“Left, and don’t worry, being a Hue’s not contagious.”
Well, thank the shadows for that.There is absolutely no non-awkward way to reach into his pants. No way to ignore the solid feel or the shape of him, or how his breath catches in his throat and shivers down his spine. The fates sure are getting creative in their endeavors to turn this foolishness into love. Telling me to kiss him in the tavern, shackling us together at the house, forcing us closer and closer—and now this? What’s next? A single room at an inn with only one bed?
“What exactly would you have done if I’d said no?” I ask once I’ve snatched my hand back, trying to dispel the uncomfortably charged silence.
“It honestly didn’t occur to me.” Ezzo shrugs as I unlock my prison. “Why wouldn’t you have agreed to get the key if it meant removing the cuffs?”
And all at once, it hits me. The sudden and monumental shift in power.
I’m finally free of the iron. Free of him and the disgrace that would come from allowing a half breed to tether me to his arm. I could shimmer him to the trackers if I wanted, and none of his incriminating stories would stick now that I’m the one in charge.
“If the Hue phases again, you’ll never find her without my gift,” Ezzo says, guessing at the nefarious thoughts I’m weighing up.And following her was your idea, the steel in his expression seems to add. Though I do also see a shred of doubt in him, a tiny flash of fear in the tightening around his eyes. Maybe he’s decided he doesn’t want to die today, after all. Maybe he’s regretting the choice to let me hold the cards.
He makes worse decisions than I do. With a muttered curse, I reach for his cuff.
“We find Alara, we figure out what she’s doing, then we’re done. We pretend this”—I point between us—“never happened. Understand?”
He gets to live, I get to impress the Council, the future gets to stop the Meridian from killing another child. Everybody wins.
“Nothing would make me happier,” Ezzo clips in reply, then together, we blink back into the physical realm.
The world explodes into sound and color, the darkness changing in texture as we swap the smokey ink of the Gray for the warm flicker of coal-burning lamps.
“Can you see her?” I whisper, scanning the near-empty market.
“Not yet, but she can’t have gone far. Let’s try back there.” He motions towards the row of workshops that sits behind the stands. “If she’s after a typic, then that’s where they’ll be.”
Right, of course. Because there are always a few vendors who work late into the night, and work equals craftsmen and craftsmen equal apprentices. Older children, usually, the kind the Meridian asked Alara to abduct.
“There—by the blacksmith’s hut.” The moment we round the corner, I catch a glimpse of her silver robe and her mousy brown hair, making straight for a boy who’s fetching water for his master’s tank. He’s older than the girl we watched shatter, stronger-looking by a decent margin and quite clearly better nourished, exactly per the Meridian’s instructions.
“Okay, good.” Ezzo pitches his voice low. “Then you distract Alara while I scare the boy away.”
“What—no. That is not what we agreed.”
“What do you meannot what we agreed? We agreed to stop her.”
“Stopandfolloware not the same thing, Ezzo. If we want to know what the Meridian is up to, then we have to let Alara take him.”
“Let Alara take him?” he parrots, mouth gaping as though I’ve lost my marbles. “That is achild, Raya. He can’t be more than fourteen!”
“And that girl couldn’t have been more than six.” I refuse to let his outrage shame me. “Every pile of glass in that house was a child, Ezzo—and poor children, at that, street kids people are quick to forget.” I certainly forgot about them quickly enough; after a few short seconds spent reading their names on all those “missing” flyers, I put the thought right out of my mind, went to go annoy my rich mother. “If we run Alara off now, we’d only be sending her in search of the next. So yes, we have to let hertake him. That’s how we find out what the Meridian is doing—and how we stop him from doing it again.” My logic is callous; I know that—but it’s also sound and Ezzo is smart enough to follow it through to the same conclusion. He drags in a mouthful of air, then another, and another, mulling over whatever objections are still urging him to argue, discounting them one by one until there’s no other option left.
“Gods, you Shades really are something,” he mutters, even as he relents.
“Hey, that’s a Hue doing the abducting, so you can put that sanctimony away. Will she use her gift to do it, do you think?”
“No, our gifts only work in the Gray—and she’s an Emerald, anyway, so hers is a protective gift, not an offensive one, good for projecting her In-Betweens around others but not for much else. My guess is she’ll use a charm—there, watch her hands,” Ezzo says, right as Alara slips something into the boy’s pocket.
Well, I’ll be damned. A dazed look instantly clouds his face. “A compulsion charm. How did you know?”
“That’s what I would have done.”
It’s quite the admission after the scolding he just gave me.
“Spoken like a true criminal.”
“We are what you Shades make of us. Now, come on, I don’t want to lose them.”
