“Help!” I call out the moment she’s ready. “Please—you have to help her; you have to help her,now.” I rattle my cuff against the bars for good measure, though since the guard left us to rot at the forgotten end of the prison, it takes a solid few minutes before he hears me and ambles down.
“What is the meaning of this?” he growls, voice hard and face angry, his hand skirting his saber as if for luck.
“It’s the Wryvern girl.” I make sure to emphasize that name, in case he wasn’t told about his guest of honor. Which—judging by the gurn of his jaw and the widening of his eyes—he wasn’t. This is the first he’s learning about the very important problem in his cell, and just as Raya predicted, he’s at a loss for what to do next.
“Please! She can’t breathe!” So I lay the rhetoric on thick, making it clear that it’s act now or face her parents’ wrath later, that it’ll be on his head to explain why he stood by and did nothing while their daughter gasped for air on the ground.
“Get in the corner and stay there, half breed,” he barks, drawing his saber from its sheath. “And don’t even think about trying anything.”
I wouldn’t dream of it . . .I do as I’m bid, grateful that the words aren’t accompanied by a binding compulsion. “But please, hurry!”
On the cell floor, Raya’s coughs go silent and her body goes limp, adding a sense of urgency to my panic.
“Gods,please!”
The guard starts grappling with his keys, then the lock, then the nausea from the iron, his gaze bouncing between me and Raya until finally, the door swings open and he wades inside.
Wait for it . . .I make a show of clinging to my corner, slouching my shoulders to appear less threatening, less like I’m about to strike.Don’t move until he’s completely distracted.
It takes far longer than I’d like for the guard’s suspicions to dampen and the point of his saber to lower down.
Now!
The second it does, both Raya and I move in sync. Me, to kick the saber out of his hand. Her, to lurch up and land a knee to his groin with enough force to make me wince and shudder.
That’s got to sting.As he grunts and doubles over, I spring forward to wrap my arm around his neck and squeeze—hard, harder, hardest, until he succumbs to oblivion and slumps lifelessly to the concrete.
“Quick, get his keys—he won’t be out long.”
Raya nods and scrambles for the ring.
“We need to find the others,” she says once the cuffs are gone from our wrists and the guard is the one languishing behind bars. “You track, I’ll shimmer?”
“Sounds like a plan to me.” Not a plan I ever thought I’d be willingly making with a Shade, but a lot has happened since the first time I was imprisoned here, a lot has changed.
I’ve changed.
Enough to hope that this will be my last encounter with the Council’s justice.
Enough to hope that I’ll never see the inside of another cell.
CHAPTER 29
RAYA
By the time Ezzo and I break out of the Council’s prison, Sarotuza is in the throes of a full-scale riot, the streets consumed with so much hate and anger it’s downright palpable, even from inside the Gray.
“This can’t be good,” Ezzo mutters, directing me through the swarm of echoes from behind the veil of his gift.
“What do you think’s happened?” I ask, since without phasing back into the physical realm, their dissent is impossible to hear.
“Given the number of Shades I’m seeing, I’d say Adriel happened.” His eyes are darting back and forth with unnerving speed. “Looks like every tracker in Sarotuza is out here.”
Which probably means we shouldn’t be.
“And the others?”
“Back at Saleen’s, all of them,” he says. “I’m reading all four trails.”
