AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I should have been the one to shut Amelie up.” Shadows flickered in the room.
“Well, you weren’t.” She measured the potion for Ruhn to give Hunt at the top of the hour.
Ruhn stretched an arm over the back of the sofa. “I’d like to be, Bryce.”
She met her brother’s gaze. “Why?”
“Because you’re my sister.”
She didn’t have a response—not yet.
She could have sworn hurt flashed in his eyes at her silence. She was out of her apartment in another minute, and barely reached the gallery before Jesiba had called, raging about how Bryce wasn’t ready for the two o’clock meeting with the owl shifter who was ready to buy a marble statuette worth three million gold marks.
Bryce executed the meeting, and the sale, and didn’t hear half of what was said.
Sign, stamp, goodbye.
She returned to the library by three. Lehabah warmed her shoulder as she opened her laptop. “Why are you on Redner Industries’ site?”
Bryce just stared at the two small fields:
Username. Password.
She typed in dfendyr. The cursor hovered over the password.
Someone might be tipped off that she was trying to get in. And if she did get access, someone might very well receive an alert. But … It was a risk worth taking. She was out of options.
Lehabah read the username. “Does this somehow tie in to the Horn?”
“Danika knew something—something big,” Bryce mused.
Password. What would Danika’s password be?
Redner Industries would have told her to write something random and full of symbols.
Danika would have hated being told what to do, and would have done the opposite.
Bryce typed in SabineSucks.
No luck. Though she’d done it the other day, she again typed in Danika’s birthday. Her own birthday. The holy numbers. Nothing.
Her phone buzzed, and a message from Ruhn lit up her screen.
He woke up, took his potions like a good boy, and demanded to know where you were.
Ruhn added, He’s not a bad male.
She wrote back, No, he’s not.
Ruhn replied, He’s sleeping again, but seemed in good enough spirits, all things considered.
A pause, and then her brother wrote, He told me to tell you thanks. For everything.
Bryce read the messages three times before she looked at the interface again. And typed in the only other password she could think of. The words written on the back of a leather jacket she’d worn constantly for the last two years. The words inked on her own back in an ancient alphabet. Danika’s favorite phrase, whispered to her by the Oracle on her sixteenth birthday.
The Old Language of the Fae didn’t work. Neither did the formal tongue of the Asteri.
So she wrote it in the common language.
