Assassins.
Shit.
Time to pretend again.
“Hi,” I said, and put on a drunken slur. “Is there a privy nearby?” I crossed my legs and swayed a bit, reaching out a hand to the wall to keep my balance. “Too much sweetwine.”
They looked at each other, then moved a step closer.
My heart began to beat faster, and each throb was agony. I didn’t have Wren’s knife, and I didn’t dare call Luna again. Even if she happened to hear me, it was too risky. I didn’t want her anywhere near the Aetheric practitioner. Not if there was any other way.
I mentally retraced the path I’d taken, trying to recall whether I’d seen anything I could use as a weapon or a distraction or a means of escape.
“Can you see Anima?” one of the assassins asked.
“What’s Anima?” I asked.
Aether bloomed behind them like a horrible, poisonous flower, and they were pushed aside. Between them stepped a girl. Maybe my age, maybe a little younger. She wore a simple dress and apron, her hair in a long braid. And there was a sickly green sheen across her damp skin. The assassins moved farther away from her, and even I could feel the heat emanating from her body.
The practitioner had forced another possession.
I needed to help her, but I’d have to hurt her to shake loose the Anima. And I had no weapons and wasn’t exactly in fighting form. My chest ached like a bad tooth. Maybe it was time to run.
That’s when I remembered what I’d seen—and what I could use. I darted out of the alcove in the narrow gap between the wall and the assassins, then down one alley and another. Threeenormous storage jars, more than half as tall as I was, perched in another dead end. They reached more than halfway to the roof, and I knew how to climb.
As the assassins’ feet pounded behind me, I hoisted myself onto a jar, balancing a foot on each side of its open mouth. I jumped and caught the lip of the roof with my fingertips. Just like mounting one of the prince’s horses, I swung my left leg up, tucked the toe of my boot into a crevice in the stone, and began to pull myself up.
“Here!” They reached the alley, ran toward me.
I had just managed to get my right knee over the edge when a roof tile slipped, striking one of the jars and shattering. I tried again, sweat slicking down my back from the effort, and had just managed to hoist my torso over the edge when someone grabbed my ankle.
Her fingers were hot enough to scald, which at least took attention away from the pain pulsing in my chest. I kicked, managed to shake her loose, and tried to claw my way forward across the roof, but the tiles were slick. More fell away, hitting the ground like cannon fire.
I made it just far enough to exceed her reach—but apparently not the reach of the Aetheric practitioner’s manipulations. Aether flared around me, and I gasped from the shock of pain—worse than any I’d felt before. Pain and heat raced through my limbs. I fought back as long as I could, until my hands were shaking and my fingertips ragged. Another strike of pain and my body convulsed. My grip released, and I began to fall.
If I survived this, Wren was going to kill me.
Fourteen
Ifelt the floor first, the cool slickness of well-worn wood beneath my fingers.
Then I opened my eyes. I was on my back in a large octagonal room, the domed ceiling painted with designs in gold long faded to glittering smears. Below it was a balcony supported by ornately carved brackets twenty feet above the floor. There were no windows, so I had no idea how long I’d been unconscious, or the time of day. The space was lit by a circle of candles stuck to the floor around the edges of the room. I didn’t like the way they hissed.
I sat up slowly, ensured all vital parts were still attached. Then I climbed to my feet. “I’m awake,” I called out to the person I could feel in the shadows. “So you might as well come out.”
Aetheric magic bloomed, my heart contracting like a fist, and a man appeared in the circle of candlelight, draped in a long, hooded cloak in a fluid black fabric. Beneath its raised hood, a mask of gleaming gold covered the upper half of his face, its edges jagged and sharp.
“Mask,” the assassin in the woods had said. I guess weknew now what he’d meant. The Aetheric practitioner had found me.
His eyes looked dark, but it was hard to tell in the candlelight and the sickly green haze of Aether that surrounded him. Every heartbeat was painful now, like my heart was beating against shards of broken glass. I tried to ignore it and focus on staying alive, and hoped it didn’t kill me first.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Former gambling hall, I’m told. Unused for many years.”
“And who are you?”
“I am the Luminae.”
