Counting Shadows (Duplicity)

alone now.”
    “You don’t have to go.”
    He glances to me, and then to the vambrace around his wrist. His gaze changes to a glare. “I want to go.”
    “I’m sorry.” It’s the third time I’ve apologized, and I want to kick myself.
    “Stop looking for Asair,” he says, ignoring me. “You’ll get yourself killed.” He strides out of the room, shoulders stiff.
    I sigh and watch him retreat. Light filters in through the bedroom windows, turning the stone floor a reddish color, and I can’t help but to think of Lor’s eyes.
    And the eyes of the men from my visions.

Twenty-One
    Lor’s footsteps retreat, and I press my face into my pillow.
    “It’s not possible.”
    I close my eyes and repeat the words to myself,
seven, eight, nine
times.
    “It’s not possible.”
    Ten.
    “It’s not possible.”
    Eleven.
    There’s a pause as my scrambling mind forgets the next number. I take a shuddering breath, and suddenly remember. Twelve. The next number is twelve. I open my mouth to repeat it again, but something else comes out, so quiet I’m not sure if I really said it.
    “I killed them.”

Part Three

Twenty-Two
    Three days pass. Or at least I
think
it’s three days. Farren never comes to visit, and I walk around in a daze, absently filling my days with reading and people-watching from the balcony. I try to distract myself by sketching, but my drawings all turn out dark and misshaped, and I quickly give up.
    Lor slowly grows furious as he can’t get the vambrace off, and finds me too dazed to help him. He demands answers about the vambrace: Would it really kill him if he took it off?
Yes.
But how can the magic in the vambraces have lasted for centuries?
I don’t know.
But you’re sure it can really kill?
Yes.
After that, I stop answering his questions and retreat into silence.
    By the third day, he glares at me every time I pass him, and I have to make an effort to feel regret. To feel
anything
. I know I should ask more questions about Asair, but I’m too numb to even try. I wouldn’t be able to hear what he said, anyway. The only words in my head is what Lor told me a few days ago:
    ‘I don’t think the Unknown even exists.’
    He has to be right. I tell myself that over and over again, until the words start to bleed together and sound like gibberish.
    “You’ve been staring at that book for two hours,” Lor says, breaking into my thoughts. He’s resting on the couch across the room, his muscular frame taking up every inch of it. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks.
    “Is that a problem?” I sit in the floral-pattern chair, close to the fireplace. The fire isn’t really necessary, since it’s late morning, but I feel cold all over and can’t seem to get close enough to the flames.
    “Okay, let me rephrase that. You’ve been staring at the
same page
for two hours.”
    I glance down at my book—it’s about gardening, the farthest subject from mythology I could think of—and examine the page it’s open to. I don’t recognize any of the words, but I also can’t remember turning the page recently.
    He sighs. “What’s going on, princess?”
    “Who says anything is going on?”
    “What? Are you trying to tell me that you regularly spend two hours reading one page?”
    I peer over the book and glare at him. He meets it with his own glare, the one that hasn’t left his expression for the past three days.
    “Why do you care if anything is wrong?” I ask.
    A small smirk pulls at the corner of his lip. “I never said anything was wrong. But you just did.”
    I curse, not even bothering to keep quiet. I should have seen that one coming.
    “You seem disturbed,” he says.
    “That’s not the most flattering adjective you could have used,” I grumble.
    “Why would I want to flatter
you
?”
    His words break through the numbness and leave a small prick of pain. I shake my head, trying to get rid of it, knowing there’s no reason I should care what he thinks about me.
    There’s an awkward silence, and then Lor says, “Look, I just want to know what’s going on with you. You look like you just saw a ghost.”
    I laugh a little without meaning to. Ghosts don’t compare to what I see every time I catch my own reflection.
    A monster.
    A killer.
    “It’s nothing,” I mumble. “Really.”
    Lor tilts his head to the side and softens his gaze into a searching stare. “Do you know that you have a tell?”
    “What?”
    “You have a tell. When you’re lying, I mean. You say