“Watch yourself, you little rat.” Magnus clips me on the head with the handle of the knife, making me curse.
“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” Captain Pellery says sharply. “And let her go before you crush her collarbone.”
Magnus throws an annoyed glance at his captain but drops his hand. I roll my shoulder and the shooting pains lessen, but a tingling remains, settling into my muscles and making me feel oddly alive.
Captain Pellery is watching me with a strange expression now, something between intrigue and confusion. As she’s standing there, I could swear a breeze ruffles through the feathers of her wings, even though the air feels quite still.
“You know,” she says, “if you’ve gotten into some kind of trouble—maybe trusted the wrong person, somehow fell in with the demons—we might be able to help you.”
Magnus looks like he doesn’t agree with this offer at all, but Pellery seems sincere. I chew my lip, distracted by the tingling creeping down into my toes and fingers.
“No,” I say. “Nothing like that. I’m just a scavenger who made a mistake, I swear.”
A flicker of disappointment shows in the captain’s eyes, then she closes them briefly, thinking.
“All right,” she sighs, opening them again. “Well, the knife isn’t really our business. And I can hardly waste a Concord council’s time on trespassing charges, so…”
“I can go?” I ask hopefully.
“Captain Pellery—” Magnus protests, but she holds up a hand.
“I’m trusting my gut, Lieutenant,” she says, and I’m surprised by how quickly this silences him. She pins me with her sharp stare. “But I’m warning you to stay away from the rift, Rose Radley, or next time I’ll hand you over to the wardens.”
Syrus
I’m pacing my office, wondering how long I should wait before it’s safe to possess Leah again, when I feel it. It’s like a soft touch sliding against my mind, caressing my consciousness, and I know it’sher. An outstretched hand reaching across the aether.
I grasp hold of it, allowing myself to follow it back into the familiar, beautifully spiky fortress of her mind. I breathe a sigh of relief, basking in the sensation of being with her again, memorizing the comforting thud of her heartbeat and the warmth of her body around me.
“How did you do that?”I ask, looking through her eyes to see she’s standing alone in a deserted alleyway.
“I don’t know; I just kind of called for you.”
The fact that the binding spell allows her to initiate contact with me like that feels unusual. I’ve not heard of a typical possession ever working that way, but then, she is my first. And it’s not like I care about any of that right now. I shift my awareness through her body, searching for injuries.
“They hurt you?”I ask, trying to keep the bite of rage from my voice as I sense the pain in her shoulder and head. There’s something else too, underneath the pain, a kind of angry buzzing in the background like a wasp bashing against a window.
“Nothing too bad,”she answers.“But Syrus…”
The sadness in her voice sends a jolt of worry through me.“What?”
“They took my damn knife. And I was really starting to like that knife, you know? Maybe we weren’t best friends yet, but we were getting to be good acquaintances?—”
“For darkness’ sake, woman,”I snap, relief flooding my chest.“I can get you twenty more knives just like that.Now what happened at the rift?”
She sighs.“I talked my way out of it, and they let me go.”
Back in my office, I blink, scrubbing a hand over my chin.“They let you go?”
“That’s what I said. Now help me with these runes,”she says, grabbing a stone off the ground to scratch Cyrax into the alley wall.
A familiar suspicion coils in my stomach.“They let you walk away, just like that?”
“Yes! How many times do I have to say it? They don’t see humans as threats.”
“Even things that aren’t threats can still be nuisances. Why not just get rid of you?”
“My charming personality?”she suggests, then I feel her shrug.“I don’t know, maybe they thought I wasn’t worth the headache of breaking the Concords over.”
