“To pick some plums,” she answered, swallowing hard. “I’m going to need them if I want any chance of Debbie saying yes.”
Taevas followed her step for step. His big body hovered just behind her as she opened the kitchen door and jogged over the creaky porch and down the steps into the garden. “What are you going to ask Debbie for? Shiya?—”
Standing barefoot in the cool, damp soil, she turned to peer at him from over her shoulder, one hand lifted to shade her eyes from the morning glare. He stood on the top step of the porch, his expression pinched with worry. He looked like he was bracing for something. It was a good feeling, knowing that she wasn’t about to disappoint him again. For now.
“Her car,” she answered. “I need something to trade.”
He drew himself up instantly. In a deep, thick voice, he said,“Naine,is that a yes?”
She turned back to the garden. “It’s the start of our negotiations.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
She honestly didn’t expectDebbie to say yes. It wasn’t that she sought out failure, but it didn’t seem likely that her first attempt at getting them a vehicle would work. Alashiya thought she’d at least have to haggle more.
But Debbie didn’t blink when she made the request. The old woman had only given her a disinterested look, her watery blue eyes illuminated by her tablet’s screen. “Sure, but what’d you need it for?”
Setting the paper bag of plums on the shop’s counter, Alashiya tried not to show how nervous she was. Howexhilarated.Her head had been full of happy little bees the entire walk to town. They buzzed so loudly, it was hard to focus on anything else. She wondered if Debbie could see her nearly vibrating as she stood there.
Am I really doing this?
The thought was too hot to touch. She shied away from it instantly, but that didn’t stop her from forging ahead.
“I need it for work,” she lied. It surprised her how easily the fib came to her. “You know I take commissions for a shop in New York, right? Well, they asked me to go in. I know I could take thebus, but it’d be so many connections that it’d take me a week to get there.”
Debbie looked away from her screen, startled. “You ever been anywhere ’sides Birchdale?”
“No.”
“You goin’ by yourself?”
Alashiya’s palms began to sweat a little. Smoothing them against her skirt just below the counter, she answered, “Yes. I’ll only be there a couple days. I doubt I’ll want to stay long.”
The hook in her chest tugged sharply in the direction of her land. Towardhim.It was like everything inside her balked at even the thought of separation.
Debbie grunted and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t like you goin’ by yourself, Shiya. These are dangerous times. What if something happens to you? Or the car? Mike’ll be a pain to live with if you mess up one of his shit-cans.”
Alashiya knew all about Mike’s obsession with collecting what could only generously be called cars. It was why she’d asked Debbie in the first place. They had at least a dozen, and some of them even drove.
But that wasn’t what caught her attention. Brows furrowing, she asked, “What do mean bydangerous times,Debbie?”
“Don’t you watch the news?”
The buzzing in her head was beginning to die down. An awful sort of quiet took its place. “No,” she admitted.
One of Debbie’s weathered hands, the nails yellowed by tobacco and veins winding like snakes across the brittle bones, flipped the tablet around. She placed it on the counter between them.“Extremists.”She drew out the word with great relish, like she was about to launch into one of her recaps of the soap operas she normally watched. “Some crazies in Glory’s Temple tried to take over the Elvish Protectorate a few weeks ago. Last month? Something like that. Same day a bunch of leaders were attacked.”
Debbie leaned forward, her voice lowering. Her eyes gleamed with the maniacal sort of glee she normally reserved for the revealof an evil twin plot line. “It’s all connected. Queen Sigrid’s death, Glory’s Temple, Lee Seymour. And Taevas Aždaja—Ithink he was the brains behind it. He’s been missing since the solstice, see? This theory that he’s been kidnapped? Please. No one else was kidnapped. They were all attacked. My money’s on him being the leader of the conspiracy, and when it went to dog shit, he disappeared to cover his tracks.”
There were no more bees. No more exhilaration. There was only silence as Alashiya slowly dropped her gaze to the glaring brightness of the tablet’s screen.
A familiar face stared up at her. It was a beautiful photo.
He stood on the steps of some grand building, dressed to the nines in a navy double-breasted suit, his hair swept back behind his horns and braided by his ears. Sunglasses with hot pink lenses obscured his eyes, but she’d recognize the lips, the hard line of his jaw, the arch of his hornsanywhere.Even in the photo, surrounded by what appeared to be important people, he radiated the kind of power that made everyone else look small and colorless in comparison.
And he was wearing her work.
It might’ve been invisible to anyone else, but she remembered the crisp white shirt beneath the suit. She didn’t often do whitework — embroidering with white thread on white fabric to make subtle, almost invisible designs — but she wanted a challenge, so she’d sewn the waves of an ocean she’d never seen with her own eyes onto Adon’s shirt.
