Page 125

“You were drunk as a skunk and called Tully an angel. My name is Puck.”

“Ah, you sure that was me?” Pan’s cheeks flushed before he noticed the music sheets tucked under the kid’s arms. “I play piano too, you know.”

Puck’s eyes sparked with interest, but only for a moment. He clutched the music closer. I recognized the look. Children who grew up in The Barracks learned the value of cynicism and suspicion early.

“I’m taking lessons, but the piano is broken.”

“Come away, Puck, we don’t know them.” The man grabbed Puck’s shoulder. I frowned at the laughter in his voice. It sounded familiar.

“Do I know you?” I asked the man, and he shrugged, just as noncommittal as the boy. His gaze drifted to my hand, which traced the notches on the wall.

“Maybe,” Puck answered for the man and looked us up and down, with the sharp judgment of a child and a flare of recognition.

“Do you know where Tully is?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Don’t answer that,” the man snapped. “Puck. I mean it.”

The shake in his voice, the tension in his body all told me one thing. He knew Tully.

Pan crouched down at eye level. “Here’s the thing. We really need to find Tully, and if you take us there, I’ll give you lessons and make sure your piano gets fixed.”

Puck responded with a shiver of excitement and shot into the corridor. He waved an impatient hand over his head.

“I-I guess you didn’t need me after all,” I joked.

I rolled my shoulders to shake off the nerves. The walls were closer than I remembered.

“Kid’s fast,” Pan muttered, flicking Puck a look as he darted into the shadows again.

Guilt whittled all of us into a shell, but it was most evident in Pan. He was silk and guilt was a moth, taking bites of him, until he was threadbare enough to snap. But he wasn’t my priority. Finding Tully was. I breathed in another lungful of The Barracks. Ajax looked green as he fiddled with his collar.

The man trotted next to us, and a look of recognition widened his eyes.

“You’re her rich pack, aren’t you? I’m Clay.”

I was so mollified by his use ofherthat I didn’t even hear his name. Ajax and Walden surrounded the man and stared down at him.

“Yes, and we’re here to make sure she’s safe. We got a strange phone call earlier. How is the security where she’s living?”

“Oh, that was nothing—” Clay cut off with a white-toothed grin. “Actually, you know what? She’s living just up here.”

Puck waved at us impatiently at the base of a metal staircase. One of the few apartment buildings towered behind him.

“Is she living in the west section?” That was my old neighborhood.

“Yeah.” Puck tossed his head, eyeing me closely. “You one of them?”

Or one of us.He added the unspoken question with his eyes. I fell into step with him and my thighs burned immediately.

“I got a scholarship, but I grew up here.”

I climbed another flight in the heavily graffitied stairwell.

“I want to try for a music one. So I can—” He gritted his teeth and covered the rush of passion with a laconic shrug. He shot a quick look behind at Clay, who was being grilled by Walden, Ajax, and Pan with a gigantic smile on his face.

"We can help you."