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“It ain’t the looks I care ’bout, is it?”
“What, then?”
“You never mind! You just give it—”
“Get your hands off me or I’ll scream.”
“You scream, ’n they’ll be down on the both of us!”
“Which would be inconvenient for you, wouldn’t it?”
He glared at me. But the hand on the front of my coat loosened. And then dropped away entirely, because he really didn’t seem to want to deal with the war mages again.
I could sympathize.
“Tell me what you want it for, and maybe I’ll give it to you,” I offered.
He scowled. And then his eyes narrowed. “Maybe we could work together, at that.”
“How?”
“That’s a big coat. Too big for a little girl like you. Big enough for two maybe, if we work it right.”
“Why would we want to do that?”
“’Cause it gets us inside the wards, don’t it?”
I looked up at the door, which was still slightly open from where the mage had left it. “There aren’t any wards.”
“Not on the door,” he said impatiently. “The inner wards. The ones they got on the upper floors. The ones on all the ’spensive and dangerous things they steal from people like you ’n me.”
I didn’t know how I felt about being lumped in with the criminal element, but at the moment I couldn’t really argue the point.
“The coat gets you through those?”
He nodded. “’Course, it don’t usually matter. Too many war mages prowling around for it to matter. More a time-saving device for them than anythin’ else.” He looked over his shoulder. “But seems like you got ’em all riled up. Seems like you got most of ’
em out combing the streets for you. Which means there’s a skeleton crew in there, and that means—”
He jumped me. And the next thing I knew, my back was against his chest, and his knife was pressing against my throat. Hard enough that, if I screamed, I’d slice my own windpipe.
“—this is my main chance,” he hissed in my ear.
“I thought we were going to work together,” I said, very carefully.
“You know that old sayin’ about honor ’tween thieves?”
I nodded.
“I ain’t never had no truck with it.”
I tapped him in the leg with the trap.
“Neither have I,” I said.
And a second later I was up the stairs and back into HQ.
• • •
