Once, she’d surprised Arvi by turning up to take him out to lunch. But that had been a long time ago. Tanu didn’t leave the grounds now, didn’t trust herself to remain coherent and rational for long enough. The voices were too loud.
Janvier held her gaze. “Your sister appears at peace.”
“Sometimes I almost believe it, but—” Shaking her head, she said, “I have to start at the beginning.”
Janvier turned sideways, placing one of his legs behind her, his knee bent so she could lean against him, and his hand warm on her nape. “I am here.”
25
“Most everyone,” Ashwini began, drawing strength from his unwavering support, “thinks my parents and Tanu all died in that car crash when I was nine. The truth is, only my mother and father died on impact. Tanu was badly injured but she survived.”
“That is the cause of the wounds to her mind?”
“No.” Terrible as that would’ve been, it wouldn’t have torn what remained of their family to shreds. “Before I tell you about Tanu, I have to tell you about our mother.”
Grief pulsed in her heart at the memory of her parents; it had dulled with time, but it would never leave her. Because while they had made mistakes, unable to understand a daughter who was so different from everything they knew, her mother and father had loved her, loved all their children. “You know my mother was a professor of literature—what I didn’t tell you is that she was like me, able to see into people with a touch.”
Placing one hand on Janvier’s thigh, the muscle warm and taut beneath her hand, she anchored herself. “Tanu had it, too. No one in our family ever acknowledged it, ever even joked about the way they’d both occasionally know things they shouldn’t. There was always a tinge of fear beneath the surface I didn’t understand at the time.”
“Wait.” Janvier ran his thumb over her nape, a scowl on his face. “Were you and your sister both in that place at the same time?”
Ashwini shook her head. “She was moved to a satellite facility when I was moved in. Because I grew up thinking she was dead, it was decided that my coming face-to-face with her would be too big a shock.” Everyone had already thought her unstable.
“But the thing was, a couple of the people who regularly interacted with me, touched me, had touched her, too. I thought I was going insane when I started getting flashes of her as if she were still alive.” For a while, it had convinced her to take the medication that made her feel so fuzzy and lost.
Unlike Tanu, she hadn’t needed the drugs. The medication had simply made things worse. “Then,” she continued, “I realized I only got the flashes near certain people and it began to make a terrible kind of sense.”
She’d confronted Arvi once she was free of Banli House, made it clear she knew the truth. “Arvi eventually told me Tanu had had a psychotic break a month before the car accident, had spent seven nights under psychiatric hold. She said the voices wouldn’t leave her alone.”
Ashwini couldn’t imagine Arvi’s pain as he watched his vivid, brilliant twin disintegrate in front of his eyes. Because the psychotic break couldn’t have been the first sign—and Arvi and Tanu were too close for Arvi not to have known. Ashwini would bet her life on the fact that Arvi had tried desperately to get Tanu help, that he’d fought to save her. But Tanu was already lost.
“As soon as she was mobile after the accident, my sister apparently went into the hospital bathroom and tried to slit her wrists.”
Janvier bit off a hard word. He might still never forgive Arvan Taj for what he’d done to Ash, but he could better understand the scars on the man’s heart that had led to the terrible decision to institutionalize a teenage girl who’d simply been a little different. He must’ve believed history was about to repeat itself.
“Arvi moved Tanu temporarily to Banli after her suicide attempt.” Ash looked out over the water, but he could tell she didn’t see the skyline beyond. “He thought it’d be a better environment for her than a hospital ward, but the temporary stay kept being extended. Each time they thought she was better, she’d go into screaming fits for days or try to harm herself.”
“I don’t understand why the fact that she lived was kept from you. Your grief must’ve been devastating.” Broken or whole, Tanu was Ash’s sister, was clearly loved by his hunter.
“Tanu didn’t want me to see her that way,” Ash said, her voice rough. “Directly after her first psychotic break, she told Arvi that if she was ever institutionalized, I was to be told she was dead.” Breathing in harsh gulps, she gripped his thigh more tightly. “And with the car accident . . . Arvi just said she’d died from unexpected complications.”
A lie, Janvier saw, that a heartbroken child would have had no reason to disbelieve.
“Neither Tanu nor Arvi has ever said so,” Ash continued in that voice shredded with pain, “but I think they wanted to give me a clean slate, no preconceptions about my future . . . because Tanu’s ability was stronger than my mother’s had been, and my mother had also begun to exhibit signs of mental illness in the months before the crash.” Agony in her every word. “I was meant to be the one who made it . . . and I turned out the strongest of us all.”
Staggered, Janvier saw that he’d been wrong, that until this instant, he’d had no real idea of the root of Ash’s fear about immortality. “You believe the older you become, the greater your chance of becoming as she is.” And a vampire’s madness could last an eon.
“It’s a certainty with our history. Tanu’s initial psychotic break happened at twenty-eight and I’m only six months away from turning the same age.” A long exhale. “It’s why I’ve always encouraged the other hunters to see me as a little kooky, a bit crazy.” Her smile was faint. “Not that I’m not, but I figured it’d make it easier to hide the first signs of degeneration.”
Refusing to listen, Janvier tugged her against his chest, his jacket open. She came, swinging up her legs to lie along the cliff edge, her head on his shoulder and one arm around him as they faced the city skyline.
“Two women in a family doesn’t equal an inevitable pattern,” he said, his heart tearing at the idea of losing his Ashblade to the insidious illness that had consumed her sister. “You said yourself that your ability is stronger than your sister’s, and yet you’re not showing any symptoms despite being so close to the age she was when she suffered her first psychotic break.”