She shook her head and peered down at the gash in her palm. “I don’t know,” she said, awkwardly wrapping the tape around it too.
“Cinder.”
“I didn’t mean to.” She slumped back in her own chair. She felt sick, remembering the dead, blank stare of the woman as she put herself between Cinder and that man. “I just panicked, and the next thing I knew, she was there, in front of me. I didn’t even think—I didn’t try—it just happened.” She shoved herself out of the chair and marched out into the cargo bay, needing room. To breathe, to move, to think. “This is exactly what I was talking about! Having this gift. It’s turning me into a monster! Just like those men. Just like Levana.”
She rubbed her temples, biting back her next confession.
Maybe it wasn’t just being Lunar. Maybe it ran in her blood. Maybe she was just like her aunt … just like her mother, who had been no better.
“Or maybe,” Thorne said, “it was an accident, and you’re still learning.”
“An accident!” She spun around. “I killed a woman!”
Thorne held up a finger. “No. That blood-sucking, howling wolf-man killed her. Cinder, you were scared. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“He was coming after me, and I just used her.”
“And you think he would have left the rest of us alone once he had you?”
Cinder clamped her jaw shut, stomach still churning.
“I get that you feel like it was your fault, but let’s try to put some of the blame where it belongs here.”
Cinder frowned at Thorne, but she was seeing that man again, with his haunting blue eyes and sick smile.
“They have Michelle Benoit.” She shuddered. “And that’s my fault too. They’re looking for me.”
“Now what are you rambling on about?”
“He knew that’s why we came to Rieux, but he said they’d already found her. The ‘old lady, ’ he said. But they only came after her because they’re trying to find me!”
Thorne pulled a palm down his face. “Cinder, you’re being delusional. Michelle Benoit housed Princess Selene. If they tracked her down, that’s why. It has nothing to do with you.”
She gulped, her entire body shaking. “She might still be alive. We have to try and find her.”
“Since neither of you will tell me anything,” said Iko, her voice taut, “I’ll just have to guess. Were you by chance attacked by men who fought like starved wild animals?”
Thorne and Cinder traded glances. Cinder noticed that the cargo bay had grown abnormally warm during her tirade.
“Good guess,” said Thorne.
“They’re talking about it all over the newsfeeds,” said Iko. “It’s not just in France. It’s happening all over the world, every country in the Union. Earth is under attack!”
Thirty-Eight
Howls filled the theater’s basement. From the corner of her bed, in the cell’s near blackness, Scarlet held her breath and listened. The lonesome cries were muffled and distant, somewhere out on the streets. But they must have been loud indeed to reach all the way to her dungeon.
And there seemed to be dozens of them. Animals seeking one another in the night, eerie and haunting.
There shouldn’t be wild animals in the city.
Peeling herself off the bed, Scarlet crept toward the bars. A light filtered down the hallway from the stairs that led up to the stage, but it was so faint she could barely make out the iron bars over her own door. She peered down the corridor. No movement. No sound. An EXIT sign that probably hadn’t been lit up in a hundred years.
She peered the other direction. Only blackness.
She had the sinking sensation of being trapped all alone. Of being left to die in this underground prison.
Another howl echoed up, louder this time, though still stifled. Perhaps on the street just outside the theater.