Page 6

I look back. Silver lines are crawling up out of his collar, along his throat and onto his cheek, as bright as the ones in my palm. He claws at his own face. Then he sees the doorman at the red door coming toward him, and he turns and runs the other way, toward the front doors, straight down the main aisle.

The only things in that aisle are the woman on the floor, the people kneeling around her, and me.

I stand up and step over her friend’s legs into his path.

“Stop!” I yell. “Somebody stop him!”

He doesn’t slow down. Up close, his face is wrong. His pupils have swallowed the whites of his eyes, and his lips are pulled back from too many teeth, all of them sharp. I see them, and I don’t move, because the woman behind me can’t.

A cold hand closes around my bare upper arm and pulls me back, hard, out of the aisle and against a chest. An arm comes across my front and holds me there. The poisoner goes past close enough that I feel the air move, and two security guards take him down a few feet later in a crash of chairs.

I barely hear it.

His hand is cold on my skin, and heat floods through me from that one spot, all the way down. He’s bigger than he looked from across the room. The top of my head barely reaches his chin, and the arm across my chest is solid, holding me in place without any visible effort. My body is pressed against his from my shoulders to my hips. He smells like cold rain and cedar.

I want to lean back into him. In the middle of a poisoning, with my hand burning and a woman on the floor, I want to turn around and put my mouth on his. It makes me furious.

I twist in his grip to look up.

It’s him. The man from the end of the bar.

He’s staring down at me as if I’ve hit him. His fingers tighten on my arm, then loosen, as though he’s caught himself. The cool, composed face I watched across the room is gone. He looks like a man who’s opened his mouth to speak and forgotten every word he knows.

Then he finds them.

“Are you hurt?” His voice is low and a little rough, with an accent I can’t place.

“No. You can let go.”

He lets go at once. His hand stays in the air an inch from my arm, like it hasn’t caught up with the rest of him, and then he lowers it to his side. I watch it close into a fist and open again.

“That was remarkably foolish,” he says.

“He poisoned her.”

“I’m aware. And you nearly got yourself killed.”

I can still feel exactly where it was.

The guards have the poisoner face down on the floor with a knee in his back. The silver mark on his cheek is still glowing. He’s stopped fighting, and he’s crying.

The staffer is still kneeling over the woman in the emerald dress. Her eyes are open now, though they’re not focusing on anything, and her breathing is fast and shallow. Two more staff arrive with a folding stretcher. They lift her onto it carefully and carry her toward the back.

“Is she going to be okay?” one of her friends asks, following them.

“We’re taking her to someone who can help her,” the staffer says. “Stay with her. Keep talking to her.”

Along the walls, the silver fades back into the brass and wood until there’s nothing left but the amber lamps. The music doesn’t come back on. All around us, people are talking in low voices, and a lot of them are looking at me.

My palm still burns. The lines are dimmer, but they’re still there.

“May I?” he asks, and holds out his hand.

I hesitate, then give him my wrist. He turns my hand palm up and looks at the marks without touching them. Whatever he sees there, he doesn’t like it.

“I’m Lenart,” he says, without looking up. “And you are?”

“Just Lenart?”