The Cerulean (The Cerulean Duology #1) - Amy Ewing Page 0,70

had she given herself the answer? Humans and Cerulean were similar in physicality. They spoke in words, not colors or hums. The difference was their coloring and the magic in Sera’s blood. Could she blood bond with Agnes? Sera did not know if her magic alone would be enough to let this human girl read her heart, to open some line of communication. It was daunting, not only because Sera had blood bonded with only four others in her whole life, but because Agnes’s blood did not contain magic. So would it even work?

“You will let me speak to her,” she said to her hands in what she hoped was a commanding tone. “You will work as you did in the days before the Great Sadness.”

“Are you all right?” Agnes asked, stepping away from the dresser.

Sera called on her magic and her fingertip began to glow.

Agnes gasped. “What is that?”

“Give me your finger,” she said, holding her own up and motioning for Agnes to do the same.

The girl was sharp—she held up a finger and said, “This? Is this what you want?”

Sera nodded. The human finger looked so plain next to her own. A seed of doubt began to sprout, and Sera squashed it before it could fully blossom.

I am a Cerulean, she thought fiercely. My blood is magic. And it will do as I command.

Then she pressed her glowing fingertip against Agnes’s.

21

Agnes

AGNES DID NOT FULLY COMPREHEND WHAT WAS HAPPENING.

She wasn’t sure what she expected when Sera held out her fingertip, glowing with a bluish-silver light. It reminded her a bit of the medulla she’d seen in Sera’s hair, but bigger and brighter—it pulsed and twinkled like starlight. It was fascinating and beautiful and more than a little scary.

She hadn’t really considered what she was doing until their fingers touched and Agnes felt a rush of heat enter her body through the point of contact. It was shocking and disorienting—she found she had no sense of where she was, if she was standing or sitting or if she even had legs at all. She felt like an empty vessel, more spirit than flesh. The heat that crawled up her arm was a tangible thing, wrapping itself around veins and bone and muscle, crackling and spitting like a fire. It raced to her elbow, then up into her shoulder, growing stronger in intensity, and Agnes wanted to shout, Stop! but she could not find her mouth.

The heat curled around her heart like a fist, squeezing it with every beat. She felt another heartbeat fall in line with hers, a secondary pulse in her chest that was both comforting and unfamiliar, and she thought she said, Sera? but she had no mouth so she could not have spoken aloud.

Yes, a new voice replied, and it was everywhere, it was echoing in her ears and wrapping around her knees and beating alongside her two hearts, and all of a sudden Agnes felt herself pulled in a thousand different directions. There was a hard jerk in the place where her stomach used to be; her eyes were squeezed shut but she could not stop the images and feelings that rose up with shocking clarity.

She was seven, snooping in her father’s study for some evidence of her mother, when Leo caught her and pulled her hair, telling her she was going to be in trouble.

She was a child in a massive, circular room with moons and stars and a sun painted on its vaulted ceiling. A silver-skinned woman with an orange ribbon tied around her neck was chastising her for asking an impertinent question.

She was sixteen, at Miss Elderberry’s, helping Susan Bruckner lace up her corset, her heart bursting with desire.

She was in a bed in a room made of opaque glass. A mobile of glittering stars hung above her, and a young woman with a purple ribbon around her neck was telling her she would love her as long as the stars burned in the sky.

It was her twelfth birthday and she was standing in front of her father, hoping that maybe this year, her Grandmother Byrne had sent a present. He handed her a small box wrapped in pink foil with a yellow bow, and she unwrapped it to find a Solit triangle necklace from Grandmother McLellan. Tears of disappointment pricked her eyes.

She was running along the banks of a large river of crystal-clear water, dodging low-hanging boughs of trees with golden leaves as another girl, silver-skinned but her own age, called out