Page 74

Air scraped halfway into my lungs and stopped. River shifted into my peripheral vision without stepping in front of me. "Breathe."

"I'm fine." The lie barely made it past my lips.

"I know." His voice dropped. "Breathe anyway."

I dragged air into my lungs. It hurt enough to make me angry, which at least gave me something familiar to work with. Another breath. Then another. River's hand rose behind me and stopped.

He waited.

That nearly did what Charon hadn't. Four days of watching him flinch away from things I couldn't see, and he still wouldn't put a hand on me without leaving me the choice. I leaned back into it. His palm settled at my lower back and the cold came through my shirt, steady and familiar. By the fourth breath I could feel my feet again. By the fifth my fingers had loosened enough that the receipt no longer looked strangled.

"Thank you." I whispered. "River." I hurried to add remembering his warning.

His thumb moved once against my back. "Good catch. Thank him and you'll be here forever."

A sound escaped me somewhere between a laugh and a sob. His hand stayed exactly where it was. Charon watched all of it with the frank interest of a man who had paid for the drama and intended to get his money's worth.

Then his attention shifted. "You have a question."

I wiped beneath my eye and looked up, but the ferryman wasn't talking to me.

River's hand left my back and he walked down to the water's edge without checking whether I was following, without putting himself between me and anything at all.

"I do have a question, yes," he said.

"The price is the same."

"I'm aware."

"You are a fallen thing now. You have less to spend than you did." Charon looked him over with undisguised interest. "Are you certain you wish to ask?"

"Yes." There was no hesitation at all in River's tone.

"Very well."

River stood at the edge of the water with his back to me. He didn't look around. He didn't check whether I was watching. He didn't make one of those dry comments he reaches for whenever something matters too much.

He simply asked.

"On any night, in any year, has a celestial being called Ashriel come to this bank?"

The river slid past them.

"No." Charon grinned.

River's shoulders came down a fraction of an inch. Anyone else would have missed it.

"You're certain."

"Nobody crosses without my knowing, and nobody has ever arrived on this bank carrying that name."

River nodded once and came back to me. His expression had already closed off by the time he reached my side, but I'd seen what that one word took out of him.

Ashriel had never reached this shore.

His mother was somewhere too.

"You paid for that," I said.