Tell the Wind and Fire (12 page)

“And I’m late for class,” Ethan said regretfully. He kissed me again, lightly this time, mouth and then my cheek, and stepped away. “Can you come back to my place after school? I have a special reason for asking.”

“Sure,” I murmured. “And you don’t need a special reason.”

I was late for class too, but I didn’t go immediately. I sat on the sill of the window opposite my locker and fought back the thought of how much I had just lied to Ethan and how massively I had misjudged Carwyn.

I’d believed the fact that he’d waited outside the nightclub’s window meant I could trust him, but that hadn’t been true. He hadn’t wanted me to get caught because if I’d been taken by the guards, I would have been found with the doppelganger’s collar on me. He’d waited for me because he wanted a clean getaway, and once he’d accomplished that, he’d thrown me off a bridge.

He looked like Ethan. I hadn’t confused the two of them, but seeing the familiar, beloved lines of his face, even on someone else, had confused me. I’d been able to be familiar with him, to take chances on him without feeling as if they were the deadly, life-altering risks they were.

Because of that, I’d trusted him, much more than I should have, when I shouldn’t have trusted him at all. He was my best beloved’s shadow self, an image made out of darkness, but worse than that he was a stranger, and I did not know what he was capable of.

I didn’t think that Carwyn was going to run off somewhere, live a blameless life, and stay safe. I thought he was coming back. I knew he held our lives in the palm of his hand.

I knew I should tell somebody. But, like always, I was afraid to tell the truth. I knew it would condemn me.

I didn’t tell Penelope, and I didn’t tell Ethan. I didn’t tell anybody at all.

Above the Strykers’ apartment was a private gym, where all four of the Strykers had sessions with a personal trainer several times a week. I had only been there before to sit on the weight bench and read while Ethan finished up.

I had not expected this to be Ethan’s special reason for asking me over. I had not expected my boyfriend to stand before me, in socked feet on the polished wood floor, with a sword glowing with Light magic in either hand.

“You scared me to death when you jumped onto the platform and leaped at those guys with swords,” Ethan said simply. “I don’t know what might happen in the future. I want to protect you—and I figure the best way to protect you is to teach you to protect yourself.”

It was a sweet idea, but I hated to think of Ethan being scared and doubtful about the future.

“You’re going to teach me?” I asked, keeping my voice light. I reached over and took one of the swords from him. I felt its magic crackling satisfactorily up my arm. “Since when do you know about sword fighting?”

“I don’t have any Light magic, so Uncle Mark wanted to be sure I could always protect myself,” Ethan went on. “He also thought it might be good PR if I joined the Light Guard for a year or so after college. I don’t know. I’m pretty good.”

He sounded shy, and a little proud.

“Are you?” I said, and I forced myself to smile at him.

“Yeah, and I’m willing to teach you everything I know.”

“Lucky me.”

We crossed swords, the blades flickering as they rang together, my blade glowing with a faint flare of Light each time I parried Ethan’s thrust. It was like lightning and thunder, the gleam and then the peal, and it felt good. It felt familiar.

I had made so many mistakes. I had been so stupid. I lay awake nights thinking of all I feared and how I had failed. I could do nothing to fix any of it, but I could do this.

I parried again and sent power from my free hand to make Light burn too strongly in Ethan’s sword. He almost dropped it. I pressed home my advantage and came at him with a flurry of ringing strokes, making him stumble back. He stared at me, awe and Light magic shining on his face, as if I had lit a huge match between us.

“You can fight!” Ethan exclaimed.

“I can win,” I said, and forced Ethan’s sword down.

Ethan did not even look at the sword points touching the floor, did not care that he had been beaten. He looked at me, frowning, and as my frantic heartbeat slowed, I began to realize I had made another mistake. “Why did you never tell me you knew the sword?” he asked.

What could I say? That my aunt the Dark magician had taught me in the little garden outside her house? That I had learned how to stand and move and fight for years, learned how to practice magic against a Dark magician as few Light magicians had the chance to—how to fight anyone, how to cheat, how to win? Was I supposed to tell him that my aunt used to say I could use these skills against a Light guard, and I had never dreamed I would, but years later, on a train platform, Aunt Leila had been proved right? That when I used too much Light magic and it poisoned my blood, my aunt would drain the poison away and drink my blood at her kitchen table, and then we would make cookies?

I’d told Ethan about my mother: that she had existed, that I’d known her, that she’d died. It wasn’t much, but he was the only person in the Light city I had told about her at all.

I had not told Ethan anything about my Aunt Leila. I did not think he would like the sound of her, somehow, any more than she would have liked him. They were impossibly different people, from impossibly different worlds, and it would have made Ethan think differently of me.

Besides, Aunt Leila was safe, as safe as a Dark magician in the Dark city could be. I did not want to bring her to the attention of any Strykers, even the one I loved.

“It never came up,” I said unsteadily.

Until the train platform, with Ethan kneeling and a guard drawing his sword. I had known the risk when I flung myself at the guard. I had known what to do. Ethan had just assumed I did not . . . because I had never told him anything else. I didn’t want him to think of me as someone who could deal with these kind of situations, who belonged in that kind of world: Aunt Leila’s world, in the Dark.

“I want you to tell me things, even if they don’t come up,” Ethan said. “Just as long as they’re about you. I only want to know more about you.”

It should have been a strange thing for a boy to say to his girlfriend of two years. I found myself looking away, as if I, not he, had been beaten.

“If you knew me more, you’d like me less.”

“I don’t think so,” Ethan murmured.

I made myself smile, even though I was scared. “Come on—let a girl keep her mystique.”

It was a weak ploy.

Ethan opened his mouth, and I knew it was to argue with me. I stared at him, mutely imploring him not to.

I thought it wouldn’t work, but after a moment he lowered his eyes and put down his sword. “Asking you to spar was a mistake, huh?” he said, stepping forward and wrapping his arms around me. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want this,” I said into his shirt. “I don’t want us to be frightened. I want things to be the way they always are between us. I want everything to be normal.”

Normal for me was keeping secrets. What was one more?

“All right,” Ethan murmured. “Whatever you want.”

There was an amazing sofa in Ethan’s apartment, deep and soft as a cloud, and the color of excellent cream, the kind of sofa that meant price was not an issue and neither was the sofa owners cleaning it themselves. Six people could lie on that sofa like a bed.

That evening it was just me and Ethan, curled together and snuggled into the sofa cushions.

“I would love you without the fabulous luxuries,” I informed him. “But they help.”

“So what you’re saying is that if I get fat, you’ll keep me around for the sofa.”

“You have a personal trainer because you’re so afraid of losing your svelte figure,” I pointed out. “But if you start balding prematurely, I’ll consider keeping you around for the sofa.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

I levered myself up on one elbow, looking down into Ethan’s face, soft with laughter and tenderness. The commercials buzzed along on television, little jingles and bursts of color, drawing into the news of the day, and everything seemed normal and safe.

“Besides,” I said, laying kisses from his jaw to his mouth, feeling him smile under my lips. “I bet all your money could buy a truly awesome toupee.”

I remembered an old poem that went,
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten
. . . but I had not forgotten. There had only ever been Ethan.

The other one didn’t count.

I had almost lost Ethan, a handful of days ago. It reminded me that it was a privilege to be close like this, the skin of his stomach under the flat of my palm, the curl of his smile against my mouth.

“You’re such a romantic,” Ethan mumbled.

“You have no idea.” I kissed him again, my hair a curtain all around us, his mouth opening in a warm, easy slide under mine, and then a cough sounded like a door slamming, and I bit down on Ethan’s lip.

“Ow!” said Ethan, and I reared back and stared around wildly.

Jim Stryker, Ethan’s cousin, was standing in the doorway.

“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, with one of his stupid grins. “You were just getting your PDA all over the good sofa.”

“Oh, as opposed to the extremely private stuff you were doing on it with Suzy at your birthday party.”

“Come on, Lucie, be reasonable. I was drunk.” Jim grinned again. He had thick lips, a thick bridge to his nose, gel turning his hair into a solid mass. Other people thought he was handsome, but he’d always looked like an overblown version of Ethan to me. “I wouldn’t do anything like that sober. Unless you’re finally willing to drop Ethan and try a real man.”

“I’ll do it!” I declared. “Now, tell me more about this real man. Will you take me to him? Because I haven’t seen anyone like that lately.”

In some ways, Jim was restful to be around, since he took everything any girl said to him as flirting. Occasionally he looked confused by something I said, but the whale of his self-esteem always ended up making short work of the plankton of doubt.

It occurred to me that if Ethan’s doppelganger had acted like Jim, I wouldn’t have felt any urges to sympathy, and I certainly wouldn’t have taken off his collar. Carwyn might have been soulless, but at least he wasn’t an idiot.

I couldn’t think about that right at that moment, and I certainly couldn’t be such a nervous wreck that I was jumping at the least little noise. I rolled my eyes at Jim and reached for Ethan’s hand.

Ethan jerked away from me, and I stared at him. He was sitting bolt upright, suddenly tense, his jaw held tight. I felt my heart trip in my chest, felt the lurch and the chill, like a little kid stumbling over her own feet into a freezing-cold puddle.

“What,” I said, my voice trembling. “What—what is it?”

“Guys, look at this,” Ethan said, voice and body strained as if the television were going to attack him.

We both turned our attention to the television. I had been tuning out the drone of the reporter’s voice, but now I looked at the shimmering Light magic projected against the wall, resolving in my sight until the voice and the picture came clear.

“. . . violent disturbance within the walls of the Dark city, during which six Light guards lost their lives,” said the newscaster’s voice, flat and noncommittal, turning the words into boring nonsense. I wondered if that was why these people were hired, because they could make disaster sound dull and give people the distance they needed from it.

The feed from the camera was grainy, showing footage taken at night on someone’s phone. But I could see enough of the entrance gate: it was just outside Green-Wood Cemetery.

I could recognize it even though it looked different. The whole scene was painted gray by night, and in the street itself were streaks and dark stains, still shining fresh. The rough, irregular stones of the street had dammed flowing blood into small dark pools.

The camera followed the path through the gate and into a scene of chaos.

It looked as if lightning had struck every tree. They were ripped to splinters and shards of wood, cast over the grass like the remnants of a shipwreck, and amid the wood were the iron cages.

Some of the cages had bodies still huddled in them. Some of the bodies were skeletons, left in place as a warning to others not to cross the Light. Some of them might have died last night, died of terror at the idea of freedom.

Some of the cages lay twisted and empty, the black iron melted, the cage doors gaping open.

The cages were down. Nobody would ever be strung up like my father had been, ever again. They were the symbols of the Light’s power, the awful threat of the Light’s worst punishment.

Nobody had ever dared attack the cages before.

I remembered that guy at the club who had told me we might have something to celebrate soon. Was this what he had meant? Had somebody planned this?

Why had he thought I would know?

A shrill sound of laughter rang out, and the camera zoomed back up the hill, through the gates, to the bloodstained street.

There were people there, and one side of my brain just said,
Yes, normal people. That’s what people look like,
and the other side of my mind, the side accustomed to the Light, said that they were gaunt scarecrows. Food had to be brought in past the walls, and the Dark city was never given quite enough. I’d been overwhelmed by the lunatic abundance of food in the Light city when I’d first arrived, but I hadn’t realized how used I had become to the Light citizens, smug and sleek as housecats.

There were people laughing, dancing, people openly wearing the black and scarlet of the
sans-merci.
Dark magicians were on their knees, doing spells with the spilled blood. Ethan and Jim would not be able to differentiate between Dark magicians—one would look the same as another to them—but I could see from the edges of their clothes under their dark robes that they were not among the Dark magicians who served the Light Council. They would not have been permitted to drain people often. They were holding more magic in their hands now than they had ever before touched in their lives.