“You can’t go in there! You know that!” Something slammed.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” The voices were female. Levi didn’t recognize either of them. The second one sounded young—a girl.
“I can’t do my job if you don’t do yours.” The first voice was softer now. “We need to keep each other safe.”
Levi pulled his head back. He shouldn’t have listened. The black doors didn’t belong to him, but he wondered who else had seen this place.
* * *
“Levi!” Jac shook his shoulders.
Levi’s eyes flew open. He rolled onto his side and coughed.
Jac smacked Levi on the back. “What were you thinking?”
“Get off me.” Levi rubbed his eyes and looked at the building—or what remained of it. The top floor had collapsed, so wooden beams jutted out of the structure like fiery stakes. His mouth went dry. “Reymond was in there.”
“I know,” Jac said quietly. “The Scarhands’ oaths were broken.”
Around them, the Scarhands sat in the center of the cobblestoned street, pressing their hands to their chests as if they couldn’t breathe.
It hurt when your oath broke. Reymond had once described it like a blow to the chest, and you could only sit there and wait to catch your breath. Reymond had lost his when he was a Dove, fighting back after Ivory’s second cut off one of his fingers. His oath snapped. Then her second cut off another.
Reymond had always acted like nothing could touch him, but in a few hours, a coroner would identify him by his teeth.
Levi felt a surge of emotions all at once. Anger, grief, fear. If he’d been faster, he might’ve saved him. Stronger.Better.
“Jonas will be the new Scar Lord,” Jac said warily.
Jonas hated Levi, so any semblance of friendship they’d had with the Scarhands was gone.
Something was crumpled in Levi’s fist. He opened it and stared at the gleaming silver back of a Shadow Card, smeared with black ink. The man must’ve left it in Levi’s hand once he’d used it to knock him out.
Six more days. Don’t forget.—S.T.
“This is my fault,” Levi whispered, echoing his vision. Sedric had said something about reminders; Levi hadn’t fully considered what that that could mean.
“‘S.T.’? As in Sedric Torren?” Jac asked, his voice cracking. “Why would he go after Reymond?”
“He’s playing with me,” Levi choked. It was fitting, for Sedric’s reputation. Sedric was proving he knew how to hurt him in more ways than one, and he’d succeeded.
Levi turned the card over and studied the picture of a man dangling from the gallows. The Hanged Man. It meant sacrifice, a new point of view and waiting.
“I don’t like this,” Jac said. “This is some serious muck.”
Once again, Levi was eleven years old, and he was at his mother’s bedside. Just another person he couldn’t save. “He was like my brother,” he murmured. “And he’s dead because of me.”
“Sedric killed Reymond, not you.”
“But it’s still my fault.”
Reymond’s murder was a reminder. Areminder. They weren’t kidding around with the Shadow Cards. If Levi didn’t make the deadline, he was dead. He’d get the invitation card, and no one survived the Shadow Game. No one.
Worse, this might not have been Sedric’s only reminder—anyone could be next. Any of the Irons, including Jac.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Levi said. He lay on his side, his cheek in the dirt, and took deep, slow breaths. The wooden beams cracked in between the roars of the fire. In the distance, sirens wailed, far too late.
“I thought you said the cards didn’t give you visions,” Jac said. “But an orb-maker wouldn’t pass out from the smoke.”
