He hissed in a breath but kept me firmly in his grip.
I looked back at Lark who was following us, his dark eyes scanning street after street as we passed. They were becoming less and less busy, I realized. He was taking me out of this city. He was taking me somewhere we couldn’t be seen.
“What have you done?” I barked at him over my shoulder. “You weren’t supposed to bring me here. I’m not supposed to be here.”
“That makes three of us,” Rook muttered.
My gaze snapped back to him.
“Let me go,” I begged him in a whisper. “Please, Rook.”
His jaw twitched, the only indication that I might have actually gotten to him.
“Even if we did,” he murmured, his voice low, “where would you go? What would you do?”
I went limp in his arms. I stopped kicking, stopped fighting. I just paled. Because he was right. Even if I broke free of my comrades turned captors, I was still stuck in the Immortal Plane, surrounded by ethereal beings of ferocious volatility. Any of them could shred me to pieces with a single thought. I was a rabbit and I had just walked into a wolf’s den. Well, I hadn’t walked in myself, had I?
I glared over my shoulder.
“I thought we were friends,” I snapped, putting all the venom and vitriol in my voice that I could. “I thought I could trust you.”
“Unwise,” Lark said simply.
My lip curled, my fists clenched, and I got a little bit of that fight back. I wrenched hard and whirled on him. Rook reined me in, my having gone as far as I had only because I had caught him off guard, but not before I could gnash my teeth at Lark, my face only inches from his.
“I’ll kill you,” I spat. “I swear it.”
“Before you go making promises you can’t possibly hope to keep,” he drawled easily, unfazed entirely by my empty threat, “you may want to hear what I have to say first.”
I blinked and Rook was pulling me through a doorway. It was dark here. We were in an alley off one of the major streets. Inside the door was a set of copper stairs, the closest metal to orange they could find, I supposed. They pulled me up those stairs and through a door at the top into a modest apartment. Lark snapped his fingers and little bulbs of floating light flared to life all throughout it.
Rook deposited me onto an orange leather couch and strode to stand beside it, arms crossed in front of him, chin up, eyes straight ahead. Like a soldier would stand, I realized, like a man awaiting his leader’s command. I pulled my glare from Rook to Lark, putting all of my hate and anger into that stare as I met his dark eyes.
“They were going to kill you,” he said after a moment.
“You don’t know that,” I snapped.
“Yes, I do. And, more importantly, you do too.”
I did not respond. I just glared at him, gritting my teeth. I could feel the anger radiating off of him as well, the indignation that I would dare to risk my life in such a way.
“Why did you stay there?” he asked. “You’re only half mortal. You found the door and yet you left it untouched. You chose to stay there with them. Why?”
I said nothing so he sat slowly onto an armchair across from me, also orange. Everything was orange. The rug, the wallpaper, the cabinets and shelves. Everything. Different patterns and shades but still, it was practically nauseating, this city’s commitment to the theme.
“Why would I want to return to the people who abandoned me?” I asked and couldn’t help but notice how Rook tensed at that. Still, I maintained my glare on Lark.
“You never wondered why they did?” Lark asked, genuine curiosity in his tone, a curiosity that I did not have the patience for. “Why no one came searching for you in the mortal realm? Why they left you behind with that crackpot uncle—”
“Don’t you dare speak of him that way.”
Lark paused, watching me closely.
“In all this time you’ve been running around closing up the rifts, did you ever stop to think about why they were appearing in the first place?” he asked.
“Of course I did,” I spat, insulted. “I’m an academic. It’s an intriguing situation. But I examined it based on what I knew. They didn’t follow the patterns typical of black holes. They did not exhibit any of the signs of other astrological—”
“You did not assess the rifts with the entirety of your knowledge, Ren. If you had, you would have considered an alternate explanation outside of the realm of science. Your colleague did.”
