He waited expectantly.
“Oh, you mean, right now?”
“No time like the present.” He offered his arm. I liked this; I liked that we were a team.
We started for the other side of the palace. As we left my apartments, Ayo was watering the two large pots of flowers outside the doors—in other words, listening at the door for any funny business. He pursed his lips as if he still didn’t quite approve. Royal permission granted or not.
“We’re just going for a walk,” I promised him.
“You don’t intend to leave the grounds, I hope?” he replied.
I shook my head. “No worries. In fact, we’re just staying inside.”
He nodded approvingly. It was sweet that he was so protective over me. In some ways he felt like a surrogate father. I thought of my father and his long letters. I knew he had missed me; he’d said it in every letter. And I knew my mother missed him. I’d wished all my life we could have been a normal family, the three of us, together, but they both told me it was too dangerous. I tried to shake off my emotions and concentrate on the task at hand.
We were getting close to the royal wing. Few sconces were lit, because no one had reason to be walking around there. It was getting dimmer and dimmer as we got farther from the main passages. Shadows danced on the walls as we walked, like ghosts of ourselves. I looked over at Lucas, his handsome face determined, armed with a Biringan crystal dagger at his hip, directing me down a remote hallway in a massive, desolate wing of a huge palace. I was glad to have him by my side.
“Watch out!” Lucas threw his arm across me and pushed me back away at the same time I heard a scraping sound and saw something move in front of us. As he drew his dagger and prepared to take down whatever hid in the darkness, a figure appeared from out of nowhere.
I seized up and touched the anting-anting around my neck just as someone reached toward me and brushed against my shoulder.
“Ouch!” a familiar voice yelped. “That hurt!”
“Nix?” I called.
She stepped into the dim light, holding her finger to her mouth. “Ouch! That burned! How did you do that?”
I shrugged. It was the protection from the amulet, but I didn’t want to tell her that. “Where did you come from?” I asked her. “What are you doing here?”
She ignored the question and instead waved for us to follow. “You gotta see this,” she said.
Lucas was still on edge. He was breathing heavily, his eyes wide and alert, glancing in every direction, like he thought something else was waiting to leap out at us. His adrenaline must have been pumping, ready to fuel a fight.
I put my hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” I told him. “It was just Nix.”
He put the dagger back in its sheath. “After you, Princess.”
I walked in the direction Nix had gone but didn’t see her anywhere. “Where are you?”
I heard “Here.” Then I saw a tiny flame. She’d lit a match so we could see her. I followed it, with Lucas close behind me. “Check this out!” she said.
Nix was inside the wall. Part of it had been pushed open.
“It’s a passageway,” she said. “Can you believe this? Come on, before someone sees you.”
I stepped into the space behind the wall. Lucas did, too. Then Nix pulled the wall back into place. It was pitch-black.
I thought of what Althea had said.The darkness is all around us. It comes out of the walls.“I don’t like this,” I said.
“Me neither,” Lucas agreed. “You have two seconds to tell us what’s going on, Nix—”
There was a click of flint, and then a blue flame came to life. Nix was holding a torch. “I didn’t want to light it until we were safe in here.”
“I assume you’re using that word loosely,” Lucas said. He still looked like he might kill the first thing that made him flinch.
“Calm down,” Nix told him. “I’m telling you—no one will bother us here.”
“But what are you doing here?” I repeated.
