Page 75 of A Serpent in the Garden

You would. There’s so little left to the imagination. I tied off the braid as the Frost guard waiting by the door cleared his throat ostentatiously to hurry me along.

Can you unbutton that a little bit? Remy asked, my eyes on my chest.

I gave my reflection a tired look.

I’m not hoping for a better view, he insisted. I want you to wedge a blade in there. You won’t be able to wear one at your hip and the thought of being out on the grounds without one doesn’t sit well.

Throwing myself another suspicious look, I unfastened the first few buttons, exposing the swell of my chest, and wedged one of his many sheathed blades littering the washroom counter between my breasts.

Thank you, he said, mollified yet prickly as I did up the buttons with one hand. You’re so determined to think the worst of me.

A new wave of damned souls crowded the antechamber, though they seemed interchangeable from the last. I averted my eyes so I didn’t see much but flouncing skirts, heeled boots of fine leather, and gnarled, dirty toes, but their piteous moaning wormed into my ears. I was careful where I set my feet this time so I didn’t slip on the blanket of coins.

Probably about time they started sweeping them up, isn’t it? I said, slipping out of the gate the Frost guard held open for me.

That happy job will probably fall to me, if my Mother ever lets me out.

The sky was a moonstone stretch of cloud. Hellhounds paced everywhere, the air humming with their low and constant growling as they moved around the meadow. I felt his anticipation ratcheting higher as Remy swung my gaze about, searching out his sister from between furry legs and lashing tails.

She was easy to spot, a bright spatter of starlight sitting cross-legged on the greenest section of grass. She looked like a tiny deity, celestial, as though her true home was the night sky back in Frost. A hound sat beside her as if it feared for her safety, its entire immense body rising and falling with every breath as it gazed off toward the silent wood. It whipped around at my approach, its great black face dipping so it caught my gaze in its furious stare, though it did nothing more than give me a mighty sniff and turn back toward the wood.

My arms were around Jessa in a heartbeat, my lips against her cold forehead, but it was she who spoke first, pulling away to get a better look at me as I sunk down beside her.

“I missed you,” she said with childlike simplicity, her cheeks flushed with frost.

He held her face in my hands as if he wasn’t quite sure she was real. “I missed you. I didn’t—” he broke off, swallowing the boulder in my throat, jittery and dazed in equal measure. “I didn’t think you’d remember me. You were so young when I left.”

“I thought you didn’t remember me,” she said, a delicate accusation in her voice. “You were gone so long I started to think I’d made you up.”

I felt something in my—his?—heart crack open. “I thought about you every day. I could never forget you.”

I suppose it hadn’t hit me until right then, when the mere sight of this child turned him nervy and disordered, that his anger and black moods, the storms of temper six years ago, had not been just fury that he’d been unceremoniously stuck with a human stranger but grief at having lost his family. I felt silly it hadn’t occurred to me before, but I’d never thought of demons as having a family, let alone feelings other than spurts of explosive rage.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing while I was gone,” he said.

She told him about lessons (excruciatingly dull) and loneliness (I gathered that Frost demons had trouble conceiving and the circle had few children her age), how she wasn’t allowed to venture past the meadow. “You did all the time,” she groused. “Valic told me. I don’t see why I shouldn’t.”

“I had five older brothers who taught me how to sneak around.” He was petting her like a cat, smoothing the hair falling loose against her back. “I’d come home soaking wet and filthy. Mud all over the snow in Frost like a path leading straight to my bedroom. Mother was permanently furious with me. I’m surprised she didn’t get rid of me sooner.”

“She said you had to go somewhere to learn a lesson.”

He laughed, unamused, but said nothing, letting my gaze drift toward the cliff bank rippling with grass.

“Did you?” When he looked back at her, she was looking up at me, frail yet intense, a forbidding gleam in her eyes. Shrewdness shimmered around her like an aura. “Or will she send you away again?”

He ground my teeth together. “Lesson received. I’m not going anywhere.” And it may not have been an outright lie, but I could feel it wasn’t quite the truth.

Jessa looked relieved by the answer. She ran a light finger over the rim of my ear, frank curiosity wreathing her fine little features. “Was it very strange, suddenly becoming a girl?”

“I’m not a girl,” he said, as if he didn’t know whether to laugh or not. “She’s a girl. I’m who I always was.”

“Well, you look like a girl.”

“Hopefully not for much longer.”

Jessa leaned into me in a limp, sleepy heap, like a puppy. “She’s your friend, though, isn’t she?”

“I think so. When she’s not finding me incorrigible.”