Key Of Valor - Key Trilogy 3 Part 66

Zoe drew a breath. "There are other things. Rowena and Kane, they said the more I cared about Bradley, the harder Kane would go after him."

"So you're protecting him by holding back." Dana lifted her brows. "That'll p.i.s.s Brad off. I know that if it was Jordan, since I love the jerk, I'd probably try to do the same thing."

"I've been going over and over it in my head. This way, that way. If I do this, what could happen. If I do that." Zoe shrugged wearily. "There's too much at stake. Everything's at stake, so I can't just grab on to something because it looks so s.h.i.+ny and beautiful. Not without considering the consequences."

"Maybe you should add more to the mix." Malory laid a hand on Zoe's. "You might hesitate to grab that something s.h.i.+ny and beautiful because to hold it you have to give things up."

"What do I have to give up?"

"The house you made on your own, and the life. The family you made with Simon. The shape of everything you have now changes forever if you reach out and take something else. That's a scary proposition, Zoe. If you don't reach out, you may lose him. If you do, something else slips away. You have to decide which holds more value for you."

"It's not just me. Not even just me, Simon, and Bradley." Zoe rose, carried her cup to the sink. "My key has to do with courage. But is it having the courage to reach out for something or the courage to walk away from it? We've read about the G.o.ds, so we know they're not always kind. Not always just. And they want payment."

She turned back. "If we fail, the penalty-before it was revoked-would have been the loss of a year of our lives. We wouldn't even have known which one. It could even have been this year, right now. There's a fine sort of cruelty in that. Mal, you were given something you wanted all of your life. They let you hold it, taste it, feel it. But to find the key, you had to give it back. It hurt you."

"Yes, it hurt."

"And you nearly died, Dana, finding yours. They changed the rules, and you could've died."

"I didn't."

"But you might have, and do you think the G.o.ds would've shed a tear?"

"Rowena and Pitte..." Malory began.

"It's different for them. They've lived with us for thousands of years, and in some ways they're just as much p.a.w.ns as we are. But the ones behind the Curtain, the ones watching through it, do they care if we live happily ever after?"

She sat again. "How did the three of us come together. How did we have the time to look for the keys? We lost our jobs. A job I needed, jobs each one of you loved. They took that away from us so we would be more useful, then dangled cash in front of us so we'd sign on the dotted line. The motivation may have been unselfish and n.o.ble, but they manipulated us."

"You're right," Dana agreed. "No argument."

"We got this place out of it," Zoe continued. "Butwe got it. We took the risk, we did the work. If this place is a miracle, we made it."

Nodding, Malory sat back. "Keep going."

"Okay. You and Flynn. You met him when you met him because he was connected. You fell in love with him, and he with you. But if you hadn't, even if you hadn't, you'd have made the choice you made up in the attic. You wouldn't have taken the illusion, however much you wanted it, and sacrificed souls. I know that because I know you. If you'd loved Flynn the way I do, as a friend, as a kind of a brother, you'd have done the same thing."

"I hope so," Malory replied. "I want to think so."

"I know so. Or you might have felt something for each other that was more transient, that faded after your month was up rather than growing deeper. It didn't matter to them whether you were happy, just whether you succeeded or failed."

"That may be true, but the things I experienced and the choices I made during that month were part of what built what I have with Flynn."

"But you built it," Zoe said. "Jordan came back to the Valley at this time because he was connected. He was a piece that had to be added. You needed to resolve your feelings for him, Dana, that was central. But you might have resolved them differently with the same results. You might have forgiven him. You might have realized that you didn't love him, but you valued your history together. The friends.h.i.+p more than the pa.s.sion. You could've given up what was between you and still found the key. You're not thinking of orange blossoms because the G.o.ds smiled on you."

"Orange blossoms might be carrying it a little far, but okay, I follow you." Absently, Dana plucked a piece of chocolate, nibbled on it as she thought things through. "When you circle it back, it's what we were told from the beginning. Each of us is a key. So what we get out of it, or don't, in the end is of our own making."

"But they manipulate," Zoe added. "They put us together, tossed in the circ.u.mstances. Bradley may very well have come back to the Valley, it's his home, and he has ambitions here. But without all this, I would never have met him. Malory might have met Flynn at any time, but it's unlikely I'd have met Bradley Charles Vane IV. And what pulled him to me first? The portrait. Manipulating his feelings."

It riled her up just to think about it. With heat in her eyes, she chomped down on chocolate. "I know it's not a painting now. But the change in him is incidental to them. We needed to be pushed together so I could be led to-or away from-the key. Depending on whose side you're on.

If I find it, if I don't, my usefulness is at an end, and so is his. Do you think it matters to them if that usefulness involves hurt, and pain, and loss?"

Her temper began to spike, giving her voice an edge. "If it means that his heart, or mine, ends up broken, they won't give a d.a.m.n. Isn't it just as likely that heartbreak is what's necessary to that last step? Despair and loss, those are in my clue. And blood," she continued. "It won't be his. I won't risk that even to save three souls."

"Zoe." Malory spoke carefully. "If you already love each other, then haven't you already built your own end?"

"Have we? Or is that my illusion, and what I'll have to sacrifice? There's another part of the clue. How I'm supposed to look at the G.o.ddess, know when it's time to pick up the sword, when it's time to lay it down. Do I fight for what I want for me, or do I surrender it for the good of the whole?"

"Those are reasonable and logical suppositions, reasonable and logical questions." Dana held up a hand before Malory could object. "We don't have to like them, but we should give credence to them. n.o.body promised we were all going to land in a big bowl of rose petals at the end of this. What we were promised was a big bowl of money."

"Screw the money," Malory shot back.

"I wish I could tell you to bite your tongue, but unfortunately I feel the same way. However," Dana pointed out, "while Zoe has posed those reasonable, logical suppositions, she's left out the parts about hope and joy and fulfillment. The intersecting paths that lead from one to the other."

"I'm sitting in the heart of that joy and hope and fulfillment right now, with both of you." Zoe held her arms out to encompa.s.s the room, the whole of what they'd built. "I'm not leaving them out, but I need to be realistic. I have to be, because I want to believe, almost more than I can stand, that when I come to the end of this, with that G.o.dd.a.m.n key in my hand, I'm going to have a chance for... for more."

"What's next, then?" Dana asked her.

"I need both of you to think about it. You're the only ones who have actually held one of the keys. Dana, you and Jordan and Flynn know Bradley's house almost as well as he does. I'll take all the help I can get."

She pushed to her feet. "But right this minute, we'd better start answering those phones again."

There was only a sliver of moon left, just a thin slice of curve to float in the black sky. Though she wished, desperately, that a storm would blow in full of mean clouds that would cover even that, Zoe couldn't stop staring at the waning light.

She'd looked everywhere. There were times she was certain her eyes or her fingers had pa.s.sed over that glint of gold. But she was unable to see or touch it.

Unless she did that within the next forty-eight hours, everything Malory and Dana had been through, all they'd accomplished, would be for nothing.

The Daughters of Gla.s.s would forever lie still and empty in their crystal coffins.

Bundled in a jacket, she sat out on the rear deck, trying to hold on to that last splinter of hope.

"It's here. I know it. What am I missing? What haven't I done that I'm supposed to do?"

"Mortals," Kane said from behind her, "look toward what they call the heavens and ask what to do, what to think."

As Zoe froze, he skimmed a fingertip along the base of her neck. She felt the touch like a line of ice.

"It amuses me."

His soft boots made no sound as he walked around her to lean casually back against the deck's railing.

He was so breathtakingly handsome, she thought. Made for the dark. For moonless nights, for storms.

"You've failed," he announced matter-of-factly.

"I haven't." The cold was creeping into her bones, so she had to fight the urge to s.h.i.+ver. "There's time left."