossed her arms and faced him. “I don’t know, Nikolas. Maybe we should find out.”

“Maybe we should,” he fired back. There was no amusement in his usually mirthful eyes. Only a cool calculation that made Solana question everything she thought she knew about him.

“You can’t be serious. That’s—”

“A great idea,” Cora interrupted. Everyone whipped around to stare at her while she pushed off the desk and walked toward the dagger. “Maybe it would give you a better idea of what the curse feels like, and how to undo it. Reyes will be here to heal him,” she said, gesturing at Reyes still by the door.

“I can’t raise someone from the dead, Cora.”