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“Why?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“But the axe?”

He pauses and I can tell his thoughts have wandered. “It was Faos, if you can believe it.”

“The commander of the winged monkeys?”

He blinks and looks back down at me. “I got caught in the woods one night by two kalidahs. I nearly lost my other arm trying to fight them off with a tree branch. Faos saved me. And when it was over, he reminded me that if I’d had the axe, I wouldn’t have needed him. He said it was too powerful of a weapon to leave it in the hands of a Cardinal Witch. He was right, of course. Logic won me over. So I retrieved it that night and it’s been with me ever since.”

“What did Glinda say when you took it back?”

“I had a feeling she’d try to talk me out of it, so Gabriel distracted her.” He chuckles to himself. “No one ever suspects Gabriel of being duplicitous.”

He puts the dagger sheath back on my arm, then the blade into place. “We should get moving.”

“Faos saving you, then convincing you to retrieve the axe … that seems significant, doesn’t it?”

He exhales roughly. “If it was significant, there’s no way for me to ask him about it now. My brother commands the flock and if I cross paths with Faos, there’s no telling what orders my brother has given him. You don’t want to tussle with a winged monkey when he’s been given a mission.”

He goes to the front window and scans the street below through a small sliver between the curtains.

“Just make me a promise,” I say.

As he turns his head toward me, light from the streetlamps below steals in around the curtains, cutting a thin line of gold across his face.

“Don’t give up your axe again.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It would take something catastrophic for me to abandon it again.”

I can only take his word for it, but as convinced as he sounds, I can’t help but feel a gnawing in my gut.

We leave the apartment silently, cautiously, and when we reach the street below, I’m grateful to find it dead.

“What about your Oil?” I whisper to Tin as we hurry into the next alleyway.

“We’ll stop on our way out of town. My dealer is on the outskirts of the Hollow.”

With most of the city asleep now, there aren’t crowds to dodge and we make quick progress.

Tin’s drug supplier lives in a two-story cottage, the stucco painted a bright shade of green, the front door painted black.

“Get behind me,” he orders and I do as he says because I don’t know what kind of person this drug dealer is or whether we can trust them. Tin’s face is probably more recognizable than mine, but Rook’s call for justice was clearly aimed at me, with Tin being an afterthought.

At the front door, Tin lifts the brass knocker shaped like an ear of corn and lets it lightly rap at the wood. The sound is almost deafening in the silence. Or at least it seems that way. But when I scan the street behind us, all is well.

A minute passes and Tin knocks again.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” someone shouts from the inside and a second later a bolt is turned open. “This better be good!”

When the door pulls back, a man half as tall as Tin peers out at us, his eyes swollen with sleep. We clearly woke him up and he’s not happy about it.

But then he realizes who darkens his doorway.

“Oh. Crice! Tin. For Crice-sake. Come in. Get off the street before someone sees ya.”

We’re ushered inside to a small, cozy living room with an overstuffed chair by the fire and a kitchenette beneath a circular window on the left.