The Cerulean (The Cerulean Duology #1) - Amy Ewing Page 0,22
around Lake Looten.
Leo could hear the clip-clop of horses’ hooves mixed with the puttering of car engines as they passed by on the street outside. The curtains in the library were closed. The curtains in the entire house were closed. It was supposed to keep out the heat, but all it did was make the air more stifling. Leo’s thick black curls were plastered to his forehead, and his shirt stuck to his chest in places. Even lounging on his favorite leather sofa was uncomfortable, the material sucking at his exposed skin. So instead he was sprawled across an overstuffed armchair, tossing a squash ball against the floor so that it bounced off the wall and back into his hand.
Thud, thump, smack. Thud, thump, smack.
He should be in his family’s summerhouse in the south, near Pearl Beach, having parties with his friends, swimming in the cool waters of the Adronic Ocean, and convincing the local girls to show him what was under their skirts. Not stuck in the brownstone on Creekwater Row, dying of heat and bored to tears. When his father announced that they would not be vacationing this summer, he had hoped it was because at long last, Xavier McLellan was going to bestow upon his only son the one thing Leo had wanted since he was a child—a place in the family business. But the days had stretched into weeks. August was nearly over, and Xavier showed no signs of including Leo in anything, business decisions or otherwise. Perhaps Leo should have expressed a desire to go to college, like Robert and his other friends. But he’d always thought—or maybe assumed—that Xavier was simply waiting until he was old enough, and now that Leo was eighteen, shouldn’t he be learning the ins and outs of the McLellan empire?
The ball ricocheted off a piece of molding and bounced out of Leo’s reach. It rolled under the couch, and he was too hot to get up and look for it. There was an open book on the table beside him—A Complete History of the Wars of the Islands, by Edward G. Bates. Leo skimmed a few pages. It was all politics, the trade deals that fell through and prices on imported goods from Pelago being jacked up as demand spiked—there had been droughts in Kaolin back then too, like there were now, and famine in the south, where overfishing had depleted the food supply from the Gulf of Windsor. Pelago had never suffered from the weather like Kaolin did; their waters were always plentiful, their soil always fruitful. Threats had been tossed back and forth between the president of Kaolin and the Triumvirate of Pelago until the inevitable breaking point, when Kaolin sent its fleet to attack the Pelagan armada. But it was the Pelagans who had won in the end.
Agnes had probably left the book out. It seemed like the boring sort of thing his sister would enjoy reading. And she was far more interested in the Pelagan side of their family than he was—too interested, if you asked him. It was almost as if she didn’t notice that their father, in addition to his famous freak shows, ran a chain of the most successful anti-Talman theaters in the country, producing plays that railed against the goddesses of Pelago. Xavier McLellan had only married their Pelagan mother for her money, and since she had died in childbirth, Leo felt that he was barely Pelagan at all. Even though, according to their Pelagan chauffeur, Eneas, he was her “spitting image,” with his fair skin and turquoise eyes. Well, Leo didn’t want to be her spitting image. The only comfort he got out of it was how much it clearly rankled Agnes, who looked like a female version of their father—brown skin, chestnut hair, eyes the color of cinnamon. For twins, they didn’t seem to have anything in common, from appearance to sensibility.
“Studying in the summer, are we?”
Leo jumped at the sound of his sister’s voice. She leaned in the doorway, a half-eaten apple in hand, her hair pulled up in a messy knot on the crown of her head. Leo closed the book with a dull thud.
“The Wars of the Islands, huh?” he said. “Better not let Father catch you reading about a Pelagan victory over Kaolin.”
Agnes shrugged and tried to look nonchalant, but Leo knew better. If there was one thing he and his sister had in common, it was a healthy fear of their father.