My brother nodded. We were going to be here all day.
CHAPTER 6
EMBER
I couldn’t examinethe brochure until I was back in the car with Lara. I’d flipped through it, of course, just to make sure there were photos. But I hadn’t been able to look. There was no way in Hel I’d admit I needed Lara’s support, but I did.
By the time I got back into the car, it was dumping rain and Lara had reclined her seat. Blessed heat seeped out of the Dodger’s vents. Lara barely spared a glance for me when I slammed my door shut. I waited, stretching my fingers towards the vents to warm my frozen fingers, but she didn’t sit up.
“Don’t you want to look?” I asked, fidgeting impatiently with the Saints medallions around my neck. Tanith and Amarante clinked together. I liked to imagine they were kissing in moments like these.
Lara was silent for a long moment. She never gave the silent treatment, so this was something else. I craned my neck to look back at her. Her eyes were squeezed shut, her jaw tight.
“If I hadn’t fallen asleep on watch?—”
We’d been through this a thousand times.
“You’d just ascended,” I said with a sigh. “And you dozed off. They got the jump on all of us, Lara. It wouldn’t have mattered if you’d heard them. They were justbetterthan us.”
“But if I’d heard them sooner—I’d have had hold ofmysword.”
It was tempting to sigh again. We’d been over this countless times. “And you’d have done what? They might as well have been ghosts, Lara. They had the swords so fast none of us had time to doanything.”
It was true. We’d made camp, and the four of us had fallen asleep easily, with Lara on watch. Back in those days, the life was traipsing around the wastelands on a horse. Humans had a lot of weird nostalgia about the medieval period, but I didn’t miss it. I wouldn’t miss whatever the historians would call this wretched era either.
Back then, sleeping outside was cleaner and safer than the desperate little wasteland inns. The five of us had woken in time to realize something was wrong, and then the swords were just gone. It wasn’t that we didn’t see the thieves. Technically, wedidsee them.
We all saw the same thing—a blur of movement, and thennothing. They didn’t even have to attack us. They moved faster than they should have been able to, obviously fueled by a miracle, though the Thaumas in the area admitted to nothing. With our swords gone, the Consulate felt it necessary to give us the worst assignments. It had been almost eleven hundred years of this shit. But none of us had ever blamed Lara for falling asleep. We blamed ourselves for letting the youngest of us, ascended only a few months, keep watch overnight.
We were all hundreds of years older than Lara and we’d forgotten what it was like to be habitually ruled by mortal urges like unelected sleepiness. The loss of our swords and honor had been devastating, making us the weakest of the Maere and the least respected. We still had our immortality, but the things most Maere could do, we couldn’t. The swords acted as a conduit for power we couldn’t access otherwise. We’d had to get scrappy since we lost them.
Lara never answered me about what she would have done.Whenever the subject came up, it always went the same. She beat herself up, wouldn’t let anyone talk her out of her stance, and then she went silent and depressed for weeks. We didn’t have time for nonsense like that—not if these actuallywereour swords and we had a chance to get them back.
“Just look and tell me if it’s them,” she said, sounding depressed already.
I suppressed the urge to snap back at her that she was the fucking expert about swords, having been a blacksmith, a swordsmith, and a rare weapons dealer. Instead, I flipped through the brochure’s expensive, heavy pages until I found them. Five swords with identically crafted blades, each with a different hilt. The photos were not clear enough formeto positively identify them, but they looked real enough that my breath caught.
Lara’s seat went up in a flash and her chin rested on my shoulder. “Fuck.”
I tapped the brochure. “There’s an online viewer. They have videos. We need to go look.”
“Okay,” Lara agreed. “Where’s the new place?”
“I lied a little last night.”
“About having a new place?”
I bit my lip. “No. About you liking it.”
Lara glared at me. “Where is it?”
“It’s at the Carlyle.”
“Ember,” Lara snarled before the word had even left my throat.
I knew she would react this way. She’d hated everything the Consulate stood for since the swords were stolen. It’s why we’d lived elsewhere before she was taken. “Why the fuck would you live there? The Consulate’s given us short shrift for hundreds of years. Why are you so fucking loyal?”
Who was she to talk about loyalty? I was loyal to my sistren, my cohort. Who the Hel had she been loyal to all these years? “Where else was I supposed to go, Lara? You all left.The Consulate is all I’ve got, and the apartment is free and safe.”
