Page 63 of These Immortal Truths
Time has exposed her to so many horrors, but what she’s overheard about the Whitechapel murders is grotesque. Something out of a nightmare.
Khiran frowns, finger tapping against the china. “I’ll look into it.”
Her eyes snap to him, surprised. “I’m sincerely beginning to question your definition of meddling.”
The tea cup is brought to his lips, but he doesn’t return her gaze. “I told you. Iinfluence.”
“And yet, you’ve never explained the difference.”
The sigh he gives is grumbling. “I can’t accost the murderer myself, but there is nothing to stop me from tipping off someonewho can.” He meets her eyes. “I can give a man a gun, but only he can pull the trigger.”
Her brow furrows. She understands the analogy, but … “But in Louisiana—”
“Was different,” he says, cutting her off. The edge of his voice is sharp, a clear indication that she should drop it and move on.
Anna doesn’t heed the warning, but she does tread carefully—choosing her words with consideration. “Why?” she murmurs, anticipation weighing on her chest. She has a suspicion, one she’ll never voice, but she wants to hear it from him. “Why was it different?”
A sigh leaves him, steeped in resignation. “Because it wasn’t a mortal’s life I was meddling in, Anna. It wasyours.”
She sucks in a breath; the dango forgotten in her hand. The syrup runs down the stick, coating the tips of her fingers. She’s too busy struggling to understand to bother cleaning it away. “But it’s still—”
“It’s a gray area.” He takes the dango from her hand, helps himself to the last morsel, before vanishing the evidence and providing her a handkerchief. “Or perhaps more of a loophole. That sad excuse for a man put himself at my mercy the moment he knocked on your door. He left his protection behind the moment he stepped through the threshold and set foot in the home of a god. If it weren’t a risk to his shepherding, I’m certain Silas would have wiped the world of that human stain himself.”
Anna wipes the syrup from her fingers distractedly. She can’t imagine that side of Silas—a side that would take a life in place of ferrying it off to safety—but she can’t bring herself to doubt the truth of Khiran’s words either. She has held the life of many in her hands, but that night she would have just as easily snuffed Mr. Abel’s life out without a single regret in her heart.
He pries the handkerchief from her hands, easing her bloodless fingers from the fabric. Anna hadn’t even realized she had been twisting it so tightly. “You are an extension of myself and my magic. There will never be a time where I hesitate to defend you.”
Anna releases a shaky breath; wishes the face she stared into was the one she was most familiar with. The rouged cheeks, the daintylips and blonde hair, looks wrong on him when she knows it’s not the face he prefers.
His nose wrinkles, entirely unladylike. “Why are you looking at me that way?”
“Nothing. Just … sometimes you still surprise me.”
Brow rising, his head tilts. “How so?”
“A few centuries ago, you would have given me the vaguest possible answer imaginable, and expected me to be happy with it.”
Khiran scoffs, but there’s laughter in his eyes. “A few centuries ago, you would have been.”
He’s not wrong, but he’s not entirely right, either. It wasn’t that she was content to be left in the dark, it’s that she was too afraid of what answers might be hiding there. Too scared to shine a light on what could be a monster contently lurking in the shadows. Time has stripped her of those fears; shown her so many horrors under the light that she’s no longer afraid of the dark.
Khiran’s head tilts, his eyes glancing to the door. Anna can just make out the sound of a child’s steps when he tips his chin in farewell and disappears.
Seth comes in, his cheeks flushed and mouth pursed. A sure sign that his piano lessons have gone just as terribly as they both expected. Anna winces in sympathy. “Would you like a bit of reading before we start our lessons?”
It’s the same offer she always gives him when he returns to her care with tensions high. A moment to himself, an opportunity to escape into another world before he has to return to the monotony of the real one.
A tense nod, and he heads towards the bookcase. Walt Whitman’sLeaves of Grasshas been a favorite lately, no doubt encouraged by his mother’s love and talent for poetry. He pulls two from the shelf—Whitman for himself and Austen’sPride and Prejudicefor her.
She offers him a grateful smile, her fingers brushing his as she moves to accept the book. He recoils before she can take it, his nose wrinkled in confused disgust. “Miss Anna, your fingers are frightfully sticky.”
He’s right, of course. The syrup from the dango still sticks to herskin. Seth holds the book to his chest, protecting it from her soiled fingers. She can’t manage to drum up any feelings of offense when she has scolded him for touching the bindings with his own sticky hands.
Over the next months, the Whitechapel murders come to a quick, unexpected end.
They still don’t know the real identity of the man the papers and the public dubbed Jack the Ripper, still don’t know if he runs free or if he met his own untimely end.
Anna is never quite sure if Khiran had something to do with it or not.
