“Freeze!”
Noam and Dara stumbled to a stop, the air cracking like thin ice under the weight of that shout. Noam spun around, hands up, not sure if he was ready to fight or surrender.
Soldiers, blue-ribboned ones, guns up. But no antiwitching armor.
No Lehrer either.
“We’re Level IV,” Noam said, because it worked last time. Only last time, his voice didn’t shake. Last time, his mouth didn’t feel like it was stuffed with gauze.
“Yeah,” the lieutenant said, his slow smile unsheathing like a knife. “I know.”
And Noam understood. He understood without looking, certainty shooting him like a lethal arrow—but he looked anyway, turning his back on the raised guns to face a worse threat.
For a split second, Noam reached for his magic, that silver-blue spark answering easily now. But what could he possibly do against 123 years of power? Lehrer would quench him like a struck match.
It was too late to run. Too late for anything now.
To his left, Dara was still—so very still.
Lehrer’s hand fell to Noam’s shoulder. In the bright summer sunlight, he looked like a hero straight ou legend, tall and fair haired with a streak of someone else’s blood on his cheek. Like the revolutionary of the twenty-first century, stepped from the pages of a history book.
“What did he tell you?” Lehrer asked. His colorless gaze lingered on Noam’s just a beat too long—then he lifted his hand.
Noam couldn’t move. His feet had grown roots into the concrete, into the center of the earth.
Lehrer’s fingertips grazed Noam’s temple. It wasn’t the touch Noam expected. It was light, delicate, like a caress.
Lehrer sighed. “I see.”
His touch dropped again, this time to curve round Noam’s neck, the edge of his thumb pressed against a knobby vertebra. Noam didn’t dare breathe.
I won’t be the reason you die, Dara told him, and Noam should have listened.
He should have listened.
“No,” Dara said. “Please—don’t...”
This was it. This was it, after all this—after all this time, this was how Noam died after all: the June heat seeping through Noam’s skin, Lehrer wound tight into his mind like so many golden threads, Brennan’s blood on his hands.
He looked at Dara—the last person he wanted to see. Dara’s face, twisted with anguish and slick with feversweat.
“Don’t what?” Lehrer asked. His fingertips slipped into Noam’s hair. Noam couldn’t have moved even if he wanted to. Lehrer was too strong. He kept him in place with barely any effort at all. “Kill him? My dear boy, there’s an easier way. Pay attention. This lesson should be well learned. Now... Noam.”
Lehrer leaned closer.
He smelled like iron. His words were soft.
“Forget everything Dara just told you.”
And Noam did.
The moments that followed would return in fractured pieces, later, like images shot in a darkroom, the flash of a bulb illuminating still frames and freezing them in time.
Dara, sick with fevermadness, his hands on Noam’s face. Saying, “You have to listen to me.”
Over and over.
Lehrer, pulling Dara away like it was easy.
