Jack put two fingers to my mom’s neck, waited a few seconds—then shook his head. With two gentle fingers, he closed her eyes.
It was like he’d opened mine.
I blinked a few times and realized what I was seeing. My mother. Lying there, motionless. Like every other person affected by this virus around the room. Not hurt. Dead.
I was exploding.
My heart, my brain, my insides exploded in a shower of red and blood and gore. Like a gunshot to Mr. Emerson’s head. Like the blood all over my mom’s face. Like flashbulbs and glass and billows of thick dark smoke. It exploded, expanded, took up every part of me. The world was ending. And I was screaming, screaming, so loud I couldn’t hear myself, so loud it wasn’t real, the world wasn’t real, I wasn’t real.
And then it all fell around me, hardened. Lava congealed into rock.
I stood up. Slowly, carefully, I took off my blood-covered studded jacket, leaving the remarkably clean dress underneath. I laid it over my mom’s face—and then I turned around and walked away.
I vaguely heard voices, vaguely realized I’d been stopped, vaguely realized people were touching me. Someone was wrapping something around my shoulders. Someone else was cleaning my face with a napkin. They were talking, quietly. What does it mean if she wasn’t Circle? She must be and we just didn’t know. Did anyone see where Cole went? No.
The voices faded from my head.
My mom was gone. Mr. Emerson was gone. My own family had killed them.
No.
Stellan had been right back in Paris, in the very beginning. The Saxons were my blood, and I couldn’t change that. But they weren’t my family.
“Where’s Stellan?” I heard my own voice say.
He was right next to me. Jack was on my other side, and they both looked worried.
I could not possibly care less.
I turned to Stellan. “I’m going to stop them from doing this to anyone else. We’re going to stop them.”
Jack took my hand gently. “Avery—” I shook him off.
“She’s right,” Elodie said. “The virus works. And now they know it.”
“There’s a cure in the tomb,” Luc piped up. “We have to find it. We have to stop them.”
“No one else in the Circle can know about this,” Jack said. “Lydia and Cole are bad enough. If some of the families got wind of it, they’d be after Lydia and Cole for revenge, and who knows how it could escalate?”
I heard them, and I didn’t hear them. I still heard the screaming, muted. It could be me. I might always be screaming now.
“No.” I heard my own voice over the screaming, hollow. My eyes slowly focused, like I was moving through water. “We tell them.”
Everyone stopped, looked at me sideways.
“We tell everyone exactly what the Saxons have been doing, and what they have the potential to do now. We should have told them the second we found out.”
“It’ll be World War Three,” Jack said.
“If we don’t tell them, it could be the Black Death all over again,” Stellan countered.
“Some families will take their side, even knowing what they’ve done,” said Luc.
“And some won’t take their side. Some will want to choose another option.” Elodie’s voice cut through the din. They all looked at me. And at Stellan.
“Fine,” I said.
They all looked at one another again. A soothing hand on my back, caressing my hair. Colette.
Elodie took my arm, and then her face was close to mine, forcing me to look at her. “Listen. I know this is a very bad time. But we need you here with us, and to understand what we’re talking about. Can you do that, for just a little bit?”
I shook off the hands holding on to me, holding me up like I might fall over, trying to hold me together in one piece. “I know what I’m saying.”
“But that would mean—”
“I know what it means.” It meant the Circle wouldn’t accept what we said without some reassurances. More and more, I’d come to realize the most powerful people in the world just wanted someone to follow as much as anyone did. And I had to give it to them. Alistair’s voice back at their dinner table in London echoed through my head. As much as the mandate is about finding the tomb, it’s also about politics. And power. It’s about a united Circle, defeating all its enemies.
They’d have to be united behind me. Stellan had dropped into a folding chair, his head in his hands.
United behind us.
Someone shrieked from the hallway. Madame Dauphin dashed into the room, tears running down her cheeks.
Luc took a glance at me, then held out his arms to her. “Maman.”
Monsieur Dauphin followed, his broad shoulders filling the doorway. Behind him were guards, some of whom I remembered as Dauphin security. And behind them, the Fredericks from Cannes and some other familiar faces. More Circle. They came warily into the now-quiet room, surveying the damage.
“What was this? Lucien?” Monsieur Dauphin stalked into the room. I realized vaguely I should be afraid, remembering the last time I was near him, at Notre-Dame, while he was trying to force me into marriage.
Instead, I just glared at him. At all of them.
“Lucien,” Monsieur Dauphin repeated, and then he turned to Colette, the only other acceptable choice among our motley crew of staff and traitors. “I asked what happened here.”
Before Luc could speak, I did, from behind him. “The same people who have been killing your sons now have a biological weapon that could decimate the Circle. These are the results of a very small-scale experiment.”
The crowd whispered.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, a heart pounding against my back. Stellan’s hand slipped into mine. We stood in front of the people who had run his life for the past decade, and I could tell in a hollow way that he needed to hold on to me, so I let him.