“No. A house in the suburbs.”
“She’ll get him a puppy for Christmas.”
“A shelter dog,” Poppy insists.
“They’ll have two kids.” This time, the sigh is mine.
It’s a game we’ve played for years, since before we were what we are. I remember our reflection in the window of our hospital room, Poppy’s oxygen lines and my IVs tangled around us, the light fog of our breath where we pressed our faces to the glass to watch the people in the parking lot below. There was something hopeful about predicting the futures of strangers, like throwing coins into a fountain, even if neither of us had a future of our own to wish on. But now, the game only leaves me aching, wanting...
“Any sign of him yet?” I ask, kicking off the brick. The crowd in front of the theater has thinned. The sidewalk’s nearly empty. Poppy doesn’t answer. I check the time on the clock above the ticket counter, my last hope of the evening slipping away on another sigh. The ten-o’clock shows are already starting.
“If you’re listening, you’ll be happy to know I’m heading back to my room now. I’ll try again tomorrow.” And she’ll still be mad at me then. Poppy hates that Julio and I get along. It worries her. We’re falling in the rankings. But the truth is, I’ve been gradually falling for years, since March 1997, when I cornered Jack in the men’s room of a bus station in Baltimore. He was cowering in a stall, using the metal door to shield himself from me.
“What do you want?” he shouted.
“From you?” I asked, surprised that the answer wasn’t obvious.
“From any of this!”
It was the first time anyone had ever asked me that. I listened to him panting on the other side of the door. After all those years, he was still afraid of dying. Terrified of it. Willing to fight to the last breath, eventhough the outcome was completely inevitable. No one had ever bothered to ask me what I wanted from my life. It had always been assumed I wouldn’t live long enough to know the answer. Life had been taken from me the day I got my terminal diagnosis, then given back the minute I died. And then there had been Poppy, clinging to my side and choosing our names, and Gaia explaining the rules. And no one ever bothered to ask me whatIwanted, what I was willing to fight for.
No one but Jack.
I was thrown so off-balance by the question, I let him walk out that door. Because up until that moment, I didn’t have an answer.
I duck out from under the awning to the slap of windshield wipers and the glare of headlights, darting between gaps in traffic as the sky begins to pour. My hotel is twelve blocks north, and I’m drenched before I make it halfway there. All I want to do is curl up in a warm bed and sleep. I slip into a convenience store, sneakers squeaking on the floor tiles as I scavenge for something to take back to my room to eat. My hand hovers over a bag of M&M’s when I’m struck by the feeling of someone watching me. A soft popping sound is coming from the next aisle over, the slow cracking of someone’s knuckles, one by one.
I glance over the top of the divider. The blond-haired boy on the other side lowers his eyes. I carry the M&M’s to the register, darting a quick look over my shoulder as the cashier counts out my change, but I don’t see his spiky blond crown anywhere as I turn to go.
The bells on the door jangle as it sweeps shut behind me. Too soon, they clang again, as someone else leaves the store. I pick up my pace, the hair on my neck prickling the way it used to years ago, back when Julio used to hunt me. I draw in a breath, but all I smell is the chocolate in mypocket and the dumpster in the alley up ahead. I risk a backward glance as I turn the corner. Through the wet strands of my hair, I can just make out the boy’s shadow, his quick gait stretching toward me.
“Poppy?” I whisper. “I think I’m being followed.”
Something moves up ahead, to my left. Another dark figure crosses the street toward me. A third matches my pace on the opposite side of the street. I know, in the bone-deep way that only someone who’s been hunted can know, that they’re herding me.
“Poppy, I need an exit.” I may be a Spring, but there are three of them and one of me. And every weapon I could summon to defend myself in this city—every root, every branch, the trunk of every tree—is anchored in concrete. I’m too far from my hotel. I’ll never make it. “In half a block, I’m cutting east. Get me out of here.”
The deafening silence that follows is broken by the boy’s footfalls behind me. Where the hell is she? Poppy’s been quiet too long. She would never leave me alone in a situation like this, even if she’s pissed at me.
The stench of trash grows stronger. I hook a sharp right, following the smell into an alley. As soon as I clear the corner, I break into a run. The doors I fly past are bolted, the windows all boarded or spray-painted black. The dark path ahead of me grows clearer as I near the end of the passageway, and I jerk to a stop in front of a high brick wall.
Dead end.
“Poppy, where are you?” I turn, fists clenched. Three shadowy figures block my only exit. The one in the middle steps closer, until his blond crown becomes visible in the pale light ghosting over the wall. A spark ignites in his hand, the flame growing brighter as it hovers overhis palm, illuminating the silver scythes embroidered on their sleeves. My blood runs cold.
Chronos’s Guards.
“Your Handler has been dismissed for the night,” says the Guard holding the flame. A heavy metal door swings open beside me. A fourth figure looms inside, bracing it wide.
The blond Guard juts his chin toward the condemned building. “Step inside, Fleur Attwell. We’d like a few words with you alone.”
My mind gropes for a root. For anything I can control. But it’s like searching for a match in the dark. The Guard’s eyes dip to my twitching fingers, and his fire sparks. “I’ll only ask once.”
There’s no point in running or trying to escape. I can’t smell them. Can’t overpower them with any elemental magic they can’t already tap. It would be far too easy for them to hunt me down, and my punishment for fighting them or trying to evade them would be far worse than whatever’s waiting for me on the other side of that door.
The Guard holds his flame aside as I pass. My shoulder jostles the female Guard in the doorway as I push my way around her into a pitch-black room. Water drips, the leaking pipe’s rhythmic spatter broken by the echoes of the Guards’ boots behind me. The air smells like piss and something putrid and rotten, and I plant my feet to avoid tripping over something gross in the dark. One of them shoves me deeper into the building, guiding me around debris, through narrow passages, and up two winding flights of stairs.
Ahead, a dim light grows steadily brighter until I’m standing in the doorway of an empty room. The walls are devoid of windows and covered in graffiti. A kerosene lamp burns on the floor in the far corner, casting ominously long shadows against the water-stained ceiling aboveme. A chair sits empty in the middle of the room.
