Tell the Wind and Fire (13 page)

My own hands were twisted together in my lap. They felt colder than my rings, shivering flesh under a weight of metal. My Aunt Leila, whom I loved and who was the one person I knew I could count on, was a Dark magician. I had only ever felt sorry for them, known that they suffered for something that was not their fault, and that they were starved of their power because people feared it.

I was afraid, I realized, of what they would do with power now that they had it.

Over the shoulder of a child, his cheeks fat with a grin and daubed with blood, I saw a message glistening on bricks.

Scrawled upon a wall with a finger dipped in blood were the words
FREE THE GOLDEN ONE
.

It was as if I was seeing the words of Carwyn and the man from the club written on a wall, a message spelled out all too clearly now that it was too late.

“Oh God, they mean me,” I whispered. Ethan took my hand and held on: Ethan was all I had to hold on to. “They did this for me.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

hen I got home from Ethan’s house, I waited until Dad was asleep. Then I crept into the long skinny hall that we didn’t call a corridor, the wood floor forgivingly quiet under my bare feet, and listened outside the door of the other bedroom. I could hear Jarvis’s deep breathing and Penelope’s faint snore, and I was almost sure I could make out the soft sound of Marie sighing in her sleep. I was the only thing moving in that dark narrow apartment, shadows on exposed-brick walls, with a beam of moonlight and the orange slant of a streetlight filtering through a tall, black-trimmed window.

I stole back into my room and opened my wardrobe, snaking my hand under the mountain of clothes and shoes at the bottom to the very back, where I had hidden the doppelganger’s hood. For a moment, I could not find it, my fingers making a blind, futile journey over the fuzz of a sweater and the rubber sole of a shoe. Then my skin caught on one of the metal slots, fingertips brushing the cracked leather. My rings almost hummed in recognition.

I pulled the collar out and heard the tumble and slam of a dislodged shoe against one of the wardrobe walls. I stayed frozen in a crouch as my father murmured, disturbed and discontent, and then settled back into sleep. My pajama top stuck to my collarbones with sweat.

At the train station, the guards had said somebody who looked like Ethan had been distributing security information to a member of the
sans-merci.
And a few days later, the cages were shattered and the prisoners had gone free.

Anyone under suspicion of consorting with the
sans-merci
would be suspected of involvement with the attack on the cages. Ethan was going to be under investigation, and his connection to me would make it worse. The
sans-merci
were acting in my name: the Light Council might decide we were both in league with rebels.

I knew that I had done nothing, and I was certain Ethan had done nothing. I had another suspect. Carwyn had been talking about revolution and blood in the streets. Carwyn must be involved.

And I had made it easy for him to move about the city, unmarked by his hood, people all around him never dreaming what he was or what he was planning.

I should take this hood and collar to the Light guards, should explain the threat I had unleashed on the city. But what would they do to me then? What would happen to my father without me?

I knew better than to expect mercy.

I wrapped the collar in the hood to muffle any betraying clink of metal, then crawled across the floor with it clutched in my fist, to my school bag. Inside my bag was a small brown leather pouch containing a handful of ashes I had taken from the fireplace in Ethan’s living room. I tucked the doppelganger’s collar into the little bag, blindly fumbling, and then crawled around the side of the wardrobe, to the brick wall.

If I crawled, nobody could see me through the windows. Just in case someone was watching the apartment.

When we had come to Penelope and Jarvis’s, I had been constantly on edge, relentlessly terrified that someone would show up to take back the pardon and take Dad in to be tortured, so terrified that I had burned Dad’s books on Dark magic and the very few letters Aunt Leila had sent. I had never written back to her, and she had soon stopped writing. I spent my time back then, whenever Dad was drugged into calm, scraping away at mortar until I could pull out a couple of the bricks.

If someone looked at this wall, they would have noticed two bricks that were obviously displaced. I had taken a fork to the crevices between those two bricks, and the mortar around them had a slightly gnawed appearance.

The real loose brick was seventeen across and five up from the bottom, in the shadow of the wardrobe. I slid the brick out, feeling its rough edges nip into my palm, to reveal a tiny hollow space. I shoved the pouch almost to the very back, then crammed in ashes, hoping the dull brown of the bag would be entirely obscured even if someone took the brick out.

Although I had burned Aunt Leila’s letters and Dad’s books, I had kept one thing: the pendant necklace with the single jewel my mother had worn and worked magic with in the confines of our home. I didn’t deserve to have a keepsake of her, but I had not been able to leave it or get rid of it.

I had never hidden anything else in there, until then.

I slid the brick back into place, stood up, stepped away, and surveyed the innocent expanse of the wall. Then I came out of the bedroom, pulling the door open and closed as softly as I could, and went to sit on the sofa. I put my guilty head in my ash-stained hands and sat there for what seemed like a long time.

I do not know why I looked up to the silver square of the window, its pale reflection cast on the floor at my feet. Perhaps it was a strange noise, or perhaps it was something the Light Council says all Light magicians have: an innate sense of when the darkness approaches and encroaches on the illumination we give out.

A dead streetlight stood in my line of vision, its magic failed, staring like a socket in which the eye had been put out. As I drew closer to the window, I saw the windows of the buildings across the street, all glossy black save for the sharp lights of cars reflected as they went by. The city was indifferent and distant, as close to sleeping as it ever was.

Underneath my window, my devil was waiting, wearing my true love’s face. The moon bleached that face and the street beneath, so Carwyn looked as if he were standing on a ray of moonlight, a shining silver expanse that stretched from the sky to his feet.

His face was so pale, the color of alabaster or pearl, the poetic peaceful color that people turned in stories when they died. But I had seen the dead in their cages, had seen them livid and ashen, and I had learned long ago not to believe in stories.

The dead are defeated, the dead are lost. But this, I thought, with all the whispers about doppelgangers I had ever heard suddenly crowding my mind, was something that had been sent back from the land of the dead. This was a shadow of a person. This was death triumphant, walking among the living.

And I had set him free.

He had not changed position or expression as he looked at the window. All he did was stand beneath the window and stare, but I knew he saw me. His eyes looked dark and empty, in contrast with his salt-white face, like holes burned in a sheet.

I do not know how long I stood at the window.

I do not know how long my pallid companion stood looking up at me before he seemed to dissolve away, slipping from the moonshine to mingle with his fellow shadows.

I did not know if it was a warning or not. I didn’t know if he was telling me that he’d had something to do with the spectacle at the Green-Wood Cemetery, or that I was guilty by association, if he wanted only to frighten me or to ensure my silence with fear.

It was a wasted trip for him. I had seen the blood in the streets and on the wall, and I had told nobody what I had done. I had made my decision. I had hidden the collar. I could not betray him without betraying myself.

All the streets could run with blood, and I would not go to the authorities. They had taken my mother forever, taken my father, and I had only gotten him back through being able to lie and pretend we were somehow different from the other victims. Only a few days ago, they had tried to take my Ethan.

I needed no apparitions in the night to urge me to evil.

I had made the decision long ago: better to be safe than good.

The next morning, I got up early and made everyone breakfast. I tried to cook and clean as regularly as I could. Jarvis, Penelope, and Marie might care about us, might feel sorry for us, but it was smart to make them like me. The last time I ever saw her, my aunt had advised me to make myself useful.

Be clever. Be careful. Remember they are not like family,
she’d said.
Wait for me to come and get you,
she had added, but I’d known she was dreaming, and I was on my own.

I forgot sometimes, with Penelope especially, but I tried to remember. I didn’t want to be stupid or careless.

Now I had been stupid and careless, and I had to make up for it by trying even harder.

“You’re a treasure, Ladybird,” Penelope declared, coming into the kitchen to snatch a piece of bacon and patting Marie’s cornrowed hair. “What we’ll do when you go to college I can’t imagine.”

Nothing would change when I went to college. I was going to college in New York, of course. My father couldn’t manage without me.

My father emerged into the kitchen last of all, glasses askew and hair ruffled, looking like a baby owl confused by the world. He sat down at the kitchen island, and I set his plate in front of him and poured his juice.

“You effortlessly make the morning shine, my dear,” he said, sounding like a gentleman from days long gone by, and I could see he felt better. He started talking with Penelope and Jarvis about the deleterious effect of dust on the minds of the young. He was doing research on the subject, writing a paper: there were days he went to the library and talked to strangers, and they thought he was such a charming, intelligent man. He was going today, and I was sure every stranger he spoke to would be fooled again. They would never have imagined there was a thing wrong with him.

I’d burned the side of my thumb cooking the bacon and eggs, and I took this opportunity to press the burned skin to the metal of the refrigerator sneakily, so nobody would see me do it. Nobody ever guessed how much effort looking effortless took.

“I’ll walk to school,” I said. I always got up in time to do that, because only four people fit in the car without being cramped, and dropping me off meant making an extra stop.

“You don’t have to,” said Jarvis. He always offered me a lift, as if it was his job to look after me, as if I was Marie. He was always so kind, and it made me nervous: I always wondered when his kindness might run out.

“I want to,” I told him.

I wasn’t lying. I usually walked, and Ethan usually met me on the way.

Ethan could not come by my place much, because my father got upset when he saw him. He got upset at the very name of Stryker. I couldn’t blame him, not really: I knew as well as he did what anybody on the Light Council could do to us, let alone what Mark or Charles Stryker could do.

I gave everyone a round of kisses and goodbyes and walked out into the sunshine. It was a bright morning, but sharp around the edges. The sun was a golden disc so high up in the sky that it made sense that its warmth had not reached the city yet. I pulled my coat tighter around myself and walked on, watching the glitter of sunlight on the tin roofs of warehouses and faraway spires alike.

I smiled when the long black car purred up to the curb and stood waiting, like a cat expecting to be petted. The richest cars were the narrowest, in a classic style built to show off that they had no need for engines now that they had Light magic, with no thought for packing a family or a car seat inside the vehicle. This was an impractical and gleaming black sliver of a car.

Usually Ethan walked to meet me, but now and then he took a car if it was cold or he’d overslept and was afraid that he would miss me. He was a child of luxury: he never needed to think twice about taking one of the cars, in the same way normal people never needed to think about grabbing a cup out of a kitchen cabinet. There were always plenty, and it was no big deal.

Talk about someone effortlessly brightening up a morning. I stood with my cold hands in my pockets and beamed at the darkened windows of the car.

Then the window rolled down, and Mark Stryker was looking at me. I looked past him and saw his face in a weaker mold. Charles Stryker. Both Ethan’s father and his terrifying uncle had come for me. That meant they had something specific in mind—they only came hunting in pairs on matters of utmost importance.

“Lucie,” Mark said mildly, “jump in the car, would you? We’d like a word about the
sans-merci.
”

CHAPTER NINE

driver in the Stryker livery, electric blue lines on a background of lambent gold like the sun’s rays in reverse, unfolded himself from the front seat and opened the door for me. Neither Mark nor Charles Stryker could be expected to sully their hands with car doors.

I crushed my impulse to flee like a scared animal. There was nowhere I could run where they would not chase me down.

Instead I got reluctantly into the car. The leather was so expensive, it did not squeak as the skirt of my school uniform slid over it. I sank backward into the seat and felt enveloped by the whole dark car, carried off like a maiden in a story, never to be seen again.

I found myself twisting my hands in my lap, barely even able to look at the men I was facing, and realized I was sitting as if I was at a job interview or worse: as if I was suspected of a crime.

Even if they knew I was guilty, that was no reason to act guilty.

I looked up. Charles was leaning forward and looking tense, because he was the clumsy one. Mark was sitting back, his face relaxed.