I didn’t want to miss how Silas looked at Reggie, shook his head a little with the smile still on his face, and it was like he was…melting.It was like he was seeing the most incredible thing he’d ever seen in his entire life.
Someone heloved.
“A special gift for a special Spade,” Reggie said. “I’ll warn you, though. You’ll have to earn it first.” The grin in his voice was unmistakable. Reggie sounded over the moon.
“I think it’s best if we leave it there. C’mon, let’s get to the other side,” Silas said, a smile on his lips and red on his cheeks when he nodded his head back toward the palace.
“No way. I jumped really high for this. Let’s just—” The view zoomed in on the apple and Reggie’s hand came into view as he reached for it.
“No, don’t touch it, no—” Silas called, but it was too late.
Reggie touched the apple.
It opened, just like that round device had in Master Talik’s workshop—except this one didn’t just throw one blade out of its body. It threw several, and they went all around.
That my heart didn’t stop in that second, it never would. Reggie moved back with a sharp intake of breath, realizing itwas already too late, and he threw up his arms in front of his face.
Then everything stopped. Everything went dark.
He was dead.
That was it—Reggie had died from all those sharp blades that had launched off the apple so suddenly, but…
Reggie had been alive, though. We’d seen him when we woke up here. We’d seen him—he hadn’t died.
Then he blinked his eyes.
The view had gone dark because he’d closed them, but Reggie was most definitely alive—and he wasn’t hurt at all. He breathed heavily, and when he pulled his arms down to see the light, there were no blades in him that we could see.
That’s because the light wrapped around him like a shield had protected him.
It was the most unusual thing I’d ever seen. A shield, half a sphere, stretching from the ground and all the way over Reggie’s head, and it was made of crackling blue-green light, a gorgeous teal that was more intense around the edges, and near transparent in the middle.
Near transparent so that Reggie, and thereforewecould see that the blades, seven of them, were suspended on air, stuck in the magic of that shield—and then they all fell to the ground at once when the light faded.
Through the corner of his eye, Reggie saw Silas, just two feet away now, looking down at his shoulder—at the two blades buried in him, one there and one lower, near his elbow.
“Silas,” Reggie breathed, and his hands were up still so we could see them shaking. He looked at the blades all over the grass, and at Silas who removed the other two from his body with nothing but a hiss, then wiped the blood on his sleeve and threw them near the others.
“Silas, what did you do?”
Silas stopped, looked at Reggie, paler than a moment ago. And he was breathing just as heavily, too.
“I told you not to touch it. This place is dangerous—Itoldyou.” And he strode over to him. Grabbed Reggie’s face in his hands.
Reggie looked up at him—Silas was about an inch taller, and they were almost eye to eye. He put his hands on his cheeks, too, like he’d done it a million times before. Like both of them had been this close, the tips of their noses almost touching, and we couldn’t see Reggie’s face, but Silas was furious. Concerned. Panicked.
“Are you okay?” he whispered, and Reggie shook his head. The view moved with him, making me dizzy.
He didn’t answer, only squeezed Silas’s face between his hands, touched his cheeks, grabbed the ends of his hair.
“Why…” For a moment, Reggie couldn’t speak, had to stop and breathe in deeply. “Why is your magic green, Sy?”
That’s when everything clicked into place for me.
That’s when I focused on what should have mattered since the beginning—the shield Silas had put up to protect Reggie hadn’t been purple, and he was a Spade.
“Reggie,” Silas whispered. He closed his eyes and leaned in, touched his forehead to Reggie’s.
