Lying Liars Who Don't Tell The Truth

Chapter Ten

Azhar — I called him Azhar now — drove me home, but the ride was in near complete silence. The decision to send me back to live with the Abaras and join Azhar as a double-agent for the Revels was made without my input. Even if I had the energy to fight Amar on it, I knew I didn't have a leg to stand on. It had been Azhar's idea, apparently. I guessed he never mentioned to Amar our fight at the school, which seemed now to have happened ages ago. The only time Azhar bothered to speak to me was just as he pulled up to the Abara home and turned off the ignition of his car.

"Don't do anything stupid," he said gravely as we sat in the driveway. Neither of us seemed particularly excited about the prospect of getting out of the car and walking inside the house. I still wasn't sure I had the strength.

I had all but given up on deciphering Azhar's feelings toward this new development. I felt nothing toward him, really. I felt nothing toward anything. Was this the carnal bliss of villainy?

Before either of us gathered the courage to open our doors back into the world, the front door of the Abara house opened and Gallem came barreling toward us. I knew she hadn't changed, but for some reason her frizzy hair and round face looked different to me. Azhar cracked open his door just as she arrived to yank it the rest of the way open. "Where is Cora, is she okay? Where's Ignius?"

Ansel was next through the door, running barefoot down the stone steps, across the grass and toward the car.

Azhar said, "Cora is okay. She's with me."

I assumed Azhar had a cover story planned out. I took a shred of comfort in knowing that I wouldn't have to conjure up this lie.

Ansel was the one who yanked open my door and enveloped me in a sweaty, desperate hug. "Oh Cora, we were so worried," he said into my hair as he began unfastening my seat belt and pulling me out of the car. Is this how it was going to be from now on? Men doting at my side, treating me like a wounded bird?

With Ansel at my side, the two of us shuffled over to the house where Naja was waiting, her face peeking from behind Squid, who appeared to be blocking her inside the house. As soon as I crossed the threshold with Ansel, Naja too wrapped her arms around me and began sobbing, choking through ragged breaths about how worried she had been about me. Apparently unable to hold himself back, I felt Ansel wrap himself around us both and together they held me tightly, blissfully unaware of the monster they had just wittingly invited back into their home.

Would I kill Naja, too?

From then on, there was a constant overlap of voices droning through the home, asking and answering a thousand questions. I should have paid closer attention to the story Azhar was retelling, but sitting on the Abara's living room couch, wrapped in a quilt with a glass of warm lemon water in my hands, Naja and Ansel seated on either side of me, I couldn't bring myself to focus. I appeared to have lost all self control.

The bits I gathered weren't surprising in the slightest; not after the thousand other surprises from the night. Azhar explained how I had come to his classroom for detention and the two of us had gotten into a spat that quickly turned violent, though I didn't pay attention to the finer details of our invented argument. Who, in this version, attacked first? Had it ended in the same brutal manner? If ignoring the details of this fight was going to prove a fatal mistake later, I certainly didn't care now.

I ended up on the street, walking home alone, and was attacked by Revels. I was brought to the Revellion Manor — did Gallem know about the manor? — and was tortured for a good long while for information. What kind of information? Did I give anything up? Two questions I heard posed, both answers I ignored. No one seemed hostile toward me, so I suppose this version of Cora actually had a backbone. Keen.