Seeking Crystal (29 page)

Crystal? Where are you?

I jumped as Xav’s angry voice rocketed through my head like a missile from a catapult.
I’m just getting a bit of fresh air.

Yeah, I got that. Phee told Yves and he woke me up. Where exactly are you?

Oh Xav, you aren’t going to be pleased with me.
My impulsive nature had run away with my good sense but
I couldn’t lie to my soulfinder. I let him glimpse my surroundings.

Silence.

Xav?

Yeah, I’m still here. Why have you done this, Crystal?

I’ve got to do something to save the girls. I’ve a plan.

Which you didn’t want to share with me?

No, because he would have stopped me.
It wasn’t like that.

Don’t fool yourself: it was exactly like that.

He was right. I would have gone ballistic if it had been me left behind while he waltzed off into danger.
Oh God,
I’m sorry.

Sorry don’t cut no ice with me right now. I thought it was going so well between us—that we were a team.

We are … !
He was so right to be cross but I couldn’t bear to think how I had hurt him.

That’s just bull, Crystal. You decided that you had to play the hero, risking half my soul, without even asking me what I thought. That isn’t team play.

The butler returned, showing no sign that he was surprised to find me with tears running down my face. ‘The contessa will see you now.’

I nodded and swiped at my cheeks with my cuff.
Got to go, Xav. I need to concentrate on what I’m going to say to her.

Xav was desperate now.
Please, don’t do this. Turn round. Get out of there. I’ll come get you.

It’s too late. I’m here now.

Anger rippled down our connection like an earth tremor.
Fine. Go ruin our life together with your idiotic plan! Don’t expect me to be waiting around for you when you get back. Maybe I have plans myself that I don’t want to share with you like, oh I don’t know, throwing myself into a shark pool.

I love you, Xav.

Don’t you dare say that! You don’t love me—not if you can do this to me.
He slammed the door shut on our link, leaving me bruised and hurting so much I could barely breathe.

‘Crystal, I must admit I am terribly surprised to see you back here.’ The countess was sitting by the fire, her feet up on a footstool. I felt in no fit state for this confrontation but I had to do it.

‘Will there be anything else, my lady?’ asked the butler.

‘Not for the moment, Alberto. Stay within call.’

He bowed and slid out of the room.

I bit the inside of my cheek, forcing myself to pay attention to the person in the library, not the angry soulfinder on the other side of the canal. ‘Contessa. Thank you for seeing me.’

She waved me to a seat opposite her. I sat down. She studied my face for a few moments. ‘An interesting tactic, coming here. Whatever do you mean by it?’

‘I want to make a bargain with you.’

She folded her hands in her lap. ‘What have you to bargain with? I would have thought it was clear we were going to fight this one to the death, so to speak. Intriguing choice: going public with that actor fellow. I had not expected that. But neither did I expect you to come here with what I think you regard as an olive branch, am I right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hmm. Do you want something to drink?’ She raised her hand to a little bell on the side table.

‘No, thank you.’

She let her hand fall. ‘Well then, tell me your bargain.’

I took a breath. ‘I’m a soulseeker. I am offering to find the partners of your son and grandchildren—your own if you care to look for him—if you tell me what you did to my sister and the other girls.’

Apart from a slight flare of surprise behind her dark eyes, she showed little reaction to my announcement. Instead, she arched her fingers together and said nothing.

What else could I say? ‘I understand that you are playing this game to make the damage even on both sides: disgrace for disgrace, loss for loss. What if I offer a prize that makes up for not depriving the Benedicts of their soulfinders—your family gaining theirs?’

I waited.

‘You really are much more interesting than I first thought,’ mused the contessa. ‘In a few years, when experience has mellowed you, you might even be a worthy opponent.’

Not the response I had anticipated. ‘I don’t think I understand you.’

‘No, you would not. There is so much you do not understand, standing on the brink of your gift like a child with its toes in the water, gazing at an ocean.’

‘But surely you want your children and grandchildren to be happy? This whole thing has been about your son—I’m sure you care for them.’ Even though you are an evil old bat, was the subtext.

She stroked one gnarled hand over the back of the other. ‘And you think that finding them their counterparts would make them happy?’

‘Yes?’ I wish that word had come out more as an assertion than a question.

She resettled herself in her seat, turning her body towards a portrait of a handsome man that hung beside the fireplace. He had the slicked-back hair and chiselled looks of a 1950s matinee idol. ‘I had a soulfinder once. My husband. He died.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘No, you are not.’ For the first time she showed real depth of emotion, squeezing the head of her walking stick and tapping it on the floor. ‘You don’t understand what that is like—losing the best part of yourself. Far better never to have known that happiness than to live with its loss for the rest of your life.’

‘If you know how painful it is, why are doing this to my family then?’ I couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to torture others with the same pain.

‘Oh the women aren’t suffering,’ she waved a disdainful hand in the air, ‘I’ve curtailed their connection to their partners, tidied it away so it won’t harm them again. Only the men are in pain—that is my revenge.’

‘But can’t you see that it is only a half life—if that—that the girls are living?’

‘You have no idea,’ she spat the words at me, ‘what a life lived in the presence of full, raw longing for something you can no longer have, what that does to you.’

I could guess: it would produce a bitter soul like the one sitting opposite me.

‘But isn’t it their choice to make, not yours?’

‘Rubbish. When one is a soulseeker, one makes that choice for others all the time. Why do you believe that you will be doing good for them?’

The recognition echoed through me like the siren for
acqua alta
. ‘What? Are you telling me that you’re a soulseeker too?’ It would explain so much.

‘Of course. We soulseekers are the only ones who have any power to manipulate soulfinder bonds. I thought you would have known that?’

She made me feel horribly ignorant. ‘I’ve only been one for a day. I don’t know much yet.’

‘You are fortunate. You have not had time to do any damage with your gift; it is not too late for you to turn back.’

‘But I want to make people happy—whole.’ I recalled the feeling I experienced when I was with Xav. Even arguing with him was being so much more, well,
technicolour
than the black-and-white emotions I had felt towards other boys. I couldn’t—wouldn’t give that up.

‘So what will you do when the Savant who comes to you for help has no soulfinder, thanks to death in accident, disease, or war? This is not an academic question—it will happen.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Or when the soulfinder has been so damaged by their upbringing, or perhaps suffers from some kind of mental illness that means they are impossible, even dangerous, to live with? Would you shackle a pair like that for life?’

‘I … I’m not sure. Is it my part to decide what a Savant does with the discovery?’

‘If you open the door, you are responsible for what comes through it. Do you have the courage to face that? You think you will be fulfilling dreams; maybe you are only ushering in a nightmare?’

She was chipping away at my certainty that my gift was a blessing; I had never been very confident and she had found my weakness and was exploiting it. Her points were worth considering, but not now, not when there was real suffering already happening, not this hypothetical sort. I realized she was distracting me from the main reason I had come here; I had to find a way of turning the tables.

‘I don’t know what I will do, contessa, but you can’t deny I had the courage to come here and face you. I don’t think I lack bravery.’

She inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘That’s what gives me hope for you.’

I thought about my mother and father; since his death, I had never once heard my mama lament knowing him. ‘But, please, answer me honestly: do you not remember anything good about your time with your soulfinder? Was it not worth knowing him even for the short period you had together?’

Her eyes hardened. ‘You dare to talk to me of Giuseppe so lightly? You cannot know—cannot understand.’ She clenched her fist against her chest. ‘You have no conception of what I suffered when he was murdered.’

A wave of pity swept through me. She had faced the worst. Death to illness was one thing; but someone else choosing to take a loved one from you another. Little wonder she was so bitter.

‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘I think you were probably more like me then than you realize. I have listened to you and I am hearing the words of someone who had hopes—illusions as you now think them. You loved him, I’m sure of that. And knowing your nature, I imagine you took your revenge for him.’

She smiled, a sour expression. ‘You’ve seen Alberto and my staff?’

I nodded.

‘They are the sons and relatives of the man who killed my husband. I disposed of Minotti himself first, naturally. He was supposed to have been our friend, but he betrayed us in the foulest way. You don’t know, Crystal, what it is like when there’s an argument between Savants, how it can run out of control.’

Actually, I did: that was what Diamond had dedicated her life to preventing.

‘My foolish husband and Minotti were vying for supremacy in northern Italy, business, as if that mattered! I warned them, but they carried on with the stupid battle. Minotti was losing his influence so he tampered with the brakes on Guiseppe’s car—he didn’t even have the gumption to challenge him to his face.’

‘That’s terrible.’ I needed no special power to know that the rest of the story was going to be ugly.

‘It was. My soulfinder went over a cliff on the road to Garda—his body broken and mangled—leaving me with a fatherless child and a righteous desire for vengeance. I swore my son would never know the same pain as I felt then. I found a new use for my soulseeker power; I found I could erase, reorder so that emotional links were broken. No one knew because they never remembered afterwards what I had done. Until you came along, that is.’

I had to say it, even if it angered her: the parallel was screamingly obvious to me. ‘So you tampered with your son’s brain as Alberto’s father did the brakes. You’ve done the same to your butler and staff. How is that just?’

‘No!’ she shrieked, thumping the floor again. ‘It is not the same. I have kept them from true harm.’

‘You haven’t let them live.’

‘Don’t you come in here, you ignorant child, and tell me you know better!’

My alarm grew as I felt her gathering herself for an attack. ‘I’m not. I’m telling you I think
you
know better. You’ve become like this Minotti, the person you hated for taking your soulfinder from you.’

‘How dare you!’

‘Your son committed crimes and when the Benedicts helped catch him, you have forced the car of their relationships off the cliff.’

‘No, this is not the same at all.’

‘And as for keeping Alberto and the others as your … your slaves, how can that be justified? It was the father, not the son, that harmed you. You are keeping life from them because your own died that day. Your motivation is like that of the dog in the manger—if I can’t have it, neither can anyone else!’

Her mental attack slammed into my head. I had my shields raised and they held. I kept telling myself that this was what I had come for: if she didn’t take my deal—and clearly she wouldn’t—I had to know how she turned her powers against her enemies, but it was excruciating. I felt as if I was standing by a jet engine running full blast with no covering for my ears to dull the roar. I tried to breathe through it. She surely couldn’t keep this up for ever?

Sweat trickled down my spine. I closed my eyes. I could feel her groping for my connection to Xav, seeking to yank it into her control, but her mental hook skittered off the walls I had built, grappling irons failing to catch on my battlements. That was how she worked: she reversed the soulseeker power; instead of following the connection she reeled it in, a spinner hoarding the thread so it could not be woven.