Tell the Wind and Fire (11 page)

And then we were standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, wind dealing my face a series of night-cold slaps, the granite and limestone towers starkly white. For a moment I felt as if we could run back into the Dark: for a moment the bridge looked like a way home.

Beyond the towers and the glittering cable lines that hung from them, web-like, as though the whole bridge were a giant spider’s castle, were the walls of the Dark city. Every Dark city had a wall built around it, even ours, which was separated from the Light city by a river. The walls were built with Light magic, and they would boil the blood of whoever tried to get over them. I remembered hearing the faint crackle of the bright walls near my home in the Dark, like the leaves of deadly trees in the wind.

I scarcely ever ventured this close to the edge of the Light.

It was a night of firsts.

“We made it,” I said, forcing the words out in a series of gasps.

“Yeah,” said Carwyn, still standing. He wasn’t winded: his voice sounded normal. It sounded pleasant and distant, like he was thinking of something else.

I straightened up, wobbly but unbelievably relieved to be safe, to have both of us safe. The water whispered soothing promises, and even though it looked deep and black, the ripples caught edges of silver. Carwyn’s face was serious until he saw me looking, when he showed me that ugly smile again.

“Thanks,” I said unsteadily, ignoring the smile.

“Oh, Lucie, you shouldn’t thank me yet,” said Carwyn. “You had no idea what you were getting into, did you?”

It was dark and cold, and I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to fight him to get the collar back on. But I would have to—that much was clear. I turned my face to look at the water one more time, to take a breath and grit my teeth. I felt the warmth of Carwyn’s body as he stepped in, but he didn’t grab me. He whispered to me instead, each word a puff of heat against my jaw.

“Someone should have warned you about me. Oh, wait,” said Carwyn. “I did.”

He didn’t grab me at all. He didn’t use Dark magic, which could cause pain even though it was not as strong as the Light. He just shoved me clear off Brooklyn Bridge.

I used the silver moonlight on the water, absorbing it into my rings, even during the long, shocked, shrieking tumble. I had barely hit the icy, disgusting water, which felt like chilled oil, when the river itself began forming steps up the wall for me to follow. I felt only an instant of black panic as the waters closed over me.

I wouldn’t let myself panic. I climbed doggedly up the steps, concentrating on them, refusing to let the river become liquid and flow away until I was back on the bridge. Once I was there, my clothes hung impossibly wet and heavy on me, trying to drag me down as if I could drown on dry land.

The night streets were, depending on where I looked, blazing with lights, or shadowy and still. I saw strangers’ faces passing me, a brief sympathetic glance, a wolf whistle from a car at the soaking-wet girl. No help was to be found anywhere: the city at night moved pitilessly on.

Carwyn, of course, was long gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I spent the next day viciously angry with myself for being so stupid.

I stayed home from school because Dad woke up a little at sea, not frantic anymore, but with the look of a child lost in a confusing world, and I knew it made him feel better to have me there. The pressing need for me to always be there—always with the right thing to say to Dad, ready to touch his hand reassuringly or stay a safe distance away so he did not feel crowded—let me not think about the disaster I had single-handedly created. I was tired from a long night, body worn from spent adrenaline and using too much magic, but his needs came first.

“I’m not a child!” he said once, and I swallowed and said, “Yes, of course,” and went to make him something he would like to eat.

I stroked his hair as he cried, for a long, wrenching half hour, and then he was quieter, listening to the stories I told. I tried to make them sound cheerful—all about Ethan and the holiday we’d had, and not how we had come home. I used the stories as comfort for myself as much as for my father, as if the gold curve of pears and leaves in the sunlight, the curve of Ethan’s mouth under mine as we lay together in the long grass, could be made bright enough to blot away all that had followed.

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” Dad said at last, his voice quiet and more even than it had been. He was so calm and reasonable sometimes, and then everything would go wrong. “It should be you causing trouble for me.”

I shuddered, thinking of what would happen to him if the trouble I had caused last night came back to us both. I kept stroking his hair, and the reflected light from my rings trembled against the wall.

“You’re no trouble at all,” I lied.

Eventually Dad went to sleep, exhausted from the outbursts, just before Marie came back from school. She dropped her school bag, with its weird pattern of monstrous half-pony, half-kitten creatures with Light-jeweled eyes, on the floor and danced in.

“You’re so lucky you got to stay home,” she said, grumbling. “I’m so tired. And I’m so
hungry.
”

“From working so hard, no doubt.”

Marie grinned at me, sly and carefree at once, so I was able to grin back. I got up and went into the kitchen to make us grilled-cheese sandwiches, and when Marie asked how my day had been I said “boring,” so she launched into a long story about her day. She was apparently having a feud with some guy in her class, and it had culminated in a game of kiss-chase, during which he’d grabbed her and she’d bitten him.

“But, like, it wasn’t assault,” Marie explained. “Because it was a protest for feminism, my teacher said, and establishing my autonomy over my body.”

She pronounced the word “autonomy” with extreme care.

“I like your teacher, kid,” I said. I vaguely thought that I should tell her not to bite people, no matter what the provocation, but that would be massively hypocritical coming from the girl who’d established her own right to bodily autonomy by threatening to send shocks through a boy’s collar to every nerve ending he possessed.

Carwyn still shouldn’t have touched me. And this boy shouldn’t have touched Marie. I put a hand on her back, as if I could protect her, when it was already too late.

“I’m never to do it again, because if he’d needed stitches I would be in a world of trouble,” Marie informed me.

“What’s this about trouble?” Penelope asked, coming in early from the hospital for a change and unwinding her scarf, subtly shining with Light embroidery, from around her neck.

Marie and I exchanged a look and chorused “Nothing” in unison as Penelope laughed.

We ate our grilled-cheese sandwiches and watched TV, Marie curled up in the space between my body and Penelope’s, fitting like a coin in a slot. I rested my chin on the top of Marie’s cornrowed hair and envied her this thoughtless security. Having a kid act like a kid was fine; having one of your parents suddenly turn into a child was terrifying.

“Hey,” said Penelope, looking at me, “you all right, Ladybird? Did your dad upset you? Or Ethan? Did Marie upset you? Because you should know that as her mother I have the right to beat her like a gong.”

She reached over and took my hand, her fingers strong and a little callused, skin clear dark brown, rings bright and the metal thin and worn from long and continual use. I wished I had hands as steady and kind as hers. I wished I could tell her everything I had done, but that would just have been laying the burden on her instead of me.

She’d done enough for me already, and she wasn’t my mother. My mother was dead, and I had betrayed her memory.

“Nobody upset me,” I told her. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”

She opened her mouth to argue with me, but just then Jarvis came home. He came home late so often, ever since Ethan had got him the job in Stryker Tower. He walked in the door with his face crumpled like a piece of office paper that had been tossed at the trash can but fallen short.

Penelope’s and Marie’s faces turned to his, and Jarvis’s expression smoothed. Marie scrambled off the sofa and ran to him, and he lifted her up to the ceiling, his Light-enhanced-for-perfect-vision eyes reflecting a golden rim. Marie laughed down at him, knowing for certain that her father would always protect her and always be there, his hold on her steady and strong.

The next day, I had to go to school. Nightingale-Evremonde did random checks on rings, sometimes, to see what the last spell you performed was. I used my rings to turn a traffic light red as I was walking to school, then ran across the street before anyone could leap from their car and yell at me.

Ethan and I had different classes on Tuesdays, and even different lunchtimes. It felt awful to be even a tiny bit glad about that.

I was punished for it. I was standing at my locker, staring and trying to figure out which books to take out and trying not to think about what I had done, when a hand ran possessively down the small of my back.

I started and spun around, knocking my elbow—skinned from climbing out the bathroom window at the club—hard into my locker door. Ethan held his hands up in mock surrender.

“Hey, Lucie, it’s just me. I’m not one of those locker muggers who have been plaguing the school.”

I’d been dreading seeing him, and yet unexpectedly it made me feel better. It was a relief to see this particular personality behind this face, to absorb all the bits and pieces that made up the person I loved: Ethan’s gold-touched eyes, the hair curling over the crisp white collar of his school shirt, the way he’d removed his hand fast when I jumped.

I reached out for one of his hands and pulled him back toward me. I was wearing heels, so we were standing at the same level, cheek to cheek. I smelled his clean, sharp aftershave and felt the faint scratch of a spot at his jaw that he’d missed.

“I heard they were locker highwaymen,” I said. “Stand and deliver your lunch money.”

Ethan’s free hand went to my waist, holding on. “Lucie,” he murmured. “I have something to tell you. You’re probably going to be angry, and you have every right to be.” He took a steadying breath. “The doppelganger’s disappeared.”

“I saw him,” I said. “The night before last. I went to see him.”

It wasn’t brave of me to confess that much. There’d been a guard at Carwyn’s door, a receptionist who knew my face, and probably cameras in the hotel.

“I know,” Ethan said. “The guard said you were going to get something to eat. He knew the place was paid for, and that Carwyn had money in his pocket. He expected him to come right back. But he didn’t come back.”

“They weren’t delivering room service,” I said. “I took him out because I thought he should have something to eat, but then I tried a few different restaurants and they wouldn’t let us in.”

Ethan’s voice grew even more serious. “Did he get angry?”

No,
I thought about saying.
No, he didn’t get angry. I was the one who got angry. I broke the law and took off his collar because I felt bad about people being mean to the doppelganger. I fed him cupcakes and took him dancing with my friends. I basically took darkness made in your image out on a date. Why? I don’t know why, Ethan. I guess because I am a crazy person!

I couldn’t say that.

“Yeah,” I said instead. “He got angry. He ran off.”

He had run off. That much was true.

“I thought he would just go back to the hotel,” I said. I wished he had; that was like thinking he would. “Tell your uncle and your father I didn’t—”

“Don’t, Lucie,” Ethan said, sounding tired, and my heart beat a frantic pattern against my ribs. “I thought you should know he was gone,” Ethan continued. “I already told Dad and Uncle Mark that you had nothing to do with it.”

“I just meant . . . I didn’t mean to cause them any trouble,” I muttered. “I’m sorry I did.”

“Carwyn can make his own decisions. They’re nothing to do with you.” Ethan sighed, fingers curling around the stiff blue material of my uniform skirt, over my hip. “Maybe it’s for the best that he went,” he said. “When I first heard he was gone, I thought . . . I thought Uncle Mark or Dad might have had something to do with it.”

Ethan meant that his uncle or his father might have ordered Carwyn to be killed.

I repressed a shiver. I knew they were capable of it. But I hadn’t known Ethan believed that too. How could he live with them, if he knew? Ethan must have felt the shiver despite my efforts, because he put his arms around me, smoothing the hair that tumbled down my back, the big, solid muscles he got from the gym wrapped around me. I felt like he could shield me from anything, even though I knew it wasn’t true. I rubbed my cheek lightly against his, catching the corner of his mouth with mine. It was wonderful to feel that way, just the same.

“I was always afraid he’d come back,” Ethan continued, low and confessional. “I was afraid that Dad would suffer for what he’d done, and I was afraid to . . . to look into a doppelganger’s eyes and see who he was, see if it meant I was doomed, like the stories say. Or if I was doomed for a different reason: that he was made because of me but we sent him away and we deserved whatever he did to us.”

“Ethan,” I said. “Ethan, you were a baby. I do wish you’d told me, but what happened to him was not your fault.”

“When he did come back, I didn’t like him,” said Ethan. “I don’t like that he had my mother for the first few years of my life. I don’t like that he doesn’t even remember her, that he doesn’t care about her or about much of anything. But that doesn’t mean he deserved to be treated like he was. He certainly didn’t deserve to die. If he got away, I’m glad. I wish they could all escape.”

I didn’t know if he meant doppelgangers or all the buried ones in the Dark city. It didn’t matter, since we couldn’t change the world. We were just two kids in our school uniforms, clinging to each other in a corridor full of the noise and bustle of school, trying to pretend the world away.

“I’m glad too,” I whispered. It felt like the first thing I had said to Ethan today that was not a lie.

I turned my face in closer to his, nuzzling, until we were kissing. My arm around his shoulders held him in, close against me. I did not want to let him go.