Right here in front of everyone so that the trackers will dismiss us as two idiot kids with no restraint. And though I feel no want in the action—no lust or attraction—the thought of touching him like that still freezes me in place. If the future thinks I’m destined to fall in love with this Hue, then the very last thing I should be doing is kissing him, for any reason, good, bad, essential, or else. I will not encourage this atrocious idea.
Show me a different way!Even as I push back against the vision, I fear in my gut that it won’t work, that I was too slow making a decision and now the window for our escape has closed.
“You there—stop.”
I hear the exact moment the trackers spot their Sapphire, taste the power in the Red command that compels the two of us stock still. My body seizes up from under me, every bone, muscle, and tendon stiffening like rock. By virtue of my proximity to the Hue, I’ve been marked as an accomplice, and the moment the trackers catch sight of my face—of my eyes—they’re going to ask a wealth of questions for which I’ll have no response.
Shit. Shit. Shit.As muchas I could probably talk my way out of trouble, the Hue could easily talk me back into it, and while my word should hold more weight than his does, his truths would still raise too many eyebrows for me to leave this tavern unscathed. The trackers will want to know what I’m doing here, for one thing, why I took it upon myself to interfere in a sanctioned manhunt and almost cost them their prey. And while Killen’s acceleration is already gnawing at the edge of the compulsion, there’d be nowhere for me to run even if I were to break free of the spell. For every tracker in the tavern, there’ll be three more waiting in the Gray. Phasing isn’t an option.
Please, I’m sorry for not listening,but you have to help us,I beg the future, though with a dozen trackers circling, I’m not sure what—if anything—I expect it to say.
Certainly not that.The phrase it whispers in reply makes absolutely no sense. Not to me, at least, but apparently it will to my Sapphire friend.
Tell him.
That instruction is much easier said than done while I’m still immobilized by this Red.
Then get un-immobilized. I grit my teeth and focus my energy on fighting the spell, throwing every ounce of strength I have into cracking the magic.Come on, come on, come on.I think of shattered glass, brittle wood, broken shells and fragile cobwebs, ignoring how, behind me, the air ripples with the trackers’ closing steps.This compulsion is weak, unstable, it cannot silence me or control what I do. And right now, I don’t need to do all that much, anyway, just turn my head, inch by inch, until I’m able to catch the Hue’s eye and repeat the futility the future wants me to say, to watch his pupils blow wide when he hears it.
“We’ll die like the stars.”
The words ring loud between us, insistent and unexplained.
And then the world explodes.
CHAPTER 11
EZZO
I wasn’t trying to get myself caught again. I mean, I knew it was a possibility when I stormed away from Cemmy and Chase, but it wasn’t actually my intent. The only thing I wanted in that moment was to find a tavern where I could drown myself in a bottle of sharp mistakes—and Iwascareful about it. More careful than I’ve been all year.
I picked a place in a street lined with iron, since the metal only bothers me when it’s used as a shackle, and because it reduced the likelihood of stumbling across another Shade. I found a dark corner to disappear into, so that no one would pay attention to my misery or my face. And every so often—when I was sure I wasn’t being watched—I blinked into the Gray for a heartbeat to search the shadows for trails.
The coast was clear the first time I checked it.
And the second time.
And the third.
But with every drink, my head was growing fuzzier, and when I finally remembered to check it for a fourth time, it was already too late. I counted at least twenty trackers converging on me from all directions, a single Indigo sent ahead to keep me distracted and trapped in place. The girl from the court chamber with the hazel eyes and the weak stomach. An odd choice, I’ll admit, but with so many others shimmering through the Gray towards me, I didn’t see a way out, no matter what kind of scouting party they sent.
What I didn’t expect was for the Indigo to try and escape the Golden Stag with me.
Or to say the one thing I never thought I’d hear again.
“We’ll die like the stars.”
The words are a spear to the heart, a ghost whispering from beyond the grave.
It was my mother who first taught me that phrase, the same day she taught me all the fanciful ways a Hue might meet their maker—shattered by the Gray, executed by the Council, put to death by the Church. Such are the options when your very existence is illegal, on both sides of the magical divide.
But my mother was an Indigo and when I was six years old, she told me that she’d seen my future and that wasn’t to be my fate.You and me, we’re going to die like the stars, she’d said. At the end of a long life, in a blaze of glory that would streak across the heavens, beautiful and proud.
And nonsense, of course.
My mother didn’t die like the stars, she died like a rogue Shade, not in a blaze of glory but in a pool of blood, hunted down like a dog for the crime of loving a typic and having his child. And Gods, I was so mad at her for that—for allowing me to hope for better.
We deserve to hope for better.It was only once Eve came into my life that I was able to take those words and shape them into something new. She’d lost her family, too; her father, her mother, all three of her siblings, her whole family butchered when she was only ten. She barely even spoke when I first found her. She didn’t smile for months. Didn’t trust for years.
